Here’s what I’m talking about.  The new app for Google Goggles.  Take a photo and get the details.

Whats your thoughts on this technology and its future?

Basically, when two websites start sharing revenue to sell a product or service, it is known as affiliate marketing. Amazon was the one of the world’s first recognised and trusted sites to start large-scale affiliate marketing with affiliates get paid anywhere between 4-50% for sales generated through their own websites. Payment is typically recorded and made at the end of each month on the number of registrations, leads or sales or as a combination of the above depending on the method agreed between the merchant (the supplier) and the affiliate (the vendor).

Affiliate marketing works by cookies.  Not the type that have little bits of chocolate embedded inside them but rather, a small file, with little titbits of information that store essential data relevant to a person who clicks on the buy button on a vendors website .The cookie is saved in the person’s computer and this facilitates the tracking. When a sale is done then the vendor gets paid the amount of commission agreed and the whole record is stored in a CRM (Client Relationship Manager) available 24 hours a day to the vendor.

Incorporated into the CRM for affiliates get their daily statistics and reports on the number of clicks, sales, leads etc. Affiliate marketing connects buyers and sellers. This is how online marketing works. The amount of money spent online is increasing day by day. E-commerce is picking up at a very fast rate worldwide.

Britons spent a record £14.7 billion over the web last year – up 35 per cent, or nearly ten times the rate of growth of the total retail market. The number of people who bought goods online also increased by 24.7 per cent to 22.6 million, research shows. And they are spending over the internet more regularly – an average of 16.9 times in 2007, up from 14.2 times in 2006. Cheaper broadband and better availability of the service also lead to the increases, analysts Verdict Research claimed.

Affiliate marketing in the UK grew by 25% during 2008, taking the total value of online sales generated by this channel for that year to £3.82 billion*. The same report found that UK merchants involved in affiliate marketing drive 12% of their online sales via this channel and that despite the recession the affiliate marketing industry was worth well over £4bn by the end of 2009 and is expected to be even larger by the end of 2010 overall.

Valueclick, the owners of the affiliate networks Commission Junction, shopping.net, PriceRunner along with MeziMeida who operate Smarter.com and CouponMountain.com made their financial and fiscal data available.  Market watch reported:

In the fourth quarter of 2009, revenue in the Media, Affiliate Marketing and Technology segments exceeded the Company’s expectations, and all four business segments exceeded the Company’s expectations for operating income.
The breakdown, rounded up to the nearest thousand and based on affiliate marketing specifically is listed below:

Year 2009
•    Revenue total – $111,903,000
•    Cost of revenue – $15,617,000
•    Gross profit – $96,286,000
•    Operating expenses – $38,165,000
•    Segment income – $58,121,000

Year 2008 (for contrast and comparison)
•    Revenue total – $121,972,000
•    Cost of revenue – $19,374,000
•    Gross profit – $102,598,000
•    Operating expenses – $43,143,000
•    Segment income – $59,455,000

Not very impressive right?

They are only down 5 million on the year before and this can be attributed to the economy and the state it is currently in today.

Spokesman Malcolm Pinkerton said “As the cost of broadband falls, consumers become accustomed to internet shopping and retailers continue to enhance their online propositions, the channel will find itself extremely well placed to capitalize on the falling consumer confidence and lower levels of disposable income currently impacting the retail market”.

In light of these statistics and predictions it is clear that affiliate marketing should form part of an integrated and successful digital marketing strategy.

There are many affiliate marketing websites through which you can choose the products you would like to promote through your website. Commission Junction, Click Bank, E-junkie and Linkshare are some of the well-known affiliate marketing websites. Quite literally, thousands of publishers join affiliate marketing daily and while merchants join at a slower rate, it is increasing in velocity ensuring a much wider range of products or items are available.

Beginning to work as an affiliate or indeed using the networks mentioned earlier to have other people sell your products is a pretty simple process and in many cases the processes and opportunities are severely under estimated and under utilised, hence the reason for this article.  When I explain what affiliate marketing means and consists of and the benefits associated with this type of selling most businesses cant wait to get involved.

