We Do Search Engine Optimization.

To the surprise of no one in the affiliate marketing industry, the Google Adsense Referrers program officially enters the deadpool. This service will be reborn as the Google Affiliate Network using the property Google acquired from the DoubleClick.com deal in March 2008 for $3.1 Billion.

Google now is a serious player in the affiliate ad space and it will be fun to see if they integrate this into other properties such as adsense and youtube.

I would love to have one place to be able to manage all my ads, and Google may create such a system. The one thing that would drive me away from this affiliate program is if Google required javascript links. I only use RSS feeds and text links, and a switch to Java Script only would be a deal breaker.

Transcript from the Google Adsense team

Thank you for participating in the AdSense Referrals program.
We’re writing to let you know that we will be retiring the AdSense
Referrals program during the last week of August. We appreciate
your patience during this transition and here are some alternative
options to consider:

* Google Affiliate Network: As part of the integration of
DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now
operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting
users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense
Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers
to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on
advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For
further details, please visit:
www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork.
* AdSense for content ads: If you have less than three AdSense
for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the
referral ad units with standard AFC ad units.

If you currently use referral ads, either to promote Google
products or offerings from AdWords advertisers, AdSense Referrals
code will no longer display ads beginning the last week of August.
We encourage you to take the following steps before the product is
retired:

* Remove the referral code from your site(s): Please take a
moment to remove all referral code from your sites before the last
week of August, so you can continue to effectively monetize your
ad space.
* Run and save all referrals reports on your desktop: Create
and save all reports related to the referrals program on your
desktop, so you continue to have access to your valuable campaign
information

Why is this happening?
We’re constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing
and supporting features which drive the best monetization results
for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing
features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most
effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring
the AdSense Referrals program. If you have any additional
questions, please visit our Help Center:

http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=14882

Sincerely.

The Google AdSense Team

———————————————————————————————

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service
announcement to update you about the retirement of an AdSense
feature.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

It’s not polite to gloat, but it is nice to prove Michael Arrington wrong once in a while. Read Write and Double Click have coverage of this affiliate marketing deal.

Godaddy has been accused of bidding against its own customers in their tdnam.com domain name auctions.
Domain name auctions are a huge business, which generate millions of dollars for expired domains.

The 3 large players in the expired domains business

1. NameJet.com
2. SnapNames.com
3. Pool.com

TDNAM is the GoDaddy acronym for The Domain Name AfterMarket, and does not provide the same level of service as the 3 main services.

A GoDaddy Vice President has been caught bidding against customers in their own domain name auctions. The employee Adam Dicker isn’t just any GoDaddy employee; he’s head of the GoDaddy subsidiary that controls the auctions. Dicker won some of the domains he bid for, and pushed up the bid price on auctions he didn’t win.

The conflict of interest is unethical, and possibly illegal according to ICANN domain name auction regulations. However, Godaddy loves controversy and I’m sure this is just part of their marketing plan. How many more links have they gained as a result of their controversial domain marketing plans?

See the news on the Nodaddy forum with comments from disgruntled godaddy customers. Nodaddy provides Godaddy reviews and rates Godaddy services.

Slashdot has a large commentary of the godaddy VP bidding on their company auctions.

While browsing the web we have all seen our share of good and bad site designs. This post lists 10 web design unspoken rules that will help you maintain a usable website and happy customers.

Choosing to ignore any of these rules could result in a complete loss of site visitors and receive flames from CSS gurus and web design forums

The Web Design Manifesto

1. No gratuitous use of animated gifs
2. Do not use blinking text.
3. Do not use Thou shalt not use marquee or rapidly moving text.
4. Do not label links ‘Click Here’
5. Do not use graphical flash intros with a ‘click here to skip intro’ button
6. Do not use background music that starts automatically
7. Do not use images in place of text
8. Do not use multiple font variations
9. Do not require Internet Explorer
10. Do not have animations or moving backgrounds behind text

Inspired by Dwight’s deadly sins of web design.

Check out these “Speed Limiters” replacing speed bumps on city streets. They make an extremely effective speed limiting device, at least the first time.

Humongus potholes on city streets

Underneath the large pot hole

Brilliant marketing campaign for Pioneer Suspension to promote their new suspension parts.

Cements the idea that driving over this massive pot hole with no shudder is what a Pioneer Suspension upgrade is like.

This car suspension ad is noted on other blogs.

The BBC has a very good documentary on the financial events leading up to the current credit crunch and banking crisis. This video is UK centric but is relevant to the United States credit crisis as much of the lending to sub prime borrowers originated here.

10 hedge fund managers pulled in 500 million dollars last year with a lucky few pulling nearly 1 Billion dollars

The video explains discrepancy in risk-adjusted returns for these financial brokers. They made obscene amounts of money without taking on any risk. Assets are no longer a function of value but a function of liquidity.

