Make Money Online

One of the most interesting social media battles gearing up online is not between Twitter and Facebook, but between all of the applications competing to help you manage your networking lives. This is because Twitter has spawned an ecosystem of highly innovative application developers.

The list is already long and growing, with Seesmic Desktop, Echofon and Twitterberry all jockeying for position on home screens. The recent revamps to Tweetdeck, the new release of Tweetie 2’s iPhone app and the impending addition of Hootsuite to the iPhone lineup mean there are a number of quality choices in an ever more competitive landscape.

The biggest benefit for users is innovation in powering integration. While Twitter is just now getting around to opening up the retweet function, which as recently as Wednesday night mysteriously vanished from Twitter.com, the ability to share and comment on someone else’s message is just a single click away through a variety web, desktop or iPhone applications. Syncing up your social networking outposts was happening through client applications before it was officially endorsed by Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, et al.

Last week, during a press conference in Tel Aviv, Israel, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone hinted his company may be looking to strengthen its value proposition to end users by possibly acquiring certain third party developers.

“As our attention is grabbed by some of these developers, we will take a hard look at them,” Stone said

I believe these apps would be best left to their own brainstorming and should remain independent of Twitter itself. Twitter is better off taking care of its core product (and focusing on, say, eliminating the Fail Whale), while the rest of the apps take care of adding the embellishments and breakthroughs.

In the meantime, this will benefit the customers, who will then be able to find the best way to interact with Twitter. The bottom line for users typically comes down to their main access point for Twitter. While Twitter.com can be an effective home base, if you have more than one account, as professionals more and more often do, you will quickly seek out something in your browser, like Hootsuite or on your desktop, like Tweetdeck. And when it comes to mobile access, Twitter has allowed the other developers to lead the way on smartphones.

So, as Twitter looks to grow in 2010, look for it (and its users) to also benefit as for the war between the client management apps to continue to heat up.

The rest is here:
Apps Compete and Innovate for Twitter

Remember part 1 and part 2 of my interview with Gordon Magee of Drs. Foster Smith? It’s been a while and I’m back to wrap up sharing what I was able to learn from this pioneer of e-commerce video.  I probed Gordon for details on the strategic, long-term approach he’s using to drive multi-channel sales with video.  In all honesty I did NOT learn of the rigid, measured direct-response strategy that I had expected. What I did uncover was how important trust is to a company that is, yes, financially precise and metrics-driven.  Trust, as it turns out, appears to be the main driver in the company’s early, yet large, investment in video.

Uh oh, is this “branded entertainment”?

Now as many of you know I’m not a big fan of traditional, mass media “branding” advertising.   In fact, I view most of it as a poorly executed, glorified art form — not a science.   It thrives on waste.  How many times have you been in a meeting and fallen back on the comfortable excuse of, “well… it did help brand us.”  Unfortunately, many marketing failures are labeled “branding wins” when, in fact, the man or woman running the show (CEO, CMO, COO/CFO) knows better.

In many cases, a campaign’s tactics failed to produce a tangible, strategic business output.  It failed.  You can call it a win but they won’t when you leave the room.

I mention it because most use of video on the Web has been rather gratuitous.  They call it “branded entertainment.”  It has a tendency to be aimless eye-candy that marketers hope gets passed around and… and… and well… create attention/awareness, interest, desire and action (with the action piece being completely un-tracked and rather blindly assumed).

In this tough economy we need new, improved (ie. trackable, reliable, PROVEN) strategies not glorified tactics.  Some call it marketing science and it’s time has arrived.

Now I’m not suggesting Gordon was or is wasting his marketing budget.  What I AM suggesting is that the direct response metrics were left unclear to me and, perhaps, with good reason.  Maybe DrsFosterSmith.com is too early on to really use them or — heck — reveal them to the world.

Increased trust as a valid goal

Let’s assume “better trust” or “more trust” among customers (new and old) is a valid business output.  How tangible is it?  How measurable is it?  Heck, should it even be measured at all?  Now we’re getting into dangerous guru territory where some believe ROI to be a silly pipe dream.  But what if we could assign some tangible behaviors that customers demonstrate to “increased trust?”

Even more wild — what if we just assumed that part of a holistic marketing strategy was a foundation that must be built without expectation of measurement?

Gordon says…

“… we probably have more articles on pet care and more veterinary articles online than anybody in the country. So to go into video and do the same thing was just a natural outgrowth of what we have been doing for 25 years really.”

Why so much content?  Trust.  When it comes to pets and doctors (veterinarians) it’s not about price.  It’s not about color, flavor, speed, accuracy or anything that would be desirable (aspirational).  It’s about TRUSTING someone to help you take care of your pet’s health, well-being or a disease.  Trust matters — in this case perhaps more than anything else.

Measurement: The details

Says Gordon, the future is all about…

“… a blending of a branding relationship development type strategy along with an ROI measurement.  The ROI will be much more difficult to measure in some respects. Certainly we can use analytics tools to find out what people are clicking through on and if they have watched a video and what they did and so on. But frankly some of that gets so granular, you can have data overload, that you’re better off looking at the larger picture to determine what’s going on.”

Now typically these kinds of comments fly red flags with me… but I’m starting to wonder at this point.  Gordon continues as I push him for details on WHAT he measures, why and what it proves…

“Are our sales moving up? Are people spending more time on the site? What’s actually happening? If we then try to drill down to every little item — at some point it becomes impractical apart from what some speakers will tell you at the Internet Retailer or show.

The first thing I study when I want to find out how we are doing is… what did we sell yesterday? What were our overall sales? What products were selling?”

Now at this point I was really starting to wonder, I’ll admit.  This sounds like a BRANDING campaign and perhaps so… one aimed at creating or fostering trust.  Gordon continues…

“Yes, we will look at email returns. Did this email do well? etc. Are people clicking through? What’s our click through rate? Those high level metrics are important so you have got a clue. But at the end of the day, if you have got all kinds of clever little analytical measurements that are telling you what people are clicking through and where they are going… well if you’re not selling anything that doesn’t matter.”

So I think you work from the other end of the pyramid, the sharp point of the pyramid being, ‘Did we sell stuff?’ Then drill down as far as you need to, to find out how you got there. Then stop before you drive yourself crazy.”

Ok… Gordon seemed to come back to measurement as being a worthwhile strategy at the end but it left me scratching my head a bit — but in fairness to Gordon and the company that’s just fine.  It sets us up to ask more questions later

User / customer generated video

And what about user generated content (UGC) — specifically video?  It would seem ripe for opportunity in the pet realm with all those cute cuddly little creatures of all sorts out there.  To my surprise Gordon said no.  His reasoning was remarkably sound and, not surprisingly, all about TRUST.

“Jeff, we will likely not get too much involved in that.. and part of the reason has to do with us being owned by veterinarians and people having that trust relationship with us regarding the information that they get.

We want to make sure that there are no misunderstandings about the veterinary pet care information that we provide. A misunderstanding could happen if we would have, let’s say, a customer quote something that isn’t the latest veterinary information from research and so on… have another customer read that and go, ‘Oh yeah, I should feed my dog X because customer Y said that’s the right thing to do,’ and maybe they didn’t read three entries later our analysis of, you know, ‘That’s actually not a good idea,’ kind of a thing.

I’ll give you just a quick example of something simple. We were on television here a few weeks ago. We brought pets down to Chicago’s In the Loop with iVillage. Had our veterinarians on, the question came up, ‘Is it OK to give milk to my cat?’  Of course, I’m from Iowa.  We grew up doing that. And one of the vets said, ‘Actually, you know, it’s really not a good idea because they can have digestive problems. It’s really not what you should be feeding them.’

So little things like that that seem to be so common knowledge but incorrect are the kinds of things that we would not want to have on the website.

So we probably won’t do that. Our goal is to brand us… and not the other customers. We may at some point have a forum… where people can interact with us, but the scale of that, at times, it becomes so huge that management becomes a challenge. We just started a photo contest this past week. Right now we’ve got 5000 photo entries already in one week, and we’ve got to manage those and determine the winners, and so on.  And I think ditto would happen with a forum.

Now, sounds like a really good marketing message to say, ‘Gordon, did you just hear yourself? If you can bring that many people to your site, wouldn’t you want to do that?’

Well, we do want to have them come but we want to have them be provided accurate information and not just have a cool Web 2.0 interaction with them . We want them to interact with information. At some point we might do the forum so they can interact with each other — I would say there’s some merit to that — but management’s part of the issue for us.

Candidly I think DrsFosterSmith.com’s approach is either a little from the hip or he is just holding back a bit.  In either case I hope Gordon might share more details with us in months ahead.  We marketers are living in historically difficult times where new tools are needed for marketing in the new economy.  As my loyal followers know, I have a decent nose for sniffing out marketing waste and I’ll continue to share my research moving forward.

Still not got your fill of Gordon?  Check out this short interview he was good enough to give me recently while in Chicago.

Excerpted from:
Using Video to Drive Sales in a Down Market

You’ll recall part 1 of my interview with Gordon Magee of Drs. Foster Smith.  I’m back to continue learning of his strategic, long-term approach to using video to drive multi-channel sales — and answering your specfic cost questions. After reading part 1 a good number of you wrote to me privately expressing hunger for information on cost.  Gordon didn’t get into the specific cost numbers with me but I can share some of his early struggles and “production / cost migration path” with you.  I wasn’t planning on it so thanks for asking.  I need to know what YOU need to know so keep comments coming please.

I’ll return to the overall measurement and “user generated content”  (use of video supplied by customers) questions in a few days.

Let’s first start by understanding the company’s multi-channel approach to advertising…

Gordon Magee: “This past year we decided we would go into television in a larger way. The owners decided to work on a broader campaign strategy for advertising. We have always done print media and that kind of thing as well but we kind of bundled print media and radio advertising. We haven’t done a lot of radio, but television as well.

So we created a television program. Then about a year ago or so I put in a proposal for us to get video on our website and create our own video studio. That got approved and we started building the studio this fall.”

It may be helpful for you to compare this kind of environment to your own when considering approaching cost and budgeting for ecommerce-focused video.  Next, Gordon shared the evolution of his company’s approach to Web video — specific to how they decided to build (invest internally) rather than lease (outsource).  It’s interesting to note that they were already “in video” by creating TV ads.

