Green or red?

The design team @ ideas(outright) created some logos for this blog earlier today.

I have two options .. Green and Red.

What do you think suits better to the blog template? I am totally confused.  Keeping the green as of now, but a part of my mind says the red might just fit better…?

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Coupon Affiliates - now on twitter!

Just stumbled across the twitter profile of DealTwit. A Coupon code microblog on twitter that regularly twitters coupon codes from e-retail merchants - one can ask for a specific merchant’s coupon code by sending a direct twitter and DealTwit promises to respond.

Dealtwit is the second “revenue” twitter microblog I have seen, the first being Twitterlit - who is “Twittering the first lines of books so you don’t have to”.

Smart affiliates have finally begun monetizing twitter, and they are doing it in very creative ways. This is good stuff, Affiliate marketing 2.0.

I’m not sure how much success this can be, Dealtwit only has 17 followers as of now, Twitterlit, on the other hand, has as many as 109 followers, both have taken the right step in a direction. These guys are branding themselves. The days of anonymously marketing merchants are going away as more and more affiliates realize the importance of building a brand and eventually monetizing it.

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The evolution of FinalTag.com - New packaging, Same great taste!

When I first started this blog, it was to be just a personal blog where I would post some technology and internet related posts.

But as it happens with blogs, Finaltag.com evolved into a place where I started journaling important events, news, ideas and opinions related to the world of e-business in general and e-retail, affiliate marketing, on-line advertising, web 2.0 etc. in particular. This is now what the blog stands for, and hopefully will for some time.

From “About on the side bar”:

[Finaltag.com is a] Weblog where Pranav Chavda journals the evolution of e-business, e-retail, internet marketing, etc…

With the evolved mission and definition, the blog now also sports an evolved (and much cleaner) look (thanks to Lucian Marin for the template used here called “The Journalist“) I did the logo myself using Gimp (for the first time ever) to match the theme, but we will hopefully see a better logo soon.

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ReviewMe launches a payperpost like Advertiser Marketplace

ReviewMe, where advertisers can buy reviews of their products/services/websites on blogs, has just launched what the call the Advertiser Marketplace in a move to attract more advertisers and bloggers to their systems.

Originally, The ReviewMe model would let bloggers put a pricetag on reviews on their blog, and advertisers would select which blog they’d like to be reviewed by.

While the original way of advertising is still in place, the new system lets advertisers set up campaigns and provide details of what they would like reviews for and offer a fixed price per review for any blogger within the reviewme network to pick up. Competitor payperpost, currently employs a very similar system within their blog advertising network.

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Planetbeta was not an April Fool’s joke!

Sam Harrelson and Wayne Porter announced on the first of april about Vinny Lingham’s Incubeta acquiring Revenews and CostPerNews, For two days, I thought this was an april fool’s joke.

Apparently, it wasn’t. The Planetbeta blog is now live with some clues on what the latest new-media entity is going to be all about.

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Five Reasons why I blog

There’s a blog meme doing circles and Vlad recently tagged me to the meme, so here are my five reasons:

1 - To make sense of what is being called the “New Internet”, “Social media”, etc..

2 - To connect with people who already blog about this and learn from them.

3 - So that my staff can read my blog and understand why they are doing the things they do at work

4 - To have something to do when I don’t have anything else to do, hehe

5 - There is no number five.

The whole process of blogging is multi-layered - and includes constantly being informed on the subject of your blog, interacting with people (other bloggers, commenters, etc.) who know more than I do about a lot of things, expressing your thoughts regularly and being open to commentary on these thoughts. all this I think results in very interesting give and take of Ideas - the stuff that makes up human existence as we know it.

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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.

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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:

read more | digg story

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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]

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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:

1. select the number of context links you want to display on each page.
2. Choose to make the context links stand out by customizing their look with a different color and an extra underline
3. Select not to include context links in parts of your content (code available in FAQs)
4. Completely configure the sample preview mouseover popup.
5. Increase conversions by selecting to link only products from select amazon categories

Drawbacks?

1. It makes your pages slower to load, it’s written in javascript and calls a .js file from a remote server.
2. 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!

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