Jangro AM
Toolbars and Network Quality | LinkShare Blog
Linkshare has made a post on their blog acknowledging the recent issues that have been raised about OneCause.
Toolbars and Network Quality | LinkShare Blog: “We take network quality seriously. That’s why we have a team dedicated to preserving the integrity of our network. That team applied the same standards to the OneCause toolbar as any other publisher toolbar. Some publishers may not like toolbars, and may disagree with the idea that it’s okay for a toolbar to allow ‘an end user’s express and informed consent’ to see a ‘special offer or proposal’, but that is a different issue. We wanted to take a moment to reinforce to the community that we remain committed to ensuring that all members of our network are compliant with our Network Policies & Guidelines.
Mark Kirschner, CMO”
“Some publsihers may not like toolbars, and disagree with the idea that it’s okay for a toolbar to allow ‘an end user’s express and informed consent’ to see a ‘special offer or proposal’, but that is a different issue.”
That’s for sure!
Anyway, good for Mark for coming out to address these issues on the Linkshare blog. Looks like he’s got comments turned on. If you’ve got feedback for him, that’d be a good place to leave it.
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If it Isn’t Fun…
Just a few weeks ago, I passed the 4 year anniversary of working for myself. Prior to that, I’d spent nearly 15 years working for someone else, always at small startup software or Internet companies, but always for someone else. I don’t regret a day of any of those experiences. I’ve worked with hundreds of people on dozens of projects in a handful of companies. Every one of them changed me in some way that has made me what I am today. I’m grateful for that.
For years I had wanted to go on my own and do something entrepreneurial, but never found the right time to make the move. Maybe I didn’t do that because I was having fun doing what I was doing. In 2004, things stopped being fun. It was time to move.
That October, I walked out the door of the company I worked for and was on my own.
Fast forward to today. The road I started down four years ago has brought me to where we are today. I co-own a small business with 5 employees including my partner and myself. It has been a blast getting here.
Now working for yourself isn’t for everyone, I’d encourage each of the people working for us to take whatever chances they’re comfortable with (or maybe even uncomfortable), but in the meantime I’m glad to have them along for the ride, as long as it’s fun.
Why am I writing this? Things are starting to become a little less fun. Just a little. It’s not a fatal condition. I’m nipping it in the bud right now. It’s time to focus again on what’s fun and fixing or eliminating what’s not.
And so I ask you to take a look in the mirror and ask yourself the same question.
Are you having fun?
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Affiliate Marketing Takes a Big Step Back to 2002
A lengthy thread is going on over at ABestWeb right now about activities going on with the loyalty program called OneCause.
According to Haiko who has posted numerous screencasts, the OneCause browser plugin is activating automatically and encouraging users to click for earnings, and thereby overwriting other affiliate clicks.
In some cases, the redirect is happening completely automatically with no user action required.
I haven’t tested this myself, but after watching several of these screencasts, the sequence of events, which differs depending on whether there was an identifiable affiliate link clicked on previously (either a network link, or afsrc=1 in the link), is as follows:
“regular affiliate” link is clicked. user ends up on merchant site. toolbar activates and encourages the user to click to get their rewards, (this step won’t happen if there was no identifiable affiliate link clicked previously.) user is redirected through a second affiliate link, overwriting the first.
It is important to note that this different behavior is not random. This application is coded specifically to behave differently when there was an identifiable affiliate link previously clicked or not.
For example, when plain affiliate links are clicked, the “Earn Contributions” button appears.
(via http://www.abestweb.com/cam/staples/staples.html)
Also, when an affiliate link that’s behind a local redirect, but does have afsrc=1 on the link is clicked, the “Earn Contributions” button appears.
Otherwise, the “Earn Contributions” button doesn’t appear and step three above is skipped. That doesn’t mean that there wasn’t an affiliate link previously clicked, it may have been, just not identifiable. Or a merchant’s PPC ad may have been clicked. Or an affiliate’s PPC ad may have been clicked. Or the user may have gone directly to the merchant’s site.
It’s been a long time, but my recollection of the Code of Conduct is that as long as the user has agreed to have this software running and actively clicks to get their incentive, it is “ok”. This active click is happening in many of the screencasts that Haiko produced. That doesn’t make this any less controversial, as it has always been.
OneCause very likely believes that they are operating within the letter of the various networks’ respective rules. And they may be correct.
Even though it may be “ok”, the vast majority of the software plugins have opted to go completely dormant when there was another affiliate in the mix, steering clear of the issue almost entirely (except for the case of return visits tracked by cookie).
This falls into the heavily contested area which is what does the end-user want? And even though the argument goes in that direction, of course, the end user should have nothing to do with deciding who gets commissions for a sale.
And there you have the major problem with incentive publishers playing in the same channel as acquisition publishers. The two just don’t mix!
But wait, there’s more to the story.
OneCause is owned by Rakuten, or perhaps even directly by Linkshare. This acquisition happened a little over a year ago, according to posts by Shawn Collins and Kellie Stevens. I’m not certain if Rakuten or Linkshare owns them, but this page on the Linkshare website seems to indicate the latter:
“ok” or not, what are they thinking?
Update:
More reading on the subject:
Hot Charity, or why your favorite coupon site is losing money.
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Best Advice I’ve Heard in a Long Time
Sage advice from Madeline Albright. It is intended for Barack Obama as he heads toward Presidency, but applies to YOU:
“When asked what advice she’d give Obama, she said two things. First - ‘listen’. Second - ‘be confident, but not certain.’ She described Bush as a president who has been too ‘certain’ - he’s ‘certain that he is correct on all issues and then never listens.’”
Don’t be a Bush.
(Via Feld.com: A Few Requests for President-elect Obama)
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I Ditched my MacBookPro for an ASUS eee Netbook
I’ve had a MacBookPro for maybe 6 years now, and until recently I was on my second one. I finally upgraded it last July to the latest hardware with the multi-touch trackpad, ever paralyzed by Apple’s rapid product release schedule. Of course only a few months after that purchase, Apple launches their totally redesigned unibody MBP. That’s the way it goes.
I don’t travel very often, and increasingly, when I do, I’m less and less dependent on the notebook. I get all my email in my iPhone, and while I schlep that 15″ notebook around with me everywhere, it’s most important responsibility is to act as a backup battery to my iPhone.
Collecting dust and powering an iPhone is no life for a $3500 MacBookPro. So I decided that it’s time to upgrade my desktop and downgrade my laptop.
The desktop became an 8-core Mac Pro with 30″ and 23″ Cinema displays. The notebook became a netbook; an ASUS eee PC. Here’s the new happy family:
I purchased the ASUS eee 1000HA from Amazon (affiliate link). I got the version with Windows XP on it with the intention of setting up dual boot with Linux.
That was a very easy process once I figured out how to boot off the SD card upon which I put the bootable installation for Ubuntu-eee. The short version is that I had to adjust the bios settings so I could watch the boot, hit F2, and select the boot device. I’ll write up the long version in a later post.
Anyway, I love this little netbook PC. I haven’t taken it for a walk outside the house yet, but it’s great for catching up on email, RSS feeds at the kitchen counter, or for couch-surfing while watching television.
There are even some uses that I didn’t anticipate as I’m discovering that it is a fantastic multi-media device. I use it to listen to podcasts, so I’m not tethered to my desktop computer. It is a great for Skype, for the same reasons. It’s fantastic for watching video. Hulu works great on it, even in Ubuntu, and I use it to catch up on TV shows while running on the treadmill. It opens up flat and sits perfectly in the magazine holder on the treadmill. You can’t do that with a MacBookPro (they don’t open 180 degrees).
Yesterday, I watched my friend Jim Kukral launch his new business live on ustream (and relaunch his own self) while running a few miles. That’s not Jim Kukral in that picture, it’s Jim Halpert from “The Office” On Hulu. On Linux. Did I mention that?
