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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New Inline Video ads on YouTube

GigaOm network’s NewTeeVee.com is reporting about a new format of video ads being tested on Youtube in what seems to be the best and smartest effort in monetizing the video sharing social network since Google acquired it.

As can be seen in this screen shot, a text ad is placed below a playing video which can be clicked to pause the playing video and play the video advertisement. The good thing is, viewing the ad is solely the user’s discretion and the ad can also be played once the video has been entirely watched.

I can not see the ads here yet, I am guessing that they may either be geo-targeted or google might just be testing them for now.

NewTeeVee also notes that ads are not displayed when a youtube video is embedded to a web page outside of youtube.

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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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Tweets for the day

I’m addicted to twitter, and today’s post will be twitter style, a few “tweets” in this post. Each less than 140 characters.

• More affiliate programs starting affiliate blogs every day - the latest is Kodak - http://kodakaffiliate.blogspot.com
• Ebay to roll out a brand new feedback system - http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y07/m04/i26/s01
• Affiliate marketing jagron - http://www.affiliatestuff.co.uk/glossary-of-affiliate-marketing-terms/
• [social network] Web 2.0 site lets users send virtual scratch cards -
• http://www.prweb.com//releases/web2-0/sweepstakes/prweb522060.htm
• The Google reader theme is very cool!
• New BumpZee! Features
• Top 10 reasons why web 2.0 sucks

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Ebay profits up by 52%

… and it’s not that the auction service is doing too well. The better than expected profit growth is thanks to shopping.com, paypal, skype and various other web/tech properties that ebay owns.

Ebay earned $377 million in the first quarter, which is up 52 percent from a year earlier and is very impressive growth!

According to this NewYork Times Article, the company had been benefiting from changes in the user experience that had increased the number of auctions leading to sales.

Paypal, notwithstanding the mighty google-checkout, was the biggest revenue driver for eBay with over 30% growth.

Full Story here

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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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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 …

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Over two million people use StumbleUpon

According to this press release, StumbleUpon is now over two million users strong.

I’ve been reading many bloggers write about how stumbleupon makes up such an important share of their traffic referrers pie.

It’s too bad I haven’t been active at stumbleupon yet - hopefully, this piece of news is enough inspiration for me to go and check out the service and make some use of it’s mammoth potential as a source of traffic.

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Social Marketing - web 0.0

I was reading iCon, a Steve Jobs biography, have only read the first few pages yet, but having already read so much about apple - something passed my mind that I guess is worth sharing here.

There is all this hype over social media, and social networks etc., as if it is the one true way to successful business and brand-development. The way most people are taking this, is they are taking niches and turning them into communities and social networks.

What Apple did, however (and Sony, and BMW, and Reliance and even Microsoft to a certain extent), is that they carried on their business the traditional way, yet they were heavily engaged in what can be noted as “Social marketing”.

How exactly they did this, I am yet to grasp an understanding of, but they did not host social networks, that’s a certain fact.

Let me end this post with a Guruish comment:

Social marketing is not hosting a social network, nor creating one, it is building a sense of community within all those who use your products.

That, IMO is the sure-shot technique of building any business and REAL social marketing - Creating a sense of belonging and passion towards your product in the minds of everyone who uses it, that way, they start bonding with all those who use the same product. This creates a sort of missionary inclination into your users - who try and “convert” more people into using your product.

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Browse goods at the Shopwave mpire

“visual shopping” web-apps are mushrooming around the web; with a hope to offer a better and more unique shopping experience to online buyers (and make money in the process too).

Browsegoods, for example and lets users browse products on amazon as if they were browsing a map on google maps - you can zoom in and out of product category maps. The more you zoom in, the more products you get to see, once you have decided upon a product, zoom into the product to see more information about it. Very interesting concept, if you haven’t seen it yet, it’s worth a look.

Other visual shopping apps worthy of a mention include BlackDogAir (lets shoppers browse through Books movies and music as if they were browsing a windows explorer window for files) and of course the already popular Like.com that recognizes stuff people are wearing in photos and displays similar products available to buy on various stores in their database (which, it seems is populated with datafeeds from affiliate networks etc.).

Today, yet another “Visual shopping experience” has launched, this time built on top of the shopping.com API, from the labs of mpire, called Shopwave.

(more…)

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