Gordon Magee: “We outsource in the sense that we use the production company, one in Los Angeles, one in the Twin Cities when we made the last, more recent commercials. We have used a California production company in the past. But the internal decision to create the video studio was definitely Web related as opposed to TV commercial related.

So they really were separate entities in terms of the business case. I think with the advent of higher speed Internet connections for most people these days – there are a smaller and smaller number that are still on dial-up – and then the infrastructure capabilities that the Internet has that’s going to make video just very, very common, even more so than it is now.

It seemed to be that it was the right thing to do. Our company’s ethos, Jeff has always been to do things internally and develop the expertise internally so that we are not dependent on outside sourcing whenever that’s possible. Because we are a catalog company and have essentially a pretty huge creative department, doing our own photography and that kind of thing forever since the advent of the company, the idea to move into video wasn’t a hard decision.”

So as it turns out Gordon’s approach was driven by the company’s traditional, long-standing belief in “owning” the creative production process and a realization that the distribution channel (the Web) WAS going to explode opportunity.

Gordon Magee: “Script development of course was helped greatly by our creative department who wrote script and art direction terms and then we tweaked those. So we had the internal expertise to try it and not be afraid to do it. So we just decided that we were going to go ahead with that.

I think it (the decision to outsource versus build your own competency) really has to do with people’s expectations. As you know, being in the Internet business, expectations on the Internet continue to rise for the consumer. I think the average consumer probably doesn’t realize the effort that goes into making a website very easy for people to use and all of the other things that are on there, ancillary things like video and articles and so on.

But I think with those expectations arising, we know that video is going to be huge. And certainly with things like YouTube and other sites like that, people are going to those sites. We wanted to be part of that for the educational side of the company.”

Yet there’s more to the company’s history that plays into it’s decision to invest in a PUBLISHING company within their direct response/ecommerce selling infrastructure…

Gordon Magee: “When the company started 25 years ago – this is our 25th anniversary literally this year – when they started we were owned by two veterinarians, Dr. Ray Foster and Dr. Marty Smith. When the company started, one of the things they wanted to do was educate pet owners to be able to use products better and to care well for their pet. That came out of their veterinary background.

Certainly that’s a good marketing strategy as well. But the primary thing was let’s make sure pet owners know what they are doing. They can make better buying decisions and so on.

When they started their catalog they went to catalog conferences. They were new at all this. The catalog experts said, ‘You know you guys are devoting way too much space to education in your catalog. You can’t do that on a square inch analysis basis and have it come out in a cost-effective way.’

They decided very early on to ignore that advice. They dedicated I think 10 to 15% of every catalog to educational articles. That really became our niche for the customer. It also provided a good marketing tool in that people kept the catalogs because the articles were in them.

Over time, that trust relationship developed with the customer. So we probably have more articles on pet care and more veterinary articles online than anybody in the country. So to go into video and do the same thing was just a natural outgrowth of what we have been doing for 25 years really.”

Like many pioneers, the founders were told “don’t do THAT!” when it came to innovating.  Much like Buy.com cut against the grain with its approach (proven successful by now?!) to mixing “media company” with “lowest price e-commerce company.”

What say you, Revenews readers?  I hope this may help clear up questions regarding costs and how to approach them in strategic terms.  I’ll return shortly to wrap up with final thoughts on Gordon’s measurement approach and use of user generated video content.

View post:
Case Study: Video Publishing to Drive Sales (PART II)

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has upped the ante in the effort to regulate consumer privacy in the online behavioral advertising space.

Not that you would guess it from the title of the FTC’s latest guidelines, which are billed as industry “self-regulatory principles for online behavioral advertising.”  However, at the very end of the FTC’s 49-page staff report is an ominous portent:  in the next year the agency will investigate industry practices and may bring enforcement actions against businesses for unfair or deceptive acts or practices and violations of other laws.  Over the past decade the FTC has brought numerous legal and administrative actions in the name of online privacy, resulting in costly cease and desist orders, fines and injunctions against online businesses for failing to disclose their privacy practices clearly, deviating from their posted privacy practices, or lacking reasonable consumer data protection measures.  Therefore, it would be a mistake to view the new online behavioral advertising principles as voluntary.

Online behavioral advertising is the practice of targeting ads to individual consumers based on data collected about their web activity, such as searches conducted, web pages visited and content viewed.  The FTC has been interested in this area for years because of the presumed invisibility of the data collection to consumers.  Also, with the increasing amount and richness of data collected by numerous sites and service providers for online advertising purposes, the potential for fraud or other harm to consumers if information falls into the wrong hands, or is merged to produce or elicit more sensitive data, grows exponentially.

In November 2007, the FTC held a two-day Town Hall meeting to discuss online behavioral advertising in a public forum.  Following that event, the FTC released for public comment draft self-regulatory principles to address privacy concerns.  Over the next few months, the FTC received over 60 comments from the online advertising industry, academics and privacy advocates, among others.  On February 12, 2009, the FTC issued revised principles which it intends to serve as the framework for industry self-regulation going forward.  The principles are summarized below, along with some practical compliance tips.  The FTC staff report can be read in its entirety here (pdf).

What Is Not Covered?

The FTC’s new online behavioral advertising principles do NOT apply to first party advertising, where the site displaying the targeted ad is the same one that collected the data and where no data is shared with third parties.  A service provider performing internal functions for the site would not count as a third party, but if the site participates in an advertising network which collects data at the site for behavioral advertising, this is considered third-party sharing.  The principles also do NOT apply to contextual advertising, where an ad is immediately displayed based on a single visit to a web page or a single search query, rather than the tracking of a consumer’s online activities over time.  (With that said, first party and contextual advertising are still governed by the FTC’s general requirements concerning privacy and data security as mentioned above.)

Not Just PII

The principles apply not only to personally identifiable information (PII), such as name, e-mail address and Social Security number, but also to data that could reasonably be associated with a particular consumer or computer or other device.  Such data includes clickstream data that could be combined with a consumer’s website registration information; individual pieces of anonymous data combined into a detailed profile that is identifiable with a particular person; and behavioral profiles that are not associated with a particular consumer, but are stored and used to deliver personalized advertising and content to a particular device.

Principle #1:  Transparency and Consumer Control

Every site where data is collected for behavioral advertising should provide a “clear, concise, consumer-friendly and prominent” notice that (1) data is being collected at the site for use in providing advertising tailored to consumers’ individual interests, and (2) consumers can choose whether or not to allow this.  The site must also provide a “clear, easy-to-use, and accessible method” for exercising this option (i.e., an opt-out).  Ironically, the FTC believes that the information and features described above should NOT appear, or appear solely, in the site’s privacy policy, since these policies may not be an effective way to communicate with consumers.  Although not required, the FTC speaks approvingly of adding a pop-up box (“why did I get this ad?”) or similar disclosure in close proximity to the ad, with a link to the section of the site’s privacy policy discussing targeted advertising.

Finally, where data collection for online behavioral advertising occurs outside of the standard website context, such as through ISP’s, Web 2.0 or mobile devices, the same principles of disclosure and consumer choice will apply, so alternative methods must be developed to satisfy these principles.

Principle #2:  Reasonable Security, and Limited Data Retention, for Consumer Data

Companies collecting or storing data for online behavioral advertising must provide reasonable security.  Reasonableness is determined in light of the sensitivity of the data, the nature of business operations, the types of risk a company faces, and the protections available to it.  Companies should also retain data only as long as necessary to fulfill a legitimate business or law enforcement need.  Limited retention is key, since the FTC is eager to bring enforcement actions against companies which experience data breaches and are found to be storing consumer information for years after their relationship with the affected consumers has ended.  The FTC has also sanctioned companies which carelessly disposed of sensitive personal information, such as by tossing it into a dumpster.  If you follow negligent practices like these, you will not be able to get off the hook by playing the victim.

Principle #3:  Affirmative Express Consent for Material Changes to Existing Privacy Promises

This requirement is extremely significant because it covers not only disclosures about online behavioral advertising, but any privacy policy or notice.  If a company materially changes its privacy practices, it must obtain “affirmative express consent” (i.e., opt-in) from consumers before it may use previously collected information under the new practices.  “Material” changes are those that are likely to affect a consumer’s conduct or decisions with respect to a product or service.  Among other things, the FTC considers different uses for data collected or different types of sharing with third parties to be material changes.

As for what constitutes “affirmative express consent,” the standard privacy policy language providing that any use of the site after a modified policy is posted constitutes acceptance of the new policy clearly no longer works for previously collected data.  Instead, users must be required to take some action to consent.  According to the FTC, use of a pre-checked box indicating consent to the privacy changes is not valid consent, nor is some sort of choice mechanism “buried deep” in a lengthy privacy policy or uniform licensing agreement.  (So, yes, an extra click really is required.)

Prospective changes to a privacy policy (applying to information collected after the new policy is posted) are not covered by the affirmative express consent requirement, although the FTC mentions a need to alert repeat site visitors to the changes, such as by a prominent notice on a landing page.

Principle #4:  Affirmative Express Consent to Using Sensitive Data for Behavioral Advertising

Companies should collect “sensitive data” for behavioral advertising only after consumers opt in to receive such advertising.  Although the FTC has not provided a comprehensive definition of sensitive data, it includes financial data, data about children, health information, precise geographic location information, and Social Security numbers.  The FTC has also raised for further consideration whether certain categories of data exist that are so sensitive they should never be used for behavioral advertising.

Regulate Thyself or Else

The main take-away here is not to be fooled by the ingratiating “self-regulatory” moniker that appears dozens of times throughout the FTC staff report.  The principles discussed above are, or will soon be, industry best practices.  Outliers should be wary.  Companies collecting data for online behavioral advertising are strongly encouraged to consult their e-commerce counsel to determine whether the FTC’s principles apply to them and, if so, how to comply without jeopardizing a valuable channel for content and revenue.

FTC Sounds Off on Online Behavioral Advertising Privacy Issues

What is an acceptable payoff in terms of time investment put IN and the return taken OUT (actual sales) of social marketing?  What’s reasonable to expect and how soon?  I’ve begun to crack the nut that is this question by talking with people who have direct experience. 