US tax payers may have to bail out the large investment banks like Bear Stearns.

In England there are currently 30,000 people earning over half a million pounds a year, and over 50 Billionaires. All of them work in finance related industries like hedge funds and private equity firms.

The video starts off a bit slow, but there are some very good financial analysis and explanation after about 10 minutes.

Basically the problem is that brokers, not actual banks, created the mortgages for the past 6 years. The brokers had no connection to any lending institution, and sold their originated mortgages instantly, often times to overseas investors. Unfortunately the fee structure incentive for brokers was to create inflated home valuations and provide financing to any individual regardless of the personal credit. The more loans a mortgage broker created, the more money they made and they had absolutely no responsibility after the loan was created.

These sub prime loans were sold to investors as AAA rated investments. Normally a mortgage is a good investment, however the value of the home loans inflated too rapidly and these borrowers were not able to maintain payments on the inflated loan amount. Unlucky investors who believed they had purchased AAA securities are left holding the bag. If 1 million homes go into foreclosure because of these bad lending practices, and the median home purchase price was $250,000 this leaves $250,000,000,000 in bad debt. This is a lot for any bank to reconcile.

ND and WB have more about the details of the underlying factors of our current recession caused by unsafe lending practices.

Ever have the feeling that the US is falling behind on technology and innovation?

Italian architects and building engineers have one upped the world with a dynamic skyscraper prototype that has articulated floors. Each floor will have wind turbines that turns a static building into a digital wind generator.

The modular construction concept is also revolutionary – each piece is built in a factory and assembled on site. Construction time reduced from 30 to 18 months and lowering on site workers from 2000 to 90.

Each floor will rotate a maximum of one full rotation in 90 minutes. The entire tower will be powered from turbines and solar panels, and five other buildings in the vicinity will also be provided with electricity. The turbines will be located between each of the rotating floors. They will generate 1,200,000 kilowatt-hours of energy from the movement of the floors, and the solar panels will be located on the roof. 5 other buildings will benefit from the green energy generated by this single tower.

The first modular skyscraper will be built in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

I have to admit i have not seen any ROI from Shopping.com.
Some merchants may have great success with this pay per click shopping engine, but I’m leery of using this service.

There is very little transparency and no indication of traffic and click quality. I would only use the Shopping.com system for very specific products in targeted niches. So it may work to sell ultra high end photography cameras but is useless to sell commodity cannon cameras.

It is very difficult to cancel an account. Only by calling their support center and using the knowledge base was I able to find out how to pause all bids.

1. To cancel your Shopping.com account login to the merchant manager
2. navigate to: Overview > CPC Program > Bidding Info
3. make all bids 0

This is hidden in the Shopping knowledge base here:

http://merchantsupport.shopping.com/kb/02n3000000001gSAAQ

Thanks shopping.com for making your site difficult to use, lack transparency and have very little phone support.

It was so easy to make a presidential bid I decided there was no reason not to try. With the internet and a little online optimization the barriers to the highest office in the land just went down. Stephen Colbert of South Carolina, watch out!

This is an amazing piece of viral video content. The social media marketers who came up with this “your name here” presidential bid should be richly rewarded.

Guy Kawasaki’s new venture Alltop.com is looking for a logo and is having a contest to generate one. We decided to enter and created 6 variations. These were done by my amazing graphics colleague Darwin. He is a great addition to our web development team, and has an awesome name that is fun to say.

Checkout the logos for the uber venture capitalist’s website. You can enter the contest or read about how the logo contest began.

Option 1

Option 2

Option 3

Option 4

Option 5

Option 6

*Update – we won! Thanks to all the voters who chose our logo and Guy Kawasaki for the iPod touch. The real prize is being affiliated with this great website.

Zappos.com shoe seller has fanatical employees that live for customer service. They have a company manifesto to put the customer first, something rarely seen in the e-commerce world. I remember Nordstrom having fanatical service and went to extraordinary lengths to keep customers satisfied.

One legendary Nordstrom story is when a long time customer wanted to return a set of automobile tires. Nordstrom is a clothing company that doesn’t sell tires, but to keep this man happy the sales staff cheerfully accepted the car tires and issued an in store credit. When you have lifetime customers, this is a small price to pay for loyalty.

Video from the Harvard site explaining the Zappos employee policy

It’s a hard job, answering phones and talking to customers for hours at a time… when Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers… paid their full salary during this period.

After a week in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls The Offer: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.”

Why? Because if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment & passion they are looking for.

I am sure this money is good an investment in Zappos future. Companies with the best working environment and best employees will win.

Calicanis posts the story from the Harvard Business Publishing site.