(affiliate link)
My only regret is that I accidentally bought the version of the laptop without Bluetooth. There are so many variations on this little computer that you need to be really careful about the one you’re buying.
It is a little bit chunkier and heavier than I would have liked in an ultra-portable laptop. But I guess maybe I’m expecting too much out of something with a 160GB hard drive and a 10″ screen.
The keyboard is tough to get used to. The thing that catches me up mostly is the sensitive trackpad that I hit accidentally while typing and the right shift key is only single key width. I always hit the page up key where it should be. I’ll get used to that.
Thanks to the tiny price-tag, I won’t feel bad ditching this netbook as well when a real MacBookAir killer becomes readily available.
But honestly, my biggest problem with this new computer is that I don’t know how to say it. How do you pronounce “Eee”? Is it “e.e.e.”? or more like “Weeeeeee”?
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Amazon Shipment Abducted by Aliens, Lost Exactly 24 Hours
A favorite pastime of mine is stalking my UPS shipments. I love how you can monitor the progress of your package as it makes it way from Amazon, through Kentucky, and eventually to its final destination. 
That is until things go wrong.
I ordered a 30″ Apple Cinema display from Amazon on Monday with next day delivery. It “shipped” on Monday evening as expected but disappeared from the face of the earth. What would normally be a very predictable trip south of the Mason-Dixon line to Louisville and back up this direction was instead the deafening silence of no updates for the entire day it was supposed to arrive.
My monitor lost almost exactly 24 hours of its life, completely unaccounted for. That’s a curious gap in time. 24 hours minus 10 seconds. Spooky. Paging Special Agent Fox Mulder.
Anyway, as you can see, it’s back among us and well on it’s way.
Oh, and uh, yes, I’ve purchased a completely over-the-top, unnecessary, but ultimate in displays. 4 years of hard work allows me to justify such a splurge. OK, there’s no use. Don’t judge me. I have been waiting years to be able to do this.
Stay tuned for a picture of that behemoth sitting next to my new Asus eee PC.
And Amazon is refunding me the overnight shipping charge. All $3.99 of it. (I’m a Prime member.)
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Hey Cuz!
My vanity google search on “jangro” turned up a really strange result this morning.
My last name is unique. There aren’t that many of us because the name mutated from the name Gingras only about 5 generations ago right here in Massachusetts. I’ve studied the genealogy of my name back to the late 17th century when they came from France to Quebec.
Barring the possibility that someone just changed their last name to Jangro (well that would be understandable, it is a cool name), anyone with that name is my cousin.
When this Google search alert isn’t about me, it’s usually about one of my athletic cousins breaking some touchdown record for their prep-school, or it’s the janitorial supply company in England who would probably love to get their hands on this domain.
I know personally many of the Jangro family members out there, and from my research and otherwise paying attention, I feel like I know OF just about all of them. But I guess I really don’t. Because every once in a while I get a surprise like this one:
The Billerica Lions Club Youth Speech Committee is pleased to announce the winner of its Youth Speech contest Meaghan Hardy, a sophomore at Billerica Memorial High School. Meaghan competed against Sara Pietila, a senior at Shawsheen Tech, and Ravina Jangro, a senior at Billerica Memorial High School as well as a member of the Billerica Leos Club (a youth club of the Lions).
from: Lions Youth Speech contest winner - Billerica Minuteman
Dear Ravina Jangro, nice try against Meaghan Hardy I’m sure. But how have you managed to get to 18 years of age without me knowing about you or your family?
And she lives just 15 miles away or so in Billerica, MA. (that’s pronounced bill-rick’-a, btw, so you can say it correctly in your head.)
Aren’t the Interwebs fun.
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Datafeeds Done Right, Finally.
Until recently, in most affiliate networks, getting a product datafeed set up involved contacting a human being and that human being going through some manual process to set up each merchant’s datafeed for the affiliate in question.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
It was one of those painstakingly slow processes for the affiliate that caused this one to not even bother in many cases.
A ton has changed in 2008 on this front. Let’s take a look at some of the bigger affiliate networks and how they’ve got it right, as well as some things that I think they could improve on.
ShareASale
ShareASale probably had the most well-automated process the earliest out of the major networks. There is an application and approval process to get each feed, but once the merchant approves, access to the feed is prompt and automated. You access your feeds individually via FTP. A downside is that the feeds are named with the SAS merchant ID, but it can be a process to dig into the SAS interface to see the IDs. A significant improvement would be to provide me with a list of all the merchants I am approved for datafeeds with their IDs. Here’s the information for a particular merchant that offers feeds. You check the box to apply for access.
One of the really great features is that SAS is a preview of the product datafeed. This saves a lot of time in evaluating merchant datafeeds:
Linkshare
Linkshare long had the most painful datafeed process. In order to get access to datafeeds in the first place, you had to pay a $250 fee or have generated some large amount of commissions for a few months. I call this a tire-kicker fee. Keeps out the riff-raff. I believe this practice keeps out a lot more than the tire-kickers. I’m honestly not sure if this fee is in place. Once you had access, getting individual feeds meant emailing the request to a special address. A few days later it would be set up by a support person.
They’ve come a long way with their interface, and datafeed management rose along with that tide. They now have a fully automated interface for requesting access to feeds (which must be approved per merchant). Once approved, feeds appear within a day in your FTP account.
One pretty major pain is the Linkshare channels. If you want to track across more than one website in LS, you must add channels. They way they implemented this is basically parallel views per website. This carries through to applying to merchants and getting product feeds. So if I want to use one merchant’s feed on three different sites, that’s three applications and three different feeds, managed through three interfaces. I cannot imagine trying to manage a dozen websites through the Linkshare interface.
Linkshare “shares” with ShareASale the problem with using merchant Ids for the datafeed file names and providing no concise list of what those IDs are. Problem could be solved by just putting the IDs right there on the feed management page.
Google Affiliate Network
Google Affiliate Network (Performics at the time) rivaled Linkshare in painful datafeed setup process. However, they are the latest to the scene with a really nice datafeed management interface.
GAN is one of the only networks that don’t require separate approval for datafeed access. This is a nice progressive move that I hope other networks start to follow. I’d like to think that our industry has matured enough such that an extra level of security is not required on access to datafeeds. If a publisher can get into a network, and then into an affiliate program, they should have passed enough tests to be entrusted with product data.
While most networks post datafeeds to their own FTP site, GAN pushes the datafeeds out to your own server. To do this, you give them access to an FTP server and account right in the interface.
Here you can see the interface. You add feeds from available programs on the right and they appear on the left. Once selected, the feed will be sent to your FTP server on the next scheduled transfer. Also note that you can select how you want the datafeeds to be named, with the merchant name or the ID. Using the merchant name causes problems with spaces and other characters, so I use the ID. But notice that the merchant ID is listed right here in the interface. Perfect.
PepperjamNetwork
Pepperjam took on product datafeeds as one of the areas that they wanted to get right and they interviewed a lot of people (including me) while they were forming their requirements. The datafeed interface at PJN is simple and effective. You select the merchants you want to get in a datafeed, it can be one, several, or all feeds. They provide you with a simple url to fetch this data.
You can run through this process multiple times to get multiple feeds that offer different mixes of merchants.
This interface offers some nice data, including the number of products and date last updated.
The feed itself is overstuffed with fields for data, including technical specifications. Good idea, but I think that they’ll find that in practice that very few merchants will provide that level of data.
Converseon
Converseon? That’s right. This boutique network gets honorable mention because they built a kick-ass product datafeed management system a long time ago, and is definitely worth mentioning.
They’ve got an entire website devoted to the datafeed and storefront creation for their clients, ConverseonFeeds.com.
Their datafeed process is combined with a storefront generator, as you can see here. I never use storefronts, so my focus is on the datafeed delivery mechanisms, raw text and a nice webservices API delivery of product and coupon data:
What’s particularly nice is that you can narrow feeds down into categories, or specific search criteria.
