Archive for the 'Daily' Category
Famous for its niche and constantly going down, Twitter still continues to be big news. Today Techcrunch has a post about Twitter and how it might become as ubiquitous as email, instant messaging, etc.
I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but they could be right. Which of course leads to the next question then, where are the big competitors? Certainly venture capitalists think there is money to be had there even though Twitter doesn’t monetize their site yet, so there has got to be room for a competitor to nudge in and take some of that market. I think this will become more of a reality if Twitter continues to have their scalability issues, but that is a side issue.
So the question again is, can Twitter be overtaken? I think yes. What do you think?
Hmm… maybe there is an opportunity to build that competitor myself 
A few more you might be interested in:
No related posts
I forgot to post about my first check, which was a whopping $87. However today I got my second check and this one is a bit nicer at $206.63. If I could only double my earnings month over month I’ll be rich in no time!
The majority of this check came from one of my eBay sites created off of my niche store builder software. I’m in the process of finishing up converting my old BANS sites to my new software and upgrading my other sites as well to use the new eBay Partner Network setup. Then it will be to find a bunch of new niches and working on prettying up the exiting ones to hopefully get some more sales.
In any event, it is encouraging
With eBay moving to their own inhouse affiliate program, I was almost dreading the changes to TUNS for it. However, like the good developer that I am :), most of the config stuff was external to the code and making the change over was pretty easy. I just took to long to get around to it honestly. The hard part however will be converting over my existing stores, but I have some free time this weekend so maybe I can knock those out without too much trouble.
As promised by eBay, they are moving away from using Commission Junction for their affiliate program and going internal. Well last night a little before midnight I got an email for them to join their new network.
Their interface is a nice departure from CJ. Nice and clean, as seen by the screen shot below.
The real chore now is to make sure my niche store software is converted over and wait for the BANS guys to do the same for their stuff. Of course I could just convert the rest of my BANS sites over to my stuff
I don’t think converting my software will be too difficult and actually shouldn’t have to change any URLs, as long as the eBay API is migrated over as well, but testing will tell. Guess that work starts tonight!
I was hoping to get a release of TUNS out this week or so, but as luck would have it eBay decided to drop Commission Junction and run their affiliate program in-house. Unfortunately they aren’t giving details until April 1st so I can’t make any changes until then. Hopefully it won’t be anything to major and it will go pretty quickly.
Since I started the beta testing program, I’ve made 19 updates to date and things are moving along nicely. I plan on having another big update tomorrow with an eye to launching in a couple weeks with a version 1.0.
I’ve already completed the features for version 1.0 so I feel good about that. So I just need to polish it off, improve a few things here and there and unleash it upon the net
So I have a couple stores setup with my new eBay store builder software and decided to drive a little traffic via AdWords. I was getting some good click through rates on a couple campaigns, but when I went into analytics the numbers were adding up. I wasn’t seeing any traffic via “google cpc”.
So I started looking around in the help, forums, etc. and it finally dawned on me about autotagging. That was all good and fine, but I never looked into how the auto tagging happened. Turns out it works via appending a query string onto the URL you provide, which honestly I should have guessed anyway. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but the framework I was using by default doesn’t allow query strings when you have the SEF URLs enabled. OOPS! In essence what was happening was every one of those clicks resulted in a 404 and a money down the drain. sigh
So I figured out how to get the query strings enabled and now it all works. Lesson learned: Test your AdWords!
Google is almost ready to roll out their AdSense for video advertising solution, starting with their 20 big partner sites and limited to the U.S.
Given that video is a really big thing on the net these days, this gives advertisers a more direct view form of advertising. They will use an overlay method for the ads as opposed to the preroll style, which is more like a traditional TV ad in addition to being more intrusive. If you have seen any videos on YouTube, then you have probably gotten a taste of what the overlay ads will look like.
The nice thing is that the ads will also be contextually targeted, just like their regular text and image ads are currently. I believe in a year or two this form of advertising will become really big for some markets that want to really get in front of potential customers. Something that AdSense ads can have a hard time doing.
I look forward to it.
The search giant appears to be expanding their revenue opportunities. Through Commission Junction you can sign up for Yahoo!’s new affiliate program. They are offering a variety of payouts as follows:
Yahoo! Toolbar: $1.00 per completed download
*Sorry, but Yahoo! can only compensate you for US Yahoo! Toolbar installs. US installs DO NOT include Canada, UK and Australia.
Consumer Products:
Yahoo! Toolbar: $1.00 per completed download
Yahoo! Personals: $22+ per subscription
Yahoo! Autos: $4.50 per quote (up to 4 quotes per user)
Yahoo! Games: $5.00 per sale
Yahoo! HotJobs: $0.50 per application
B2B Products:
Yahoo! Web Hosting: $60 per subscription
Yahoo! Merchant Solutions: $90 per subscription
Yahoo! HotJobs: 20% of sale
Yahoo! Search Marketing: $15.00 per account
Aaron Wall of SEO Bookfame has a rather scathing review of Commission Junction. To make it worse most of the commenters don’t have anything good to say either.
I personally have no bad things to say about their service, but I’m curious if you have any good or bad experiences?
