Make Money Online

In a previous post I discussed how I thought Twitter was a good tool for businesses.

It turns out that I was underestimating the enterprising drive of Twitter and now Foursquare users. In June of 2009, there was much talk about how a Twitter user suspected his tweets lead to a robbery of his house. Such robberies are possible since the user’s home address is still publicly available via the domain registration of one of his web sites.

I often wondered when (not if) someone one would create a service to highlight the risky behavior of announcing that you weren’t at home. Fast forward to February 2010, and someone finally did it. PleaseRobMe.com is live. The site blatantly looks like a satire, and the creators explain that they made the site to point out the folly of people’s actions. Unfortunately, the information on the site appears legit (you can search Foursquare and Twitter to see the source of the updates), showing people broadcasting that they are away from home. Finding home addresses are not so difficult to find: simply try this search to get a list of people’s addresses, and then you simply need to watch people’s status.

While the Twitter user mentioned in the start of this post has a business, the information people are revealing create the wrong kinds of opportunities. Making it easy for criminals to find and rob you is not the fault of the service, but it does reveal that common sense doesn’t keep up with the new social media technology.

So I end this post with a thought. What are the business model opportunities here?

a) Businesses marketing on Twitter and Foursquare announcing special hours and and ‘on-the-road’ promotions?
b) Businesses offering to catch and correct users who self-reveal risky information?
c) Criminals who are looking for an easier time casing homes?
d) Writers who point out risky behaviors?
e) Other

Please comment, especially if you are one of those who likes to reveal that they are not home.

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Satirical Please Rob Me May Point to Business Model for Twitter and Foursquare Users

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I have a very good friend who frustrates me. He’s the kind of guy who puts his drink on the floor next to him despite having a coffee table (and a coaster) 8 inches in front of him. If there are four chairs in a room, he’s likely to sit on the floor – just because.

As a person who follows the rules, does the “normal thing” and mostly conforms to common wisdom and conventions, I have often found his approach to even the simplest tasks odd and annoying. Whenever I think there is a standard way to do something, he finds another “weird way”. Sometimes his methods are inefficient and off putting.

However, lately I’ve come to appreciate and even embrace his different thinking. I’ve been noticing,that in many cases, his way yields unexpected and pleasant results. Every now and then there’s even been an “aha” moment for me when he does something in his own unique fashion.

He’s a super-successful software engineer and his unconventional ways are teaching me to look at problems (and life) in a new way. Now that I’m no longer constrained by the boundaries of working for someone else, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on what I want to do with my life and work. I certainly don’t have it all figured out, but I realize that the only one putting limits on me, is me. Who says I can’t work any project that tickles my fancy or that I feel passionate about.

Once I began to open myself up to new ways of thinking and alternative sources of inspiration, I started feeling so much more creative. I was sort of surprised to find inspiration in the simplest things and now I revel in time spent thinking about how I can apply features or ideas from my everyday life to translate to my work.

Whenever, I think about starting a task or solving a problem, I ask myself, what if I was a child with no preconceived notions about how to solve the issue. What would I do? How would I tackle the problem? It doesn’t matter that 99 percent of the ideas are just flat out ridiculous. But there is that 1 percent that turns out to be a gem.

I put aside the ways things have been done before and try to think outside the box. I know, I know. That phrase is so overused. But it’s hard to come up with another phrase that really captures it for me – especially I have long felt boxed in by something – bosses, financial responsibilities and mostly fear of failure.

Of course, there are tried and true methods that warrant implementation. There’s a reason that best practices work. But I’m working hard not to get bogged down in doing everything by the book.

Here are some great ways to find inspiration.

Read – And not just information related to your job or industry. My smartest and most creative friends are voracious readers. Fiction, non-fiction, magazines. You name it – they gobble up everything. You never know when inspiration will strike. That cycling magazine, or biography of a well-know historical figure may include something that resonates with you and starts the wheels in motion.

Talk to Peers – I know most people in the online marketing space are extremely busy and prefer email or instant messaging to communicate. But I find that every phone or face-to-face conversation I have leads to idea. I feel energized after chatting with people. Even if I don’t come away with an action item or the next big thing – I feel inspired, which in turn, makes me 10x more productive.

Talk to Everyone – Including Your Mom – It’s easy to get caught up in a bubble. The majority of my friends and colleagues are all super smart and techies. However, being cutting edge, early adopters doesn’t always mean we are in touch with the general public. I talk with the guys at the coffee shop, people in line at the grocery store, the mail man, my neighbors and anyone else that I come in contact with. I love knowing more about people and their big concerns. I am genuinely interested and I often get great inspiration from people. It also helps me realize that sometimes I am slightly out of touch.

Give Back – When you help others you often end up helping yourself. Sharing information with peers, offering to help on project, working for a charity, whatever it may be, gives you a sense of the world beyond yourself and your own work. It can help you see the larger picture, which often opens up new ways of thinking about problems. I must also point out that the many people who have helped me with advice, time and support are among the most creative and successful people I know. They are on to something that I want to be part of.

Be a Problem Solver – Ask yourself what frustrates you in everyday life. Chances are other are in the same boat. Why can’t I easily find a support group in my area for a specific health concern? Why is there not a single place online that aggregates information about my favorite hobby? What do I do with the hundreds of used jigsaw puzzles overcrowding my closet? These frustrations may lead to new online business ideas.

Take a Break – When I need to tackle problem, the mere fact that I am sitting down in front of my computer to bang out my thoughts doesn’t make the ideas flow. However, when I take a walk or just sit and relax for 15 to 30 minutes, my mind is free to wander, ponder and there is certainly less pressure than sitting in front of a blank outline on my screen.