Once you settle on the content, you get a URL to fetch the data using http.
Commission Junction
I cannot make a post about the major affiliate networks without including Commission Junction, else you’d be at this point thinking “What about CJ?”
Unfortunately, they don’t offer a self-service management interface for feeds. They’ve had a similar policy to Linkshare (high performance or a fee) for gaining access to feeds.
Once set up, it requires a support call to get feeds added and removed from the datafeed download. They do offer a number of great configuration options. I also know that they’ve got a nice internal interface for configuring feeds for publishers. Hopefully they’re working on exposing this in the affiliate interface.
Give it another look…
If you’re like me, you may have given up on datafeeds in certain affiliate networks long ago and never looked back. A lot has changed this year with product datafeeds. I’d encourage you to go back and take another look.
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The Apple Store Guys Can’t Keep Up Either.
The rate at which Apple releases new products, rendering previous versions of hardware obsolete is simply maddening. It seems every time I purchase hardware, something replaces it just a few months later. Better technology, same price. Damn you Steve.
But at the very least, I’d expect that the so-called “geniuses” and sales consultants in the Apple stores would know what they’re talking about. But it seems they can’t keep up with the new products either.
There’s a caste system of sorts in the apple stores. The flocking sales people in their orange and blue t-shirts are there to mostly keep the kiddies at bay and from drooling all over the iPhones and Macbook Air computers. Their product knowledge is pretty shallow.
I generally ask enough tough questions that I get passed on to someone who is supposed to know what they’re talking about.
Yesterday I was at the apple store planning to buy a MacBook Pro, a Mac Pro, and a few Cinema Displays and I caught a glimpse of the ultra-sexy and brand-new 24″ LED Cinema Display. Amazing. Ready to pick up a few of those beauties, I was informed that they’re actually not shipping until the end of November.
OK then, I’ll wait, because THAT’s what I want for the Mac Pro that I just purchased.
In the meantime, I planned to use the Mac Pro with a 23″ Cinema display that I already have. Not wanting to be stuck when I got home, my question was what adapter do I need, if any? I’m currently using it on an iMac, which has a mini DVI adapter on it. I had a nagging feeling that I was all set, but wanted to make sure. He looked around for a female mini DVI to DVI adapter to plug into the Mac Pro. He didn’t have the part that he thought would be needed. Going on hope that I really was all set, I was on my way.
After getting home to be able to take a look it turns out that there was already an adapter on there converting the DVI into a mini adapter to fit into the iMac. Of course the right answer was that I’m all set. At least the news was good.
I then moved on to further research on the new LED Cinema display. It turns out that is only compatible with the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros. If you’re planning to use one of these new LED Cinema displays on your Highest of high-end Mac Pros, forget about it. At least for now.
Had he known this little fact, he would have made a few more thousand dollars, and saved me a bunch of trouble.
Lesson learned. Don’t count on the Apple store crew to know what they’re talking about. They’re figuring out out as they go just like the rest of us.
And I know that as soon as I buy a second display for the Mac Pro, they’ll come out with an LED display that will work on it.
But not a minute sooner. That’s just the way it works.
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Yes Virginia, There are Businesses Thriving in This Tough Economy.
Got an email from Adam Viener this morning at imwave announcing that they’ve acquired MoveMarketing’s Search business.
Long story short, or short story shorter, it looks like moveMarketing needed to resolve a conflict of interest in moving forward with their PPC tools business. Needing affiliate marketers to trust them with their data, they needed to get their own affiliate business out of the picture. So Andre Colantuono and the Move search business has been sold to imwave. Well, Andre wasn’t “sold”. You know what I mean.
I see this as another great sign for our industry, that professional affiliate and performance marketing-based organizations continue to be seen as strong businesses. Not only are they viable acquisition targets, but are themselves acquiring other businesses as well.
It is especially good to see such a bright spot in what’s otherwise a grim economic environment. Many silicon valley start-ups who took big money from VCs are hunkering down and laying off employees to minimize burn in hopes that their business plans will pan out before the money runs out. Meanwhile, smaller, self-funded, and even profitable affiliate and performance based marketing based organizations are much better set to ride out these tough times.
Here at MechMedia, we’re fortunate to be in a similar position to have recently hired a few people to help us maintain and expand our publishing business, keeping an eye on our long-term goals.
Congrats to my friends at imwave and moveMarketing in what looks like your own strong successes in these tough times. Godspeed!
Read more about it at Revenews.
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Affiliate Networks and Social Media
My post from earlier this week on Affiliate Networks and blogs got me thinking about the bigger social media picture in the affiliate network space.
Engaging clients via social media is pretty much a no-brainer by now, though many businesses remain reluctant to open themselves to a public conversation with their clients for fear of the bad press.
In our small affiliate marketing industry, adoption of social media by the U.S. affiliate networks has been pretty slow but it is improving.
Message Boards
In the beginning, there was message boards. Back in 2001 time frame I was working at Be Free. We grappled with whether it made sense to get involved on ABestWeb. At the time, we were the network that affiliates loved to hate, but we decided to give it a go to see if we could do something about that. First our PR person gave it a try and she was slaughtered. Then our VP of client services went on resulting in a complete firestorm. Finally, I couldn’t take it any longer and I took the baton and ran for the next two years until we merged with Commission Junction. How was I successful where the others failed? I let the conversations happen, listened, and gave real and honest responses. I tried to answer all questions, not the ones I liked. I spoke with people, not at them. I grew thick skin. I dished it out once in a while to keep it fun, but never got personal.
Other networks had similar successes. It seems to take a special kind of person who can be entrusted to actually engage with the public. That’s opposed to the “network rep” that now pushes out promotions and answers the occasional question for CJ and LS. That’s not “social” media.
Todd Crawford was that guy for CJ and after he left was never replaced. Other than that (Todd was a VP), it seems that the owners of the Networks are the only ones who can stand up and take the heat. Linkshare had their owner Steven Messer who was also not really replaced in that capacity when he left. Shareasale has their owner Brian Littleton, who has made a name for his company with his openness. More recently Kris Jones owner of PepperJam Network ends up in a complete fiasco every time he shows his face, only to be exceeded by the next time he gives it a try (if he isn’t banned).
How is it that some company representatives can succeed to brilliantly while another one flames out every time? It’s not just about company’s policies toward things like adware. Todd and Steven showed us that regardless of company popularity, a sort of understanding can be reached between them and the affiliates. Constructive discussions can happen.
Why even bring up message boards in this discussion? I think it set the stage and the bar in affiliate marketing around network communication.
Blogs
To me, this is a requirement of any online marketing company that has stakeholders. Alerts in the interface don’t cut it for communications any more. And this is not only for promotions. Get someone out in front of the clients to post real, honest information about what’s going on with the company. For better or worse. Read my post from Monday to see how the U.S. affiliate networks are doing with their own blogging efforts.
You don’t have to look much past ComcastCares to see the positive impact that a twitter presence can have for a corporation.
Below is my short list of Affiliate Network twitter’ers. Either the “company” account or a personal account of a public figure at one of the companies. I’ll limit it to the ones I reviewed in the previous post AND that I currently follow. This is not meant to be a researched, inclusive list.
Commission Junction is, again, the only one missing from the party. Surely if Todd Crawford, Lisa Riolo, and Brian Caldwell were still there this would be a different story. Or me, for that matter.
It seems to me that the basic pre-requisite to a company attaining a successful social media presence is that they’ve got at least one person who is (a) interested and already heavily involved in social media, and (b) in a position that the company trusts them to represent.
How does that not happen at a company like CJ? This is not to judge (though I’m sure somebody will), but to ask the purely academic question, seriously, why?
