Shawn Collins of http://www.affiliatesummit.com gives some last minute suggestions before Affiliate Summit 2008 East for networking, getting the latest news, and an opportunity to have your photo on the cover of issue 3 of FeedFront magazine.
Archives for August 2008
pepperjamNETWORK Going Mobile
The pepperjam NETWORK has partnered with M3 Mobile to launch pepperjamMobile Powered by M3 Mobile, according to Mobile Marketer.
First, affiliates will have the ability to offer mobile lead capture.
Second, merchants will have the ability to drive revenue and shift customer behavior through ecommerce or bricks-and-mortar sales.
Next, affiliates will be able to earn commissions for offline-to-mobile and mobile-to-offline sales.
Finally, pepperjamMobile will offer creative services.
Pepperjam has initially invested in the joint venture. M3 Mobile will build and manage the service.
More details on pepperjamMobile on the Pepperjam blog.
New Pricing for eBay Affiliate Program
The eBay affiliate program is in the process of implementing a new pricing structure for Active Confirmed Registered User (ACRU) compensation.
The new pricing scheme will reward affiliates for the amount of quality traffic they drive to eBay advertiser sites.
Initially only affiliates that join the eBay Partner Network on or after August 1st will placed in the new system.
All existing affiliates will remain in the old pricing system until November 1st, at which point all affiliates in the US program will be placed in the value based pricing system.
eBay is phasing this change for existing affiliates so they can have time to look at the data and see how the change will affect them.
More details at http://www.ebaypartnernetworkblog.com/en/news/new-value-based-pricing-for-ebay-us-program/
Yahoo Mail Blacklists a Respected White Hat
Randy Cassingham, who writes the longstanding and popular This is True (the first for-profit e-mail publication, by the way), has had his double opt-in newsletter blocked by Yahoo.
This is big stuff for a list of Cassingham’s size, as Yahoo addresses represent more than 20,000 of his subscribers, and the majority can’t receive emails they’ve opted-in and confirmed they wish to receive.
“As of now, about 70 percent of the Yahoo addresses are blocked. That’s more than 15,000 folks. That’s more than 10 percent of my entire distribution. And that’s catastrophic: it has the potential to kill True’s newsletter. Nearly 15 percent of my audience, as of this week, which means 15 percent of my revenue, including 15 percent of my ad revenue, has suddenly stopped. It’s the biggest crisis in True’s more than 14 years online. And it’s (sigh) right in the middle of a worldwide economic slowdown. What lovely timing.”
The reason for this whole mess is that some of the subscribers to This is True clicked that the newsletter was spam, rather than simply unsubscribing.
But why should you care? Well, if you’ve got an email list, you could be crushed by the same misguided policy.
Randy has been putting out This is True since 1994, and he’s been a clean emailer.
I’d urge any legitimate emailers to bring some attention to this matter – Digg it, blog about it, spread the news on Twitter, talk about it on a podcast.
And go to This is True to subscribe. It’s a very entertaining email that goes out once a week.
Don’t be the next email publisher to get whacked by these Draconian rules that result from newbie ignorance.
Separation of Blog and Site
Q: Do you think it’s better to have a blog separate from a site and promoting the site, or have the blog as part of the site? Also, if you are promoting items on a blog with a post, it goes to the background after the next post. How can I make this post viable, so it can still promote products?
A: For quite some time, I’ve had sites with a separate blog promoting the site. But I’m actually moving towards consolidating everything.
I plan to combine blogs and sites and run everything off WordPress. In the past, I’ve hand coded the HTML for my sites, and that’s something I enjoy, but I decided it was time to be more efficient.
Also, I think it’s sort of counter-productive for search engine listings to break up the site and blog into two different sites.
As far as the issue of having your posts getting pushed out each time there is a new post, this isn’t really something to worry about.
If you’re using WordPress, MovableType, Joomla, etc. your blog is based on a logical site architecture that is easy to spider. As your blog gets more established, your posts should be getting indexed.
In my experience, the majority of my blog traffic comes through individual entries via search entries and links to the entries. Few people arrive on my homepages.
Just focus on building unique, quality content and everything should work out from there.