Don’t Click This

I was just reading John Chow’s review of Bla.st, and immediately the MDHP came to mind. The basic idea behind Bla.st is that people can place a ‘card’ on the site and the more you pay determines it’s location - obviously the highest paying ad is on the first page and free ads are last. Anyway, everyone seems to be getting all excited about it but I really don’t understand what the user benefit is at the end of the day. And to be honest, it seems like the majority of the buzz around it is coming from webmasters and bloggers who see it as another way to promote their website or blog - but the question is, to who exactly?

Obviously, it may be worth placing a card on the site considering you can do it for free and at the end of the day it is a link (plus with the amount of people talking about it, Bla.st may end up with a decent PR), but that could be the only benefit and I’m convinced that the majority of people visiting the site ARE the people who are placing the ads. So once all the fuss has gone, what good will it be?

Having said that, good luck to the peeps behind it and I hope they prove me wrong.

I was reading a post over on the A4U Forum today about when the best time to launch a new site is. Perhaps the immediate answer that comes to mind is ‘when it’s ready’ but I don’t think it’s that simple.

Obviously, you want the search engines to index your site as quickly as possible but you also don’t want people visiting and being put off by incomplete content before it’s ready. Plus you don’t want to upload a site with a load of dead end links.

This is why I always try an adopt a ’stages stratergy’ when I’m uploading new sites. What I mean by this is that I’ll always split parts of the site up so that they can be published independantly of other sections, as this way you can get some inbound links and keep adding more content gradually.

I was just browsing Tech Crunch when I noticed that the outbound links now have a little snap icon next to them, and the Snap Preview box only shows up when the icon itself is rolled over and not the link. I think this is a much more user friendly way to have snap preveiw set up as although it is handy, I know some people found the preview popup annoying every time they roll over a link especially as links with long link text are often activated accidently.

On further investigation, I also discovered that Snap have added a few other features as well as the option to choose when the preview pops up, including changing the colour theme and even adding your own logo. I reckon these changes will go down pretty well with people who may have had a problem with snap being too intrusive before, as the website owner now has much more control over the design and use and visitors are much less likely to get annoyed by accidently activating the pop up.

Over the past month I’ve noticed at least a dozen blogs that I frequent, add various widgets; the most popular one being the My Blog Log recent readers widget. Bumpzee has also released a similar widget, along with a digg type plugin for posts (but I can’t seem to get these to work at the moment). It seems that widgets are clearly the way to ‘pimp your blog’ and to be honest it wouldn’t surprise me if Technorati release a recent readers widget pretty soon as well!

Anyways, I was thinking about how you could take advantage of this recent widget craze from a business perspective (not in any kind of spammy way, mind). It seems to me that now is a really good time to have a blog in conjunction with or as part of your website as it’s an excellent potential source of traffic. All these communites that are popping up all over the place make it easier to get your website noticed. Just by submitting your blog or site to My Blog Log can get you at least a few new visitors.

But think about this, when someone leaves a comment on your blog, nine times out of ten you’ll go and check out their site too. The same often applies to widgets (maybe not so much on high traffic blogs as recent readers change pretty quickly) when someone sees a new recent reader they’ll often have a look to see who it is (I know I do).

So essentially you could generate traffic and get some exposure simply by logging into My Blog Log (then you’re avatar shows up) and then browsing other blogs and sites with the widgets on them. Obviously, it’s not like readers click on the recent readers widget that much (I don’t think) but still, the author might and it’s free, so what have you got to lose?

This is brilliant! Plus it’s much quicker than the Yahoo/Overture tool. I know wordtracker is the paid choice for a lot of affiliates so I think it’s safe to assume that this service should be pretty accurate too.

Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

Source: Final Tag

I knew something was up with it, it hasn’t worked at all for at least a week. I normally use this keyword tool which incorporates the overture tool and gives an estimate for other search engines, but even they agree that something is up:

This really sucks, looks like I may actually have to start paying for this kind of service. Bummer.

Apparantly, YouTube are planning on rolling out a revenue share system in a couple of months for people who upload their own videos. But before everyone goes and starts uploading tons of videos, you should know it’s exclusively for the uploaders who own the full copyright to the video. There are currently various video sites that run an ad revenue share scheme but none with such a huge audience as YouTube.

