It’s amazing to me that the same lead gen style setups that swept through the affiliate industry in 2003-2005 have now made their way to Facebook:

In short, these games try to get people to pay cash for in game currency so they can level up faster and have a better overall experience. Which is fine. But for users who won’t pay cash, a wide variety of “offers” are available where they can get in-game currency in exchange for lead gen-type offers. Most of these offers are bad for consumers because it confusingly gets them to pay far more for in-game currency than if they just paid cash (there are notable exceptions, but the scammy stuff tends to crowd out the legitimate offers). And it’s also bad for legitimate advertisers.

via Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell (TechCrunch)

If you’ll remember, for a $1.00 payout (but eventually up to $2.00 or $2.50 as the market became saturated), publishers could send an email address and zip code (or just email address) of a “consumer” hoping to win their free iPod (and eventually laptops or HD TV’s).

The quality was, of course, terrible.  However, this was about getting a one time credit card charge through a miasma of a three step co-reg process.

Amazing that this trick still works, just with new clothes.

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.

“In a few weeks you will not be following people that are not on at least one list as they will be considered either a spammer or irrelevant.” @vinnyohare

Earlier this week, Twitter caused a considerable amount of envy-then-joy as it slowly rolled out its new and important Lists feature to users.

Interestingly enough, there have been a number of affiliate lists popping up and a couple of them are really valuable:

These are just the lists that have included me (obviously the bests lists because of that), but there are already a number of Lists being rolled out by users that focus on affiliate marketing and its various niches such as Geno Prussakov’s valuable affiliate networks list.

Listorious has quickly gained the position as “Lists Central” in the geek community and a search for affiliate there comes up with interesting items like Affiliate Summit ’10’s speakers.

So, the question becomes how valuable are these purely subjective lists beyond just mindshare (which itself is valuable but not always immediate)?

What I think would be incredibly interesting relates roughly to what Market Leverage has put together (although in a sloppy shotgun-the-wall fashion) with their “Fans and Friends” List. Networks or affiliate vendors should already be putting together lists with all of their employees and execs for affiliates to follow. That’s a no-brainer. I’m waiting for Linkshare, Shareasale, CJ etc to realize the immediate return this would provide and do it themselves rather than waiting for an affiliate to do it for them.

Most importantly, Twitter Lists carry a large element of social/link capital with them. What would be interesting is for a network to use Lists in a “spotlight” type of way, highlighting interesting new affiliates, high performers, or just good people on a rotating basis. These would have to be small-numbered lists (20?) akin to Twitter’s oft-maligned but always envied “SUL” or Suggested Users List. These lists would also have to be highly marketed and grow the number of people following in order to bring the social capital, but that wouldn’t be a problem with the market share of the larger networks. And let’s face it… we all love to be on “Best Of” lists.

As Vinny points out, Lists changes the game of RT’s and Follower numbers. All of a sudden those metrics mean much less and how many (or which) Lists you appear on mean everything.

This is a special edition of the Geek Dads@ Home podcast. Sam Harrelson, Daniel M. Clark and Joe Magennis discuss the issues that felled Twitter today. We highlight the importance of Friendfeed as a service and how it could be the big winner from this event.

via The Day Twitter Died | Geek Dads @ Home.

Basically, if you want to know how I feel about the future of Twitter (or twitters), then give a listen.  Today was a very significant day for how the future of the twitter protocol will play out.

Download the mp3

Well, not really ditching. I’ll still be following Twitter folks via Google Reader with this great tool from Dave Winer (who is really kicking butt with the rssCloud project):

When you return to the Google Reader main page, you’ll see a new top-level section for your Twitter subscriptions. Pretty cool. Permalink to this paragraph

via rssCloud news (Scripting News).

I love RSS and I love real-time. Twitter has always been more of an aggregation listening post for me while FriendFeed is dirty, transient and a movable feast. I’ll still be interacting on Twitter but FriendFeed (with the awesome BuddyFeed app on the iPhone) is where I’ll be actively participating.

Come on over to FriendFeed with me, Jangro and Joe.

We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.

via Twitter Status.

Now go read some blogs and play on FriendFeed.

[EDIT] Looks like Facebook is down as well. Coordinated attack?