Look Around You – Good ideas abound offline and there are often ways to implement them online. I have been struck with good ideas at the park, the grocery store, even while standing in line at the DMV.

Be a Trend Spotter – Going green, financial concerns, saving money, health insurance issues, buying foreclosed homes, recycling clothing, watching TV online, etc. These are all topics that are top of mind for people. You can maximize these opportunities and other emerging ones as well. Spot the next big thing by reading, talking and just absorbing.

The bottom line is that inspiration to get your creative juices flowing is everywhere. You just need to be open to looking at things in a new way.

Do you have unique sources of inspiration?

Lisa Picarille is consultant specializing in online marketing, branding, social media and content creation. A journalist for more than 20 years, Lisa was most recently the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Revenue Magazine, The Performance Marketing Standard.

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Igniting Inspiration

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Here at Revenews we strive to provide content not previously published elsewhere. The following article by longtime Revenews author Brad Waller focuses on Net Neutrality. A timely and important subject worth revisiting.

This column is an outgrowth of a post made on our internal email list. A debate was started by a discussion of the Wall Street Journal article on Google looking to embed their servers with the various cable and network providers, and the intimation that this was a violation of “Network Neutrality.” As the discussion evolved, one participant wrote “This issue is so convoluted, it will require Stephen Hawking to sort it out.”

I’m not Stephen Hawking, but I am a Physicist…

What I get out of this is that Google wants to co-locate their servers inside the facilities of the Telcos so that the pages are served faster. They are asking to pay for this, and not to exclude anyone. This is a way to reduce latency and get better performance; this is not a fast track with preferential treatment. If Google were to ask for exclusive co-location, then there might be an issue. If the service providers were to downgrade everyone else who did not pay, that would be an issue.

Has anyone ever made claims that Akamai was violating Net Neutrality? They have servers located around the globe to optimize the delivery of their customers’ content and no non-customer has complained of unfair treatment when their content was not included for free.

The Net Neutrality issue is that the Telcos want to treat traffic differently by source. One video stream might be slowed down, while another might get the fast pipe. So I may be paying for 15/5 megabit service, but my ISP might decide to throttle some new company down to 1 megabit because they are not paying the extra fee for the best service. Maybe the ISP has their own video streaming service, and they want to charge the competition a dollar a bit to transmit the data, thus cutting everyone out. Maybe they want to charge a million dollars for the service, in which case the biggest services will be able to pay, and the up and coming services will not be able to afford it and fail because customers will see really slow file uploads.

This can be particularly stifling to new services that cannot compete with the established deep pockets and cable companies. What would Twitter do if they were asked to pay a fee for every tweet that gets passed through the network providers service, or risk being “managed” to the point where the real-time benefits are eliminated. Without a revenue stream they would just go away. How about Facebook? They are just starting to monetize their service and something like this might be enough to kill them off. I’m sure that is fine for the providers. But what about consumers?

This whole issue is one of doublespeak. Net Neutrality is really free and open access for all, yet the opposition calls it excessive regulation of the Internet. Senator Ted Stevens kicked this off back in 2006 when he said, “Until somebody tells me what net neutrality means, until they can give me a definition, I don’t want it in there. Right now, nobody knows what it means, so why put it in the bill?”

If nobody knew what it meant, then how did the FCC define it in an agreement with Verizon over their acquisition of MCI in 2005 where they agreed to “adhere to ‘network neutrality’” principles adopted by the FCC earlier this year? So Verizon had to agree to abide by Net Neutrality to get their merger approved, and now that agreement periods are over these companies are arguing that these same principles that they agreed to are confusing and impossible to define, as well as being unneeded government interference with free trade.

I think this issue is too simple for the government. Neutrality at is most basic means that ISPs pass through everything that comes in exactly the same, no matter the protocol (like Comcast) or source. Just treat all Web sites and services as equals with the same access to bandwidth. That way email, Web pages, music, streaming video, P2P traffic, and yes, Google, get the same access to bandwidth without any interference or additional charge.

An ISP or bandwidth provider must route all traffic and treat it equally. Act like a switch: data in, data out.

This article originally appeared in the newsletter for the Internet Oldtimers Foundation.

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Just because we have a new administration that has been more supportive of Net Neutrality does not mean that the battles are over or that we need to stop paying attention.  The Telco shills are still at it, trying to show people that having unfiltered access to the Internet is not a consumer issue, that it is regressive, that it is anti-freedom, that it is a myth.  The latest in a string of paid “analysts” is Scott Cleland, who uses 27 pages to obfuscate so many things that you just have to believe him when he tells you that “Google uses 21 times more bandwidth than it pays for.”

His conclusion is the worst apples to horseshoes comparison I’ve ever seen:

“The study estimated Google’s payment to fund just the U.S. consumer broadband Internet segment to be approximately $344 million in 2008 or 0.8% of U.S. consumer’s flat-rate monthly Internet access costs of $44.0 billion. Thus Google’s 16.5% share of all 2008 U.S. consumer bandwidth usage, is ~21 times greater than Google’s 0.8% share of U.S. consumer bandwidth costs – or an implicit ~$6.9 billion subsidy of Google by U.S. consumers.”

He uses a lot of research into SEC filings to estimate numbers, but that is all moot.  You just cannot put bandwidth costs and use by hosts in the same bucket with money paid by consumers. Having paid bandwidth bills for almost 15 years, I can attest that a decent percentage of what I have paid for is actually not even consumers accessing our sites.  Check your logs and you will see gigabytes (if not terabytes) of bandwidth that comes from search bots.  In other words, Google pays for their server bandwidth to access the Internet and check out trillions of pages of data, and the owners of those sites in turn pay a part of their bandwidth for Google to do this.  The consumerhas not even turned on their computer and a ton of bandwidth has already been used by all the hosts and services out there.