That’s when I need to explain the bad side.  Its not a major issue and it is handled well by the affiliate networks but its one that many have to consider before offering their products to other affiliates and its all about brand protection and reputation management. When other people sell your products you have little or no immediate control over how they approach the matter. While the likes of spamming are not permitted under the membership agreements of the affiliate networks, it wont stop people trying to take advantage and hope they don’t get caught.  If caught of course they and their details can be permanently banned from the network.

So, the question remains, what have your affiliates sold today?

* The eConsultancy Affiliate Marketing Merchants Report 2008

American Mom Media

American Mom’s have taken up the social media mantle and are using it to track their children when at college or university to ensure that they make every effort to succeed and stay away from potential problems.  Some American Media Mom’s have even went further and integrated themselves into their children’s lives with alter egos to ensure they have a more direct influence on their development when out of physical reach.

Watch this concerning development and the story behind it right here:

Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

Now seriously… I hope your laughing.  I sure as hell am.

Basically it adds in a panel to the side of the browser and allows you to do some pretty cool features regarding commenting on a post, article or even a specific piece of text or information.

All of the comments are aligned with your gmail account so its all “networked” back to your google profile, so thats a nice feature as well, but Im beginning to wonder if the good will be out weighed by the bad at some point.

Heres what has occured to me as being somewhat negative and is worrying me a little, though it is early days:

1. The sideWiki allows comments to be made on any page in the site on any piece of information but it DOES not notify the site owner that a comment has been made, so it will prove to be impossible to reply to sidewiki comments on larger sites.

2. Community is diluted in the site itself as the option to comment directly on the post has basically been liquidated.  I can effectively comment on any page anywhere.

3. I cannot moderate the comments, so spam is already a worry, but also, the opportunites for untrue or even slanderous comments is wide open and must be a serious worry for businesses. (I dont worry about arguements, love them actually but its difficult to enjoy one if I dont know it exists –> see point 1).

4. SEO wise, I really cant see what effect this will or would have on a site directly and how open the whole thing is to manipulation.  Will play a little more on the weekend with it and see what conclusions I can draw.

Anyone else got anything to add?

(I wonder how many of you smart alec’s will add your comments to the sidewiki instead of the comments on this post…  :P)

AlertThingy – Your Social Desktop

Launched on April 16th 2008 the standard install of AlertThingy supports quite a few social media networks including:

• Amazon
• Basecamp
• Digg
• FaceBook
• Tumblr
• Flikr
• Hundle
• Ping.fm
• TinyURL
• Tumblr
• TwitPic
• Twitter
• Twitter Search
• Yammer

AlertThingy promises to be adding more networks as development continues.  The interface is what we have come to expect and is similar to TweetDeck,  with multi or single columns and information segmented into the various feeds and groups you have imported while also being associated with the logo of that feed, for example the Twitter t against all tweets.

One very cool thing that this tool does it also allow you to also import news feeds and blog feeds to a separate column and comes with a range of different RSS feeds already prepared such as the BBC, WallStreet, TweetMeMe and Techcrunch but you can choose specific feeds to add yourself so its really quite flexible.

Pretty easy to use all in all but I will spend more time with it to see how it holds up against the likes of TweetDeck.

AlertThingy FriendFeed

Interestingly enough, if your a FriendFeed User and would like desktop software for Friendfeed but don’t want to add all your profiles individually, they also have a version of AlertThingy specifically catering to Friendfeed.

Installing it and adding in your Firendfeed account details starts pulling in information from your established FriendFeed Accounts (although I’m not sure at the moment if this includes things like Youtube, or only the list mentioned in the alternative version, I’m still checking it out at the moment).  As Comments come in you can “like” them or “comment” back directly via the interface directly from the desktop.

Its still in the early stages, even though its been about for over a year, and looks a bit ugly with an all black interface and white writing but I’m assuming its in the early stages of development and am hoping it will expand in the near future.

Give them a try by downloading them from:

AlertThingy

AlertThingy – FriendFeed

Let me know your thoughts on how it works, good or bad and if you think its a serious contender as a social media desktop application. For me the Jury is most definitely, still out.

**Update**
Just came across this video by bwana.tv about AlertThingy, might help to describe it better!

Why is it important to address your WordPress load time?

Don’t underestimate load times on a site or blog, especially your own. Just to make the point, lets illustrate.

If you click this image below:

It opened a page with an image of your site that a first time visitor will experience for the first few seconds. If this stays the same for longer than 3 seconds, how does it make you feel.

