An all new FinalTag, All over again…

FinalTag, the blog that journals the evolution of e-business, is a continuously evolving blog.

It is true that I wasn’t posting much over the last few months, and the blog has become a not very active area of the web lately. Earlier today, I decided to change that.

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Affiliate Window Gets a Blog

When Affiliate Networks start blogging, you get one additional reason to trust them a little bit more than you used to. It’s a cool thing for affiliate networks to have blogs, it means they are being transparent about their business and allow a forum where their customers - affiliates and merchants - can interact publicly with with network. I am sure you’ll all agree that one of the reasons we all love shareasale so much is because of it’s communication with the affiliate marketing community - they’re everywhere, on forums, twitter and their blog.

UK based Affiliate window, which already has a widget platform, an API, RSS feeds etc, is now the latest network to start it’s own blog, check it out here!

The official Affiliate Window blog has been launched! The blog will cover news and views from the Network, up coming events, new technologies, advice, comment and opinion about the affiliate marketing industry as a whole. All articles and features will be specially created by Affiliate Window staff from across the company, giving you a balanced, informative and interesting read. Already we have blogged about analysing programme performance, the recent AWin training event and our Website givaway.

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Yet another social shopping network acquired

Sugar, Inc, formerly known as Sugar Publishing, the online publishing company that publishes popular blogs targeted towards women has acquired a social shopping startup ShopStyle, reports Om Malik.

Today, the company decided to take the next step in its evolution and has bought Los Altos, Calif.-based ShopStyle, a social shopping site for an undisclosed amount of money. “We had content and community, and now we are adding commerce,” said Brian Sugar, CEO of Sugar Publishing. The company is also changing its name to Sugar Inc., in order to better reflect its broader focus.

The acquisition is seen as a move to make use of ShopStyle’s existing infrastructure and business model that is aimed at revenue generation to monetize the sugar network of blogs that currently lot as many as 5 million unique visitors a month.

More on GigaOM ->

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Blogging turns 10 today!

That’s According to the WSJ:

The dating of the 10th anniversary of blogs, and the ascription of primacy to the first blogger, are imperfect exercises. Others, such as David Winer, who blogged with Scripting News, and Cameron Barrett, who started CamWorld, were alongside the polemical Mr. Barger in the advance guard. And before them there were “proto-blogs,” embryonic indications of the online profusion that was to follow. But by widespread consensus, 1997 is a reasonable point at which to mark the emergence of the blog as a distinct life-form.

Happy Blogiversary!

(from the six month old blog - FinalTag.com to all Bloggers and Blog readers worldwide!)

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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 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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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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Affiliate marketing? Get a fortune cookie at Sam’s new blog

Sam Harrelson, publisher of popular internet marketing blog Cost per news and CEO of PlanetBeta has just launched a brand new online publication for affiliate marketers at Affiliate Fortune Cookies.

Affiliate Fortune cookies is a “affiliate marketing tip/hack/tricks blog” that aims at “lowering the currently high threshold that keeps many people out of our industry.” - how this will be done, is explained in the blog’s first first post:

Affiliate Fortune Cookies is a blog where we’re going to be throwing out quick and easy tips, tricks and hacks to help out both newbie’s and old pro’s alike.

So, the experience level required to understand posts will range from absolutely none to fairly advanced understanding of algo’s and CJ inner workings. However, there will be something here for every affiliate marketer looking to stay up on the latest tips.

Definitely a blog I recommend subscribing to, I have already subscribed and placed it among the first blogs I read in my netvibes page. If you are an Affiliate-manager, I also recommend advertising on AFC, it’s only $250 for 2 months, and if an affiliate signs up to your program via AFC, you know that affiliate is going to be a top-performer!.

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Back to Akismet

Since about a little more than a week, I have been testing the Math comment plugin instead of Akismet to prevent comment spam on this blog. Akismet was blocking a lot of legitimate comments as spam, but it looks like the math comment plugin is not doing a great job at preventing spam from being posted as comments here.

So Bye bye math comment plugin, and welcome back Akismet. It’s just much easier to monitor the blog comments for a few non-spam comments and up-spam them than to spam-mark 50 comments each day.

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PRWeb Announces “Blog This”

PRWeb, the online press release distribution service has announced the launch of “BlogThis” - A new tool that allows bloggers who comment on PRWeb news releases on their blogs to blog directly using PRweb’s interface.

A new “BlogThis” button is displayed next to every press release on prweb.com, upon clicking which, one is asked their blog type, url and username/password - this leads to a simple wordpress-like text box where a blogger can write the contents of their blog-post. Click post, and you’re done. PRWeb posts your post to your blog with an image, link and a track back to the original PRweb story to your blog like a good third party blogging app. The only drawback I can see is not being able to choose catagories/tags while posting.

Click here to read the press release

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