Cleland estimates Google’s percent of bandwidth used by ignoring a ton of other types of bandwidth. He writes that what “drives this conspicuous bandwidth consumption is Google’s search bots regularly copy every page on the Internet, some as frequently as every few seconds, and Google’s YouTube streams almost half of all video streamed on the Internet.”  Really?  Google copies every page on the Internet?!? Some pages every few seconds?  They must really want to make sure they are up to date, copying the entire internet every few seconds.  No wonder they use the entire bandwidth of the United States every few minutes.

A year ago this report came out and blamed 49% to 89% of all traffic on P2P services.  Another report from 18 months ago says that HTTP traffic is approximately 46%, P2P 37%, Newsgroups 9%, non-HTTP video streaming 3%, gaming 2%, and VoIP 1%. It does come close to one of Clelands numbers, estimating YouTube accoutning for about 10% of all traffic. Sandvine, a provider of “bandwidth management” services has a very recent study that looks at both upstream and downstream traffic from the subscriber level (ignoring the server to server action) that showed an increase in bandwidth use by P2P networks. I guess the P2P networks are harder targets than big G, as I found it interesting that P2P still dominates upstream networks and accounts for more than 61% of all upstream dataas well as 22% of downstream.

What is the big hog of downstream  Web traffic? Video (Web Media 15.7% of traffic) of course.  But YouTube is just one of the players.  All the networks either stream content or have deals with Hulu or another provider.

The bottom line is that attacks on Net Neutrality (simply defined as treating all traffic the same, with no regard to source or content) are still going strong and we need to make sure that our elected representatives understand the simplicity of the idea as well as the absurdity of the arguments against it.  Remember, they are not experts on the Internet and have little or no idea about what these terms mean and how this type of thing works.  Go out and make an appointment with your local House member. Talk to them about this and any other issue you thinnk is important, and let them know that you are available to answer questions and be their expert when it comes to questions about the Internet.

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Net Neutrality Not Neutered

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Holy hell what a day! For those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter (@bradwaller), today was a day to forget.  My plan was simple: drop my daughter off at school and head off to Santa Barbara for CJU so I could check into the hotel and man the PMA table at the expo. That got blown away last night.

I’m in the process of getting LASIK and Monday was my final exam before my scheduled procedure on Thursday. After four months of wearing glasses to prepare, I’m really ready to get this done with. Part of the final exam was dilating my eyes and checking the retina. The doctor saw some spots that she was not comfortable with and told me I had to see a specialist. This was a few minutes after 5 PM last night. The specialist’s office closed at 5. Crap.

I got in to the retinal specialist at 8:30, expecting maybe an hour or so appointment that would still give me ample time to get my stuff and head off to Santa Barbara since it is about a two-hour drive under normal non rush-hour traffic. Two hours later the doctor is telling me that I have a slight retinal detachment and he’ll take care of it right away. Just a little LASER blasting to re-attach the retina around the flap where the fluid was getting under the retina. Pretty minor and LASIK should not be a problem after the procedure.

Another hour or so later, I’m in the room with the YAG or Argon LASER (I’m pretty sure it said 532 nm) waiting for the doctor to come in and do the deed. The device is pretty cool. He wears the same microscope goggles used for an exam, but it is fitted with two LASERs. A red for aiming and the green for “photocoagulation”to create small burns around the edges of the tear, producing scars which will hopefully seal the borders of the tear and prevent fluids from leaking toward the retina.

The worst part of the procedure was not the really bright green light, but the Q-tip he used to jam behind my eye to press on the back side to I assume get fluid to flow out and get the LASER to seal the retina. THAT was painful.  It still hurts 12 hours later. I wonder if I’ll have a bruise tomorrow.

It only took a few minutes for me to guess that the repair was not going as smoothly as I thought when he kept calling out high power numbers for the LASER and it got brighter and brighter until my eye was overloaded and went dark.  That was actually easier since the bright light made it hard to keep myeye open and look to the top right and hold that while he prodded and zapped.

Luckily, vision came back pretty quickly, albeit everything was purple and dark. It slowly got better, but was still pretty blurry. I postponed my LASIK appointment and set up a one month checkup to see if the reattachment took. Now fo course it was almost noon and I was really late.  I rushed home and gathered my stuff and ate a quick lunch. If I was really lucky and traffic was light and I broke the speed limit by 10 miles per hour I might make it to CJU by 2 PM when I was supposed to man the PMA booth.

Of course this didn’t happen and I finally made it to the Fess Parker at about 2:30. Thankfully, word got out that I was late and a few of the other volunteers were at the booth. Already exhausted, I went to work at the booth and eased into trade show mode. I put in some time and made sure the other volunteers had things handled and got a chance to look for some goodies for my daughter (don’t tell her yet – I said there weren’t going to be any) and talk to people at the expo.

The expo was a mini show floor with lots of basic tabletop displays where you could learn about merchants and OPMs who all work in the CJ universe.  Walking the tables was tough because I wanted to talk business and also educate them about the PMA at the same time. Lots of talking and I got to meet some great people and get a few pledges of varying support for the trade association.

I then headed off to the Zoo for the cocktail mixer with Lisa Picarille and Connie Berg where we sampled the delectible food (I’m not sure if the mini-Reuben or the skewered beef was better) and wandered the grounds. After a few hours of networking and talking to old and new friends I was beat and ready for the hotel, where you find me writing this…

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Day of Detachment

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Jeff Molander wrote a post for the new blog of the Advaliant affiliate network that is pure dynamite.

