Advertising

Quite a few of you have asked about how to track how many users you’re refering to the Partners blog advertising network. So many in fact that we re-prioritized a little just to release this new code a bit quicker.

If you’re in the Partners program, you can see how many Partners you’ve refered by visiting: your referrers reports page which is a new subsection under reports in the main publishers section.

How referals work

The Partners program was conceived and developed by folks with a fair bit of experience in web publishing for profit. We’ve tried to build this (and indeed, are still building it) with publishers at the very heart of the system. Without you we cant do this, and our commitment to you on referals reflects that beleif and attitude.

This is from our pricing policy page

we pay a further 5% of either publisher earnings, or advertiser spend, to the partner that referred them to us. Not only that, we pay it for as long as the referree is actively displaying our ads, or buying them.

This allows you to build a strong base income independent of your own blogs advertising sales over time. The longer you’re a partner, and the harder you work to promote the program to others, the larger that residual income base will become. Good isn’t it?

• We pay 5% of either publisher earnings or advertiser spend
• An advertiser is considered your referal until they stop buying ads *
• An publisher is considered your referal until they stop showing ads *
• There is no limit to what you can earn. The more you make, the more we make
• Only publishers displaying ads are elligible for the program, once your account is inactive for 90 days we wipe the slate clean, and any remaining advertisers or publishers revert to the ‘house’.
• * account inactivity for 90 days

How to refer pulblishers or advertisers

It’s dead simple:

• Make sure your partners code is on the page you link to us from.
• Link to any part of the performancing.com site
• When a user adds their first blog, or makes their first ad buy, the referal is recorded and the deal is done.

Linking to the partners home page, publishers page or advertisers page is probably your best bet, but the mechanism works provided the partners ads are shown on the page you link from. If a reader clicks your “advertise here” button, it will also count as a referal, and indeed you can even link to that same page if talking to potential advertisers.

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Friend of our blog Darren has a great post up about how long it takes to get into the Technorati 100.

While I would never encourage someone to put their efforts into getting into a list (building a great blog that happens to get into a list is a far nicer goal, heh), his research proves (in an unscientific way) what we have said for a while.

For your blog to be successful you need to stick with it.

Half of the blogs in Darrens study have been around two years or more. I would say give your blog a year before expecting big numbers (traffic or income). It can take a good few months to get noticed by other blogs, maybe longer to get them to link to you for more than one-off posts.

Sticking with it means keeping up with the posting for the long haul. Don’t take the easy route of just re-posting stuff you read on other blogs, put in original or hard to find material too. Make friends. Be generous, link out and help people in forums. I really do believe what you give you get back tenfold and it has never been more true when it comes to links.

One of the benefits of having a long term view is the pressure is off to be a success today or tomorrow, you know the work you are putting in is money in the bank to be paid back with bonuses at a later date.

Think of each post as a couple of dollars in a high interest account. The future you will thank you for it.

The talent for knowing when some venture is going to be a success or a failure is a valuable thing to have. Most of us don’t have it so either end up failing a lot (in order to get that one out of ten success) or don’t risk trying things. While we work on Performancing Partners this is something quite prominent in my mind when my brain isn’t occupied by lines of PHP code.

Yesterday Dilbert creator Scott Adams posted another wise article to his blog about “knowing when to quit”. His story about his failed TV show attempt really rings true. Why did it fail? Because everybody “liked” it.

The reason that a product “everyone likes” will fail is because no one “loves” it. The only thing that predicts success is passion, even if only 10% of the consumers have it. For example, I’m willing to bet that when the TV show Baywatch was tested, 90% of the people rolled their eyes and gave it a thumbs down. But I’ll bet 10% of the test audience had tents in their pants. Bingo.

That is so true. Have you noticed some of the products that go on to be massive have that “love it or hate it” thing going on? Now think about your blog, do people love it or just like it? How can you turn the passionometer up to 11? Well, that is the real trick isn’t it? Heh.

So with this in mind, our job with Partners is to create something people will not just like or accept but truly love with a passion. A tall order but for it to be successful, has to be done …

And an awesome excuse for annoying alliteration, as well! Heh. But I promise I’ll stop that now, since what I really want to post is a review of the pros and cons of Amazon’s aStore program. Note: Adding an Amazon aStore to your blog requires no template hacks. It’s as easy as cutting and pasting a bit of code into a blog entry!