I won’t give “grades” this time as it seems to bring out the worst in people. For the fun of it, I will include their publicly visible twitter stats in case you’ve got your own methods for measuring the type of Twitter user they are.
| Network | Twitter’er | Following | Followers | Updates | Comments |
| Commission Junction | C’mon guys. Nobody? Really? | ||||
| Linkshare | LinkShareBlog | 68 | 93 | 23 | Along with the blog, a new effort. A good start. |
| Google Affiliate Network | LarryAdams | 138 | 194 | 462 | This is mostly Larry’s personal stuff. But to me, Larry is the GAN guy. So he gets roped in. I don’t know of any more formal GAN twitter accounts. |
| ShareASale | brianlittleton | 90 | 439 | 328 | ShareaASale’s owner. Mostly personal stuff, but you cannot separate Brian from ShareASale. |
| ShareASaleNews | 5 | 35 | 7 | Shareasale’s newest twitter effort. Follow this to keep tabs on new merchant news. I like the idea of a separate twitter account for the promotinal stuff! | |
| ShareASale | 0 | 141 | 31 | Looks like this is more fun/random stuff coming out of Shareasale, rather than promotions. Perhaps Brian’s effort to extract the SAS stuff from his personal twitter account. possible? | |
| SaraBeeSAS | 33 | 40 | 12 | Sarah’s one of the public faces at SAS. Her personal twitter account, but she does talk SAS stuff. | |
| catango | 218 | 315 | 483 | Last and anything but least, Carolyn Tang mixes up personal and SAS. | |
| PepperJamNetwork | KingPepper | 2,892 | 1,749 | 477 | “King Pepper” is Kris Jones, the CEO of PepperJam. Like most of Kris’ social media activity, this is a mix of him personally and talking up PepperJam. There are surely other PJ employees on the twitter, but I haven’t come across them. |
| AvantLink | Avantlink | 0 | 164 | 104 | Follow this twitter account to keep tabs on all of the new merchants at AvantLink. |
| Buy.at | Buy_at | 70 | 69 | 27 | Not sure who’s behind the twitter account at buy.at, but it’s becoming more and more active recently, and a nice mix of buy.at promotions and announcements and some fun stuff. |
Friend ‘em up!
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Affiliate Marketing Network Blog Scorecard
I’ve come out of my two month blog hiatus (caused by a perfect storm of home and business activities) to discover that yet another of the big US affiliate networks has launched a blog. As of October, Linkshare has apparently seen the light and jumped into the blogging fray. Good onya Linkshare.
This prompted me to take a step back and review what’s been happening on this front. Here’s a quick scorecard of affiliate networks and their blogs.
Google Affiliate Network
Larry Adams, the long-time Performics product manager has been doing a great job with the blog for a few years now and writes thoughtful, quality posts that give insight into the product features and direction. The change to Google has resulted in a new home for the blog, rejuvenation, and participation from other folks in the company. There is always a few comments on blog posts, and Larry does answer questions.
Content: A
Frequency: B
Community: B
Overall: B+
http://googleaffiliatenetwork-blog.blogspot.com/
Going back to August 2007 here:
http://blog.performics.com/affiliate/
Shareasale
The Shareasale blog is one of the oldest, going way back to March of 2005. Brian Littleton, backed by SAS stalwarts Carolyn Tang and Sarah Beeskow, provide a good mix of product information and promotions and new merchants. Brian injects quite a bit of his own personality into the blog with opinion pieces on industry issues as well. This great mix results in a good following of readers and some lively commentary.
Frequency: B
Content: A
Community: A
Overall: A-
Linkshare
As I mentioned in the introduction, Linkshare is the newest US affiliate network on the blog scene with their launch on October 1st.
So far, the blog is a great mix of different authors from product management, marketing folks, VPs and do-bees. It’s still the honeymoon stage for Linkshare blog, but congrats to them for a solid first month. Keep it up guys.
Update Frequency: A
Content: A
Community: C (graded on a scale since it’s too soon to tell)
Overall: A-
Commission Junction
Commission Junction is notably blogless, and as of October 1, they’re the only one of the big guys.
Given what all the other great things the networks are doing with blogs, from promoting new programs, to announcing maintenance windows, to getting the product word out, it’s pretty amazing that they haven’t got on the ball.
There’s not a complete lack of new media coming out of Commission Junction. They’ve delivered a series of enthusiastic podcasts, a skunkworks promotions blog, and most recently a happy-10th-birthday-to-us YouTube video (happy birthday CJ!).
But they somehow skipped chapter one in the social media book: “Set up a Blog”. ???
Overall: DNC
Pepperjam Network
The Pepperjam Network Blog served as the launching point for the network announcements. Things got a little dicey for a while around the launch of the network and some mud-slinging with CJ, but settled down again with some great content mostly from Kris Jones, the President of Pepperjam. The blog has a lot of promotional information about new merchant launches, which can overwhelm the rest of the stuff at times (good problem for them), but Kris does write a good amount of new product information and even some personal stuff. They’ve put out some unique stuff such as the “Meet the Affiliates” feature that’s been going steady for quite a while now. From a community standpoint, the only posts that get any comments are product-focused (indicating that’s really what people are interested in seeing.)
Update Frequency: A
Content: A
Community: A
Overall: A
http://www.pepperjamnetwork.com/blog/
Also check out Pepperjam’s Marketing blog http://www.pepperjam.com/blog/
Buy.at
No blog, but at least they are active on twitter: http://twitter.com/buy_at.
Overall: DNC
AvantLink
I don’t currently do anything in this network (not for any good reason), so I don’t pay much attention. But since they do have a blog, I’m adding them on. Like PJN, their blog is heavy on the new merchant launches and promotions, but there is a smattering of product information as well. Community-wise, it does have a pulse with the occasional commenter. I think if they went after more industry and product issues, they could get some more activity out of the reader-base.
Update Frequency: A
Content: B
Community: B
Overall: B+
http://www.avantshare.com/blog/
There are of course other smaller networks with blogs, and individual merchant programs that have great bloggers working for them. But I’ll stop there or I could spend all day on this post!
If you have a favorite that I’ve left out, feel free to comment below.
[Link]
Blog the Vote: Which Candidate Will Help Small Business?
This is my first political post ever, possibly my last. But there’s something weighing heavy on me as a small business owner as we go into election day.
We’re a growing small business. I’m proud to say that even in these uncertain times that we’re not only profitable, but we’re growing. In the past few weeks, we’ve gone from three employees to five.
Like many retail businesses, most of our profit comes in Q4. And as we approach the end of the year, we’re facing the prospect of having to pay big taxes on the profits.
Now I’m ok with paying taxes. We all take our salaries and pay taxes on that. But as an S Corporation, the business profits flow to through to the owners of the company and we must pay taxes as if that profit is our income.
I don’t want to take all that profit and go buy houses and cars. All I want to do is reinvest it into my company. If we could spend the profit in the next few months and get a 40% discount, I would. We spend where we can, buying stuff now that we’d be buying next year anyway. we’ll buy some computers, pay for hosting a year in advance, etc.
But why can’t we designate and allocate profits to be reinvested in the business? We’d be promising to spend it over the next year on hiring new employees and contractors to help us grow our business, buying services and capital equipment. All great for the economy.
Instead, profits that would help us grow our business get slashed nearly in half.
What’s worse, I don’t even see how I can take this to the polls tomorrow. (Not that it really matters here in Massachusetts.)
I haven’t heard words from either candidate that tells me that next year I won’t be in the same or worse place next Q4. (We’re talking greater than $250k here.)
I’m a pretty apolitical guy. So on election-day eve, I put this out to my much more politically-minded friends and readers:
Which candidate has the best interests of the small business in mind, specifically in regards to helping us reinvest our profits?
[Link]
I Love Logo Contests
I have a strange thing for logo contests. I don’t know if it’s the idea of dozens of people working on something for you, hoping to win the business, or if it’s the chance to see so many creative people at work, or that it is just just an amazing application for the web.