I agree with Jeff on many points, including the lack of innovation in the industry during the past five years. Why was there not much innovation you might ask yourself? In my opinion networks and also many advertisers did shift their focus and priority towards affiliate publishers who are not traditional affiliates in the first place. Those publishers use the affiliate or CPA tracking platform to handle the technical details of their relationship with the advertiser, but that is all what they have to do in common with real affiliate marketers. Yes, I am referring to incentive and cash-back sites and to some degree coupon sites as well. There is not much innovation necessary to keep those publishers happy, the rest of the publisher base was neglected and their needs ignored.

Affiliate Marketing is Not
Now those publishers make up the largest chunk of revenue through the affiliate marketing channel for many advertisers. Add to that the payment of the top tier commission to raise the cost, lower the margin and leave the program without the needed profit figures to convince management to invest money for even more profit in the future. Investments into traditional affiliate marketing usually tend to pay off exponentially, but growth in business with the large incentive sites result in either a linear growth in profits, but in many cases even a linear decline in profits. The publishers probably demand more commission for the additional business that they bring you. The increase is usually accomplished by special placement and promotion of the advertiser within the publisher’s member base. The higher premium on the other hand will be paid for all business referred and not only for those extra business that comes from the special placement.

Compare it with paying more for the entire display advertising inventory, if you increase the order volume. You buy more impressions and the eCPM is going up as a result of it. But display advertising does not work this way.

That is my take on the whole innovation issue. I only would like to add that I see things improve slowly, which is a good thing. Much more is still needed though.

Burned by SEO and PPC?
Jeff also talks about SEO and PPC advertising and that advertisers have been burned by affiliates who were and are using SEO and PPC as well as by the search engines themselves. Okay, he says that this is what he believes what advertisers think, which is hard to refute. However, I can and do refute the statement that affiliates and search engines burned advertisers in the past.

Affiliates did PPC and SEO when there was not even anything that came even close to be called a search marketing industry. GoTo.com pioneered the PPC based bidding for ranking and placement model in 1998 and Google launched AdWords in 2000. Nobody had an idea back then how big this would become. There were also no stats and figures available widely that tell you about user behavior and how users interacted and experienced the search engines. Everybody knew as much or as little about the dynamics that make PPC work as the guy next to him.

I stumbled about the weird results that you get, if you happened to bid on an advertisers brand and trademark name in 2002 I believe. It was not just any brand term that caused the weird results, but brand names that are generally known brands with memorable names and owning the .COM domain for their brand name. Who in the world would type into a search engines search box the term “Dell Computers” or worse “Dell.com” and then click on the sponsored result on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page(s))? It was like a guy asking for the directions to city XYZ while standing directly before the welcome sign of that city. The dynamics to understand odd user behavior like this were not 100% understood from day one. The business overall was still too small and the marketing channel too new and uncertain to have any large advertiser care a bit and spend even one minute on it. Big brands had bigger fishes to fry, such as the large CPM inventories of those web-portals that grew more expensive every day until the bubble burst in 2000 and 2001. Search grew quickly after the crash, but advertisers were slow to see what happened. It was still new, unknown and risky. Affiliates took the risk, maybe burned themselves at first, but reaping in the rewards later.

There was a short period of grand payback for affiliates between 2003 and 2005, where business exploded, but advertisers still undecided. When search grew to a size that could not be ignored, even by big brands, advertisers learned that their affiliates were already there and have been there all along. For them was everything old stuff from yesterday, what was for the advertisers new and mint-fresh as if it just came into existence the day before.

Not Been Burned, Left Money on the Table
Advertisers today catch up to a large degree with where affiliates have already been for five or more years. Some advertisers still were not able to catch up to this day.

Advertisers have not been burned; they left money on the table for too long. That should not make them angry at their affiliates, but at themselves. Traditional affiliate marketers are risk takers and experiment at the frontier of technology and society. They went niche before advertisers even knew that there was one. They did and do local marketing before talk about local search came up only about 2 years ago. They worked the long-tail before Chris Anderson wrote a book about it and gave it a name.

Affiliates can go where no Advertiser has gone before!
This is what affiliates do. They go where the advertiser cannot go himself. But things change and the advertiser might be able to enter the space that his affiliates have entered long before him. Booting off those affiliates and punishing them for finding the pot of gold first is not the right practice. Affiliates are naturally the weaker link and will move way if the advertiser moves in. Channel conflicts should be accepted as part of business and they will only increase over time. Work them out, but don’t throw the baby out with the bath-water.

Instead of using the torch is it more productive and mutual beneficial, if borders are staked clearly and taken away pieces from the affiliates will be compensated by giving them some leeway that they can venture off and explore the new unknown and small niche that is too small, too new, too uncertain and too risky for the big advertiser who has to worry about his brand and spend his day in internal political battles and overcoming power struggles rather than exploring the unknown.

There are Black Sheep in the Whitest of Families
There are always folks who break the rules that were clearly set. There always have been and will be thugs and thieves, who are in it for the quick buck. Not only affiliates, but also from the advertiser’s side. You have to watch out for them and try to keep their fingers out of your valet. Assuming that your affiliates are guilty until proven innocent is an unhealthy method of handling these matters. Doing so has proven itself wrong in the society and social life time and again. Not much good can come out of it.

Putting a stack of money on the table that can be publicly seen through the window and then keeping the doors unlocked and you distracted is also not the smartest thing to do. You don’t want to tempt the ones who are usually honest people by inviting theft; at least would you do so in a capitalist society.