Let’s be honest — when people start talking about marketers becoming publishers in a ’social marketing’ context it can quickly begin to smell like Web marketing snake oil or ‘branded entertainment’ hogwash.  One way of fighting this is to get, as Sam Decker of Bazaarvoice said to me, “operational, not conceptual” — consider less and do more.  But before we start doing it’s critical to justify and plan investments in what amounts to online publishing-with-a-purpose.

Picking up from my prior story, Rok Hrastnik of Direct TV marketer, Studio Moderna (and speaker at the next eComxpo) believes that “the content is your way in … your bargaining chip to win consumers’ attention.”

He says it’s the first step in a relationship (with prospective customers) that, someday, may result in profitable sales.

“The emphasis being on ’some day.”

To me this was beginning to sound a lot like branded entertainment.  Someday?  Yet these are big questions and I knew Rok to be an experienced guy so I pressed him for more.  In fact, I’ll share a couple of examples — focusing on Studio Moderna’s Dormeo.com brand (mattresses and bedding) and Wisconsin pet goods purveyor, DrsFosterSmith.com.  Both companies report steady sales streaming in as a direct result of publishing efforts.

Setting Expectations

How fast have each of these companies managed to track back sales to efforts?  In a matter of months — and make no mistake these are direct response marketing companies that have been around for a good while.  They know how to get things done on the Web (built for direct response).

Ok — so I’ll make quick work of how this gets done. First, this “marketing as publishing” model is not a short-term vehicle as evidenced by companies like Drs. Foster Smith who’s PetEducation.com site produces audio-visual content internally (they don’t outsource).  That takes time to build and get good at (production value) yet Drs Foster Smith have decades of content creation to lean on (they pioneered “magalogs” — content-heavy magazines).

On the other side, the Dormeo brand leverages outside writers to create e-mail newsletter content that establishes continuous, often viral relationships with ’someday customers.’  When I say ‘viral’ (another voodoo word) I’m referring to customers who love to pass Dormeo’s content to family and friends under promotional incentive.

“Content creation and publishing is the long term thing you do to gradually convert your prospects into customers in ways they may actually welcome,” says Hrastnik who’s busy selling products that consumers don’t exactly purchase frequently or on impluse — mattresses!

Yes, “It Depends”

Sure how fast you’ll see results and what those results look like will vary… but be assured the metrics are not “videos viewed” and/or “e-mail open rates.”  They’re far more serious — metrics that please CFOs and CEOs.  No, they’re not always focused on the immediate sales transaction.  Think “actions taken” that involve interaction with the brand itself (sign-ups, registrations, downloads etc.).  Things you’re doing that help prospects move forward along their “chronology of purchase intent” — toward purchase.

Nobody expects immediate results these days.  They just expect you to have a plan that can be measured and adjusted as you execute it.

Don’t forget the most important aspect — making *occasional* calls to action.  Pitching content-lovin’ prospects what you’ve got to sell.  What’s the proper mix of content + sales pitching?  Again, that depends on what you’re pitching to a degree and Hrastnik only tends to talk about it “offline”

Talk Talk

What to talk about?  Stated plainly, Hrastnik suggests if you’re selling things like mattresses, don’t limit yourself to talking with customers about sleeping or your brand — “talk about sex, relationships, health, productivity, motivation, success and other things that people actually care about.”

How do you say it?

Although Bazaarvoices’ Decker is invested in the concept of customer-generated content, he admits, “Customers won’t create content in all the places you need to reach the market and at the times you need to hit your goals.”

“The key is to leverage their voices, either in the creation of your marketing or by using their words directly, to make your ‘talking-at-them’ more authentic, credible and relevant,” says Decker who recommends a listen-and-react model to creating content that could be published as text/email or video.

Aagin, Hrastnik outsources to a team of external writers and graphic artists to get the job done but holds on to the promotional and database marketing aspects.

Just Do It

“Get operational, not conceptual,” says Decker who worries that too many marketers invest time planning and not executing.

He also suggests creating an internal “council” focused on forward-thinking ideas — working to drive them forward across multiple functions and make them happen.  This, he says, fosters the required cultural shift that crosses multiple departments.  Essentially, “it takes a company” to plan and execute a content-driven lead or sales generation strategy.

In the end all of this can be a little scary.  Yet by tying even the smallest of “baby step” trials to their impact on sales — and ultimately profit and loss — progress can be made.  Marketers simply must take a little risk and definately take a note from the book of direct response marketing.

See the original post here:
Justifying Social Marketing: From Publishing to Sales

A visitor of my site who read some of my product data feed resources contacted me with an interesting question about how to deal with availability and SEO issues when you are utilizing merchant product feeds.

If I build a website with an affiliate data feed of an example: 10,000 different digital camera products. How would anyone but myself know that these products are available on my website?

My idea is a simple PHP script site with a CSV data feed file dynamically loaded. Because there won’t be any static pages built, how will the search engines see them?

If your pages URLs change all the time (as in appear and disappear = 404 error), you will have a hard time to get pages indexed by search engines. In order to be able to generate the same page for the same product over and over again is it necessary to have an unique product identifier, which could be the merchant SKU or in the case of digital cameras the UPC or EAN (I would use the EAN if you have that).

You don’t have to delete pages if a product is out of stock. You could (and probably should) keep the page and indicate that it is out of stock. You have one problem though. You need to know when a product is out of inventory and discontinued (= it will never come with new inventory in a future data feed file). There are three 1/2 options, which all involve the merchant (more or less)

Option 1) The merchant provides ALL products in the feed that he is selling, even the out of inventory one, but indicates the inventory level in a column of the data feed (absolute number or just an indicator e.g. available/out of stock or out-of-stock/back-order/low/available etc.

Option 2) The Merchant has a product status that indicate which item is an active SKU that will be replenished or if it is a “discontinued” item. A column for product status would do the trick, like “A” for active and “D” for discontinued.

f a SKU that was in status “D” is not included in the next feed, then you have to delete it, but you keep all products that are in status “A” and just show “out of stock” for them and wait for a future feed with new inventory again.

Option 3) and 1/2 If you don’t get any of the above, you can’t automate the update properly and should keep the product in the DB until you remove it manually. You either have to check yourself, ask the merchant or the merchant comes and asks for the removal (if he complains, explain to him what the problem is and what he can do about it).

In the case of cameras does it probably make sense to check once or twice a year if old models are still manufactured or not. Call it inventory cleaning day or spring cleaning / preparing for the holidays.

Dynamic Scripts and Search Engines

Now some general notes to the use of Product Data Feeds to generate content pages in an automated fashion.

I did a lot with data feeds in the past and know that they can be a pain in the neck sometimes.

While the technology behind it isn’t rocket science, did affiliate networks and merchant manage to screw up pretty much everything there is in the process, leaving it up to the affiliate to deal with those problems. You can’t assume anything and should always expect the worse. It does not only sound like a lot of work, it actually is.

I don’t want to discourage you, but I want to make sure that your expectations and goals are realistic and that you are ready and willing to spend the time and energy necessary to reach them.

I spent a lot of time to collect and write up resources and information to make it easier for other affiliates to deal with the subject. I also talked to several of the networks about the issues. Most listen, but only few are actually doing something about it.

Data Feed Resources / Suggested Reading

I suggest checking out the entry page on my site that is dedicated to affiliate data feeds.

My posts in this forum thread talk about the requirements and skills needed that are necessary to deal with data feeds from a technical point of view. It also mentions alternatives to the use of raw data feeds that should always be considered. I planed to write something up based on those posts, but did not get around it yet.

I created a write-up that is a good 101 for merchants and affiliates to the subject. It was also based on a forum thread at ABestWeb actually. I strongly suggest to you to read it.

Then I have documentations for the individual networks that provide data feeds. There is no standard, which means that it is up to you to either create a flexible solution and/or you chose to work with data feeds from one source (network in most cases) only.

Regarding SEO and the use of automated scripts to process feeds

Read this article of mine. It’s about web templates, but mentions data feed sites as well.

If your goal is to create sites based solely on data feeds and nothing else and expect them to rank anywhere in the search engines and make money off them, look for something else to do.

It is not 2001-2003 anymore. Google caused virtually a genocide among data feed affiliates with their “Florida” update in Fall 2003. Webmerge was the tool of the trade to create those sites (its still available, see my data feed page).

The sites that were build a bit more cleverly were mostly killed off by their “Jagger” update at the end of 2005, followed by their “BigDaddy” infrastructure update in early 2006. My largest data feed based site was among those. I was not doing much SEO at that time anymore, which was part of the reason why I could not prevent the site to get almost entirely washed out of Google’s index. There are only a few hundred pages left today, most of them are supplemental.

Making a Data Feed based Site Work Today

You have to add value for the user and content for the search engines in order to make it work. What you also need are a lot of inbound links to your site to be able to keep thousands of pages in the search engine index. This means that some word of mouth and social media marketing should be part of your business plan. It can be done, but it is much harder today than it was back then.

I suggest to concentrate on building a socially friendly site that does not rely as much on search engines and do the SEO work on the side and see the results of it as a nice added bonus, but not an essential part of your business.

You can do what you want. My tips are only well intended to save yourself a lot of time by learning it yourself the hard way and make mistakes that others already did before you.

Cheers!

Carsten Cumbrowski
Cumbrowski.com

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SEO Concerns and Product Update Issues with Affiliate Product Data Feeds

Recent launches of Amazon’s Kindle 2 eBook reader and its Sony counterpart, the Reader Digital Book, have satisfied the wants and needs of bleeding edge consumers with longer battery life and enhanced text readability. But how much are they expected to disrupt traditional print-based media like books and newspaper? More importantly, will they significantly influence the way the majority of consumers consume printed media?

I’ve read a couple of analytical pieces, including a recent post Kindling an Interest in eBooks by Revenews writer Barry Silverstein  comparing the potential  revenue generated by an eBook  to a paperback and a hardcover.

The Great Paper Waste

While on a per unit basis it appears that hardcover books and their limited editions/first edition counterparts give better returns than eBooks, the writing’s on the wall that digital printing will outperform and likely supplant traditional media. The factors  are pretty overwhelming and the question is when this will happen.

According to a post by Dave Taylor in response to how much of a book’s print run remains unsold  or destroyed, the industry estimates are between “as little as possible” to about 55%. Having worked in the publishing industry before, I’ve seen as much as 90% of the print run of a book remain unsold.