The process is that you post a specification and how much you’re setting for the prize. Then people submit their designs, you give feedback, and they will generally refine the designs. It’s a great process to go through, especially if you don’t know exactly what you want.
We mostly use 99designs for our contests.
We just finished up a logo contest to rebrand our company, MechMedia, Inc. We’ve been in business for several years, I figured it was about time to get that up to snuff. Next up, the website which is not only horrific, it’s way out of date.
You can see most of the 200+ entries (!) on 99 Designs. The contest ran for a week and ended early this week. It was a really difficult decision.
Here’s the winning design. We still haven’t settled on colors. What’s your favorite?
For all it’s goodness, there’s also a strange subculture at work in these contests. Among the designers, there are friendships, competition, fighting, snipes, and outright accusations. After the winner was chosen, there were some sour grapes comments as well. Fortunately, not much of it seems to be directed at the contest holder. Hand that feeds, I guess.
Anyway, if you need a logo designed, for just a few hundred bucks you can have many designers cranking out dozens of designs.
Can’t beat it.
[Link]
RevTrax In-Store Affiliate Network
RevTrax is an affiliate network and technology solution that tracks from online into a store through printable coupons. 
I met with the co-founders, Seth Sarelson and Jonathan Treiber, early on when they had some smaller regional tests going on. At the time, the prospect of making much headway promoting a restaurant local to one city didn’t seem that great. But their vision and concept was terrific.
RevTrax’s technology provides a publisher with a unique printable coupon. Once printed, this coupon is then scanned at the point of sale and the transaction is credited to that publisher. Here you see what the publisher posts on their website, and once the user prints it, it gets a barcode that’s scanned at the store.
Last week, RevTrax launched their first program with CompUSA/TigerDirect (as you can see above). I honestly cannot think of a better type of first merchant to try this out with. How many people search online for electronics and run to the store for the purchase? This guy certainly does. I’m as impatient as they get.
Finally, sales that were researched online, and now fueled with a coupon, can be tracked to the point of sale in a physical store. Pretty cool stuff.
This doesn’t conflict with the online affiliate program. If the sale happens online, it tracks through the online affiliate program. And if the sale happens in the store, it’s tracked through the unique printable coupon.
I cannot imagine any merchant or publisher who wouldn’t want to adopt this technology. The affiliate captures sales previously lost, and they’re adding value with a printable coupon. The merchant not only gets the referred sale, but they can now track online-to-offline buying behavior — a big gap in accounting of marketing dollars.
I’m in the process of signing up. The interface is nice and easy, very much like a traditional affiliate network.
Check it out for yourself: RevTrax.com
[Link]
Affiliate Marketing Success Tips
I get asked a lot about my tips for success and my approach to business, usually specifically related to affiliate marketing. As if I’m qualified to give tips for success, but let’s put that aside for now.
There are lots of ways to make money on he Internet, and Affiliate 
Marketing (or Performance Marketing as some prefer) is of course one of them. Even within Affiliate Marketing, there are lots of ways to make money. That’s why I have such a hard time with the term “Affiliate Marketing” when describing what it is that I do every day. Is “affiliate marketing” itself a business? Or is simply way to monetize your business? I think both.
Bottom Up Affiliate Marketing
Many people look at a performance based offer and ask themselves, how can I make money with this? There are people who want this thing, or this service. If I can find those people and get them together with the company who will pay me to do that, I can make money.
I can build a website, I can buy traffic, I can send out emails to a list, I can hold up a sign on the side of the road.
Those approaches are all “marketing”. There’s nothing wrong with getting paid to get the word out.
Many, many people make a very nice living doing this. I think this is what most people think of when they say they do “Affiliate Marketing”.
Top Down Affiliate Marketing
Then there’s the top-down approach, which is to find something that people are interested in (and hopefully you are too), and build something that they will not only willingly visit, but stick around, even sign up and come back.
Then, once that goal is achieved, you monetize it.
Now of course not all websites that people use and love lend themselves toward monetizing with affiliate relationships. But, this can be done in a way that has affiliate marketing or performance marketing in mind from the start, and in that sense, this is also “Affiliate Marketing”.
My Approach
I prefer to swim with the tide rather than against it.
The problem with the bottom-up, marketing-first approach is that people simply don’t like to be marketed to. The primary sources of inexpensive traffic, the search engines, don’t like what people don’t like.
If you’re a marketer, the world is working against you.
That’s a tough road and often unrewarding as efforts only work well for a short period of time if at all, because the consumer space (consumers and the services they use) pushes you away. And if there’s money to be made, it can be easy for competitors to move in and it is only a matter of time before they do.
Then it’s back to the drawing board or on to the next thing. And many times, the easy way to the consumer is to be deceptive, giving the group a black mark, making the consumer space dislike the activity even more. A vicious cycle.
On the other hand, the consumer space loves the top-down, build-something-useful approach. You are creating something they want. Search engines in turn want that stuff in their index. Then they don’t mind if you mix in some advertising or marketing to pay the bills.
So while bottom up is generally smaller in scope and faster to implement and see returns, top down has longevity. Top down is much harder to get started on and gain traction. It takes a big idea and executing on it well with typically a larger investment. It isn’t easy, but when it works, it works for a long time.
[Link]
Back in the Disqus-sion
My long love affair with Disqus came to an abrupt halt several weeks ago after they introduced their new API plugin and the comment import functionality.
I was a little concerned about using it because I have a post here with over 1000 comments, and pulling all those via API on the back end with each page load would put some serious strain on both my server and their service, especially for a page that is viewed often.
I gave it a try anyway. It was pretty slow to load, but it worked (some local caching would have helped) so I left it running.
A few weeks later, I discovered that anyone who was using Internet Explorer to view those pages with the huge number of comments was getting a browser crash! Yikes.
After a few emails back and forth with Andrew at Disqus, he did indicate that he saw the problem but that it would take a little while to fix.
At that point, I was forced to pull Disqus and go back to the spammy old Wordpress comment system. I think the disappointment of the whole thing even knocked me out of blogging for a while.
Fast Forward about 6 weeks and still no fix. Andrew did indicate that the new paging in the latest version (2.03) of the Disqus plugin would solve the problem.
Great! I wanted paging anyway, for that pesky post with 1300 comments.
So now it is installed and I’m giving it a go. Here’s what I’ve found.
New Disqus Features
First, I did a comment import to update the comments that have collected in the past 6 weeks. It came back with an “Error” import status. It looks like the comments did get imported, so I’m not sure what’s wrong there.
Pagination
The pagination works, but I don’t love the implementation. They use the view some comments, and “click to view more” model where it will use ajax to pull down the next block of comments. This goes on until the page fills up with comments.
But if you’re viewing my 1300 comment post, that’s, uh, 52 clicks to get to the last page. I can increase the comments per page, or I could display them in reverse order, but neither seem like a good tradeoff. People just don’t see reverse order comment threads very often.
I think I’d prefer the previous page / next page / first page / last page model.
It does allow the posts with hundreds of comments to load more quickly. I do wonder what SEO impact that may have.
Trackbacks
Discus now supports trackbacks. Seems to be working as I see all the old trackbacks showing, though the true test will be for a new trackback, I guess.
What’s in store for Disqus
Of course the big elephant in the room is the impending doom that is the Intense Debate integration with Wordpress that’s coming in the next major release.
Disqus was clearly the rabbit out of the gate in the blog comment system race. The Intense Debate turtle hitched a ride on a rocketship.
What do you think will happen?
[Link]
Toddler Chinpose
At Affiliate Summit East in Boston, Shareasale was handing out toddler-sized t-shirts. I was only at the show for a few hours, but I managed to get my hands on one of these hot items.
And thankfully, I’ve got just the toddler to wear it.
Alex never stops moving, so this was as close to a chinpose as I could get.
Not bad for a rookie.
Thanks Bryan, Carolyn, Sarah and crew at Shareasale, for the shirt, and for being excellent people to work with!