About a month ago I got an email from Amazon inviting me to try out their new aStore program, but didn’t get a chance to do more than glance at it until today. It’s actually pretty cool… using your Amazon Associates account, you can build an inline store to display and sell items from Amazon within your blog. You don’t need to know how to code, it’s easy to set up, and to a certain degree you control the content in the store. When readers buy items, Amazon pays you through your existing Associates account. If you haven’t got an Amazon Associates account, it’s easy to set one up and earn up to 8.5% in referral fees.

If you’d like to see an example of how a store looks and works within a TypePad blog, take a look at the store I built. It took me about 15 minutes, but that was because I was being picky and trying out every option. If all you want is an easy potential revenue stream for your blog, you can probably set up a store in less time than it takes to read this review.

There are some things I really like about the aStore program, and some that I don’t. I’ll start with the good stuff.

Here’s where aStore gets it right:

• It’s easy.
• It’s hosted on Amazon’s secure servers, but you can use it on your own site.
• The interface, documentation and steps to create a store are clear.
• There are options— you can create a link to your stand-alone store on Amazon, embed the store in your own site with iframes or use HTML frames to incorporate it into your site.
• When readers click a product in your store, it loads all of Amazon’s info within the same page… I much prefer this to a store that would take readers off-site.
• Amazon provides widgets that allow you to include (or exclude) features such as your Amazon.com Wishlist , Listmania (reader lists on Amazon), Similar Items, Accessories, Customer Reviews, and Editorial Reviews. All but the reviews show up in sidebars on you store page… the reviews are included in the body copy of individual items (or not, your choice).

What aStore could do to improve:

Almost every single suggestion I was going to make about what could be better in aStores is apparently on the slate for the next revision already! According to a post by Darren Rouse at ProBlogger, he just received an email from Amazon alerting him that the following features are to be included soon:

• Build and maintain multiple aStores using a single Associate ID
• Specify products to feature on Category and Sub-Category pages
• Create multiple instances of individual categories and sub-categories (e.g. Beatles Music and Rolling Stones Music)
• Feature up to 54 products on the front page of your store rather than the current limit of nine
• Write longer custom product descriptions
• Better control the layout and design for use in frames by providing
  the capability to remove the store header and category navigation

Darren doesn’t say when these features can be expected, and I can’t find anything on Amazon’s site that includes an actual date but I would give aStores an almost perfect review once these are included.  There are only a few things I would change that aren’t already on this list:

1. Currently, you can enter keywords to restrict products shown on Category and Sub-Category pages… but it only finds products matching all the keywords. I like the idea of being able to select specific products in the new version, but it would also be useful to enter multiple keywords (separated by commas maybe) and have Amazon’s catalog return results based on any of the keywords rather all. For instance, say you want to feature products by several manufacturers in the Hardware category: if you enter DeWalt and Bosch, the search turns up nothing right now rather than displaying all the items by Bosch and DeWalt because none of the listings in the catalog contain both terms.
2. I would like to see Amazon make it possible to create multiple pages for a store, rather than just allowing a larger featured items list. Nine items is definitely too few, and 54 is probably too many for one page. When you view a category page in the current version of aStores, the bottom of the page has numbered links that allow you to see as many pages as the Amazon catalog can generate. It would be nice if the Featured Items part of the store worked this way too. After all, a great deal of the strength of Amazon’s model is allowing shoppers to filter results based on the recommendations of others… The biggest reason to shop on an aStore rather than on Amazon itself is to take advantage of selections edited by someone you trust.
3. It would be nice to be able to choose which order items display in. Currently that is not an option and I don’t see it on Darren’s list. A simple drag and drop AJAX interface would be ideal, but additionally, it would be nice to be able select items and modify the sorting order based on variables like price, availability, genre, author, etc.

Thanks to Darren for the heads up on the new features. I didn’t get the email myself and just happened to notice he had posted about the new features as I was procrastinating typing up this post. It was especially handy ’cause every single thing on the list was something I planned to suggest and thanks to him, my lazy hands didn’t have to type them up. Yeah, there’s a reason I like to provide cut + paste template code… and it’s the same reason it works better to get me on the phone or skype than to IM me.

Darren’s post 101 Ways to Run Out of Things to Blog About got me thinking about the dangers (or not) of running out of things to blog about.