Similar to how CDs,  DVDs, and other physical goods are produced, you might expect 5% of product produced to be bestsellers, going into a 5th or 10th printing, another 30-50% to break even and possibly generate marginal profit, while the balance is relegated to the bargain bin section of your bookstore or online and direct mail specialty book clearinghouses. If said stock, whether CD, DVD, book, magazine, newspaper, remains unsold, it’s either recycled or ends up in a local landfill.

What this means is  with half of all books printed not sell the  viability and bottom line  for traditional publishers is brought down. Printing a string of dud books could be financially fatal for niche and specialty publishers.

The Digital Publishing Paradigm Shift

How digital publishing disrupts the established business model is by allowing authors the option to choose to self-publish.  This is feasible if they’re confident in promoting their books themselves outside of the book catalog  and book tour avenue of publishing publicity.

Publishers  can also benefit since by being  able to avoid printing an excessive amount of inventory, reduce production and storage costs and channel their efforts more towards promotion and less on the production element of the business.

But the biggest payout for digital book readers could potentially be the environmental impact.

Step into your bookstore and imagine that half of the books you sell will be unsold and relegated to a paper mill for shredding or burning.

When you take that example and multiply it by all the bookstores in the country, the potential is there for digital publishing to supplant not just the business model for brick-and-mortar bookstores, but also positively impact the environment.

Overcoming The Final Barrier

Cost, however, remains a barrier at this point. At the current $350 to $400 price bracket, eBook readers will appeal to the tech set  and remain out of the hands of the masses for some time.

If the industry trend in MP3 players is similarly replicated in the eBook reader industry, we might eventually see these devices drop to the $100 price point or better. When that happens, we might see printing presses become a thing of the past.

Andrew Wee blogs about blogging, affiliate marketing and social traffic at Who is Andrew Wee.

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How eBooks and Digital Publishing will Disrupt Traditional Book Publishing

From an online revenue perspective, eBooks today represent a small market.

Amazon is out to change that. The e-commerce giant, doing well despite a sagging economy, recently introduced Kindle 2. This next-generation reading device comes with a library of over 240,000 books, worldwide newspapers, magazines, and blogs. It’s got 3G wireless for book downloading, an improved screen, and it’ll even read books out loud to you.

Sony offers the “Reader Digital Book,” a Kindle competitor. Both Amazon and Sony are banking on early adopters who want to read books electronically and remotely. With the Reader Digital Book priced at $400, and Kindle selling for $359, consumers will need to read a lot of eBooks to make their investment worthwhile.

But the more interesting Amazon announcement came on March 4, when the company said that iPhone and iPod users could get a new free Kindle application that gives them access to the entire Kindle library.

Just days after Amazon’s iNews, Barnes & Noble announced a $16 million purchase of eBook retailer Fictionwise. Barnes & Noble’s eBook sales sputtered in the past, but now it will try to give Amazon a run for its money.

The Amazon iPhone/iPod application and the Barnes & Noble acquisition may help ramp up eBook sales. But there’s no guarantee book publishers will be fully onboard. A recent article in Financial Times stated:

“What is perplexing for publishers is the long-term viability of the existing model. The profit margins are difficult to determine… E-books are sold at a fraction of the suggested hardcover price on the physical edition with many new Kindle titles sold at $9.99.”

The “existing model” that concerns publishers is the fact that eBooks sell for under $10, while hardcovers sell for upwards of $25. eBooks are a little more expensive than paperbacks, but paperbacks are typically published only after a hardcover edition’s selling cycle has ended. Publishers have to cover the costs of marketing and author advances, whether a book is published as a hardcover, paperback, or eBook.

Still, with book publishers facing continuing declines in profits, you’d think the industry would embrace any avenue to increase sales, especially if it actually decreases their dependency on printing and distribution. But book publishers are not known for being visionary.

Book publishers do follow consumer demand, however. So if a critical mass of consumers creates a true demand for eBooks, publishers would have to commit to publishing them. Will that really happen? Maybe the reading public will want to retain the admittedly old-fashioned but treasured tactile experience of leafing through printed books. Or maybe, as Amazon hopes, they will begin to see a book as one more searchable electronic document to be viewed on a screen.

——————
Barry Silverstein is a freelance writer/marketing consultant and co-author of the McGraw-Hill book, The Breakaway Brand.

See more here:
Kindling an Interest in eBooks

Currently going on at eComXpo.com is the latest installment of the eComXpo virtual tradeshow for internet marketers, which happens entirely online in the realms of cyberspace. No travel ling required; no hotel room to book… none of those hassles.

Today is the first day of the show and it will be continued tomorrow. Admission for attendees is absolutely free for all of the 8,000+ expected attendees.

The virtual trade show has all the elements of a real-life event, except for the meeting people face to face, the parties and the hangovers the next day . Exhibitors have virtual booth, you have a virtual bag to collect contact information and virtual schwag. You can chat with people at the booths, not just with the folks who run it, but also with the folks who visit it… you can even chat with anybody who runs around on the exhibit hall floors or any of the lounges.

Like a regular trade show, eComXpo has educational sessions, with the difference, that attending them at this virtual conference is free, no “FULL PASS” to access them is required. Just go to eComXpo.com and register and off you go.

If you missed any of the educational sessions already, no worries, because all of the presentations and panel discussions will become available on the eComXpo web site after the show is over. You have to have an account though, which is another good reason to check it out. The session recordings will be available for 90 days, before they will be taken down.

eComXpo is a good training exercise, if you never attended a conference before.

Let me quote a post of my own that I wrote in October 2006 for ReveNews.com.

The eComXpo has a lot of advantages to attract affiliates of all levels:

• The free admission makes it possible for any affiliate to attend regardless of available budget, newbie and supper affiliate.
• There is no need to travel to get to the show, you just go to your computer and you are there. You can attend as long as you want, 5 minutes or 5 hours or every hour for 15 minutes. Its up to you or the time available, especially for affiliates that still have a day job.
• Affiliates that can afford to spend the time and money for the trade show pass, flight, hotel, taxi etc. (which is not cheap) have a hard time to believe and see for themselves that the investment is worth it. eComXpo is a good introduction of those Affiliates to the principle of those tradeshows and the opportunities that can come from it.

Entirely virtual Tradeshows like eComXpo will never replace the real live human contact of tradeshows in the real world, not to mention the socializing and networking opportunities at the parties that are organized by show organizer itself and various sponsors.

I used to be one of those affiliates and eComXpo (among other things) made me attend real-life conferences afterwards.
I will be one of the presenters at the event, among many other known figures in this industry. My session will be at the end of Day 1, Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 8:20 pm EST. It is a ca. 50 minutes long presentation titled “What Makes a Good Datafeed? Tips for Merchants” and as the title already says… it’s about product data feeds.

My presentation slides are already available at my Slideshare.net net account. In order to hear what I have to say to those slides, you have to come to my session on Wednesday when every attendee will get the information that my slides are up on Slideshare.net. So if you are reading this before the coming Wednesday, you have already the advantage that you can check out the presentation before everybody else.

If you are a Merchant or Network and interested in the subject of affiliate data feeds, make sure that you also check out my data feed related resources at my website at Cumbrowski.com/datafeeds and my data feeds primer article at Cumbrowski.com/datafeeds101.

Cheers and see you soon in Cyberspace!

Carsten Cumbrowski
Internet Marketer and Blogger
http://www.cumbrowski.com/

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eComXpo 2009 – The Virtual Tradeshow for Internet Marketers – Now Open

Affiliate Summit West 2009 in Las Vegas came to an end this Tuesday. I am always fascinated by the fact that I get something out of it, which I had no idea about when I entered the airplane in Fresno last weekend to go to the conference. Sure, I always like to get back in touch personally with the friends and business partners who I more often than I’d like to, neglected during the past months.

A large part of the year 2008 was again sucked away by some invisible force, which cannot be explained with any know law of physics. I just had the feeling that the year was by no means anything as close to 365 days in length. 120 days is probably much closer to the “felt” length of the previous year. No computer will change this feeling of mine. I know it were 365 days, but try to get this message to my intuition and my guts.

Getting Efficiency Back into Performance Marketing

I stumbled across an interesting article by Jeff Molander, CEO of Molander and Associates, which was published in May 2008 at the UK marketing research company blog by eConsultancy (like a Brit version of MarketingSherpa / MarketingExperiments).

I didn’t see this one when it was published it last year. As I mentioned already, it was written in May 2008. Now it’s January 2009. I suggest that you are going to read Jeff’s article, it is most certainly worth your time.

Where are we today? Did things change? … I don’t think that they did very much… a little bit, true; I have to be fair with that one.

The holistic approach should be taken beyond affiliate marketing and applied to all marketing activities that can be tracked somehow, online and offline (pay-per-call is getting more and more mature these days)

eBay Seems to be Leading the Pack once more

I attended this Tuesday at the summit a session by Steve Hartmann und William Martin-Gill from the auction giant eBay.com. The affiliate manager(s) from eBay were giving a presentation that I found pretty interesting. I did not follow the eBay program during the last year very much; I have to admit to my discredit so what they were talking about was all news to me.

eBay does pay affiliates based on the value and quality of the business that they refer. This is not in beta, they doing this across the board today already.

This shift that eBay underwent after they moved their program away from Commission Junction and brought the whole program in-house was also causing a shift within their programs list of top 100 affiliate partners (they said that, not me). They were basically able to clean up the house. Sure, they lost some publishers over this, but why bother; those publishers were the ones that only sent low quality traffic along their way. The publishers who send great traffic on the other hand, saw their commission double and quadruple instead.

Affiliate Marketing Worldwide

Affiliate Marketing in Europe being behind the U.S.? Look again!

I also touch-based with some European affiliate networks and German OPMs, specifically with Deputy Managing Director Torben Heinmann from TradeDoubler Germany (which does not have a presence in the United States … YET), Markus Kellermann Head of Affiliate Marketing and some of his colleagues from eXplido Web Marketing.

