Monthly Archives: April 2008

Twitter Hits Scalability Speedbump?

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Perhaps it’s a sign of growing pains (good pains!), but a number of twitterers (i guess it’s a nicer term than “twits”) have mentioned that twits are not appearing in their twitter stream…which could be a concern for some, especially as twitters @ other users and direct messages are fast replacing email and IM for a number of the users.

I was a little surprised that some conversations seemed to be ending mid stream, till I went to the individual twitter stream (typically twitter.com/(username) ) and saw the continuation of our conversation there.

So, if that chatty blonde suddenly stops chatting, go over to her twitter page and see if she’s replied.

I’d also be prepared just in case “she” is a gold farmer/credit card collector over in Russia or China too…

As a form of consolation, twitter has posted an update that they’re recovering missing twits and will be inserting them into your twitter stream. If you’re a heavy volume twitter user however, it might be faster to check individual pages before the torrent or updates pushes the re-inserted twits off your archived pages.

Oh yes, Twitter gets my vote for “digital crack” for the more social among us. I think the Type As and the hack-and-slashers will be still hypnotized by Kongregate.

Are You Ready For Some Aural Gratification?

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This past weekend was a busy one, as I’ve been shifting one of my home offices around. My 10mbps DSL connection finally works over ethernet (I was struggling with poor signals over a 802.11g network previously). Every LAN point in my home should provide connectivity. So now I have wireless and wired Internet and LAN access from just about every bedroom, as well as the living room, dining room, kitchen and the toilets if the need arises…

While I was huffing and puffing on Sunday manhandling my heavy desk and moving the computer, monitors and bunches of cables around, I was listening to the huge backlog of MP3s I had downloaded over the past couple of weeks.

I probably listened to about 10 hours of audio over the weekend and was more active than usual in my twitter stream too.

I think it’s important to use your “downtime” well, especially if you’re working on your taxes, cleaning the desk, clearing your inbox (snail mail and email), or sorting out your baseball card collection (or samurai katana collection if that’s up your alley).

Here’s my list of favorite podcasts at the moment:

#1: Geekcast (the podcast, not the network…) -  A collaboration between Shawn Collins, Sam Harrelson, Lisa Picarille and Jim Kukral, I’d classify it as a industry banter session. I can identify with Lisa’s sentiment that it seems unstructured at times, but I think it’s part of the fun, especially as the show hosts go off on each other.

There was some drama recently as Shawn and Sam had a spat with Jim, but all seems well now, and we should have the 4 musketeers back in the seat. The show is recorded every Tues and Sam usually has the podcast up within 24 hours.

Be sure to check out the “Sorry, Jangro” drinking game that accompanies the podcast.

#2: Affiliate Summit Sessions Podcast: If you missed the recent Affiliate Summit West Continue reading →

Friday Podcast: Affiliate Marketing Tips with Jeremy Palmer

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jeremy palmerI had a chance to chat with Super Affiliate and Commission Junction Top Performer Jeremy Palmer.

Jeremy talked about his affiliate marketing strategies and gave tips for new affiliates entering the industry.

Hear from this veteran about on topics like:

  • Tips to get started in affiliate marketing
  • Should you promote offers from affiliate networks, CPA networks or direct merchant offers
  • Take a look at some of Jeremy’s successful affiliate sites (FreeBudgetingSoftware, TrySuperPass and AudioBookHub)
  • Why you should get a few seasonal campaigns up
  • Sources to do your affiliate research
  • And Jeremy’s soon-to-be-released BlackInkProject

You should also check out Jeremy’s Quit Your Day Job blog.

Check out the podcast below:

[display_podcast]

>>> The Black Ink Project

Are Alexa Rankings Becoming Irrelevant?

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If you weren’t already aware, Alexa just instituted an update to their rankings – with pretty dramatic changes for many websites out there.

A case in point: My blog’s 3 month ranking had been 70,655  (still captured at Mark Wielgus’ Top 100 blog rankings)  – it’s now 157,638.

How an update can revise your website position by 80,000 positions is beyond me.

But that’s not the end of the goodness in store.

Mark’s 45n5 website has gone from 27,961 to  89,002 (a difference of 61,000 places)

The blogosphere’s most recognized ProBlogger Darren Rowse’s rating has been revised from 3,797  to 12,917 .

Which makes you wonder Continue reading →

Is Your Internet Business Going To Be Around 5 Years From Today?

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If you’ve been to Greenland or the Antartica (especially around the North Pole), you’d have seen numerous icebergs, some as big as a house, and many that are many times the size of an apartment complex or even bigger.

That’s your internet business. Get it?

iceberg

Picture if you will your internet business as represented by the iceberg.

It could be huge. It could be imposing.

Or it could be just a couple of ice cubes floating about in the water, blown all over the place by the wind.

Here’s the kicker.

Ice is about 90% of the density of water. So what you see is the “tip of the iceberg”. There’s another 90% of ice attached to what you see above the surface of the water.

Or is there?

–

Here is the problem facing 90% or more of pure-play Internet marketing efforts today…

They’re focused solely on lead generation, and often there is little longterm viability built into the business.

Some may say that CPA affiliates are pretty short-sighted because they’re selling leads (the majority who fill in email and zip submits and sell them to CPA networks for between $1 – $5 a lead).

But are affiliate marketers much better?

In most cases, affiliate marketers are only paid on the initial sales. Eg: a lead buys $200 worth of merchandise from Amazon or Overstock or Buy.com, and the affiliate earns from 2% to 10% of the sale value (depending on whether you’re getting bumped up payouts/are a top performer, etc).

In many cases, once Continue reading →

An Inconvenient Truth About Social Media

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One of the strength and at the same time, weaknesses of social media is it’s social nature.

Because you are able to broadcast your message across multiple platforms and multiple social networks, you can reach a huge number of people in a very short time.

A recent incident (nowhere near conclusion now) bears this out.

Jim Kukral’s TwitterMeThis social adventure.

affiliate summit west

At the recent Affiliate Summit West in Vegas 2008: Andrew Wee, Shawn Collins, Jim Kukral, Sam Harrelson, Zac Johnson

About a week ago, Jim published a blog post “Twitter Marketing Experiment – TwitterMeThis” where he’s pay $5 to the winner of a trivia game played on the Twitter micro-blogging (similar to SMS text messages) platform.

Shortly after, the topic was discussed on Geekcast, Jim posts a follow up about “social media being bullshit” and Sam posted a response and Shawn follows up with a sequence of 3 posts: one, two and three. In between there’s a discussion on TrishaLyn’s blog that Jim might not continue with the Geekcasts.

But I’m not so keen to talk about the  discussion as to look at how it took place.

Far beyond a one-to-one email exchange, the issue has escalated to the point of seeming disagreement and the potential departure of Jim from the Geekcast team.

In the non-social media world, it would have just remained a private exchange of emails.

Within the social media context, the communication trail has gone through several blogs (many of which are highly trafficked), and re-syndicated or referred to by other blogs.

It has also been twittered about (with many of the protagonists in this exchange having followers in the high hundreds.

Add to this the number of Youtube and other video responses being generated, and you can see that a minor disagreement has blown up to probably most of the affiliate industry knowing or at least hearing about this.

If you factor in the fact that Continue reading →