Affiliate Marketing is not, Part II
Affiliate marketing is not display advertising and also not traditional off-line marketing, not even off-line direct marketing. Affiliate marketing allows businesses to reach into markets that are too small, too diverse and disperse, too new, too unknown or too risky in order to try them out and be active there itself. Affiliates take the risk and are also the ones who act faster to new developments because the traditional affiliates of yours are not big and huge businesses. Affiliate marketing is the realm of individuals and small to mid-size businesses. If an affiliate grows beyond that, it becomes a publishing or distribution partner and compensation should be done as it is common for such kind of relationship.

Flexibility, not Card Blanche
What you have to offer your affiliates in the field is flexibility. Flexibility does not mean Card Blanche and giving up your brand message and control entirely. You should care about your brand message remaining intact, by being flexible when it comes to the specific ways this message is being transmit to prospects by your affiliates. Affiliates will take things into their own hands, if a program shows potential, but lacks the needed flexibility and that is when it gets dangerous and the risk high, that your brand message gets deluded or changed in an unfavorable way.

Affiliates rather have the advertiser provide the exact message and media (creative or whatever is used) than the affiliate spending time to create something on their own. They will have tons of ideas that require different designs and slight change of focus of the marketing message. Providing affiliates with what they need here is what I referred to when I talked about flexibility.

Brand is good for Everybody
A brand is a marketing tool affiliates can, should and will leverage and it is stupid if an affiliate tries to reinvent a big brand by itself and by doing so effectively damage the brand and is most likely also not generate much commission for the affiliate. But some advertisers have a different idea of what their brand is than it is in reality and seem by their customers and ordinary people. Some advertisers wish that their brand is seen a certain way, but this wish is only a fantasy that has nothing to do with the real world. Affiliates usually know the real world and are confused about the unrealistic way how advertisers see their brands and would like to be represented to the people.

Friends when you need them most
What affiliate marketing was doing on a small scale is now happening en large without any active two-way business relationships in place. Something much tougher to control, the outspoken and self-aware customer who becomes an unpaid evangelist for the brand or a product or the equally unpaid disgruntled ex-customer who made it his quest to take your business down with his last breath, if he has to. Look at the evangelists and pass ideas and message along to your affiliate partners and work together with them to address the anti-evangelist. You should address the valid complaints made by your companies’ personal enemy and surround what is left with positive examples for similar cases that show that you are willing and able to deal with those issues, but that it always requires the commitment of both parties to solve a problem once and for all.

Conclusion
Does all this sound not easy scalable and labor intensive to you? Good, because it is, but the payback is exponential if done right. Leverage the strength of affiliate marketing even more by integrating it into your overall marketing mix. Work together with your affiliates and not against them. Most affiliates also prefer to work together with an advertiser than snitching on him and watching their back that they will not be back-stabled either.

What I wrote might sounds nice and good, but here is where Jeff is absolutely right and hitting the nail on the head. At the end of the day does it only matter what the advertisers thing, believe and feel. It is irrelevant if that believe or feeling is wrong or correct, because the advertiser will act on it as if it is right, in either case. The education of advertisers to understand the dynamics, issues, hot-spots, potentials and approach that should be taken to run a successful affiliate program is the most important thing to do.

Call to Action
This education needs to be done not just by the affiliate publishers, but all parties involved, including networks and any third party service vendors and services. Pointing fingers at each other does not solve any of the problems and it does not make advertisers better educated about the reality they operate within. It only confuses them even more and mistrusts the industry as a whole. The loser will be all of us. The winner would be the thieves and thugs who were forgotten over all this and were able to take advantage of the situation undetected.

What is your take on this? Feel free to provide your comments below. Thank you.

Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski
Marketer, Affiliate, Entrepreneur, Blogger
Find No BS Internet Marketing Resources here

Lack of Innovation and the Rejection of the unwanted Child called Affiliate Marketing

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This concept is in my head for far beyond 2 1/2 years and I admit to myself that I am not going to do anything with it myself anytime soon. I outlined the general idea to several companies and people, but only shared the much more specific details only with a person who is as busy with other things as I am myself. I remember talking about it to Shawn Collins back in 2006 when the problem that my proposed solution is meant to take care of, was still on the rise and not that high on the priority list of things of the potential customers and users of the service.

When I saw Mark’s post at 45n5.com about “Steal This Idea – Your Abandoned Make Money Online Ideas“, I thought that my idea would be a perfect fit for this “series”.

I talked to people like Asasf Igell from Syntryx, Balazs Nagy, Tetsuto Yabuki, Andrew Wee, some outsourced development shop in India, a tools development company in Germany (SEO/SEM tools) and others, but somehow was it never going anywhere to make progress and have a real project. In some cases was it my own fault, but in some cases was it also the lack of time, interest and/or understanding of the concept by the potential partners for this project.

I decided to clean up my notes for this blog post and to publish the concept in as much detail as I have in writing myself (a large chunk actually, although there is still some stuff left in my head that was not spelled out yet). Anybody, person or company is free to grab the stuff and run with it.

If you make it happen and it becomes a success, send me an email, call me or buy me a beer at the next Affiliate Summit or something like that to tell me that it actually worked. You would owe me that and a thank you, but beyond that it will be up to you and how grateful you are and what the actual part of my contribution to the success was or not was. I am not a big fan of the ocean, so a yacht would be a waste of money hehe, just kidding.

The post is long, but you only have to read it in full, if you are actually interested in doing something with it. The first paragraphs are also interesting for the potential customers of the outlined services, because it talks about how to automate things that you might not even know about that you should do them in the first place.