They actually implemented already tracking technology that is capable to provide analytics and commission structures attached to that data, which goes beyond the mere “last click” and “banner impression” of how U.S. Networks track stuff since the day when Amazon.com launched their partner program soon to be 15 years ago. They basically do some crude multiple-touch-point tracking of clicks and content views (e.g. video watches). Nothing as sophisticated as some of the top web analytics solution providers is capable of, but hey, it’s going into the right direction.

Nothing new from our old, big and fat networks here in the States. It seems that they try to ignore the changes around them for the greater part, hoping that things will be as good (for them) as they always were. I get the feeling that some executives at those networks (I won’t mention names) live in some state of denial of the realities of this industry.

Europe did not only catch up; they surpassed us already!

In 2003, Germany and the rest of Europe seemed to live in the affiliate marketing stone age. Over the years, this huge gap got smaller. After I learned at ASW about what they are already doing today, I’d say that there is no sign of this old gap anymore at all, quite the opposite… A gap is opening again, but this time the other way around.

U.S. based networks who continue to live in their bubble, will one day go down together with it, if they don’t start getting their act together soon and do some catching up with the rest of the people on this planet.

My Personal Affiliate Summit West 2009 Session and Panel Highlights

What was the IMO most Disappointing Session at ASW 2009?
Believe it or not, I was actually able to manage seeing a bunch of the educational sessions at the Summit. The picks that I made were pretty diverse. The first session where I was able to make it to on Sunday was the session/panel about “Ethical Issues in Affiliate Marketing“. It was moderated by Haiko de Poel Jr. from ABestWeb.com and included the panelists Brian Littleton, CEO of the affiliate network ShareASale, old-school super affiliate Connie Berg, founder and owner of the top-coupon web site FlamingoWorld.com, among other successful affiliate projects, OPM Chuck Hamrick from Affiliate Crew and last but not least a guy from a toolbar development company and subsidiary of Rakuten, who owns the LinkShare affiliate Network. (I am sorry, I cannot remember the guys name. He jumped in last minute for Paul Nichols from eBates.com)

The session was a bit of a disappointment for me. I don’t think that it was the fault of Haiko or any other panelist in the room that the session pretty much fell flat on its face and was over after 40 minutes already (20 minutes too short), because nobody had anything to comment, ask or say at the end.

I think that biggest problem was that right from the start more than just one major industry problem became the herd of elephants in the room. It was impossible to tackle all of them at the same time, because it takes much more than the time available for average comments and questions to even scratch the surface of just one of the issues that filled up the room like smog the L.A. city limits during rush hour in summer.

Maybe we should try one issue at a time the next time around. I don’t know. It’s tough and my suggestion to the approach of the subjects might falls as flat on its face as the approach last Sunday.

What was the IMO most Productive Session at ABW 2009?
I would say that is title has to go to the panel “Super Affiliate PPC Marketing Strategies” moderated by Anik Singal of Affiliate Classroom and panelists Rosalind Gardner, author of the Super Affiliate Handbook and CEO of WebVista, Inc., Colin McDougall, author of the VEO Report and CEO or the VEO 2.0 Elite Certification Course and last but not least, super affiliate and fellow blogger Amit Mehta, CEO of Performance Marketing Worldwide and author of the blog Super Affiliate Mindset.

The panel was very well moderated and thought through by moderator Anik Singal (hey, it’s the experience from teaching at Affiliate Classroom and PPC Classroom I guess). The panelists themselves were also top of the crop, long time affiliate marketing professional with hands on and real as reality gets experience in various different areas and niches of this industry.

It was demonstrating nicely to the audience that there is simply no silver bullet in this business. There are numerous different (and sometimes even conflicting) ways to be successful as an affiliate marketer.

Why I think that this session was the most productive? Very simple answer: All of the panelists were speaking blunt honest about everything they did right and where they screwed up. No panelist was holding back any secrets and answered any of the many asked questions as good as humanly possible. I don’t think that anybody who was asking a question walked away without an answer or at least with a sack full of ideas and things to check, measure, verify or test.

After the session was officially over, all panelists remained where they were and did not leave until they responded to/answered the questions that people who approached them personally, were asking them. I stood next to a visitor who was getting a crash course in PPC campaign creation and initial testing by Amit. The tips were not vague at all… real figures and numbers were given. Tools mentioned by name and URL, even the personal unknown favorites, which might provide a cutting edge over competitors, while you know about them and they do not.

Very refreshing!

What was the IMO most Enjoyable Session at ABW 2009?
The session that was one hour long, but felt like 30 minutes or less, while getting a ton of specific tips and information, the none-specific, but bloody honest truth (test-test-test-test, don’t guess or assume = work), mixed in with some humorous, interactive and engaging segments to get the crowds full attention while at the same time help the listeners to relax a bit to be able to suck in more facts about a somewhat dry and boring subject. Well, a subject that involves hands on the job work, and separates facts from fiction. What I am talking about? “Landing Page Testing to increase Conversion“, presented all by its lonely self, Tim Ash, CEO of SiteTurner.com and author of the book “Landing Page Optimization“, which I can also highly recommend buying by the way. I wrote a short review about it on Search Engine Journal when it came out.

Tim knows his stuff and is not kidding around. At the same time he knows how to present structure and perform a presentation that is never boring for even a second and where you walk away from with the feeling and knowledge, that you learned something new, that you did not know or even thought about before the session.

What Else is New?

I did a video interview with Angel Djambazov, Marketing Manager at PopShops.com and Kellie Stevens from Affiliate Fairplay at Affiliate Summit West 2009 at the Rio all-suites hotel and casino, January 11-13, 2009, in Las Vegas, Nevada on January 13, 2009. The interview is about ReveNews.com where Angel is Editor in Chief and about Kellie’s commitment to write some posts for ReveNews.com, if Angel will send her some premium coffee from his home in Seattle, Washington. Kellie’s posts are something that is worth looking forward to. Kellie did win Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Award for Affiliate Marketing Legend the day prior to this interview for some good reasons. Billy Kay also made a commitment I got told by Angel, but unfortunately I was unable to get this commitment on camera by Billy himself.

Here is the video interview. Also mentioned in the Video were Wayne Porter and Pat Grady.

More ReveNews.com Bloggers Wanted
Furthermore, Angel mentioned that despite the various new ReveNews.com bloggers he was able to get to write and contribute to this blog, especially experts in the social media space; RN still needs some expert voice and opinions to other relevant and important subjects, such as Net Neutrality and/or Internet Security. Those subject used to be coved well in the past, by another Affiliate Marketing Legend (the first one actually) and co-founder of this web site, Wayne Porter.

Unfortunately does Wayne not write as much (and long, longer than mine, seriously hehe) as he used to not too long ago. This is sad, but nothing Angel or I can do much about it, except for hunting down some experienced security experts with some writing skills to fill the huge void that the absence of Wayne created here.

Some Fun at the End to Loosen Up a Little Bit
I published a second video, which is only one minute in length about the Affiliate Summit Triathlon. It’s actually a funny video. I hope you will enjoy it, but do not forget the serious issues that I was pointing out in this post over all this fun and excitement.

Affiliate Summit West 2009 Triathlon Best of – Crashes

Okay, that is enough now!

I can already see Shawn Collin’s face, when he looks at this post of mine and thinking to himself “Gee, again one of Carsten’s overly long blog posts that I am not able to read entirely, because my attention span does never exceed 500 words at one time“.  Sorry Shawn, but I hope that my paragraph headings will help that you are not missing too much of the facts and details of my post hehe.

Cheers!

Carsten Cumbrowski

Check out my free collection of useful internet and affiliate marketing resources at Cumbrowski.com. All the hard research work done for you already, that you don’t have to. You’re welcome!

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Affiliate Summit West 2009 Recap and the Issues Ahead for the Year 2009 and Beyond

Imagine a site where you could define a project, application, or task you wanted to have completed and a global workforce of talent would bid on doing the project on an hourly or fixed cost basis.  You then get to review their qualifications, interview them, and see what other’s have said about the projects they have done for them.  You select your contractor to complete the project, and while they are working on your task you get screen shots of their computer screen as they go, so you know they are on task.

I have been telling a lot of people about this site.  oDesk has opened up a world of possibilities for me.  Here is are some examples of some tasks I had completed:

1. Identify all the flights available from British Airways can put them in a specified html format for tripzam.com.  For $2.22 per hour, my contractor in the Philippines completed the task in short order. See the final results of the british airways destinations.

2. Create a php script that shows my friends for afftwitlist.com so that I could show what people who are on the affiliate twitter list are saying on the site. Cost, $54 fixed price.

If you can define the task, you can find someone at oDesk to complete it for you.  oDesk charges your credit card and handles paying the workers.  They also have some more advanced features for bug reports, and code checkin, if you are running a more sophisticated programming outfit.

Like 99Designs.com for logo design, oDesk has been an eye opener!  Check it out!

Originally posted here:
Your Global Workforce!

I was updating and expanding my affiliate product data feeds and APIs resources at Cumbrowski.com, in particular the resources to the product feeds and store builder feature provided by the PepperJam affiliate network, which was launched about one year ago.

I liked what I saw overall, although some items were IMO a great idea, but then implemented half way only, probably without intending it.

Free? Hurray!

Product data are available to any affiliate without any cost directly via the PepperJam Network web interface. There is also a coupon feed available, in delimited format and RSS format (using some custom tags outside the RSS definition). They also have a tool called “store builder” (product show-case creator), which is similar to the tools available through third party tools providers like PopShops.com, GoldenCan.com, DataFeedFile.com or FeedShare.com.

Data Delivery via HTTP

Providing the feeds directly via HTTP, accessible via any web browser is a smart, efficient and cost effective solution. There is no need to charge any fee for setup or maintenance, because there is really nothing to setup. Via a, what you could call, “special page” are the product data rendered into the web browser in simple delimited text format, without HTML tags or anything like that. This is close to the format how the networks developer gets the same information out of their product catalog database, without the need for the developer to write a fancy, functional and error free user interface to browse the products.

The product information can be pulled and rendered into the browser in real-time.

Large Feeds

Since no FTP account needs to be created and no static product feed files created to be picked up by the affiliate via FTP client software, a whole new set of options become available and possible. No disk space is wasted on files that are not being picked up and no server CPU is spending a single cycle of processing power on it, until the affiliate publisher actually requests it.

