Godaddy to adopt registerfly’s domains

GoDaddy.com, the leading registration company for Internet addresses, has agreed to take over and manage more than 850,000 domain names belonging to customers of a troubled rival, officials announced Tuesday.

This is good news, I had a few domains stuck with registerfly that hopefully will be on godaddy soon. That would make much easier to transfer them to another registrar - which was very difficult to do with registerfly.

The full AP news story here

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Microsoft genuinely trying to change the world…

Video: Surface computing from Microsoft. One can see unlimited possibilities once this thing is out in the market and ideas as applications are built on top of this platform.

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Widgets now live on shareasale

Brian littleton just twittered that shareasale’s much anticipated widget ad platform has just been activated.

Update: Announcement on shareasale’s blog.

As an affiliate, you can now preview and retrieve widget code for live use. Have fun!!!

Click the yellow link under the “Get Links” menu titled “Get Widgets”….

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P.S: this is my first blog post from a mobile phone ever!

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Affiliate Marketing at Yahoo Answers

We have seen affiliate marketers use new web 2.0 social platforms such as twitter and squidoo as a medium of promoting their websites - There is another social network I hadn’t previously taken very seriously as an affiliate marketing platform.

I just realized that affiliate markers are turning to yahoo’s answers service in a bid to drive traffic to their websites.

An affiliate I noticed is answering questions related to a particular niche and directing traffic to their website - what’s more, the affiliate is also using text-link-ads to drive traffic, not directly to their domain, but to the page on yahoo answers that has a link to the domain(that is how I came to know of this, a link was bought to a yahoo answers page on one of the niche blogs I sometimes write for).

This may seem like black or grey hat SEO to some, but I perceive it more as social media marketing, or what I sometimes call, “Participation marketing”. The affiliate is actively participating within the social media doing what he/she is expected to do, and making money in the process - without spending on domains, hosting, search marketing campaigns etc - driving probably what should be very handsome ROI.

On the negative side, I didn’t notice any disclaimer on the answers stating that the answerer owns the said website(s) for the purpose of profit - it would be a good idea to add such a disclaimer, just to be safe and not misguide the traffic.

Yet another example of smart affiliate marketing!

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Affiliate fortune cookies reaches 100 subscribers!

Was just browsing Sam Harrelson’s 10 day old blog - Affiliate fortune cookies - and the feed burner sticker on it proclaims “100 subscribers”. This is phenomenal growth for a blog so young. Congrats Sam!

Sam has been posting some very useful tips, tricks and hacks for affiliates. As you would expect, the blog has a web 2.0 tilt in it’s content. There are posts that talk about matters ranging from how to monetize video and using facebook as a marketing platform to organizing your office and managing your time.

If you haven’t subscribed to the blog yet, you should - now. It’s an awesome resource for seasoned affiliate marketers to be introduced to entirely new concepts as well as for newbies to learn the art of affiliate marketing.

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eBay on TV for Time Warner Cable customers

More and more web-apps are getting on the television screen. The latest is e-Bay, at least for time warner cable’s subscribers.

eBay on TV

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Google announces click-to-play video ads in new shapes and sizes

Google has just announced in the inside adwords blog new formats for the click-to-play video ads that have been around for a while.

Video ads can now be 28×90 Leaderboard, the 120×600 Skyscraper, and the 160×600 Wide Skyscraper joining the original formats of 336×280 Large Rectangle, the 200×200 Small Square, and the 250×250 Square.

We all see video on the web in square or at the most rectangle boxes, I wonder how it would be to view video playing in a skyscraper and a leaderboard area!

Get ready to scroll those eyeballs!

Inside AdWords: Click-to-play video ads available in three new formats

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Chitika introduces “Linx” - in-content contextual text ads

Chitika - A favourite CPC product ad platform of many bloggers has just introduced “linx”, a new system similar to Amazon’s Context Links that will automatically identify key products/keywords mentioned in the content on a website or blog and link those keywords to product comparison listings from the chitika network (which, if I remember correctly, runs on top of the shopping.com API)

As can be seen in the image, chitika’s javascript code will automatically recognize product names and keywords from a blog’s content and double-underline them, if a user hovers their mouse cursor over any of these links, they see the chitika widget pop up with links - monetized for the blogger - to products on various online stores via chitika’s network.

This new system is currently in closed beta and available only to select chitika publishers by invitation.

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Linkshare testing widget-ads

The Internet’s first big affiliate network - Linkshare, is also one of the first affiliate networks to be able to adapt itself to the new internet.

Linkshare is currently beta testing an ad network that they will be opening up to bloggers and product review sites called Linkshare Showcase. This network will focus on specific products from leading merchants and allow publishers to highly customize the ads with features and reviews. Publishers will be able to choose which products they want to recommend to their users from participating merchants

Reports Salvo.ws

Linkshare showcase is what will probably be a linkshare sub-network targeted towards bloggers and other web2.0 ish content heavy websites that will offer:

• One simple interface for choosing the products you want.
• One small piece of Javascript to copy and paste onto your site.
• LinkShare Showcase is optimized for peak performance.
• No waiting for your money. Fast payments, from the first $1.

There are, of course, other companies that offer such advertising networks, linkshare, however, is the first major affiliate network to talk about offering widget-merchandizing besides shareasale, which started offering widget ads earlier this month

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Why Amazon.com is E-commerce 2.1…

It’s the simple innovations that have made Amazon the e-commerce leader, and ensure that amazon will hold on to it’s position as a leader for many years to come.

The latest of such simple innovations: A subscription service that will automatically ship to you a new toothpaste in June (and other such stuff) as soon as the toothpaste you purchased for May is used up.

In a “Why-Didn’t-Everyone-Think-of-This-Before” move, Amazon.com has recently begun to offer a subscription service for frequently purchased drugstore-type items like one’s preferred shaving cream, face wash or soap. It also offers an incentive to try the service, providing a discount on the product as a reward for subscribing. It’s a great concept, catering to a convenience-obsessed consumer who increasingly relies on the web for all of his or her shopping needs. The service itself is straightforward and flexible, allowing the consumer to choose the duration of the subscription both when making the initial purchase and during check-out.

Read more about amazon’s latest simple innovation on e-commerce cache

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