Podcast for January 7, 2008 (about 22 mins / 10mb’s)

Download the MP3 File

Show Notes

- Jim Kukral Says Take a Holiday During CES
- Bill Gates at CES
- Gizmodo’s Best of CES ‘08
- Advertising Age on CES and Importance for Marketers
- Jeremiah Owyang Recognizes Affiliate Marketing
- The Coffee Shops of Mayfair Says The Affiliate Network is Dead
- Online Ad Industry Groups and Self Policing
- Amazon’s Beacon Play
- Ask.com Getting Better

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Music by The Roy Owens Jr (great band!).

I joined Jeff Molander, Lee Gientke and Amanda Watlington for a fun discussion on yesterday’s Weekly Insight podcast:

• Of Facebook and Tu Tu’s: The Privacy Myth
• Google’s Wireless Plans
• IBM Declares Advertising Dead
• Jimmy Whales, Info-Filters & Re-Defining Search
• Exploring Vendor Relationship Management & "Relationships"

Of Facebook and Tu Tu’s: The Privacy Myth on the Weekly Insight

Carsten Cumbrowski has the best run down and explanation of Google’s new Pay Per Action platform.  He’s thrown in some nice data, comparison reviews, and historical analysis…

Google announced today via a press release that they expand the Google Pay-Per-Action beta program to include beta testers around the world. As of today are willing advertisers and publishers outside the United States able to participate and apply for a beta account.

Worldwide Expansion of Google Pay-Per-Action (CPA) Beta

Last night into early this morning, news broke that the affiliate network Linkshare had made its first acquisition, Traffic Strategies.

Traffic Strategies is a lead generation and validation firm out of Tampa, Florida. The acquisition by Linkshare gives even more emphasis to the lead generation sector of online performance marketing, which has been heating up to a slow boil since late 2005.

It’s no secret that lead generation is one of the hot spots of online marketing, and will only increase in importance and profitability as marketers become more savvy in their abilities to court qualified online users.

Steve Denton, President of Linkshare, writes…

The acquisition of Traffic Strategies.com is a continuation of LinkShare’s strategy to provide our partners with the best pay-per-action products and services. Traffic Strategies.com will bring expertise and new features to our LinkShare Lead Advantage offering here in the US, and around the world. What’s more, I hope it demonstrates to you, our partners, the continued commitment of our parent company, Rakuten.

For our merchants who rely on LinkShare for customer acquisition, Traffic Strategies.com adds strong capabilities to our Lead Advantage Service. For our affiliates, as we accelerate the growth of Lead Advantage, you will have access to new and varied offers.

(Oddly enough, the entire press release and message from Denton only linked the last word “strategies.com” instead of the whole term “trafficstrategies.com,” but that’s beside the point).

There were no terms disclosed in the announcement, but I have an email in to Linkshare PR to try and find out some of the financial details.

So, with acquisition Silly Season 2007 fully upon us, will lead generation firms such as LeadPoint start to be gobbled up by middle tier advertising agencies to round out their stable so that they can, in turn, be gobbled up by a Yahoo or Google?

Is this a signal that super affiliates like Traffic Strategies are the next target for acquisitions?

Ashley Jones will be coming on board here as the regular “Weekend Editor” and also contributing a few articles during the week.

She’s keeping the North Carolina flavor of Affiliate Fortune Cookies as she currently resides just outside of Charlotte, NC.  After a successful career in law and business consulting, she decided to take on the role of an affiliate marketer a few months ago and has had a good deal of success in her short time working in the industry.

Ashley also has a very interesting (and practical) viewpoint on the world of affiliate marketing, so she should be a great counter to my more web2.0 based theoretical mindset.  We’ll see how that dynamic works out!

We are also trying to work out a way for her to get to Miami for the Affiliate Summit in July, so hopefully you all will have the chance to meet her.  Who needs a family vacation in the Catskills during that week??

Additionally, her email address is ashley@affiliatefortunecookies.com.

Welcome aboard, Ashley!

Thanks to everyone for such a great first full week of Affiliate Fortune Cookies.

We just broke into the triple digits for subscribers today (not bad for a little niche blog!)…

Starting near the end of next week, a wonderful newer affiliate named Ashley will be joining the team here and start blogging.

I’ll save the full intro for when she comes on board, but I’m definitely excited to have help and additional insight from such a talented person. She should be posting around mid-week and then take over on the weekends full time after that. We’ll call Ashley the “Weekend Editor” or something fancy.

I’m also looking for one more blogger to come on board and help out with 8-10 posts during the week. You can see all the details (revenue share, Affiliate Summit ticket and travel, etc) for that here.

Thanks to everyone for a great first 10 days. Keep reading!

You might have noticed that we’ve added a little hack ourselves to help you find the content you’re looking for here at Affiliate Fortune Cookies.

Thanks to BUMPzee’s Scott Jangro, we came across this WordPress Support page which helps you to place categories as actual pages. As Scott pointed out, scroll down to the first post under the username “dzr” to see the hack in its full glory.

So, enjoy the category goodness up there…

Here’s the top five posts from this week’s opened fortune cookies…

• Banner Ads and Psychology
• How (and Why) to Sign Up for CJ’s RSS Feeds
• Search Engines Love Micro-Blogs Like Twitter and Jaiku
• Essential Firefox Plugins for Affiliate Marketing
• Newbie Tricks: PPC and Affiliate Marketing

We’re only five days into Affiliate Fortune Cookies, but the blog has grown each day in terms of traffic and quality.  Next week will bring the addition of video and audio posts, so stay tuned.

Here’s to the next five days, weeks, months and years!

As an added incentive for those thinking about blogging here at Affiliate Fortune Cookies, you’ll get a free press pass to the Affiliate Summit this July in Miami. There are only a limited number of those available, but we’ve been lucky to get a couple of them for the bloggers here.  I’ll even work with you on getting a hotel room and travel to and from the event as well.

So there’s a nice immediate bonus for blogging here :)  Thanks to Shawn and Missy from Affiliate Summit.

I’ve had a couple of inquiries so far, and I want to repeat that you don’t have to be an old pro at this. Sometimes, people new to an industry have the best insights (and questions that need answering), so this is a chance to make a name for yourself (and earn a few bucks) if you’re climbing the ladder.

Cut off date is June 1, so email sam@affiliatefortunecookies.com if you are interested.

Affiliate Fortune Cookies is looking for two additional bloggers / writers / tipsters / hackers to contribute to the content here.

Here’s the description:

-Two individuals who can contribute at least 8-10 posts during the week. These posts should be within the realm of affiliate and online marketing and be broad enough to help newbie’s and old pro’s advance their efficiency, knowledge or success in this field.

-The two writers will be given a rev share of the advertising revenue here and possibly a base rate every month depending on experience, performance and success of the site.

-You can be a complete new comer to the world of affiliate marketing or an old hack. The main prerequisite is a sharp and inquisitive mind with a passion for the industry.

SO, if you have the urge to share your knowledge (and want to make some extra money every month) send an email to editor@affiliatefortunecookies.com.

Submissions will be taken until June 1 and should include a LinkedIn profile or some sort of previous experience credentials.  

Get on board with an up and coming blog early!