True, there are some challenges, if you use HTTP as delivery method, if the amount of product s requested and downloaded is very large. However, 99% of all merchant product feeds do not fall into this category and even the merchants who have such large feeds (e.g. Buy.com, Overstock.com or Walmart.com) learned that it makes sense to break up their huge 1 million+ products big data feeds into smaller chunks, because it is never an easy undertaking to process over 1 million product records all at once, regardless if you download them via FTP or not.

Since HTTP requests can be handled and processed in real-time, the option to provide filters to reduce the amount of data returned, is now suddenly also (or should be) of the interest of the network.

It used to be an interest of the affiliates only (for the most part). I remember the time when I downloaded gigabytes of junk data every day, because there was only the choice between “everything” and “nothing”. Well, nothing was really an option, so you had to deal with all the overhead that you did not need.

Imagine the Possibilities

The real-time factor does allow the setup of virtually an unlimited number of filters. It is sad that affiliate networks who utilize HTTP for product data delivery are not making much use of this. A filter by product category, advertiser and keyword should only be the very least at the beginning.

When I was an affiliate manager in 2003 for a retailer who had the affiliate program with Commission Junction, the first thing I did was the creation of an affiliate intranet where publishers could create an account and pull product information and more. The intranet was initially created to solve the issues of not having contact information of any publisher (a CJ “feature”) , avoiding the $750 setup fee for the product catalog at CJ itself and the up to $250 setup fee for each publisher in our program that did not qualify for the free access to product feeds through CJ.

The intranet required a second registration, which is tough. We had to offer an incentive to do this. That was when we came up with features that were impossible to provide via the traditional network and the way how they did (and to some degree still do) things. For example it was possible to pull the top XXX number of best-selling products for the whole site or specific categories only and also the time-frame of the sales, ranging from “this month” to “all-time”. This enables the discovery of seasonal trends or sudden “hot” items that are new in the product catalog.

Those are only a few examples. Use your imagination and I am sure that the possible opportunities that come out as a consequence of it would be great, if at least some of the ideas will be implemented.

Web Services instead of Delimited Text via HTTP?

You might say that all this is what the new hot feature “web services” is supposed to be doing.

Yes and No. The border between web services and delimited feeds with several filter options provided via HTTP gets blurry, no doubt about that, but the technical details how similar they might appear are still different. The question whether to use a delimited feed or a web service (if available) still remains to be answered on a case-by-case basis. In some cases a combination of both does make sense.

Btw. as with web services, providing other data via HTTP beyond product and coupon data makes sense also, including reporting data or general program information about active or possible merchant/advertising partners.

One thing that PepperJam forgot over the nice and easy access to the product data via HTTP is the need for automated access to the data. HTTP is great and the link provided, updated based on my selections even better, but all this is of no use for many affiliates, if they have to be logged-in to the networks web interface in order to use the URL provided to them.

If I log-off and try the feed URL, no records are returned. Not good!

Automated Access without Login

PepperJam were not the first nor last who made this mistake. I remember LinkConnector.com having the same problem. I contacted them a while ago, suggesting to them to remedy this short-coming. I need to check, if they actually did anything or not. I could not send them sample source code as I did with Kolimbo (MyAffiliateProgram), where I could tell that they are using Microsoft Active Server Pages, where I am familiar with.

The affiliate network AvantLink.com did it right from the start. I wrote about it, when they launched, what they called their “AvantLink API Module“. Well, AvantLink had and has the reputation to be very knowledgeable about the subject of feeds and APIs.

You can have a look at their solution to see how they made it possible to provide access to the data in an automated fashion but at the same time doing it in a controlled manner without the option for anonymous access to the content.

If you do not want or like to see what another affiliate network is doing, fine, how about Google?

If you used the Google Calendar, you probably noticed the feature to pull your private events as a feed via an obscure URL provided by Google with the note that you must not give the URL to anybody, because it would give that person access to your feed as well. The protection is the obscure code in the URL that is virtually impossible to guess by anybody.

In the case that you think that the URL did leak out somehow, the option is available to render that URL invalid and generate a new unique and private URL for the same content.

I think you got the idea behind this.

PepperJam Sample Source Codes

Oh, btw the coupon feed provided by PepperJam Network does not require to be logged in to pull it. The lack of tags for start and end date of a promotion in the RSS version of the feed limits its possible uses, but I provided an example with source code for how to use it.

I also put the source code of a Visual Basic Script on my website that works around the problem of the need to be logged in to the web interface in order to pull the product feeds. I added a bunch of command line options to make it as flexible as possible for the use by affiliates to automate the pickup of product data from PepperJam.

Documentation? Configuration?

Last but not least. Is it really that hard to provide some notes about the general structure of the delimited feed (column and row separators, first row having column names or not, escaping of content that contains column or row delimiter) and to each column in the file about its use, possible values and format, which columns are required and always must have appropriate data provided by the merchant (and verified by you, the network)? Since the output data are generated on the fly, how about letting the publisher choose the format himself? We did that at our affiliate intranet too. The feed format preferences were simply stored with the affiliates intranet account. Some folks prefer tab-delimited, others pipe and there are even folks who like to deal with the mess that a CSV feed can create, if created improperly. The Linux guys prefer a simple Line-Feed after each record, the Windows guys a carriage-return plus a line-feed and the Mac guys just a carriage-return. Let each have it the way they like it.

I did as in almost every case educated guesses again by looking at actual product feed data from various selected merchants. But why should I do the guessing, if you are in the know and just forgot to write it down and share with your publisher base? “Should” and “Seems Obvious” is not good enough here. Once you automated the download, import, processing and publishing of a feed, having guessed wrong becomes more than a minor inconvenience, especially if it would have been easily avoidable early on.

Cheers

Carsten Cumbrowski
Internet Marketer, Blogger and Entrepreneur

Cumbrowski.com, the resources portal for internet marketers. The content is free, no strings attached.

The rest is here:
Affiliate Data Feed Delivery via HTTP

Ok we all know that no one really goes to the International Consumer Electronics Show for the sessions. With over 2,700 exhibitors eager to showcase their marquee product line for this year in hopes of creating the kind of buzz that will carry them into next year, there are plenty of distractions to waylay even the most educationally focused attendee. Plus while it may be ahead of the curve in terms of the technology being showcased; CES tends towards the mundane with its sessions unless you happen to have never heard of Web 2.0 or don’t know that mobile is the next big marketplace.

This year, with the upcoming change in the Administration and with the challenges everyone faces with today’s economy it is good to see CES offering sessions that are timely. The following sessions are my pick for those you can’t miss at CES 2009:

1)  One-on-One with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin

I am a big believer in the truism that you are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past if you don’t learn from them. As part of an unpopular administration Kevin Martin has served as chairman of the FCC for over three years.  As the subject of a congressional investigation which sited him with creating a “climate of fear” within the FCC, Martin has seen his share of mistakes and we can learn from those. It will be interesting indeed to see how he perceives the challenges facing the incoming Administration.

Panelists include:

~Kevin Martin, Chairman, FCC
~Gary Shapiro, President and CEO, Consumer Electronics Association

2) Reaching the Promise of Universal Access to Technology: Creating the Global Tech Ecosystem

The economic crisis has served as a reminder of how real the global economy has become. Providing easier access to technology to people in growing economies promises to create a flood of new users whose ingenuity and participation may well create a shift in the way we interact with technology. Tackling the subject of universal access as a catalyst for growth, the Technology and Emerging Countries (TEC) Panel is sure to be interesting.

Panelists include:

~Eric Nonacs, Managing Director for Global Affairs, Endeavour Financial Ltd.
~Michael Fairbanks, Co-Founder, The SEVEN Fund
~Kazi Islam, Chief Executive Officer, Grameen Solutions
~William Kamkwamba, Inventor
~ Kentaro Toyama, Assistant Managing Director, Microsoft Research India  

3) The Internet – How Do We Keep The Road Open?

Hand in hand with providing global access to technology is insuring that the Internet pipeline remains open to everyone. This creates challenges in managing the infrastructure of a network that companies and countries will desire to access and control. How to keep that access open to everyone will be a tough problem to solve and will directly impact the future of net neutrality.

Panelists include:

~Rob Pegoraro, Personal Technology Columnist, Washington Post
~Scott Cleland, Chairman, NetCompetition.org and President, Precursor LLC
~Paul Misener, Vice President, Global Public Policy, Amazon.com
~Brent Olson, Assistant Vice President- Public Policy, AT&T
~Ben Scott, Policy Director, Free Press
~Rick Whitt, Washington Telecom and Media Counsel, Google Inc.

4) Washington Update: The Times They Are a Changin’

After recovering from the spin of FFC Chairman Kevin Martin and orienting yourself to the global stakes, this session further speculates on how the incoming Administration will take on topics such as global access, intellectual property, media regulation and net neutrality.

~Andrew Noyes, Reporter,  CongressDaily
~Markham Erickson, Executive Director, NetCoalition
~Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies, The Cato Institute
~Leslie Harris, President & CEO, Center for Democracy & Technology
~David K. Rehr, President and CEO, National Association of Broadcasters (NAB)
~Gigi Sohn, President and Co-Founder, Public Knowledge

5) Emerging CE Technology – A Preview of the IEEE ICCE’s Most Interesting Technologies

I always found the OZ behind the curtain far more interesting the flashy Wizard in front of curtain. Although CES often provides a bit of flash the chance to peek at what the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers feels is the most interesting emerging technologies should be tempting to anyone attending.

~Stuart Lipoff, Partner, IP Action Partners
~Atul Batra, Senior Director, Marvell Semiconductors Inc.
~Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates
~Uwe Kraus, Professor, University of Wuppertal
~Scott Linfoot, Professor, De Montfort University

6) Finding Money in a Bad Economy

Have a startup idea or want to fund you newly launched startup? Well, 2009 will prove to be a tough year to find funding with venture capital firms actually seeking to (gasp) fund business whose fiscal strategy makes sense. This session should prove to be a good gauge for the type entrepreneurial pitch VCs are open to this year.

Panelists include:

~Don Rainey, General Partner, Grotech Ventures
~Mark Heesen, President, National Venture Capital Association
~Brian Jacobs, General Partner, Emergence Capital Partners
~Michael Kelley, Principal, PricewaterhouseCoopers
~Jeb Miller, Principal, The Carlyle Group

7) Greener Gadgets: The Future of Consumer Technology

One field we know VCs are open to is greentech. This panel on emerging green trends and innovations should provide a peek at how new and established companies are moving towards sustainable design.

