Archive for March, 2007
Linkshare to offer merchant RSS feeds?
Chris Sanderson of AMWSO recently posted on his ABW forum about an email that he got from linkshare announcing the launch of pre-coded merchant RSS feeds…
I don’t have any such email in my inbox yet, possibly the announcement just went out to merchants so they may set up their RSS feeds and affiliates might be told about this after some merchants have their feeds ready.
Looks like this is yet another step by linkshare on what is looking like a series of improvements to the oldest affiliate network on the web.
Update: Just got the email from LS
“For more information on setting up RSS feeds, select RSS Resource Page from the Home tab in the Affiliate Interface. RSS feeds do not eliminate the need for you to log into your LinkShare account, but will make it easier for you to get promotional links directly from your Merchants. Please keep in mind that Merchants may not be offering feeds right away as it might take them a while to set up the feeds.”
There’s also another new feature from Linkshare starting today - Affiliates can access and use product thumbnail images for individual product links directly from the affiliate interface.
Sphere ItIf you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Mahatma Gandhi on Customer Service
I was on the Zoho website just now and for some reason clicked the About us link, where I found this awesome quote by the Mahatma - hehe, he said what any true Gujarati would!:
A customer is the most important visitor on our premises.
He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him.
He is not an interruption in our work - he is the purpose of it.
We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us the opportunity to serve him.
- Mahatma Gandhi
This must have been said back in the early 20th century, but in 2007 and beyond, customer service is the one thing that can make or break a business, especially relevent to the industry I frequently blog about (and belong to) - e-retail.
BTW, the Zappos story comes to mind every time I think about customer service in e-retail - I was doing a price comparison for shoe sites, and found out that for the most part, Zappos is pricing it’s shoes at the maximum they are sold online, and yet, they sell more shoes than anybody else; Customers keep flocking to zappos and I very strongly suspect that the primary reason behind the success of the company is the importance they give to providing A grade customer support (Heck, 65% of those of shop there, at any given day are repeat customers!).
Sphere ItIf you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Screenshots - AdSense Publisher View Of Google Pay Per Action
Last week Google launched Pay Per Action in beta version for some AdSense publishers and AdWords advertisers.
Barry Schwartz (searchengineland.com) noticed today that the referrals section in his Adsense account was redone to allow him to start placing Google Pay Per Action referrals on his site.
Here is a screen by screen view of Pay Per Action from the Google AdSense publisher side of things:
Sphere ItIf you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Centernetworks offering free advertising in exchange for a video about your startup
Popular blog about all things web 2.0, CenterNetworks, is making an offer startups can’t refuse - you can now promote your startup idea and be talked about at the blog for free.
All startups will need to do is to make a video pitching the startup, the benefits, why do you think it’s going to be the next big thing, etc., and send it to the Centernetworks. In return, Centernetworks will post the video on their blog, review and write about your startup - which has to be less than 2 years old and not a public company to qualify.
Finally, all the videos will go through a competition, a panel of judges will select be best video, the creator of which will win a 2 month advertising slot (May/June) on CenterNetworks
[Via Press Release]
Sphere ItIf you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Macs do vistas too
Apple has just released bootcamp 1.2 with support for running Windows Vista on a mac!
The 138 MB download also contains many driver updates and the apple remote now works with iTunes and the Windows Media player - which is cool. Are they planning to introduce a media center like frontrow for windows in the future?
So if you wanted to try out Vista, and couldn’t because your version of vista legally didn’t let you do so with parallels virtualization, this is the download link.
[source: TUAW]
Sphere ItIf you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
New Amazon Context Links
A couple of days ago, I read on the 5 star blog that Amazon has announced the public beta for a brand new linking technology for the amazon associates program - Context links beta.
Today, I finally decided to check out the new links and try and figure out what they are.
After playing around a little bit with context links on some of my sites, I’m starting to think that Amazon is already taking the newly-found competition from Google pretty seriously. In one word, the new context linking is revolutionary - and I am not exaggerating!