There are some new services that are doing at least to some degree what I have in mind, but I don’t know of any solution that takes care of a need of a small and very specific niche with an unfulfilled need, waiting for somebody to come along to solve the problem and the need that was created from it.

General Purpose

Trademark Monitoring in Paid Search

Who is this solution for?

Affiliate Managers, Outsourced Program Management Companies

Background

The trademark concerns moved up to the #1 concern of advertisers in the affiliate marketing space as per Affiliate Summit East 2007 in Miami this last July. It was the #3 – #4 concern last year two years ago. (Note: Shawn, if you would have the links handy to your posts that talk about this and could post them here as comment, that would be great. I have a hard time finding some of your stuff, since your site re-design about one year ago )

The first step advertisers take is updating their affiliate agreement to specify the does and don’ts for paid search affiliates. This includes the specification of terms that affiliates are not allowed to bid on and/or maximum bid caps etc. Some prohibit bids on certain keywords to their general affiliate base, but allow selected hand-picked affiliates to bid on those terms.

So far so good; now monitoring and enforcing those policies becomes an issue. Abusive affiliates are also smart and use tricks to bid on forbidden terms without being detected.

The methods used include the pause of campaigns during office hours when advertisers and affiliate managers are likely to check for affiliates, who violate the TOS and also the exclusion of the location(s) where the advertiser and/or affiliate management company have their office locations via the geo-targeting features available at the major paid search providers, such as Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter.

Advertisers who already use advanced software or services for paid search monitoring, competitive intelligence etc. can use those tools or services to do monitoring of the SERPs. How good the monitoring works when it comes to all the mentioned tricks, differs from service to service.

The rule of thumb is that the better the service is, the more expensive it is. For existing competitive intelligence services is this use of their solution, to monitor affiliate activities, only a by-product and not their core business. A large number of advertisers cannot afford the big enterprise services out there and/or also not justify the high cost, just for the purpose of trademark monitoring their affiliates.

Scalability (Business Point-of-View)

The solution would be a scalable service with recurring revenue (monthly/annual subscription), probably starting at about $10 per month for the basic service to more, depending on the client needs.

Fees should increase linear, depending on how much more the client wants to use the service.

“More” means not “different” in this case but additional things that are similar (some development to support additional things that are very similar to almost identical to what you started with) and/or more of the things that is already done for the customer and/or doing more often what you also already do for the client as well (= more hardware resources in essence).

Features needed to address those needs

1. Ability to specify a list of terms that need to be monitored

This list is limited in size, because it contains trademark and brand terms only.

2. Selection of Paid Search Providers to Monitor

1st Tier providers:

• Google AdWords
• Yahoo! Search Marketing
• Microsoft AdCenter
• Ask Sponsored Listings

2nd Tier Providers US:

• Miva Pay-Per-Click
• Looksmart AdCenter
• Findology PPC Search
• Enhance Interactive
• Search123
• ABCSearch
• GoClick
• 7Search
• ePilot
• Kanoodle
• adMarketplace
• FindIt-Quick
• Copernic Media Solutions Publisher Network

2nd Tier Europe:

• Espotting
• Mirago

3. Check Frequency

• Weekly
• Every other day
• Once a day
• Multiple times per day

Some randomness should be applied to this to prevent that the monitoring time schedule can be predicted and affiliates become able to adjust their PPC campaigns accordingly and pause their ads when they know that a check will occur.

4. Location where check is conducted from

To prevent that rouge affiliates can avoid detection by excluding the monitoring service via geo targeting, monitoring has to happen from various different locations around the United States and the world. For the most possible flexibility and ability to predict the location from where the check is conducted, the use of proxy servers is the best way to go. Starting with open proxies and then rent proxies down the road when business expands or find business partner with servers across the country (or world), which could be used as proxy.

5. Alerts

The advertiser needs to be alerted about activities for his selected keyword terms. This should be done via email and web interface. The alert needs to follow an action by the advertiser to tell the system the status of this incident and to know what to do with it in the future.

6. Known Ad versus new Ad

If a new Ad is detected at a search provider and an alert was sent to the advertiser, no future “New Ad” alerts should be generated for the same Ad in the future.You need to specify a set of criteria that allow you to determine the unique identifier for each Ad, to be able to determine, if an Ad is new and unknown or if you encountered this Ad before in the past already.You must gather as much information about the origin and target of the Ad as you possibly can; the basics include:

• Title
• Description
• Display URL
• Destination URL
• Final Destination URL (if possible without committing “click-fraud”)

You also need to log:

• search provider
• keyword
• position of the Ad
• used proxy location
• date/time of the check

However, this information is not part of the key to identify an Ad as new or old.

7. Actions by Advertiser

7.1 Categorization of Ads

This categorization must be done by the advertiser per hand. We might be able to extend this with some extended configuration options to automatically pre-determine the right category based on parameters such as domain of destination URL etc.

• Own Ad (advertisers own paid search campaign) (okay)
• Approved affiliate Ad (okay)
• Competitors ad or competitors affiliated (okay)
• Unapproved affiliate Ad (action needed, warning email, reversal of commissions, account termination)
• Violating Competitors Ad (action needed, cease and desist)

The default category would be: “Unknown Ad”

7.2 Action Needed Categories

If a new unknown ad is assigned to an actionable category, an incident is created. The advertiser has to assign the incident to an entity, which he needs to specify. He can select an entity from a list of previously created entities or create a new one. Entities could be a specific affiliate or a competitor.The incident must also contain the keyword phrase(s) as key and date stamps for first and last reported occurrence. Geo location information might be logged in addition to that (a flag if geo-targeting was used or not might be sufficient at the beginning).The advertiser needs to specify, if the incident can be closed automatically by the system, if the Ad disappears, or if this will be a manual step, the advertiser wants to perform by hand. Reoccurrences of the same incident while it is open are tracked and stored with the open incident.