Panelists include:

~Marc Alt, President, Marc Alt + Partners
~David Floyd, Managing Director, Freeplay Energy
~Mary Lou Jepsen, CEO, Pixel Qi
~Jeff Omelchuck, Executive Director, The Green Electronics Council

8 ) What Will They Think of Next? Consumer Technology in 2025

After the IEEE trots out the technologies it finds interesting, join in some good old fashioned speculation as tech experts attempt to predict how the consumer electronics industry will evolve over the next 25 years. Personally, I am still holding out for jetpacks.

Panelists include:

~Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor, All Things D
~Stephen DiFranco, Vice President and GM, Americas Consumer Group, Lenovo
~Gregory Harper, Co-Founder, Gadgetoff and President, Cerberus Corp.
~Len J. Lauer, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Qualcomm Inc.
~Sean Maloney, Executive Vice President, General Manager, Sales and Marketing, Intel
~Phil McKinney, Vice President, CTO, Personal Systems Group, Hewlett-Packard Company

9) Your Robot Will See You Now – How Technology is Creating Your Personal Hospital

In a case of the future is now, the field of health informatics is growing as smart technology begins to augment health monitoring. From remote doctor visits via video to advanced personal diagnostics the way we think of medicine is changing quickly. Of course with the boon of such devices comes concerns over privacy and quality of care which hopefully this panel will address as well.

Panelists include:

~Rick Merritt, Editor-at-Large,  EE Times
~Howard Jay Chizeck, Sc.D, Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Adjunct Professor, Department of Bioengineering, University of Washington
~Mir Imran, Inventor & Authority on Medical Electronics, In-Cube
~Rajiv Mehta, CEO, Zume Life
~Marshall Stanton, M.D., Vice President, Remote Disease Management, Medtronic
~David Whitlinger, President and Board Chair, Continua Health Consortium

10) Tie between the two: Day One Keynotes

Keynotes often set the mood for a conference. A lot of challenges currently face the Consumer Electronics industry. Especially with Ford Motor Company being on the schedule (2nd Keynote of the day) it will be interesting to see how rose tinted or straightforward will CEA CEO Gary Shapiro’s State of the Industry address be. My bet is on rose tinted.

Keynotes by:

~Gary Shapiro, President and CEO, Consumer Electronics Association
~Sir Howard Stringer, Chairman and CEO, Sony Corporation
~Alan Mulally, President and CEO, Ford Motor Company

That’s the rundown of my picks for what should be a very interesting CES. What sessions are you looking forward to? What technology do you most want to see unveiled?

Read the original:
Top 10 Must See Sessions at CES 2009

You know those little icons on your desktop that designate the presence of a active program or the same icons in a browser that designate the presence of an active file? Mac or PC you have been using them for years, right? Well according to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) only Michigan based Cygnus Systems, Inc. owns the rights to visual representation of that active program or file via a thumbnail. And Cygnus is suing to protect those rights.

According to Ars Technica, application developer Cygnus first filed for the patent in 2001 as a continuation of an original application filed in 1998. The patent covers thumbnails, or more specifically the navigation and access of files based on representational thumbnails.  In May 2008 US Patent # 7,346,850 was granted.

It is a shining example of what is wrong with the US Patent system which is woefully incapable of dealing with either the rapid growth of new technology online or the expanding number of companies that exist in the space.

Established in 1790, the purpose of the US Patent Office is to issue state and federally recognized writs designed to help protect legitimate innovation. As long as there have been inventors there have been profiteers who seek to use intellectual property as leverage against a competitor or simply to extort money.  In such cases, the existence of a patent can protect the creative, intellectual and financial rights of the holder.

However, modern patent profiteers are not so easily contained.  As Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy stated in a concurring May 2006 eBay Inc v. MercExchange, L.L.C., 547 U.S. 388 (2006) decision,

“In cases now arising… the nature of the patent being enforced and the economic function of the patent holder present considerations quite unlike earlier cases. An industry has developed in which firms use patents not as a basis for producing and selling goods but, instead, primarily for obtaining licensing fees.” (PDF of text of the decision)

The Case of Amazon

Let’s take as an example one of the most famous cases, US Patent # 5,960,411, known as the Amazon 1-Click patent which covers a “method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network.” Twenty-three days after the patent was issued Amazon tried unsuccessfully to wield it as a weapon against Barnes & Noble in a suit filed in 1999.

This led to cries for a boycott of Amazon spearheaded by the slightly fanatical Richard Stallman. Thankfully, mainstream voices like Tim O’Reilly founder of O’Reilly Media, jumped in. O’Reilly stated he felt Amazon’s patent was, “a land grab, an attempt to hoodwink a patent system that has not gotten up to speed on the state of the art in computer science.”

The 1-Click suit was settled in 2002 under undisclosed terms. Shortly after the settlement Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos posted an open letter on patents (interestingly the letter can no longer be found on the Amazon site). In the letter Bezos calls for patent reform stating that the “vast majority of our competitive advantage will…come not from patents”. He does however say that they will not give up their patents; instead Amazon will simply be more careful in how they use them.

But the fact is that Amazon also owns the patents for 404 Pages (US Patent # 7,325,045) and for Affiliate Referrals (US Patent # 6,029,141) among a host of others the common use of which can be found on almost every website online.

Think about it.  How many web designers and how many company websites use 404 pages?  Almost every website you see online today. And as for affiliate referrals, well apparently the whole industry is indebted to Amazon.

Hopefully the backlash from Amazon’s use of the 1-Click patent was strong enough that they learned from the “harvest of ill-will”, as O’Reilly put it, received from the online community. However, Amazon’s current patents, including the cookie patent which is still active, cover more territory than I feel comfortable leaving to any one company’s discretion.

Should Software be Patentable?

The case against patenting software or codeware is made using three arguments:

1. Software is already afforded copyright protection thus it is adequately protected
2. The creation of software code is not dissimilar to mathematical algorithms which are not patentable. According to Gottschalk v. Benson 409 U.S. 63 (1972) “an algorithm or mathematical formula is like a law of nature, which cannot be the subject of a patent.”
3. Software patents currently 17-20 years in term, have a disparate negative impact on freeware and thus stifle innovation.

Personally, I feel that the copyright argument only is tenable in cases where the software is sold via packaging or download. Designed to protect the publication, distribution and adaptation of an author’s work, copyright does a very poor job protecting code tied to web development as any site that has been scraped can testify, due to lack of enforcement ability.

The math argument is indeed perplexing due to the similarities between math and code. However, the way software has evolved, allowing for people and companies to interact with it through hardware in a way that is inherently different than the way math has evolved due to ease of access. The idea that under the math argument, patent law would treat have to treat software different than hardware which through common use it is coupled with, is untenable to me.

Finally there is the argument of the disparate impact on freeware. It is true that large corporations have the legal resources to wield patent legislation tactically against potential competitors. The reverse edge of the argument is that under the current structure corporations also have the legal resources to stifle Open Source software by patenting ideas that are already in the public domain.

Rise of the Prior Art Database

The call for patent reform as put forward by O’Reily and Bezos was published in 2000. In his letter, Bezos states that the process could take “2 years or more”. Ironically that is approximately the date of the settlement with Barnes and Noble. Aside from putting that issue to rest has anything significant change happened?

Although it was mentioned again in a Wired interview, the prior art database which would provide an easily accessible resource of prior art examples to help determine the originality of an invention, that Bezos’ offered to fund in his letter has never materialized.

Even though Bezos wasn’t able to put together his version of a public focused prior art database several other have stepped up to do so. The Open Invention Network launched what it calls the LinuxDefenders.org. Co-sponsored by the Software Freedom Law Center and the Linux Foundation its mission is to, “eliminate poor quality patents…and codify known inventions” thus protecting individuals from larger corporations. It advocates a peer review process for issued patents and the creation of defensive publications to high light prior art instances. Others include Wikipatents and the Peer to Patent Wiki.

Clash of the Titans

In 2007 a coalition of Patent Fairness was formed specifically to help push legislative reform. Members included Amazon, along with: Apple, Cisco, Dell, Google, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, Palm Inc., SAP, Time Warner and Visa among hundreds of others. Their stated mission is to “improve the quality of the patents being issued” and “re-balancing and strengthening the patent system”. Many of their goals were made into what’s known as the Patent Reform Act of 2007 (H.R. 1908, S. 1145).

The problem with reforming the US Patent System, as with any legislative body, is the complex number of special interests and industries such changes potentially impact. The Patent Reform Act sought to create major changes in the current system including:

1. eliminating so-called “submarine patents” often used by patent trolls that purposefully keep patents hidden only to target companies for lawsuits who unknowingly infringe on them
2. allowing for a post-grant review process via petition instead of the current limited options of litigation or USPTO reexamination
3. changing the system from a “first-to-invent” system to a “first-to-file” system which would bring the USPTO in line with the rest of the world

The Patent Reform Act met with heavy resistance.  General Electric, DuPont, Corning and many universities stepped up to defend what they saw as an attack on the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. The AFL-CIO  resisted the bill with concerns (pdf) that it would weaken protection for American manufacturers. And a coalition of headed by the Patent Office Professionals Association expressed concerns (pdf) that changes would “significantly weaken…the strongest (patent system) in the world”.

Despite the resistance the Act did pass the House of Representative in 2007. The Act however stalled in the Senate in 2008 where it fell out of the Judiciary Committee process allowing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to pull the bill from the floor schedule.

Cygnus’ Thumb

All of which leads us back to Cygnus Systems, Inc. which filed suit on Friday against Microsoft, Apple and Google over representational thumbnails. The lawsuit lays down a scattershot of features it feels infringes on Cygnus’ patent including those found in: Window’s Explorer, Apple’s Finder, Opera, iPhone, Safari, and Google’s Chrome. The suit not only goes after retroactive damages but also seeks a “permanent injunction” against further infringement.