YouTube founder Chad Hurley confirmed to the BBC that his team was working on a revenue-sharing mechanism that would “reward creativity”.

The system would be rolled out in a couple of months, he said, and use a mixture of adverts, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film.

YouTube has more than 70m users a month and was recently bought by Google.

The offer applies only to people who own the full copyright of the videos that they are uploading to the YouTube website.

Read full article from the BBC Website

I’ve just read this post from the ‘Evolutionary Imarketing Success’ Blog, and although it brings up some good points about both paid and unpaid or natural site traffic, I think the general message they are trying to get across that paid traffic is always superior is misleading. In my opinion, it depends on the type of site you’re running and that kind of sweeping generalisation cannot be made across the board.

If you are running a site that basically consists of just a landing page with some text and a link to the merchant then yes, paid traffic is probably the way to go as you’re unlikely to get ranked highly in the SE’s and finding sites to link to yours will be tough. However, if you have a content rich site which can get tons of inbound links due to it’s unique content, the SE’s will probably rank it well and it’ll get decent traffic for free. Ok, so this are two very general and simplistic examples and obviously both paid and natural traffic can go hand in hand for a lot of sites, but you get the jist. Essentially it depends on the type of site, but to say that paid traffic (although it may produce quicker results), will always be the most effective is wrong.

I’m setting up my latest site in the hope that I won’t have to pay anything for traffic, but I’ll have to wait and see if that’s going to be viable or not and how well I rank naturally in the SE’s. To be honest if I have to I don’t have a problem with paying for traffic so long as the end result is profitable, but I know it isn’t the be all and end all. But then again, what do I know? I’ve only been in this game for a few months…

I found this site on my web wanderings yesterday; it’s a social networking site/blog directory. It currently only hosts affiliate marketing blogs, but I assume more ‘communities’ will be added soon. Basically, you add your blog and your posts are automatically submitted to the community. Members can then bump any posts of interest, so it’s essentially a Digg for (at the moment) affiliate marketing blogs (which is probably a good thing as some Digg chumps users seem to have developed a resentment towards this type of blog recently).

I think this is great. I love reading about other people’s experiences with affiliate marketing, but there are so many SEO guides and advice type blogs that it can sometimes be a mission to find the genuine, personal blogs. I know there are people who are looking for guides etc and sure, they do have some good tips and advice, but there’s just too many off ‘em!

For example, I registered my blog at Blog Top Sites but if you look in the Internet Marketing and SEO section virtually all the blogs are ‘a guide to this’ and ‘tips on that’. Enough already!! I dunno about everyone else, but I much prefer to read business or affiliate marketing blogs that have a personal perspective.

Anyway, I digress. Basically, I really like bumpzee.com and they’ve already sent me a decent amount of traffic even though I only registered yesterday. I suppose the best thing about it is that your blog posts will definitely get seen (if not read) by people browsing the site as they are automatically submitted. And if you write really interesting posts then you should get a fair few visitors to your blog, so make sure you submit your blog asap.

By the way, I got to the last sentence of this post before accidentally pressing ‘back’ which erased the whole thing. There’s now a wall shaped dent in my fist…teach me not to ’save and continue editing’…

As I was browsing the A4U Forum today I noticed a ton of questions from people new to affiliate marketing, something which I’ve noticed more and more since the new year (hell, I only got into this a few months ago) and I can’t help wondering what’s going to happen in a couple of years. As more and more people turn to the internet for their dollar (not specifically affiliate marketing), it’s getting a lot more competitive and there are fewer niches to explore. How long is this going to work for? Is there always going to be money for people to make; are there enough new areas and niches popping up to meet the ‘demand’?

Obviously people who have established themselves as ’super affiliates’ etc will probably be fine but what about everyone else? A general rule with internet marketing is that 20% of affiliates produce 80% of the total revenue for a given program or whatever so it’s more than likely that people (the other 80%) will start to get squeezed out eventually, as they begin to find they can no longer compete.

I guess the key is to adapt and diversify if you want to succeed - The days of a simple shopping directory or comparison site are definietly long gone! It will certainly be interesting to see how the landscape of this industry looks in the next couple of years…