• Is it worth waiting on? (impatient)
• Is it actually loading? (uncertainty)
• LOAD DAMMIT! (frustration)

Not the best way to introduce someone to your site is it?

The importance of your blogs load time

While you may look at your blog everyday, its easy to become complacent about your blog load time especially if its cached on your computer after the first visit making it appear  to load faster than it actually does, but that’s only for you.

Lets put it into reality here to show how important load time is. Have a read at this:

According to research if your blog takes more than 3 seconds to load you are losing around 40% of your visitors.

That rate goes to 90% if it takes more than 8 seconds to load.

rumbling – Improve load time of your blog

A 40% loss of traffic is bad, a 90% loss is ridiculous!

For Google an increase in page load time from 0.4 second to 0.9 seconds decreased traffic and ad revenues by 20%. For Amazon every 100 ms increase in load times decreased sales with 1%.

Gabriel Svennerberg

What a fickle bunch we are!

Fortunately, with a little bit of graft, a few excellent wordpress plugins and some handy applications and extensions, addressing your blogs loading time shouldn’t be a big issue and can be addressed quite simply IF you are able to code.  There are a few plugins that are helpful, but they can only do so much unfortunately.

Fist of, check out the post 40 essential tips for wordpress blogs – Joost De Valk and the first section:

Making your WordPress Blog FAST

and

Maintaining your WordPress Blog

Done that?  Good.

Now here are a few other handy tools and firefox plugins and google apps you can use to go a little deeper and get that blog load time even lower.

**Before we start I would suggest you keep a note of this page address as this process requires you to restart your browser a few times to complete installations. Wouldn’t want you getting lost half way through would we!**

If you want the short version of this and don’t need to follow all the info and instructions  below I thought it would be a good idea to do an overview for those folks who like things in a convenient short list:

• Downlod install Firefox
• Install Firebug
• Install YSlow
• Install Google Page Speed
• Open your site
• Activate FireBug
• Along the FireBug options bar choose the extension and run
• Digest the data and address the errors
  

Now for more details.

Page Load time extensions guide

The first thing you will need is to Download and install Firefox to use these apps.

Once your done, you will need this handy plugin for the browser called FireBug (an essential tool for any designer or developer anyway). Once its installed you will be able to activate the extension by clicking the little bug icon in the bottom right of your browser screen while you have your website open.

When you open the extension you will end up with a screen like this:

Click the image to enlarge

FireBug alone is a great plugin for editing CSS code but its the next two extensions that address the page load time.

YSlow – blog load time analysis

Yahoo!’s rules for high performance web site.

Install the extension YSlow. This extension focuses on Yahoos criteria for page load times and will report back on errors and areas to be addressed on your blog.

Once you have it installed you will see the icon for the extension beside the FireBug icon in your browser window.

Open your site and while viewing hit the YSlow icon to be presented with this:

Run the test on your blog to begin the analysis and get a report on items that need to be addressed. Each area is graded from A to F, A being perfect and F being bloody terrible. All the results can be filtered by:

• CONTENT (* Number of errors detected)
• CSS (*)
• IMAGES (*)
• JAVASCRIPT (*)
• SERVER (*)

As you click through each section it will display a list of problems and a short description of  what the error and how to resolve it.  More details are available to help you understand the error and address it directly.

At this stage your own your own im afraid as each site will be completely unique in the fixes that it may require.

*Special thanks to Ian Miller for pointing this extension out to me.

Google Page Speed

Googles open source code for best practice web page performance

Never ones to miss a trick Google, of course,  also have a FireFox extension available to evaluate your page performance and offer analysis and suggestions on errors to be addressed. Just like YSlow, the extension requires FireBug to be installed in order to work, so since we have covered that lets go straight to the download page and install it.

Install the Google Page Speed extension.

Once thats complete, open your blog or site and activate Firebug:

You will be presented with something like this. Click on the highlighted otpion, Page Speed:

Click on the image to enlarge

You will be presented with this, just hit the button to begin the analysis:

And low and behold your presented with a report and details of all the errors that need to be addressed on your page to make it load faster evaluate the page speed. The interface is easy to understand and review and clicking on the titles will open a page with explanations and definitions to the error with recommendations on how to address them.

Clicking the “+” icon opens a list of all the pages affected by the error or causing it.

