Thanks to Trisha Fawver, this swanky personalized Red Sox t-shirt appeared in my mailbox this morning.
Trish is the marketing manager for PsPrint. Be sure to check out their affiliate program.
Thanks Trish!
Boy, do I look tired. That must be because my wife has been away at a corporate meeting at Doral in Miami for the past 5 days. No, I’m not run down from enjoying a partying bachelor lifestyle. Instead, I’ve taken this opportunity to perform a “binky exorcism” on our two year old son and spare mom the pain. You parents know what I’m talking about. It has been successful, but not without mental and physical damage (mostly to me).
Note: If you’d like to get a shirt featured here on jangro.com, you can send a shirt to MechMedia, Inc. PO Box 886 Stow, MA 01775. If you need a physical address, email me: scott at jangro dot com. (I don’t know why I’m obscuring that email address. every spammer in the world has it.)
The guys over at Disqus have been delivering some steady improvements to the Disqus platform, and video comments are by far the most significant. Previously, they announced some improved popup profile information as well as inline editing of submitted comments. There may be more that I’ve missed.
I miss these updates because here on Jangro.com because I’m using the Disqus wordpress plugin that is based on their API instead of using Javascript integration to load up the comments. The Disqus guys are not keeping that version of the plugin up-to-date with the new features.
What’s this API version of the plugin? When you integrate with Wordpress, you have two choices of plugins to grab from Disqus.
The Javascript plugin is a “client-side” integration. When your blog post is served up, there’s some javascript code runs in the reader’s browser that goes off and grabs any comments from the Disqus service, very much like how Adsense works. If you look at the source of a page with this on it, you won’t actually see any of the comment text. It’s loaded after the page is rendered using Javascript code that fetches the content from Disqus.
The API, Beta version does this calling to the Disqus service on the server-side, before the page is sent down to the browser. This means that the comment text gets sent down as HTML along with the blog post.
If you’ve followed my love affair with Disqus, you know that it started with an evaluation of third party comment system plugins. A major factor, if not THE major factor, that had me choose Disqus was this server-side integration.
In my opinion, comments are the life-blood of an active blog and not only do they show readers that there’s a vibrant community behind a blog, it gives search engines more to work with. This becomes especially important as the blog content itself becomes less and less text-rich with video and audio podcasts.
Search engines cannot see the comments rendered with the Javascript plugin. They do see the comments displayed via the API version of the plugin.
The Javascript implementation does have its benefits. In addition to ease of integration and feature updates, the fact that comment text is unavailable to search engines means that comment spam is rendered completely ineffective. There are other ways to accomplish this, and for now, I’m uncomfortable with using a full Javascript implementation.
I may change my mind down the road, especially if the Disqus guys abandon the API version of the plugin and force a decision on me.
I do hope the bring it up to date and give us the choice.
With a big thanks to Daniel at Disqus, I present what I believe to be the first free t-shirt chinpose.
What’s a chinpose you ask? It requires a thoughtful and serious gaze and of course hand on chin. An expensive watch or other classy accessory is always a nice touch.
What’s Disqus you ask? It’s an awesome blog comment service that is used here on Jangro.com and other forward thinking blogs. If you have one or more blogs, you owe it to yourself to take a good look at this service.
Why not leave a comment and check it out?
While I’m not the first person to whore himself out for free t-shirts in exchange for blog publicity, you cannot beat the chinpose. And I am pretty damn handsome in this steel gray tee, wouldn’t you agree?
Drop me a note if you’d like to send me a shirt. sjangro at gmail.
As I mentioned in the podcast I did on friday, the Geekcast.fm crew, as well as myself and a few others acquired a new “fan” last week.
A person acting anonymously under the pseudonym of “Marky Zarc” posted a blog on blogspot, entitled lorenfeldman.blogspot.com including posts that not only made fun of us, but said some pretty hurtful things.
He pulled the site down quickly, perhaps because he got the idea that we were onto his identity. More on that later.
Of course we did grab mirrors, screen shots, and even videos of the entire blog, so while he was able to take down the blog, we’ve got it all saved:
Satirical posts that make fun of people aren’t that unusual and you might even be thinking, what’s the big deal?
