The always reliable Brian Krebs with an amazing story of Russian spammers, huge botnets and oddly named pwnsters. Microsoft on Monday named a Russian man as allegedly responsible for running the Kelihos botnet, a spam engine that infected an estimated 40,000 PCs. But closely held data seized from a huge spam affiliate program suggests that the driving force behind Kelihos is a … [Read more...]
CPC Rates Up By 20% While Mobile Video Traffic Triples
While affiliates gathered in Vegas and then found themselves stuck by the snow storm on the East Coast, life went on. CPC rates were found to have gone up by an average of almost 20% during 2010. YouTube announced it was serving 200 million views a day to mobile devices and is now going to run ads on that traffic. And spammers invaded Mechanical Turk. Catch up with news you can … [Read more...]
Shock! Google Isn’t Infallible!
It has become crystal clear over the last week that Google rushed the introduction of Google Buzz, did little or no external user-testing, and as a result is scrambling to mitigate a massive PR failure. As we reported last week, early concerns about privacy were confirmed for many when a blogger writing under the name of Harriet Jacobs complained that her “actual … [Read more...]
Winning With Authority
It's all good - from online advertising being up 25 percent, according to the IAB; to online commerce on the rise 23 percent, according to comScore; to Google search queries that are up 41 percent, per Nielsen//NetRatings. It's clear that online marketing grew strongly through the first three quarters of 2007.However, as industries grow, so does the attention paid by state and … [Read more...]
The Tangled Web of Link Spam
In my last column, you were warned to "Never watch sausage being made," lest you find the process so unappetizing you'd never eat it again. But even if you find sausage links tasty, you'll want to spit out those spam links every time.Last time, we explored the consequences of content spam, which include bad publicity and getting banned from the search engines. This time around, … [Read more...]
Spiders Don’t Eat Spam
It's the headline any search marketer would dread: "Google Bans BMW for Search Spamming." For well-known companies, such bad publicity is reason enough to stay away from deceptive search practices. BMW's plight was published in leading newspapers worldwide. But even small companies have reputations to uphold, because the blogosphere can trash a carefully cultivated image for … [Read more...]
Going to the Mat
In the last two issues of Revenue magazine I've written about mistakes that affiliates make, highlighting common errors that most affiliates commit at some point in their affiliate marketing ventures as well as detailing my own outrageous faux pas. Turnabout is fair play, so in this issue we'll look at an example of how affiliate managers prove that they too are only … [Read more...]
Feeding the Beast
If you're doing online marketing and you're not leveraging RSS, what the heck are you waiting for? New technologies that both publishers and advertisers use to connect with online consumers are always continuing to emerge. From HTML to Macromedia Flash to streaming video, the arrival of distribution methods requires organizations to periodically reinvent how they speak to their … [Read more...]
Win Or Lose
In a lot of ways, Cynthia Fanshaw is just another star in the affiliate marketing universe. With a specialty in search engine marketing, she works hard to drive traffic to her company's site and then to convert visitors to customers. She's anxious to learn new tricks that give her an edge over competitors, and glad to share a few tips with newbies. But there's one thing that … [Read more...]
Hot Profits
The marketing of adult entertainment is a lot like any other segment of the affiliate industry, except that it is nothing like any other. The business model and best practices are the same, with skills that easily translate to this sector. But the content makes this a world apart. X-rated sites commercialize one of the deepest human drives, one that's idealized, demonized, … [Read more...]
Side Effects
Affiliates promoting pharmaceuticals online can earn lifetime commissions and five-figure paychecks while helping consumers purchase the drugs they need for a fraction of what they would pay at the corner drugstore. But the price also can be unacceptably high. It certainly was for Ryan Haight. Using a debit card his parents gave him to buy baseball cards, the 18-year-old honor … [Read more...]
Been There Done That: Q & A with Shawn Collins
It's very difficult to find anyone in affiliate marketing better known than Shawn Collins, who earned his first commissions more than seven years ago.Wearing his newest hat, as president/CEO of Shawn Collins Consulting, he provides outsourced affiliate program management. But he is, perhaps, better known as a co-founder of Affiliate Summit, as the author of the top-selling book … [Read more...]
The Spam Jam
What a mess. Jim Gordon is hell-bent on collecting some of the $600,000 or so he thinks Commonwealth Marketing Group owes him for sending more than 1,500 emails advertising credit cards. He says the emails had inadequate subject lines and the transmission paths - the list of computers that passed along the email - had been doctored. Gordon, who runs an online health and … [Read more...]
Cyber Creeps
When thousands of consumers got emails asking them to help electronics retailer Best Buy combat Internet fraud, they were eager to help. But those who clicked on the link and entered credit card and Social Security numbers learned the ugly truth too late: They'd been had.The link took them to a "spoof" page that looked just like Best Buy's home page but was actually operated by … [Read more...]