Again, your basically on your own here as each and every page will be unique in the issues that need to be addressed.

Addressing load time issues

All these options may seem a little overwhelming at first, but take you time and address the points you can do quickly and easily to begin with. Doing this should make a noticeable difference on your page load time immediately.

Some of the errors will simply boggle your mind and really I would be surprised if there’s any page out there without errors or points that could be optimised. Try running it on your Google search page to see what I mean, it even has errors and warnings.

The point it that all this is about optimising the page, not making it 100% completely perfect. Its about doing the best you can to make the time to load as little as it can be and in combination with the plugins on the other post mentioned above it should help get that load time down to a more than acceptable level for your visitors.

Best of luck all, and as per usual, I would love any comments or feedback, suggestions or points to this post, so don’t hesitate to let me know if there’s anything I have missed or could expand upon.

His session focused on optimising your wordpress blogs and a prominent part was ensuring that it was able to load quickly for visitors but also factors such as SOE, maintenance and analytics.

Slow loading sites can serious reduce your visitors experience as patience is definitely not a virtue online and its about time I addressed the points he raised. The other tips are definitely worth reviewing and applying although all the recommendations might not be applicable to your own blog depending on what your coding ability is or what plugins and features you may already have implemented.

If its easier, here’s the list of recommend pages and plugins included on the slide show to help make sure your wordpress blog is running at full capacity.

Making your WordPress Blog FAST

Slide 19: Install WP Super Cache with Gzip enabled

Slide 20: Move .htaccess directives to your server config (if possible) and disable .htaccess parsing. (what the hell is this? dont ask me how to do it, pay someone who knows.)

Slide 21: Combine CSS files into one big CSS file, same goes for Javascript which should be loaded in the footer.

Slide 22: Use CSS Sprites (see your developer if you dont know what this is).

Slide 23: Add a PHP opcode Cahce – pick one, all are better than having none. (see slide 20 for instructions in how to deal with this)

Slide 24: Kill some plugins…and try and replace them with similar ones, some plugins are god awful.

Slide 25: Still slow?  Switch to better hosting: http://www.westhost.com/blog-yoast.html (that’s an affiliate link for Joost, so if your gonna purchase hosting use it, I’m sure he would appreciate it and he kinda deserves it even though he owes me a beer).

Adding SEO to your WordPress Blog

Slide 27: Set Pretty Permalinks – Why do people still forget this?

Slide 28: Switch Blog name and Post Title – the format should be post title – blog name

Slide 29: Give Robots Directions – Noindex wp-admin, login and register pages etc. Try Joosts Meta Robots Plugin.

Slide 30: Write better Titles – Use HeadSpace2 or even All in one SEO.

Slide 31: Write Good Meta Descriptions – If you don’t, do NOT auto generate them.

Slide 32: Create Proper Pagination using wp-pagenavi by Lester Chan, f/i

Slide 33: Diasbale paged Comments… they suck.

Slide 34: Read and Implement everything in my (Joost’s) WordPress SEO Guide

Maintaining your WordPress Blog

Slide 36: Backup your database every few hours. Use Lester Chans WP-DBManager plugin.

Slide 37: Optimise your database every day using the same plugin.

Slide 38: Backup your files every day. Use WordPress Backup.

Slide 39: Check your queries. Use the debug queries plugin to check for plugins gone mad.

Slide 40: Run Askimet. Kill those spam comments.

Slide 41: Check the referrers for comments.  (Click the WP plugins Tab)

Slide 42: Remove those nonsense widgets. Technocrati rank? Well…OK. Blog Value Widget: = Nonsense.

Slide 43: Track your uptime. Use pingdom, or another tool. But be the first to know when your blog is down. (and address it immediately)

Slide 44: Check 404′s. Use the 404 notifier plugin and fix them using the redirection plugin.

Slide 45: Remove unnecessary META info.

eg:

// Remove Really simple discovery link
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘rsd_link’ );
// Remove Windows Live Writer Link
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘wlwmanifest_link’ );
// Remove  the version number
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘wp-generator’ );

Making your WordPress Blog Social

Slide 47: Allow and encourage people to submit (share) your content. Use socialable, dammit :)

Slide 48: Doing newsletters? Add a refer to a friend button the the Thank You page.