Honestly, I don’t really think that any of the subjects of this would have minded the attention at all, but Marky Zarc crossed the line and got pretty hurtful. The venomous posts were clearly fueled by anger, most of it apparently directed toward Shawn Collins and Sam Harrelson, calling Sam a Redneck, making fun of a lisp (non-existant), and painting an unflattering and unprofessional picture of Shawn and the Affiliate Summit conference. The rest of us (Jim Kukral, Todd Crawford, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Loren Feldman) weren’t exactly spared, but we seemed to be a bit more incidental to purpose of the attacks.
We have more, maybe the others will post something as well.
Who is Marky Zarc?
The fact of the matter is that while he surely thought he was acting anonymously, he left enough fingerprints for us to quickly figure out exactly who this is.
He’s an affiliate manager with a program that’s running in Commission Junction, and he did all this from his company, during business hours. This is a large company based in the Midwest US. That’s all I’ll say for now as outing him may not be the best course.
I’d expect a professional in this industry to not let emotions get the better of him and do anything so stupid as to jeopardize his reputation, or worse.
Now I think the last thing any of us want to do is stoop to his level and become the aggressors or jerks.
But do we just let him clean up after himself and walk away? That’s the question, and a hard thing to do.
Lessons Learned
Regardless of the course of action from here, there are a few lessons to be taken from this.
First, it is very difficult to cover all of your tracks on the Internet. If you’re smart, you can do it, but fortunately, most people who are stupid enough to pull something like this are also stupid enough to be lazy or naive about covering their tracks.
Second, don’t shit in your own yard. If you’ve got a beef with someone in your industry, is it worth staking your own reputation on playing foolish games like this? Criticism is fine, and to me, always welcome. But this was not criticism. It was much worse.
Third, as people make themselves more personally visible with blogs and especially video and audio podcasts, it opens them up to attacks from people who for whatever reason don’t like what they’re seeing and hearing. If you’re putting yourself out there, be prepared for the significant possibility that someone’s going to take a shot at you. Thick skin helps.
Unfortunately, this ins’t the first time this has happened and it won’t be the last.
Note: This is a post submitted by a reader of jangro.com. If you would like to submit a post to be published here, click here.
Is this the million dollar question? Ah…No. But I propose to call it the $1 per day question. Huh? Let me explain.
There is so many things out on the internet that say something like, “How to make $500 day on the internet using these 3 simple steps.” Let me give you some free advice. Ignore those.
I’ve read a few and it’s all garbage. Honestly, think about it. Are they making $500 per day? If they are it’s from all the suckers who gave them $99 for their “groundbreaking” e-book. So that’s one way to do it, but not the way they will tell you in their book. Usually the 3 simple steps are:
Start a website or blog.
Sell popular products (like everyone else).
Market those products on search engines (not simple).
If someone is promoting an offer that is making them $500 per day, do you really think they are going to tell you about it? A few years ago I ran an offer that made me $800 per day. Guess what? I didn’t tell a soul about it until my luck ran out. Why would I do that? I tell people and now I’m competing against them.
I’m writing this post to give you real advice. Advice you can actually use today. It will not make you millions of dollars but it will change your perspective in a way to help you grow your affiliate marketing efforts.
Most affiliate marketers have their day job and use affiliate marketing as supplemental income. Yes, you’d love to have it be your full-time job but, then again, I’d like to play for the Atlanta Braves.
Very few have this privilege. Right now, I want you to focus only on where your affiliate marketing business is today.
Remember the story of The Tortoise and the Hare? Slow and steady wins the race. That’s the theme for this advice. I want you to look at what your currently doing and ask yourself this question:
What Can I Do To Make $1 More Per Day?
One lousy buck? Come on Jason! Listen. $1 per day is $30 per month or $365 per year. Now, still not going to pay off your mortgage but I’ve at least peaked your interest. Do what you must to make $1 per day more. Here are a few ideas:
Write some Squidoo lenses or Hubpages promoting products with great content.
Start a blog focusing on a micro-niche. Free idea: Nascar Baby Gifts. What I usually recommend doing is looking at a site you’d like to promote. Pick one of their sub-categories and make a micro-niche site/blog out of just those products.
