I forgot to post about the Petition against Commission Junctions Link Management Initiative.I believe it was actually good that I post about it separately, because it would have gone lost in my very long post.Scott Jangro started the Petition and almost 150 people signed and commented it by now already.I encourage every Commission Junction Affiliate that sees this post to sign the Petition, because it will be in your own best interest.Link to CJ-Petition against CJ’s LMIThe changes are very slim, that CJ will change their plans back, but at least will they know what affiliates are thinking about it.It also sends a message to the Merchants at CJ who should have an interest in keeping Affiliates in general and also keeping them busy promoting their products rather than updating and re-programming all their Websites. There might be a tiny chance to convince CJ to re-think their initiative , if Merchants and Affiliates let hear their voices together and say: NO-LMI!
It has been almost 2 Weeks now since Commission Junction announced on 5/23/2006 their LMI P1 or Link Management Initiative Phase 1 (CJ Account required).It caused quite an uproar in the Affiliate Marketing Community and a lot of debate and speculation. There are still 2 more weeks before Phase I gets actually launched on 6/23, but a lot of stuff did happen already which made me decide to write a summary and my opinion why CJ is doing this.I will be proven wrong or right in the months to come. In either case, it will be an interesting time and there is a lot of pain to come. The overall effects of that can not be estimated, but no matter how it develops, it will have a lasting effect for the years to come.The CJ stated “The Link Management Initiative (LMI) was conceived in response to requests from our employees, advertisers and publishers” (“our (CJ) employees”? Is this a typo? shouldn’t it be spelled employer?). I guess this statement was not entirely correct because people had a hard time to find publishers or advertisers that applauded the announcement as something they were looking for and wanted to have.Sudden ImpactThe strongest and loudest criticism and rant came from the CJ Publishers (Affiliates) , because they are affected the most by CJ’s announcement.It was not all just screaming and yelling which a lot of marketing professionals consider a common trait of especially smaller publishers, when it comes to changes in this industry.[…]
I didn’t see the simple kept email from Commission Junction which was sent on Tuesday night at first. It looked not important in the bulk of emails in my Inbox on Wednesday morning. I saw the announcement first at thread watch. The Threadwatch Post refers to Jeff Molander’s view on the topic and to Scott’s Jangro’s Blog Post which was very good in pointing out some of the major issues with CJ’s idea. I decided to leave a long comment there and showed even more problems with CJ’s plan to replace regular URL links with AdSense-Like or Google Analytics-Like JavaScript code. This post does repeat some of my comments, but from a slight different perspective. I also refer to statements made there a couple times without repeating them here. I recommend to read all the posts and comments and also check the hundreds of posts at the ABestWeb Marketing Forum and of course the source of all this trouble, CJ’s email announcement of their Link Management Initative (you do require a CJ Advertiser or Publisher Account for access).The PlanThe CJ JavaScript Ad’s can not be used in all cases. The option to get a different URL for email and another for PPC Advertising and another for product feeds is not going to work in all real-world scenarios eitherIt will get really ugly, if CJ is going to disable referrer tracking for a link that was created for one purpose, but is being used for a different one by the publisher.Here[…]
If probably heard in the News or from an internet savvy friend about Google’s Big Daddy update and the mounting problems that developed since the update was started at the beginning of February. My business site, the comparison shopping portal ConsumerMatch.com was affected by the Google problems as were hundreds of others. It have been very frustrating months for everybody who got “hit” by this. The worst thing of all is, that there is nothing we can do about it, but wait and hope that Google gets it’s act straight and that everything will be back to normal rather sooner than later.It started last summer with Google’s Big 3 Phase Jagger Update. The goal of Jagger was to detect spam and duplicate content better and cleanse the Google Search Index from millions of pages of junk. The Jagger update caused serious problems for our Websites. We were not the only sites that got problems. A lot of other sites. Google was able to remove a lot of Spam from their Index, but removed together with the Spam a lot of legit and valuable content.The last months of 2005 were pretty much like a roller coaster ride for us: Added to the Index, Loosing Pages, Removed, Appearing, Growing and the same from the beginning again. To make the story short; our Google traffic during the peak of the holidays was virtually nothing.Google Engineer Matt Cutts posted on 10/19/2005 at his blog what Webmasters should do, who’s websites dropped out of the[…]
The title of this post is not just hype, but a serious question.Here is what happened.I wrote and published 5 days ago on 4/24/2006 my article about my experiences and opinions about the current beta of Google’s new toy called Google Pages. Link to Full Article: Google Pages DemystifiedIt is now 4/29/2006, for only 3 hours, because it is right now 3:00 am in the morning here in Fresno/California. I got my usual email from GoogleAlerts.com at around 6:00 pm. GoogleAlerts.com is the commercial version of Google’s Free Service with the same name. It has some more features and options that the free version does not have. Anyhow, I use the service to monitor Google Search Results for important things that affect me personally or professionally, such a my Name, Artist Nick Name, Company Name, My Websites etc.Here is what I looked at and had me read it twice.The Account is now a bit over a week old and the content (5 Pages) is up for about 5 days now. The Site is already in Google’s index and here it comes: outranking a lot of old sites for the same key-phrase. It ranked #17 and when I checked now in complete disbelieve, was it still #17. The Search Results are for my companies name, VisionOne,Inc. (#24 if you count the indent sub-results). It outranked almost a 100 other websites (our clients for the most part), with an estimated 487,000 Pages indexed by Google. I am absolutely speechless. This is something[…]
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