I’ve always loved the old theme of my old blog (even though I ended up changing it at least 300 times over the course of two years). The theme (qwilm-0.3) was passe and clunky then. Now, it’s akin to a bad early 80’s domestic auto design. That’s part of the charm for me since I like to ramble on about the latest-and-greatest shiny web objects.
So, I decided to resurrect that now decripid and almost-non-googlable WP theme, brush off the cobwebs and reapply it here. I think it looks quite nice again.
By the way, it’s the 3rd anniversary of CPN today. I started that blog after a long day of lawn mowing and brainstorming. For some reason, I thought I should blog about my views on how these crazy new things like Twitter and Feedburner could change or improve affiliate marketing. Things worked out and my career evolved into places I would have never considered or had the opportunity to consider without CPN. So, thank you if you were a reader/supporter there. It was always a ton of fun even if we were yelling at each other (Molander). Good luck to Evan and the CostPerNews team in the future.
And I think there’s still a niche for investigating how Twitter or Facebook or open standards or Open API’s can influence and improve online marketing.
So, three years later it’s good to be here still annoying people about Track, RSS and democratized platforms.
I’ve got three invites to LazyFeed. Who wants one?
Why should affiliate marketers care?
LazyFeed offers the best of both worlds for marketers: discovery and specificity. The ability to drill down as far as you want (my topics are pretty broad as you can see in the screen shot above but I’ve experimented and you can get very niche or hyper-local with results), this becomes a very useful tool for affiliate marketers and networks in need of a tool that helps discover new offers, affiliates, content or trends that might not otherwise be available (for cheap).
LazyFeed is a fantastic web app for discovering new content in a flowing, real-time manner.
However, you can’t use it yet.
It’s still in private beta (and no, I don’t have any invites), but if you do get the chance to try out the service via an invite code, definitely take advantage.
There’s nothing particularly mind-blowing about the concept. You plug in a number of keywords or topics that you are interested in and then you get updates from blogs or sites that have posts which focus on those topics. Think of this as a RSS reader mixed with Google Alerts system.
Where LazyFeed gets particularly interesting is in the new site connections. By handing over your Twitter, Delicious, or Flickr username (or the username of someone you may be interested in because they produce high quality content since no password is required… that’s really lazy) or a blog/site URL, keywords from your posts, tweets, bookmarks and pics are picked up and recommendations are made from that data. In other words, it’s the semantic discovery engine we’ve all been buzzing about since web2.0 died.
Why should affiliate marketers care?
LazyFeed offers the best of both worlds for marketers: discovery and specificity. The ability to drill down as far as you want (my topics are pretty broad as you can see in the screen shot above but I’ve experimented and you can get very niche or hyper-local with results), this becomes a very useful tool for affiliate marketers and networks in need of a tool that helps discover new offers, affiliates, content or trends that might not otherwise be available (for cheap).
Again, LazyFeed is in private beta and you have to score an invite code to get access (I received mine on a FriendFeed thread), but stay on the lookout for when they start opening up access.
Just today, there were a number of feature updates:
1. Term: ‘Add’ has changed to ‘Save’.
2. Help section on the home page: As soon as you sign in, you will see ‘Getting Started with Lazyfeed’, just below Hot topics area.
3. A gray status bar has been added at the bottom. This bar includes ‘Saved stuff’ and ‘Topics for lazy me’ which are both important features of Lazyfeed. Saved stuff is where you can view everything you save. Topics for lazy me alerts you whenever new topics are discovered and delivered to you by Lazyfeed. Please refer to help section to learn more.
4. Save button for each entry in ‘Topics for lazy me’: You can now directly save topics from Topics for lazy me and instantly start getting live updates without visiting each page.
Again, nothing earth-shattering, but the simple and ajaxy interface does a good job of staying out of the way of the site’s main accomplishment’s of discovery and specifics… both of which serve affiliate marketers well.
1. I sold CostPerNews a while back, so that’s out of the question. I love the brand and we had a great run together, but that ship has sailed. Yet, I miss having a dedicated space to blog about affiliate marketing. Which takes us to…
2. I really enjoy reading about, thinking on, and discussing affiliate/performance/whatever marketing.
3. Many of my good friends are still in the affiliate marketing business. They deserve to read a good thought-provoking blog about their niche once in a while. But seriously, I do miss the engagement with friends and foes that I once had because I was “in the scene.”
4. Now that I’ve officially hung up my gloves as a full time affiliate marketer, I (think) I have more credibility to actually write about networks, other affiliates, practices, tools, etc that impact affiliate marketing. Think of me as an affiliate marketing journalist without a journalism degree. And since Revenue Magazine went belly up, there’s not much competition there. The only dog I have in this race (that’s an incredibly non-politically-correct analogy, I just realized) is my opinion on what is good for the affiliate marketing industry that I do still care about. That is very freeing.
5. David Lewis is blogging and on Twitter more these days (and making points that I wish I were making). I have to offset that by blogging more myself. Darn you and your solar backpack, David.
So, I miss being a part of the active affiliate marketing community but I’m done being a full time affiliate. I love thinking about affiliate marketing and what it means for the wider web and the developing real-time social tools (and vice versa). I like writing. Bingo, bango. Blog.
Good question.