If an incident was closed and the same Ad reappears again, a new incident is created, but with reference to prior incidents that are in status closed.

This allows for example to see, if the same Ad is used for another forbidden keyword phrase or if the Ad suddenly appears with geo targeting filters in place after running nationwide before.

8. Logging

All check results should be logged to be able to provide additional functionalities in the future. It should be logged the advertiser, the keyword phrase, the search provider, date/time of check and the proxy that was used for the check and then store all the ads that were found during the check.

Development Notes

• The database will grow and archiving needs to become a functionality that is needed early on.
• The development of the features can be phased-out.

Special Development Skills Needed

• Experience with pulling web page results via HTTP?
• Experience with using proxies to make those requests?
• Experience with parsing SERPS, organic and/or paid search results?
• Know the structure and format of Paid Search Ads to extract information like “who is the advertiser?” or “What is the landing page URL of the Ad?”

Pricing Notes

The pricing options should also vary depending on the needs. Pricing will depend on the number of terms to monitor, search providers to cover (1st tier only, 2nd tier only, both), number of geo locations from where to check and frequency of checks.

The most basic package which will be sufficient to get started and a hang on things should be priced below $20 per month and include up to 5 terms, 1st tier engines monitoring, 2 geo locations (east coast and west coast) and perform those checks once a day with a randomized time of the day to check during different times of a day and cover every hour of a day within a period of one month.

Fees can then be increased depending on the needs of the advertiser. More terms to monitor, additional search providers, more geo locations, higher frequency of checks (multiple checks per day etc.)

Profitability

Getting it up to making a couple hundred dollars each in profits is not very hard (and pessimistic). I would consider $1,000 grand per month in profit for each of us, without the need to spend any time on it other than making sure that the hired services (hosting etc.) do their job and on feedback from users to get new ideas for how to improve and/or expand it.

Everything beyond that is added bonus and would depend on how serious we proceed on that avenue.

Current Market and Marketing Strategy

Initial marketing cost could be kept low to almost nothing and include the use of blogging, posting in forums (where possible and/or applicable) etc. to get the word out, letting people know what you do and how much it cost. Those methods rely on a viral affect to be effective in getting more business.

I would suggest to provide free access to a handful of people, who are influencers, have a voice and like to try thinks out, if they believe that it will help them and their pears doing a better job with stuff they already do today (at least should do), but very inefficient and inadequate. This would increase the likely-hood of success for a marketing campaign that relies heavily on word of mouth promotion of the service.

The businesses talk about those things to a larger degree than other stuff, because talking about this subject does not give anybody a significant competitive advantage over a competitor, which would prevent him to talk about the subject and share useful information and tips, in the hopes that that the competition will find out about those useful information as late as possible. All this is not a problem, which is the reason, why viral marketing might has a good chance to work well and help with some significant business growth initially.

Large companies are not the target, because they get or can get what we provide indirectly (to some extend) from services that are much more expensive, and which they probably already use for other purposes. You can use other services to do what I suggest, but

1. A small team of partners or even an individual can do it a lot cheaper and
2. Do it optimized to a larger degree to serve this small niche that is probably too small for many of the large players out there.

The other services are designed for other purposes, thus not competition really.

The high price tag of those services puts them out of reach for a large number of businesses who would only be able to leverage a fraction of the features those services offer and never be able to get the returns needed to justify the cost for them.

Players that I am referring to include services like:

• Syntryx – Syntryx.com
• Adgooroo SEM Insight – Adgooroo.com
• Hitwise Search Intelligence – Hitwise.com

To a limited degree services like:

• Trellian Competitive Intelligence – ci.trellian.com
• KeyCompete – KeyCompete.com
• Compete Search Analytics – searchanalytics.compete.com

Other Trademark Monitoring Services include:

• Thomson & Thomson – thomson-thomson.com
• LegalZoom – legalzoom.com
• Trademark Center – tmcenter.com
• Trademark Tracker – trademarktracker.com
• NameProtect – nameprotect.com

Beyond the Basics / Cost and Compensation

After that is it depending on how hard you push it.

Press releases, paid search, old media advertising, display ads, sponsorships and all that can all be done and will help to increase the business, but will be completely up to you, if you want to do any or none of those and how much you want to spend on it.

My suggestion is that the first revenue will be used to pay for your time and any outsourcing you are doing to cover the basic needs, then not pay out the profits right after that and accumulate money that will be used for future expansion, including outsourcing of development, marketing and that sort of things.

After that money could be paid-out to be used for other purposes and new projects, but I would still recommend having some money going to a general pool every month and use it for expanding the business. If you think that some of the initial development can or should be outsourced, make sure that you have money available up-front to cover this.

The first profits could then be used to pay back your initial investment.

Another option is that yours or your potential partner’s development time will not be paid in cash up-front and considered yours or your partner’s investment into the project and you or your partner would have to put the same amount into the project in cash, which then would become the money for marketing and expansion etc.

Important for any fair partnership is, that both parties will have the same share of investments and risks in this project to prevent any unfair imbalance. Some work like maintenance, administration etc. can probably not be outsourced, at least not at the beginning.

While it may not cost anything, does it still take time to do it. You or your partner might be ending up working more on this than the other partner. That’s why should a compensation for this time become part of the partner agreement and considered to be the equivalent of a cash investment right from the start.