[Link]
More Virtual Servers: Slicehost update and GoGrid
A few weeks ago I wrote about some of the experiences I had with looking into grid and VPS server solutions. Here’s a bit of an update on what’s going on there and a look at GoGrid, a “cloud computing” hosting solution that is taking on Amazon’s Elastic Computing service.
SliceHost Update
This blog is still running on a VPS at Slicehost. As you can read in my previous post, I started out with a very small, basic, slice and due to memory issues, I upgraded to 512MB and then fairly quickly to 1GB. Jangro.com has been running happily on that slice for the most part since then with one pretty major issue that came up a few days ago.
Sorry Larry. My server was locked up tight. I couldn’t get in through SSH but I could get in through the online console in Slicehost’s interface to see it frozen up with an out of memory error and some kill process errors.
I don’t often get to see the consoles of the Linux machines that I run, so that was new to me. I did find a lot of people seeing such errors with Ubuntu, so maybe this is an Ubuntu issue with memory. Maybe I’ll transfer jangro.com over to a CentOS slice. Ubuntu sure was easy to configure, but if it ain’t reliable…
My search continues. If nothing else, it is fun trying these out.
GoGrid
In the comments of that previous post, someone tipped me off to ServePath’s GoGrid service. So I thought I’d give it a try.
They promise some very nice features, including free load balancing. Their fee structure is usage based, so it’s a little uncertain as to what this will cost me. But I’m willing to give it a go for a little while to see how the math works out. At $0.19 per server RAM hour, my 512MB server will cost me about $70 for a month, plus $0.50/GB outgoing bandwidth. That could all add up, but seems reasonable to me for a great service.
Anyway, they’re offering a $50 credit, so this is on them for a week or two.
GoGrid is in Beta, so my expectations started out a little low.
The interface is well done. I can start up new server instances quickly. They have some pre-configured for Windows and Linux and as application servers or database servers.
After starting up my first server last night, a process that was very easy, my server was running within minutes on the CentOS Linux LAMP image that I selected. At least the interface said it was running. However, I couldn’t get to the server through it’s external IP address.
I jumped on a support chat session, and it was nice that someone was available at midnight. We went back and forth slowly for a few hours and we ultimately left it unresolved and escalated.
Hopefully this is a short-term issue that they’ll have worked out quickly. After seeing their interface and the promise of what’s possible there, I’m very excited about the service.
Again, reliability trumps all else, and if it’s not reliable it’s nothing.
[Link]
Affiliate Marketing Annoyances: CJ’s Reports
You ever read any of those “Annoyances” books from O’Reilly Press? Titles like “Windows Vista Annoyances”, “Microsoft Office Annoyances”, actually they’re mostly about Microsoft. Who’da guessed it?
The ideas of these books aren’t so much to bash Microsoft (maybe a little), but to help users work around the annoying things in the operating system and applications with useful tips.
Now I’m sure that Microsoft developers read those books as well and learn from them. At least I hope they do.
Likewise, as a website publisher and affiliate, and former product manager, I’m frequently in the position to have my own ideas not only about how an affiliate network interface should work, but also some tricks to get around the problems and/or be more productive within the environment that we’re given to work in.
I don’t like to complain for complaining’s sake. And Lord knows, I’ve done a lot of complaining here on this blog. While sometimes I get ornery, I like to think that I’m providing constructive feedback and criticism for the networks and merchants who run programs in them. Actually, I frequently hold back, just so I don’t come off as a whiner. But it bothers me that if I don’t provide this feedback when it is on my mind, I’ll probably never bring it up again.
I also find that the more you can become comfortable with the nuances of a network interface, the more likely you are to do business there. So I figure if someone can show you around, it’ll give you a little more confidence to dig in. By bringing up these subjects, I hope to be shown around as much as I’m showing.
So in that spirit, I’m thinking about taking this on as sort of a regular topic here on jangro.com: Affiliate Marketing Annoyances. Hopefully in shining the light on some of the things that can be good and bad about the interfaces we work with, we can all become more productive.
Today’s Subject: CJ’s Reporting
Generally speaking, I really like Commission Junction’s reports. There aren’t many of them (which can be a good thing), but they’re the ones that matter.
Event Date vs. Post Date vs. Click Date
CJ is one of the only networks to show the distinction between the date that an action (sale or lead) happened and when they posted it. This is really nice for being able to see how timely their reporting data is and if there is a delay. More on that below.
But did you know you can also get the click date on transactions in CJ? It isn’t in the transaction report in the interface, but if you download the report data, you get some fields that you won’t see in the screen. Most notably, click date! It is nice to be able to run an analysis to see what the numbers are for click vs. buying for different merchants. With a little excel magic, you can see some interesting data about buyer behavior.
Note the two highlighted rows were clicked weeks before the purchase was actually made. Return/Cookie days DO matter!
Timing of Reporting Data
For merchants who do real-time reporting (pixel tracking on conversion page), CJ is very predictable with their reporting data. They update transaction data hourly, so if you take a look at today’s transactions at the top of the hour (or a few minutes after), you’ll see any new transactions.
You can also see in this report if there are any delays in reporting. At the top of every hour, typically, transactions load at the top of the hour for second hour prior. So at Midnight, PST, the data from 10PM hour is loaded. If you see a bigger gap than that, you know that there is a delay. Of course it helps to have frequent transactions to be able to see these trends, a luxury that we all don’t have.
I love that CJ is so predictable with their transaction data. I know not to look more than once an hour, which in and of itself can keep me doing more work and less stat watching.
Their performance data and balance information are on a longer delay, a few more hours. Anyone know the exact schedule there?
Charts
I’m not a big chart guy when it comes to affiliate data. The one thing that I do like to watch is charts of daily overall revenue (commissions) so I can compare week-over-week performance. For example, I like to look at this monday vs. last monday.
(That spike at the end is Labor Day. Did anyone else see that as a major shopping day? Wow!)
But who makes a chart with days with gridlines every 5 days? C’mon CJ. Make them 7 days. I actually have to count kinks in the line chart to compare same day of week points on the chart.
Saving Reports
I also find that CJ’s reporting involves a lot of clicks to get to the reports that I like to look at. Fortunately, CJ has a feature to save reports. I like to look at today’s transations, yesterday’s transactions, and yesterday’s merchant performance. So that’s what I have in my saved reports. Saves me a bunch of clicks.
What are your tips, tricks, complaints about CJ’s reporting?
[Link]
Deep Linking: It Shouldn’t Be This Difficult
One feature that belongs in every affiliate program is deep linking. Deep linking is the capability to link directly to any page on a merchant site, typically by appending the merchant url onto the end of an affiliate tracking link. Virtually every affiliate network supports deep linking in some manner, though not all merchants allow it.
Unfortunately, the networks have generally kept this feature obscured in the interface, and some don’t make any mention of it whatsoever, perhaps because it’s complicated enough that affiliates can break links. Networks are infamous for saving affiliates from themselves.
What I need is very simple. I need a template that allows me to turn a merchant’s url into an affiliate link by appending it to an affiliate link, like this:
http://networkname.com/click?url=[encoded_merchant_url]
I need to be able to do this programmatically in PHP code, not manually in the network interface.
Simple as that. Many networks do support this sort of linking. Some do and don’t publicize it. Some don’t.
And even when a network supports it, a merchant might not. Sometimes this is for a good technical reason (tracking). Sometimes not.
I recently went through an effort to identify once and for all the way to deep link at the different Networks that I use most and ended up with the information that I’m sharing with you here.
It shouldn’t be this difficult!
How to build deep links on each of the major US Networks Commission Junction
CJ makes it pretty easy to create deep links. The tough part is finding out which merchants allow deep links, and then which links are valid for use as deep links.
Basically, you have to hunt for a link that supports deep linking. In this example, Shoes.com, there is no indication in the Advertiser Detail page as to whether they support deep links. And they have 112 links in the CJ system. On the link list, there is no hint as to which links can be used for deep linking.