Now I don’t know if Cygnus’s owner Gregory Swartz is a patent troll. He may genuinely feel he is simply protecting a technology that he developed.  In theory Swartz should have provided the USPTO with any examples of prior art he was able to find, “if” (as the law reads now in Rule 1.56) he was able to find such examples. It is telling that Information Week writer Dave Methvin found “after only five minutes of searching” prior art examples of the thumbnails in a book by David Karp titled Windows 98 Annoyances (got to love the irony in that name).

What I do know is that 10 years is far too long of a timeframe for a patent to be reviewed prior to being granted. As of the end of Fiscal Year 2008 (pdf) there are 1,208,076 patent applications still pending at the USPTO which essentially indicates a 3 year backlog. That’s a clear sign of an organization that doesn’t have the capacity to keep up with the times, much less the resources required to the determine validity of something as minuscule as a tracking cookie or as abstract as a 404 page.

Although the IEEE does raise valid points (pdf) against the structure of the Patent Reform Act as it languishes in the Senate, some sort of reform must happen. I think the easiest methods would be to a) shorten the length of software patents down to around 5 years; and b) modify US patent rule 1.56 to stop rewarding willful ignorance and require companies to search for prior art.

Without reform our industry can never hope to get out from under the thumbs of these patent trolls.

Originally posted here:
Cygnus Provides Reminder Everything is Still Patently Unclear

Ian Rosenwach, product manager at LinkShare, announced here at ReveNews.com in October this year the launch of the new LinkShare web service called “LinkShare Targeted Merchandiser API” and the feature by LinkShare that is based on that new web service called “Easy Links”.

This is only an addition to a set of different web services that are available to LinkShare publishers. The web service was silently launched months earlier already and this post was originally written, but not published in June, a few days before the soft launch of the service. I provided feedback back in June. I updated and expanded this post to incorporate changes and additions to the new features since I originally wrote it some five months ago.

This API is LinkShare first step into the realm of contextual advertising. The web service returns 1-X products of a LinkShare Advertiser, based on the content of a web page that was either specified in the API call or the referring page /URL (default), if no link was provided.

This is not a full blown contextual advertising service like Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network, Amazon Omakase Links or eBay AdContext. LinkShare does not render any ads for you. You or somebody else (hint) needs to do this for you. Maybe LinkShare will offer something like this in the future, but nothing is planned to my knowledge.

The implementation guide lines for this API for developers can be found here.

A Look under the Hood

Let’s take a look under the hood. I had already a bunch of question after looking over the beta of their Implementation Guidelines. LinkShare did not get back to me yet regarding all the questions and comments that I had, so I decided to repeat them here in my post.

Using the vast number of products that are already available to LinkShare via their Merchandiser Service (Affiliate Product Data Feeds) is a good thing to do and something that I am talking about with people for a long time already. Making access to the product information as easy as possible for non-technical folks should be high on the priority list of advertisers. Existing and potentially new affiliates often like to promote a particular product they like and recommend. Being able to pull a product ad with affiliate link to get a commission for referrals is not as easy as adding an iLike widget on your Facebook or MySpace profile. It should be, but we are still a far cry away from this.

Access to the new API is cumbersome and not helping a lot with the mentioned goal to make it very easy to use. Advertisers decide for themselves, if they want to make their products available through the API or not. The advertiser must be using the LinkShare Merchandiser Service already though. Merchandiser enabled advertisers are not automatically enabled for Easy Links. You can find a list of Easy Links supporting merchants at the LinkShare Help Center here.

The affiliate itself also has to be enabled for the API and as far as I understand does this also require to be already enabled for the Merchandiser Service. The Merchandiser is not free to get access to for many affiliates. You either have to pay a setup fee or must be a good performing affiliate within the LinkShare network for several months already. But even if the Advertiser has the API enabled and uses the Merchandiser and you are an affiliate of that merchant and have merchandiser enabled for your account, does not give you automatically access to the API. The merchant has to manually approve every affiliate first. I don’t know if advertisers can enable automatic approval or not, at least for affiliates who were already approved to receive the advertisers product data feed via FTP.

Once you are approved for the API itself and for the access to the advertiser’s products via the API, you can start making API calls and use the new web services feature. Unfortunately is it necessary to specify with the API call which advertiser’s products should be used for the contextual matching. It does not work in the way that the more advertisers are enabled for the API for your account the more products will become available for the matching of your content. This is a huge drawback and something LinkShare will hopefully change soon.

The affiliate has to specify an advertiser’s MID with the API call and then only 1-x of the products available for that single merchant will be returned. This means that the affiliate has to pre-qualify the content of every page where you want to make use of the API first. If the page is about listening to music and not about making music, you should specify the MID of Apple iTunes and not Musicnotes.com to get a good match for example. This determination is a large piece of the matching already. If you need the API make some work for you, then I guess that you have to use advertisers like Overstock.com, Wal-Mart or Target.com who have a lot of different products.

I noted back in June in my feedback to LinkShare about the new web service, that the practical use for the API will be significantly limited because of the requirement to provide the MID of an advertiser for the contextual matching. Ads cannot be generated like an AdSense, YPN, Amazon’s Omakase, eBay AdContext or Microsoft Content Ad.

The “MID” is not something that a publisher specifies today on a page and ad unit level. He cannot reuse existing meta-data (keywords meta-tags etc.) and has only very few (and always ugly) ways of doing it. If you cannot find or program yourself a work around, the only option you are left with to limit the content of your whole website or website section to make sure that it always matched the product catalog of a specific merchant and then hard code the MID in your site template. I strongly suggest to make the MID optional and do a contextual matching across all merchants that are enabled for the publisher.

The updated developers guide also did not provide an answer to what results you have to expect in certain instances. I hope that the following question will be answered by the LinkShare web services team soon.

If I specify that I want 10 products back as a result, but you cannot find 10 products that actually match the content, what do you do? Do you return less than the 10 (only the ones where you have some kind of match)? Or are you filling the missing slots with products that you pick based on other criteria? What happens if there are no matches at all? I didn’t see an error message for that, which implies that you always return at least one product.

Web Interface and Widgets

In addition to the access to the Easy Links feature via web services, for the tech-savvy affiliates, LinkShare also offers access to the Easy-Links feature via an easy to use web interface. If you know how to create and implement Google AdSense ads into your website, you won’t have any issues with using the Easy Links widgets provided via the LinkShare web interface for publishers.

The Ad units provided by LinkShare are pre-defined, and are available in the standard banner sizes: 300×250 (medium rectangle), 468×60 (full banner), 234×60 (half banner), 120×240 (vertical banner), 125×125 (square button), 728×90 (leader board), 160×600 (wide skyscraper) and 120×600 (skyscraper).

The units can be customized to some degree. You can specify the border color, text color and link color and if you want to show the product name and/or product price. You do not have control over the product image and if or if not you want to show it. It also comes with a “buy now” button image, which cannot be changed. Also the link at the end of each product with the anchor “at Merchant Name” is static and not customizable.

Also not customizable are the background color of the ad unit, the font face, the font styles (bold, italic, size) and an alternative style for links if they are hovered over by the visitor. The border around the Ad unit cannot be suppressed, if you want to. You can only change the color to match your sites background as good as possible, especially if the background is not simply one color, but an image or gradient etc.

However, it’s a good start and most affiliates are probably able to live with the limitations. I also assume that the team at LinkShare will extend on the available options in the future.

The ads will not show the most relevant products right away. It may take up to 48 hours until LinkShare determined the most relevant products for your particular pages. LinkShare will show products that match the site category that you selected during registration for your web site until LinkShare completed the contextual matching process.

The Code to add to your affiliate pages looks like this.

<script type="text/javascript">
lsadunit_publisherId = 'YOURPUBLISHERID';
lsadunit_oid = '102327';
lsadunit_width = 160;
lsadunit_height = 600;
lsadunit_uid = '2004804';
lsadunit_u1 = '';
</script>
<script src="http://adnetwork.linksynergy.com/lsadunit.js"
 mce_src="http://adnetwork.linksynergy.com/lsadunit.js"
 type="text/javascript">
</script>

You can get additional help and information to this feature at the LinkShare Help Center for Publishers here.

Personal Comments

LinkShare also seems to be pretty confident that they are able to do a perfect job when it comes to the matching of products to the publisher’s page content. Even Google who has a much bigger pool of ads to chose from and several years for improving their matching algorithms (which still fails to produce good results in many cases), provides some means for the publisher to help them with the matching.

I am almost certain that LinkShare’s matching is by far not as good as Google’s nor do they have remotely enough ads to pick from for the matching, which makes it not always easier to find an ad that is actually relevant and targeted.

I suggested to LinkShare that the publisher will be provided with some overwrite options, e.g. a set of keywords that should be used. At the very least as a failover, if LinkShare’s content matching returns too few results or no results at all.

In addition to that they could use the proprietary HTML tags by Google or by Yahoo! for the specification, which (content) segments of a HTML document should be included for the content matching (the Google tag) and/or which segments should be excluded from the matching (the Yahoo! tag).

I am pleased to see that a few of my suggestions and comments that I made to LinkShare directly were actually listed to and changed, such as the inclusion of the Error Numbers in the developer guide.

Conclusion

Overall I have to say that I think that it was a move into the right direction by LinkShare, but that I am not impressed by the implementation of the API as it is now. Some might argue that you are better of using the existing Merchandiser Query Tool API, which is not very far-fetched, but they just started.

The least I want to do is discourage the folks over at LinkShare and stop with what they are doing right now. Consider this assessment as a well intentioned feedback. Let’s keep the stuff coming!

To learn more about the LinkShare web services and data feeds as well as web services and data feeds provided by other affiliate networks, check out the collection of resources and guides over here.

* Note to LinkShare Merchandiser Access
Request for access to Merchandiser Feeds – Online Form at LinkShare.com

Quote from their website:

• You have been active in the Network for at least 3 months, AND
• You have generated at least 50 orders in the most recent calendar month

LinkShare reserves the right to charge a one-time maintenance fee of $250 or discontinue access to the Merchandiser product.

Additional Information and Resources to Easy Links

• Easy Links Product Info for Publisher (PDF)
• Easy Links Feature Help at the LinkShare Help Center for Publishers
• Implementation Guide Line for Developers
• List of Easy Links enabled Advertisers
• You can also watch the recording of an educational screen cast from LinkShare about Easy Links here. You can also find additional recordings of seminars for Publishers at the LinkShare.com website here

Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski

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