Everybody getting the same piece of the pie, no matter if you/he contributed 0 or 100 hours each month into the project is not right. I would suggest that you are not doing that mistake.

How long will it take?

Depending on the existing routines (code) and knowledge you and maybe also your partner has already, a few days to a few weeks for the core, then some time for the user interface and usability features, that you can do yourself or outsource. The standard stuff; such as User signup, Account management, recurring billing etc. that is a very good candidate for outsourcing or for the use of an out-of-the box solution.

The audience who is targeted is more Internet- and tech savvy than the average user and could be considered power users. They can be as demanding as they can be forgiving. You have to keep the mix of price, features, support and service just right to keep them happy and turn them into evangelists of the service.

Well, it can take months or years, if you don’t work on it as I did. So go and run with it, now!

Cheers!

Carsten Cumbrowski

Cumbrowski.com – the Internet Marketing Resources Portal – a project that I actually did start and, which made some progress over the years to take it a bit more serious than when I started it in 2006 .

Update Note! I looked over the post ones more and thought that I should add the following:

I do not think that the market for this service is huge. It has certainly not the potential for becoming the next multi-billion dollars company; I even think that a multi-million dollars business is not very realistic.
It is a very small niche, but it can be served and being profitable at the same time.

The approach is scalable to reduce the need for a large up-front investment of time and resources in the hope to get that investment back one day and then some. You can start small and grow while revenue and profits grow at the same time.

Furthermore, your customers will be a very specific kind of customer with many other (related) needs that are growing and multiplying in the years to come with almost absolute certainty. It will only harder to do the job of managing and watching over an affiliate program. The industry as a whole is growing too. You can have your finger on the pulse of your customers and the opportunity to create plenty of spin-off business from them.

Today a watch-tool to detect rogue PPC affiliates and tomorrow some other tool that takes affiliate managers a lot of time to do by hand over and over again.

Considering those facts, things look actually much better overall. I think those facts are actually important and not just pure wishful thinking and a fantasy of nice dreams.

See the rest here:
Paid Search Monitoring Project Concept – Run with it!

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The Associated Press thinks that Fair Use means it’s Fair to Use unless you’re a blogger.  They don’t like the blogoshpere’s use of too many quotes from AP articles and they want to set a policy of what constitutes fair use, as opposed to the federal government.

Check out this article’s coverage of the issue:

Jim Kennedy, the AP’s director of strategic planning, said Monday that he planned to meet Thursday with Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association, as part of an effort to create standards for online use of AP stories by bloggers that would protect AP content without discouraging bloggers from legitimately quoting from it.

The meeting comes after AP sent a legal notice last week to Rogers Cadenhead, the author of a blog called the Drudge Retort, a news community site whose name is a parody of the prominent blog the Drudge Report.

And here is where the AP article talks about the guidelines:

In response, the AP indicated it would seek to create guidelines, though even that idea triggered further protests. Michael Arrington wrote on his TechCrunch blog Monday that AP “doesn’t get to make its own rules about how its content is used, if those rules are stricter than the law allows.”

Wendy Seltzer, a legal scholar and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, said the news organization should not try to go beyond what’s legally permissible.

“If they were on the other hand to say, you may use 10 words only and any time you use 11 we’ll send a takedown notice, that wouldn’t be helpful,” Seltzer said.

AP worries that bloggers will dilute their content:

Kennedy said the AP had both a journalistic concern about preventing AP news from being quoted out of context and also a business concern about protecting the value of AP’s news from being diluted if its key elements are made available from places that aren’t licensed.“We need to protect our content, no matter who’s using it, but we also recognize that the bloggers perform a really important function on the Internet in terms of increasing the engagement of the audience online, and we want to facilitate that,” Kennedy said.

So AP, did I quote too much?  Let me know.

More:
Hey AP, Got a Betamax?

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With the announcement that the state of New York will be collecting sales tax from affiliates, and the termination of New York based affiliates, we have an opening for a new business model.  We already have outsourced affiliate program managers, and merchants can choose any number of solutions to run the technical side of the program, and affiliates can sign up for other 3rd party enhancements, so why not outsource your location?

All New York based affiliates could sign up with a company (in Delaware or Nevada perhaps) who could do a quickie incorporation and set
up a mailing address (PO Box) for them in the new state.  Then the affiliate edits their payment information to the new location.  The outsourced manager could charge a small fee to cover the incorporation and a monthly fee to forward mail and checks (or deposit them) for those who are not paid electronically.  You may need to change your address on your bank statements and other bills to the PO Box.

Tax that New York.

Here is the original:
New Business Opportunity: Outsourced Affiliate Locations

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Yes, it’s true.  Jason wants to work you to death.  The New York Times printed a story that says that blogging is deadly so it must be true. Jason has evidently built his wealth on the graves of many.  I’m waiting for the NYT to do a complete investigation into the whereabouts of every blogger who was ever employed by Jason at Weblogs, Inc. as well as the writers he pays tens of dollars per post to at Mahalo.

It is patently obvious to anyone with a brain that the in depth reporting at the Times has uncovered a massive conspiracy that has been brushed under the rug for too long. Now we know why Wayne Porter lost all that weight and why so many ReveNews bloggers are no longer making posts – they are either dead or on medical leave.  According to article, bloggers have died from heart attacks, experienced weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies.

I sure hope they get this figured out soon.  I’ve gained about 10 pounds over the last few years and I’d love to blog just enough to lose weight and not have a heart attack.  If I do die, I’m sure it will be in the middle of composing a post, so please have the decency to publish my last words.

I’m not dead yet.

Here is the original post:
Jason Calacanis Wants You Dead

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