‘I spent days putting together this great list. I wanted it to be big as a way of bringing new readers in and to show how much I comprehended of the topic…’

‘the results were amazing. I got on the front page of Digg and high on Reddit and Delicious…’

‘I had close to 30,000 visitors in 48 hours!.’

‘the next day I sat down to write my next post and realised that every topic I thought of to write about was covered in my mega list…’

Sure we’ve all been there. I mean, how many times have we blogged about content on Performancing? How can I possibly write another post about that!?

I think regurgitating content — with a new spin and/or flavor — is a good thing, for several reasons.

1. New readers haven’t necessarily read your old stuff. If you’ve been blogging for 2 years, probably half or more of your readers have only been reading for one year or less. Why not introduce them to some of your older posts? (Or put a new spin on the old post, and introduce them to the concepts therein…)
2. It can be helpful to old readers and the blogger alike to take a stroll down memory lane. Football usually comes down to the basics (block and tackle; don’t turn the ball over). So does pretty much any subject. Investing: Buy low, sell high. Amazing how often people forget that one.
3. Revisit and expand: Did you REALLY cover everything you know in your 101 list? I bet you didn’t. Each of the 101 points had a sentence or two explanation. I’ll bet my [valuable appendage here] that you could write an ENTIRE POST on each point. Five posts a week, that’s 20 weeks worth of content you can write!

Bottom line, I knew I wouldn’t like that post when there was a complaint about getting 30k visitors (and probably a ton of secondary links) from a good ol’ link bait. Repeat after me: link bait, then regurgitate!! (That has to be the most disgusting slogan ever!)

While we have talked about the new features for the next version of PFF (1.4) including Image-Uploading capabilities , I know some of you really want support now.

So today I’m pleased to announce the OakFlickr4PFF performancing Addon by Chen Zhiyuan for PFF 1.2 and 1.3.

This is an awesome addon that gives direct image uploading to Flickr from PFF.

To use this addon:
Read More…

1) First install it, restart firefox, then enable it in the addons section under settings as shown below;

   

2) Make sure you are logged in to flickr, if not, go to flickr.com and login.

3) You can then use the normal Image Uploading dialog as you would an image url or ftp upload, and choose the new ‘Flickr’ tab.

   

4) Now click on the browse button, find the image you want to upload, then click the ‘Upload to Flickr’ Button.
   

Done, now you can insert your new image.

Another great thing about this add-on is that will also catch images dragged and droped into pff from your hard drive, or pasted in via the clipboard on publish.

Once again I want to give a huge hand to Zhiyuan for this awesome add-on.

For any problems or issues check out his Step-By-Step Tutorial or post in the forums and we’ll try and help you out.
   

Technorati Tags: performancing, flickr, blogging, blog editor

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All this talk about “widgets” is well and good, but there are a few holes in the theory that widgets are the next big thing despite the excitement buzzing round yet another old technology given new life by web2.0 — Next big gimmick may be closer to the truth.

Where’s the money?
Though Om Malik points out that business models are still emerging (web2.0 translation: “we dont have a clue, but it’s cool ok?”), to me at least, it seems a tough area to monetize. You have the “free mindset” to contend with for starters, then you have privacy and commercialism concerns if you try doing something obvious like inserting affiliate links in your widgets.

Really, where is the wonga in widgets?

Usability, and er… Usefulness…
I wrote about how widgets on web pages kills usability a while back, and nothing has changed really. As of yet, all i see are gimmicks and whirly flashy things, where’s the use?

A Place for Widgets
Im not saying widgets can’t be useful, just that the majority of them are useless fluff, and there’s no clear path to $$$’s in the production of widgets.

People like Ed Anuff of WidgetBox (who ive spoken to breifly and seems a good chap) may well make a killing at this yet — I hope they do. But I also hope they make it by making the web better, not by selling shiny badgets to the terminally stupid.

One Thought on $$$’s

Profit share apis.

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It’s difficult not to notice that MSN have finally put Live.com out in public and Search follks are already kicking the tyres plenty aswell.

I can’t help rooting for MS on Live.com — it’s a pretty neat service and it “feels right” from an interface point of view — there was a time when supporting MS was tantamount to devil worship but with GOOG looking more and more like the old MS as every day goes by that’s simply not true anymore, at least where Search is concerned.

MS the underdog, who’d a thunk it?

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