When I started CostPerNews in October of 2006, the affiliate marketing blogging scene was quite crowded. Between ReveNews, Shawn’s AffiliateTip Blog, Jeff’s ThoughtShapers, Scott Jangro’s blog, Jim Kukral’s blog and smaller blogs like Mark’s 45n5, there was always something to read and always some place to get into an argument about the early days of Twitter.

However, as we approach Affiliate Summit East 2009, it seems that the once-crowded scene has become emptier than a 4pm ASE session on legalese for network executives with no wet bar.

What happened?

1) Jangro’s BUMPzee went away. Scott, save the cheerleader, save the world. Bring the site back and save affiliate blogging. Please.

2) Twitter. Like it or not, Twitter took the place of the town watering hole that affiliate blogs had previously filled. As we all become more comfortable with Twitter, I expect that process to reverse.

3) Affiliate marketing is growing outside of its old wardrobe and it’s become increasingly hard to write as about “affiliate marketing” and stay sane. Trust me. My particular take is to focus more on the tech/geeky side of affiliate marketing. Maybe nichification will bring more folks back to the blogging fold?

4) There’s no money in it. I made decent money by selling CostPerNews (twice), but there really wasn’t much there in terms of monthly revenue (I did have some great sponsors, though). It made for some nice PayPal gadget money, but the time invested there against the money return is/was laughable. I’m not doing this for the money, either. And I suspect that keeps some bright (or non-bright) people from actively blogging when they could be making much more money doing something else. My line is to always remind people that blogging doesn’t give you an ROI directly, but the opportunities, gigs, speaking events, etc that you do get as a result of blogging will more than pay the bills.

5) Attention is short. That’s never going to change.

So, what can we do?

I’m not sure. I’d love to see more affiliate bloggers, though.

[Edit] I should include that there are still a number of great affiliate blogs out there like Tim Jones’ blog, Andrew Wee’s site, TrishaLyn.com, Mike Buechele (nice theme), Daniel Clark and a few more that I’m forgetting. Go read them and support affiliate blogs.

[EDIT 2] I completely forgot Geno Prussakov’s well-written Affiliate Marketing Navigator blog as well. Many apologies.

Looks like this post has helped to remind me that despite my earlier thought, there are still some great affiliate blogs out there. If only we had a place to discover them all (cough BUMPzee cough).

As I’ve talked about before, the future of “social media’s” success formula will have nothing to do with the amount of people following you on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, your RSS feed, etc.

The future of social media success will have to do with Likes, Favorites or Thumbs Up. Companies, marketers and advertisers will scramble to produce content that will receive the most Likes possible rather than just amassing non-interactive followers.

Google Reader has made a step towards that future today by making the Shared Items feature a real-time experience both within Google Reader and places such as FriendFeed where the Like mechanism is so important for discovery and relevancy in that particular community:

We’re therefore happy to announce that Reader has begun adoption of the PubSubHubbub protocol, beginning with the publishing of our shared items. All shared item pages have feeds, and now all of those feeds will ping a hub (and there’s a element in them). This means that if you (as a web app developer) would like to more efficiently and quickly monitor Reader shares, you just have to subscribe at the hub to be notified of changes in real-time. If you want to learn more about PubSubHubbub and how it works, see the site and protocol definition.

via Official Google Reader Blog: PubSubHubbub support for Reader shared items.

Affiliate marketers need to start positioning their content, sites, items, feeds, etc to better integrate with the real-time and “likable” future where discovery will be dependent on the metric of Likes.

I didn’t realize DirectTrack had mobile implementation. This is a major innovation.

Roll out new and exclusive campaigns and payout details to your publisher base in real-time. Constant and meaningful communication is one of the key ingredients to building and nurturing affiliate relationships for maximum productivity, ROI and loyalty. In an industry where time is money and the competition is fierce, DirectTrack’s new mobile interface will arm your network with the powerful ammunition it needs to stay one step ahead of the pack—while providing your affiliates with the information they immediately need.

via Reach Your Affiliates – Anytime, Anywhere.

Are there any other affiliate networks offering a mobile client?

I keep waiting on the ShareASale, Linkshare or CJ iPhone client…