So it’s is a mystery until you go looking at each and every link. Luckily for me in this case, the third link I looked at had the custom Image URL and Destination URL fields. That means I can use deep linking with this link.
In the past, I’ve searched through literally hundreds of links on some merchant programs only to find a single link that was set up for deep linking way down the list, and sometimes no support at all.
Query String Parameter: url
Example: http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-2057689-5319906&url=[encode_merchant_url]
LinkShare
Linkshare wins the award for having the most difficult deep linking process. They do have a tool called the LinkBuilder, which walks you through building a deep link to a specific merchant’s product page.
Side-Annoyance: They want me to paste the Merchant’s product URL, but they’ve got it in a frame, and I cannot copy it.
However, the merchant’s URL gets saved in the Linkshare system and all you end up with is a unique link ID and no way to replace the URL in a template fashion. I’m not interested in using the Linkshare interface to build deep links. I need it to be automatic.
Alternatively, Linkshare offers a Webservice to build deep links, called The Automated LinkGenerator. To use this, you make a call to their webservice using the REST protocol. The call looks like this:
http://feed.linksynergy.com/createcustomlink.shtml?token=&mid=&murl=
And you end up with something like this:
http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=AAA111AAA11&subid=0&offerid=999999.1&type=10&tmpid=939
&RD_PARM1=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.merchantname.com%2Fsearch%2Fdetail.cfm%3Fchunk%3D25%2526mtype%3D%2526wauth
%3Da%2520name%2526qwork%3D2875272%2526S%3DR%2526bid%3D8713366401%2526pbest%3D2%252E95%2526pqtynew%3D0
%2526page%3D1%2526matches%3D24%2526qsort
Ironically, THAT looks like a link that I could make a deep link template out of, by putting the merchant URL in the RD_PARM1 parameter. I don’t know if there’s some magical connection made between the link ID and the URL. I’ll need to ask them about that. Actually, I’ll just give it a try. Shhh.
But for now, I’m going to have to call this unsupported at best.
Query String Parameter: unknown
Example: unknown
Google Affiliate Network (GAN)
Google Affiliate Network (nee Performics) has a tool called the Build Your Own link, or BYO Link.
It looks promising, but like Linkshare, it creates a link in the database with the URL you specified nicely hidden away. Here’s the link I got out of that operation: http://clickserve.cc-dt.com/link/click?lid=41000000026601953 No deep link template there.
I searched online and found a reference to putting a redirect parameter on a normal link. I emailed their support and discovered that it is in fact supported. So it seems there is a nice easy, albeit unsupported, feature for building deep links, saving them from taking the top honors from Linkshare.
It it likely that not all GAN merchants support this sort of linking, so it is probably a good idea to check with them on that. Given that it is undocumented, you’ll probably get a big shrug from the merchant. It’s probably safe to assume that if the merchant supports BYO linking, then this redirect link will also work.
Query String Parameter: redirect
Example: http://clickserve.cc-dt.com/link/tplclick?lid=222222&pubid=111111&redirect=[encoded_merchant_url]
ShareASale
Shareasale has a how-to on creating deep links (login is probably required), and most of their link codes have the correct parameter already in them. But there is no interface for creating deep links. (So no screen shot is necessary.)
It’s very straight-forward, and it appears that all links and all merchants support this type of linking. Shareasale’s examples omit the http:// in front of links, so it may be necessary to not include the http:// on the deep links.
Query String Parameter: urllink
Example: http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=76716&u=141928&m=12238&urllink=[encode_merchant_url]
PepperjamNetwork
PepperjamNetwork’s deep linking is refreshingly easy and apparent. Like most networks, not all merchants support deep linking, but when they do, you can easily see the option.
Go to the text links page and the additional options have the deep link field easily available.
Again, merchants can choose which creatives support deep linking (not sure why), but since all links appear on the page, it is very easy to choose one that does support it.
Query String Parameter: url
Example: http://www.pntra.com/t/QDs_Q0RDO0FDRDtBQT4?url=[encoded_merchant_url]
Buy.at
Buy.at has a nice tool called the LinkEngine in their interface. with it, you can create deep links for any program and get feedback as to whether the program allows the links. To use it, simply go into the
The interface is so simple that it seems like it is missing options, like which merchant. It’s not missing anything, it is simply smart enough to detect which merchant you’re linking to from the URL. Paste any link from a merchant site into the URL box and click create links.
You’ll receive immediate feedback on which merchants allow deep linking, along with the deep links.
From there, you can use one of those links as a template.
Query String Parameter: DURL
Example: http://buyfootwear.at/mechme?CTY=37&DURL=[encoded_merchant_url]
More Information
URL Encoding
When you put a URL inside another URL, generally it is a good idea to encode it using a method callled URL encoding. That turns all of the special characters like ampersands, slashes, question marks, etc. into special codes that won’t break the parent URL.
I built a URL Encoding tool that you can use.
Other Networks
As I was searching around for this information, I discovered that Keith Bond in the UK went through a similiar effort a few months ago. Here’s his information on Deep Linking in some European Affiliate networks.
[Link]
Coda 1.5 is Available. Wish I Could Use It.
If you haven’t checked out Coda, it’s a beautifully designed and useful (looking) web development tool for OS X. If you do web development, you have your arsenal of tools… text editor, FTP program, terminal application, source code revision management.
Coda does it all in one window. Pretty sweet.
Maybe I’m just in love with their website, which is just a joy to use.
For years, we’ve used Cyberduck to edit files on directly on the server. Click on the file and open it in TextMate. When you save it, the file on the server is changed. As our team has grown in numbers as well as in the level of collaboration that we achieve, editing files live on the server has become less practical, and safe. The IM messages, “yo, are you editing profile.php? I need to update it,” used to be oh so common. They’re now a thing of the past.
Currently, we use TextMate and edit local copies of the website. We each have our own development server (aka sandbox), and when we’ve got some code that’s ready, we’ll check it in to our Subversion repository. Subversion is a magical creature that will solve all your software development version control woes. Even if you work alone, it’s worthwhile. I’ve written about subversion before, so I’ll leave it at that. Anyway, with some TextMate macros that run subversion and rsync, we rarely have to leave TextMate to check out code, edit, save, push up to the development server, and check in code.
Back to Coda. They released version 1.0 many months ago and there were some things that just didn’t allow it to fit into the workflow, such as lack of scripting and subversion support. They’ve surely heard this from many, many developers as they’ve added many features, including Subversion support. Sweet.
So Why Can’t I Use Coda?
I downloaded the trial, set it up for one of our websites and headed directly to the Subversion tools. Bang. brick wall.
Now I know that “stdin: is not a tty” warning message all too well. I see it every time I do a subversion update in TextMate
or of course on the command line
But it is just a warning and doesn’t break the subversion operation.
It does seem to stop Coda in its tracks. Boooo.
My understanding is that this is caused by a script running in a shell resource file somewhere that is expecting interactive mode and complains when it’s run from subversion. Word on the street is that it’s specifically caused by the mesg unix command. For the life of me, I cannot find anything like that in any of my resource files, mine or system defaults.
Anyone Listening?
I’d love to get this working. Anyone have any suggestions on what’s causing this error? Or otherwise, what can I do to get Coda to not choke on it?
The Coda guys must have seen this before. Help!
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Trying out Virtual Private Servers
August starts an exciting time of year for us at my company. Our biggest website is a Web 2.0-ey Social Costume Shopping Site, CostumZee. It does well all year, but we get some mad traffic come halloween time. October is sort of like our Christmas.
Of course that’s fun that we plan for and look forward to all year. But as the de facto CTO of the company, this is when I lose sleep worrying about server performance. Each season has brought us some new surprises. Two years ago, our site was written up on TechCrunch and LifeHacker. Last year we got a mention in Time Magazine, and even a mention on the Yahoo homepage. I’ll tell you, a mention on Yahoo dwarfs any slash-dot or digg effect. Our very beefy servers practically melted.