Slide 49: Or use my(Joost’s) Comment Redirect plugin, and add the refer a friend there!  ^^

Slide 50: Use WP Greet Box, even useful on “normal” sites.

Slide 51: Make sure your comments are gravatar enabled.

Slide 52: Do the Twitter thing. Its an absurd traffic driver.

WordPress Blog Analytics

Slide 54: Use Google Analytic’s (and my*Joosts* Google Analytics plugin for it)

Slide 55: Use RSS link tagger

Slide 56: Track Twitter Traffic with Twitter Traffic Plugin

Slide 57: Install Canonical URL’s so your analytics does’nt interfere wiuth your SEO.

Slide 58: Use comment redirect to track first time commenter’s

Slide 59: Track Comments as a goal! Use an onclick Javascript with a minor delay.

Slide 60: Track RSS subscribers the same way.

Slide 61: Start optimising: Which traffic leads to more subscribers? (and yes that means forgetting about Digg).

Slide 62: Use my(Joost’s) blog metrics plugin. Improve yourself each month!

And to round it all of, heres the actual presentation itself.
*Joost, next time, make it 20 tips will you?  This took me bloody ages.

The (traditional) difference between Blogs & Websites

The Website

Every business needs a website. They nearly all have one. They use the site to explain their product or service, display them in the appropriate fashion and market them to grow the business and convey the brand image and representation of the company in line with the physical business.

The site is usually contracted and developed by designers and coders and may or may not have a content management system to manage the information on the site although even today their are still sites that are completely static and do not update or maintain their information with Content Management.

That’s a website, plain and simple.

The Blog with WordPress (the free CMS)

Firstly lets explain something here.  WordPress is not only a free cms for blogs.  The perception is generally that blogs are a site which allow people to keep an on line diary of their experiences, but this perception is somewhat dated now. In reality, the flexible nature of the WordPress CMS and the Search Engine friendliness of the software has ment that businesses have begun to utilise its features in conjunction with their current websites or even as stand alone sites in themselves, meaning that they are not only blogs in the traditional sense, but also complete websites in form and function.

This goes some way to showing just how flexible a WordPress CMS is.

A full list of WordPress features are listed on the Official WordPress site.

As a business you should look at this extensive list of features and compare them to the description of the website above.  A website will not necessarily come with all these features included.  You will have to detail your requirements to a web designer who will then see to implementing and actioning all your requirements.  Then you will be considering the marketing and applications options for your site. Why should you when this free cms covers a vast range of these options already and is Search Engine Friendly from scratch!

But lets clarify something here.  While the CMS itself may be free, nothing in this world is for nothing. Someone with the right knowledge and experience needs to set up the site, edit the design and implement all the correct plugins and settings to get the software to where it really needs to be and that, I’m afraid, means putting your hand in your pocket and shelling out some cold hard cash.

The benefit though, is most certainly in the long term as the wordpress cms is open source, hence new plugins and additions to the site are constantly being added and developed allowing you the freedom to extend and expand your site as required, and with a little training, you can even manage to do all this yourself.

WordPress CMS site examples.

Check out just a few example sites being run on the wordpress platform:

Ford Autoshows
Harrington Estates
Collegian
Maryland Commercial Real Estate Investors
Kauai Rentals
IES Solutions
Z World

Other FREE CMS Options:

And Finally, just so you know, for a whole range of Free CMS options available check out this post by Paul Anthony from Web Distortion Ireland.

Yahoo have just released a new piece of software today, called SideLine,  that bears a striking resembelance to TweetDeck.  The offical site description reads like this:

Sideline is an Adobe® AIR™ desktop application built with the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI). It allows users to create and group custom queries by topics of interest.

Sideline is an open source application released under the BSD license. The first beta release is out and the code is hosted on github. If you experience difficulties with the Flash “Install” badge on this site you can find the manual download here.

Without further delay I’m going to download it and give it a spin, will let you know what I think of it soon.

As per usual Joost has been on the ball and ahead of the game in explaining the reasons for and the solution to canonical issues and again provides us with this cool little plugin so instead of waffling on about it I will pass you over to him so you can read and download his new Canonical Plugin for Woordpress.

Also by doing this it means I can get back to installing it…stop reading this and go get it. (And while your there make sure and leave him a nice comment, he gets all giddy over things like that.)