So, What are context links?:
Context links are a cool way to monetize your content rich websites (and blogs) using the amazon associates program.
Put up a javascript code before your </body> tag, and the code will do the rest; i.e place links on special keywords like names of authors who’s books are sold on amazon, Brand names who’s products are sold on amazon or the product names themselves; the text will automatically get linked to the product page on amazon. Not only that, you can also add some blin to your blog by selecting the feature where if users hover their mouse over the link, a snap like popup with the product name, image, rating, and price is displayed.
Okay, so It’s not that something like this hasn’t been done before, such links have been around for a long time on lesser advertising platforms, but this is the first time that a major affiliate program that actually pays per sale has come up with such a linking method. Besides, Amazon sells almost EVERYTHING! so there shouldn’t be need to “optimize” your content or something like that. whatever you write about there will probably be something on amazon selling around the subject.
Other cool features?
Sure, you can:
- select the number of context links you want to display on each page.
- Choose to make the context links stand out by customizing their look with a different color and an extra underline
- Select not to include context links in parts of your content (code available in FAQs)
- Completely configure the sample preview mouseover popup.
- Increase conversions by selecting to link only products from select amazon categories
Drawbacks?
- It makes your pages slower to load, it’s written in javascript and calls a .js file from a remote server.
- Still in beta, some links are not going to the right places and I can’t see any context links when I open my webpage in IE (they are there on firefox).
I think I am in like with these new links already, there’s the slowing down of the website thing that’s kinda bad, but over all a brilliant product from amazon - now let’s see how much actual revenue it can generate!
Sphere ItIf you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
First Web 2.0 Spam in my inbox
Was just checking my email - and today is the day when I check the “Spam” folder to see if any important emails has accidentally been filtered as spam - There were none, Gmail’s filter is fantastic.
However, there was one email titled “Red Herring Ballmer Trash” that cought my attention, so I decided to click and see what the spam is all about - and the message turns out the be the FIRST EVER Web 2.0 Spam ever received (by me).
If you haven’t seen it in your mailbox yet, here’s what I saw:
Science scoble, scripting? Jboss jobs jotspot joyce jruby js json kawasaki kids.
Grid, groovy gwt hackdays hacks haiku hardware. Ask aspectj atlas atom, attend attention.Email from grave seeks immortal.Presenting preso presos press wordpress pricing print.
Beagle beta, bio biology bitter blog blogging.
Earth ebay eclipse ecommerce! Apps aprilst article ask aspectj atlas? Ads adsapi adsense adverisign adwords.
Evangelist ex exo fashion feed feedback fetcher.
Stress, struts sun, sund sundd sunpeople svg? Http humor in ide. Regexp religion, remix rest restaurant results ria? Stock storage store strategy stress. Oscommerce, oss ossgtp overture ozzie. Local longtail longterm, ma, mac mail man management mano.
Cloud listraquo sort by alpha, freqraquo use minimum. Dorothee, dotnet, drawing, drive, drm dsl dvd earth.
Going, screw them if, they dont, do you.
Pg philosophy, phone, photo photos php. Mapreduce maps, marcou marketing mashup mashupcamp mashups maven medecine?
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Google Checkout gets an affiliate program
The payment processor most famous for not entirely supporting affiliate tracking now has an affiliate program!
Adsense publishers can now push google checkout registrations to shoppers for a referral CPA of (generous?) $1.
International publishers can not promote checkout. As of right now, the affiliate program (and google checkout registrations) are limited to US publishers and shoppers only.
Sphere ItIf you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Are you (time) rich or (time) poor?
Fantastic article on the Lightspeed venture partners’ blog.
Categorizes Internet users in two categories, the “Time rich” and the “TIme poor”.
I’d speculate that many of the readers of this blog fall into the Time Poor category, but the vast majority of internet users fall into the Time Rich category. If you’re starting a new internet company, its important to know who your audience is, and to make sure that you don’t let your own experience and that of other Time Poor people guide you wrong.
Rest of the article here …
Sphere ItIf you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Categories
Subscribe
Recent Comments