Move up a few spots on Google by researching some SEO strategies and doing some hard work to implement it.
Make your landing pages better (split-testing).
Improve the look of your site. After we re-designed CornerStorkBabyGifts.com our conversion rate improved by 15%. We all know the math but we forget that improving a conversion rate from 1% to 2% DOUBLES your income!
The point of this post is not to give you ideas, but to change your mindset. Work hard, do what it takes to reach that $1 per day increase. If it takes a $100 investment to get there, do it. Usually, though, it’s going to take the investment of your time. Time to find a good link exchange partner, time to write great content/lens/article, time to create a better landing page, time to create another website, etc..
What happens when I reach my $1 per day goal?
Do it again. And again. And again. Now your up to making $5 per day or $1825 more per year. After awhile you’ll get better at generating those extra dollars that you’ll be asking yourself:
What Can I Do To Make $10 More Per Day?
Still may not seem like much but it’s $300 per month (would that pay your electric bill?) or $3,600 per year. I’m not going to lie to you. It’s hard work, but you’ll discover that affiliate marketing is a lot about building. Continue to build. Create a site that makes you $100 per month. Then build another. And another. Make them sites that require a small amount of maintenance.
Affiliate marketing is a lot about mathematics. $100,000 is a big number. But if we break it down, it’s only $12 per hour! $12 bucks an hour! I can make that working at almost anywhere. Go, get working. You’ve wasted too much time reading this.
Note: This is a post submitted by a reader of jangro.com. If you would like to submit a post to be published here, click here.
Jangmeister, I observed some friends shopping the other week, and learned something interesting, and would like to get your take on it, as well as your visitors. In some newer browsers, there’s a third party cookie warning icon that shows in the status bar. IE’s icon is an eyeball with the international symbol for no (red circle with angled slash in it). Two of three shoppers I recently observed, when they saw the icon, they volunteered to me (I didn’t point it out to them) that the site was “spying” on them by using cookies. They said if the site wasn’t one that they trusted (like Amazon), they’d bail on providing any information, like any purchase or signup. So, of late, I’ve become very aware of it’s presence.
Your blog here uses two services that try to load a third party cookie - seesmic.com and lijit.com. I was using a social tag (addthis.com) that was doing the same thing on a site of mine. Having heard these shoppers reaction to the icon (one called it the “do not spy” symbol), I took down the service.
I have an affiliate site that serves up merchant images and that merchant was kind (sarcasm) enough to try to set a third party cookie when the image is called. I am planning to host the images on my own server, which I want to do for speed anyhow, given the adwords quality scoring issue regarding page load time - but doing so will also solve my third party cookie issue on this site.
So, question is, am I concerned (calling it worried would be an overstatement) about nothing here? Does my small sample size of my shopping observations have me over tweaked on this issue?
Assuming visitor’s behavior is affected by it, and since seo algo’s build in things that consumer’s care about, do you believe there’s an seo impact likely attached to having third party cookies called?
Most modern browsers default to block them anyhow, so should we contact these parties (addthis, lijit, etc) as webmasters and say “hey dudes/dudettes, knock the cookie calls off, you won’t get data anyhow and you’re thirst for data ain’t helping us, and might even pimple our butt cheeks now and then”? Or do you think the data collection lust has become such a strong pull (Alexa comes to mind), that it’d be pointless to ask?
Transparency is a term that’s tossed around quite a bit in affiliate marketing, and I don’t think any affiliate marketing network fits my definition of transparent. Listen to hear my take on transparency in affiliate marketing.
I also discuss the TwitterMeThis/TwatterMeThat marketing spoof by Jim Kukral, Sam Harrelson, and Shawn Collins and the recent Twitter privacy Gaffe.
Today’s podcast is hosted on switchpod.com. Previously I’ve been using podango, but I’ve been waiting two hours for this episode to be processed. I give up.
Today, Patriots’ day, I listened to David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby on Rails framework) talk about the secret to making money online in a presentation at “Startup School ‘08″, and most of my podcast today is on that subject, my takeaways, and thoughts related to my business in affiliate marketing.
