72 Kilowatts Internet Marketing

Over Convergence - The New Time Sink

A quick glance over to my sidebar there and you’ll find that I’ve incorporated Twitter into my blog.  So if Isay anything brainy over there, you’ll see it here, where I say ALL SORTS of brainy things.  It’s going to be a one way path, however.

I don’t think I’m going to try Twitter Feed.  Here’s why

I remember hearing about Twitter for the first time just before Affiliate Summit West 2007 in Las Vegas. Shareasale was going to use it to run some contests, we were all going to use it to plan dinners, drinks, etc.  And for the most part, it went pretty well.  But it was new, and people started using it like instantmessaging, which we already had available to us in may forms.  Since then, it seems to have calmed down.

But now, I can integrate anything I say at Twitter into my blog, into my Facebook, onto my phone, and thanks to TwitterFeed, vice versa.

I think RSS has caused an over convergence of technologies.  Making it easy to port information doesn’t make it desirable to do so in every situation.  I’m sure humanity saw the same issue when paper was invented, then radio, then television, etc.  And I suppose we’ll learn to come down with the RSS rush too, after a while.

But more to the point on Twittergration…  How much do we really want to know about each other?

Tags: affiliate summit, facebook, shareasale, twitter

Shareasale raises the cost of entry… just enough

I’ve often been critical of this industry, and the lack of responsibility put on the networks for watching the bad actors, and contract breakers. When all of the onus gets put on the merchant to monitor everything all the time, it keeps the small business from being able to effectively launch and manage an affiliate program, given the responsibilities of watching restricted keywords 24/7 etc.

The price of all that adds up.

At the same time, I always thought Shareasale was undervalued, perhaps to their own detriment, as well as ours.

In announcing the new merchant set up increase, I think Brian Littleton and company have done us a favor. The new price won’t discourage serious merchants from applying, but may cut back a bit on the crap we see over there on occasion.

Kudos to SAS on a wise move.

Tags: affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing networks, new affiliate programs, shareasale