While we’ve learned a lot from those things and have put the appropriate server resources in place for this year, I’ve also learned that it’s always going to be difficult to prepare for everything that the Interwebs can throw at you. So in addition to being prepared, it is just as important to be able to adapt.
We’ve been running several dedicated servers for years now, and they do very well. They do, however, get old, and upgrading is a major hassle. Also, it is not very easy to throw additional hardware at a problem without having it provisioned ahead of time, consuming hosting dollars.
And even if you do have the extra hardware around and at the ready, it’s very easy to get complacent and start hosting lightweight applications on them. Then one of these websites gets busy, and it’s too much running on one set of resources, and a disaster in the making.
The other problem is that we’ve been developing more and more custom solutions. Using custom server configurations that the hosting tools like CPanel just aren’t made to handle. While I can get under the covers, it more often feels like I’m fighting against CPanel and it’s automatic configuration.
Long story short, I’m frustrated with aging and tough-to-customize CPanel-laden dedicated servers and I’ve started looking at Virtual Private Servers (VPS). VPS are based on virtualization software that takes a larger machine and slices it up into several fully virtual computers with smaller sets of resources, but act like a dedicated server.
The great thing about this sort of server is that it isn’t a single hardware box that, in order to upgrade, you have to install or move to new hardware. Instead it is very easy to just take the server image and quickly move it to a new bigger slice. A few minutes of automated goodness.
Investigating Virtual Private Servers
Mosso
My first look was at Mosso and their Cloud Computing. They have all the right buzzwords around scalability, virtual servers, etc. But as it turned out, the server was not very configurable. It had a web-only configuration interface with only a menu of options. I couldn’t even connect to the server via SSH. So, while I’m sure it’s a great solution, I dropped it. I need to fully configure my server, rebuild PHP, Apache, and other custom software. I will say that they were very good with their cancellation policy.
mediatemple
My second look was at mediatemple and their VPS servers. These are full VPS servers and boast the easy and seamless configuration upgrades as a website scales up. I’ve actually got a site running very happily on one of their (dv) Dedicated Virtual servers. What I don’t love, is the Plesk management interface. More of the same over-managed configuration that’s great for a hosting reseller, or someone who doesn’t have to do a ton of server customization. Like my current dedicated servers, I’m reluctant to over-customize because the Plesk management software is there with its own expectations of how the server will be configured.
SliceHost
Enter Slicehost. I noticed these guys a year or two ago when they just got started. They had a huge waiting list for their servers. I recently came around again to check them out. They sell “slices”, which are fully virtual servers upon which you can install one of several flavors of Linux. A slice can be as small as 250MB up to 2GB of RAM. You can have one big slice, or several smaller ones. Recently, they can even be networked together on the private network and intra-networ communications don’t use bandwidth. That’s perfect for a database server and one or more front-end web servers.
I signed up for their smallest slice (250MB) last night to check it out. To my delight, I had my server in literally a few minutes. I chose to install Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS (Hardy Heron). It was just a bare server installation with nothing on it. A blank canvas! Intimidating at first, but I know my way around Linux, so I was soon hardening the server security with iptables and public/private keys. I installed some standard applications, then installed the work-horses Apache and Mysql, all with the options that I need. Ahhh.
I chose not to yet install any of the mail transports and other additional things that servers do. I may just grab another slice to handle all the email for the many domains that we have. More investigation needed there.
Now what to do with it? Of all things, I decided to move this blog, Jangro.com, off of one of those aforementioned dedicated servers that are serving many purposes and migrate it here.
Done and done. I had it moved in just a few hours of work. I started with a test subdomain serving up a copy of my blog. It wasn’t at all difficult for me to bring this small slice to its knees by refreshing my browser several times. Apache is a big application and uses a lot of memory. 256MB was used up very easily, especially with mysql running.
So right then, I went into the Slicehost control panel and upgraded my slice to 512MB. It immediately started on the upgrade process, and when it was done copying the image over, it rebooted my server. The whole process took maybe 5 minutes with a minute or so of downtime.
At this point I was unable to get the server to buckle under my own manual stress test. While I figured that should be enough for this blog to operate well. There were still too many apache2 processes running and they used up all of memory. Instead of lowering the number of processes, which may have been fine, I upgraded to a 1G slice, again, a 5 minute operation. Very easy.
Linode
The other VPS hosting solution that caught my eye is Linode. They appear to be a very similar solution to Slicehost using Xen virtualization, and offer a bit more RAM for the same money. I think I may need to give this service a try as well.
Moving Forward
So here we are, on slicehost, performing well on a 1GB slice (thanks to the demands of apache).
Are you using scalable hosting services such as cloud computing and/or VPS technology? Which ones?
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Geek Birth 2008 and Social Media
So we’ve been blessed with another new baby here in the Jangro household. It’s been a busy few weeks here since August 7th when Jason Thomas was born. Beyond the normal joys, trials, and tribulations that come with a newborn, there has been a new dimension to such an important event. Social Media.
Since his big brother was born a little more than two years earlier, so much has changed in the online world. And it’s hard to even remember what communications were like when his older sister was born 11 years ago.
This time around, I didn’t send out an email announcement (though my wife did to her friends and family), yet more people than ever were informed more quickly than ever thanks to the tight online social network that I’ve developed in the past few years.
Dozens of my online friends and colleagues were enthusiastic witness to some hourly updates of the progress on my wife’s induction thanks to Twitter and Flickr. Even my mother and sister followed the minute-by-minute updates on Twitter. My other brother and sister and dozens of other friends kept up through a few facebook updates.
A few days later, I attended a little of Affiliate Summit. And I could not believe that virtually everybody I knew at the show (a lot of people) greeted me with a big “congrats!” What an amazing thing that so many people were completely in the loop about what had happened to me just a few days earlier.
A few people expressed how odd it was that I was posting updates to twitter from the delivery room. But it was a slow start and we were pretty much just waiting for things to happen for most of the morning. To have so many people following along real-time with their well-wishes was pretty crazy, but fun.
There are not many events in a person’s live that are at such a high level of importance. And it was interesting to see what happened when it is cast out to the web 2.0 world, particularly Twitter.
Most interestingly, the differences in types of “friends and followers” and how people use Twitter really became very apparent. I don’t have a huge group of followers maybe 650 at the time, and I understand that most of them don’t watch twitter at all on a day-to-day basis. Though a good subset of them are very active Twitter users. I was pleased, and even a little surprised at how many people, especially those I don’t know personally, were seeing my updates and took the time to respond.
Just the same, I was a little let down to see some people who I do know pretty well, were so busy posting their own twitter updates at the usual frenetic pace, somehow didn’t seem to notice my posts or the flurry of activity among common friends.
Clearly they’re in it for different reasons. I think they’re missing the point, or at least missing out.
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Wordpress on iphone!
Since the new 2.0 version of the iPhone OS has been out, I’ve picked up a number of apps. Many have been games and otherwise a few productivity tools and web 2.0 app companions. But nothing has really hit me as being such a great tool as the Wordpress application.
In fact I’m in a hospital room waiting for things to progress with my wife’s induction writing this. Keep an eye on my twitter account for updates there if you are interested.
It is a full blogging application, managing posts, handling images, preview, etc. Very productive.
It even saved my post for me when the phone rang. I’ll post a few screenshots.
A really great app. Check it out if you have an iPhone.
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Jangro’s Gone Green (For Real)
So I just turned in my leased 2007 BMW 325xi. I thought I’d be more disappointed to let it go.
I’ve been driving my new car for a few weeks now, a 2008 Nissan Altima hybrid.
Yes. I’ve gone from a 6 cylinder 6-speed manual transmission sports sedan to a 4 cylinder gas sipper and you know what? I love it.
Part of it is the benefit of buying a Nissan vs.