Everyone has heard about “The World Is Flat”. I was recently watching the author of the book, Thomas Friedman, give a keynote address which was being broadcast on CNBC. The program was aptly titled, “The World Is STILL Flat”.
It was an interesting lecture, but there were 2 points that clearly stuck on -
 
1 - He said that the date August 9, 1995 should be etched in History. Why? Because this is the day a small technology company called Netscape went public and triggered the dot com boom. Their simple little point, click and surf browser coupled with the tons of optical fiber laid by companies instantly brought Bangalore, Beijing and America closer. It made us all neighbors!!!

2 - In a flat world anything will be done, either it will be done by u or to you.

We all know about the first point. However, it’s the second point that I feel is so true. Today, the barrier for entry to most business is much lower than it ever was… and if one can dream it… he can do it. And if he doesn’t, someone else surely will!!!

Just read Fortune’s latest story “Is Mark Zuckerberg the next Bill Gates?” Josh Quittner says,

“Let’s say Mister Softie (Microsoft) wins, with a $1.5 billion buy in. Microsoft gets first dibs, not only on the nascent business, but on the nascent businessman: Mark Zuckerberg. Yes! Who better to succeed Bill Gates?

As every school child knows, the similarities are striking. Both men came from upper-middle class families and dropped out of Harvard to pursue their tech visions. Gates built a new platform (actually, two, if you count DOS and Windows) and Zuckerberg aims to create one now.”

Hell! It’s too early to make such a comparison, Josh Quittner! Agreed facebook is all around in the news today. Agreed facebook is massively capturing the ‘young adults drawn to social networking’ crowd. Agreed they JUST launched the Facebook platform and are soon looking to tap the huge advertising potential that their network offers. But hello, there’s no point in making comparisons right away; give Facebook some time to show their true prowess! Having said this, I also will agree that I’m a Facebook fan and tremendously respect Mark and co. for building a really snazzy networking site and attracting all the traffic that they are!

Bill Gates drummed up a “software industry” when there wasn’t one, made the “then only used by large companies” computer “personal” in the true sense (Remember Ken Olsen of digital computers said, “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home” We know what happened to Digital next!). Let’s see what revolutionizing can Zuckerberg  do with his Facebook platform!

- Archit

Office was buzzing with activity as usual this evening. When suddenly, phones started ringing and Vishal’s mobile went on an overdrive. And before anyone of us could comprehend what’s happening, a team mate dashed in to the conference room where 3 of us work, and said, ‘We’re on Rediff…1st page!’ 

And then we checked and found Vishal’s interview in an article titled ‘A million dollar company built on failure.’ We knew an article on rediff.com was coming but never expected it to be titled this way! Extremely candid interview with our CEO, who answers the ‘How we started off’ questions with a tremendous zeal The article talks in depth about his journey from a Radio FM site webmaster to being the CEO of a 40 odd employee firm and seeks to motivate budding entrepreneurs, which I think it does, looking at the comments that started flowing in. 

You read interviews of the rich and famous, celebrities and businessmen; and one day you read an interview of this kid who had the passion to defy odds, fulfil his dream and go on to build an organization…and it truly makes you sit back and wonder…”If he could do it, why can’t I?” So let’s hope this article reaches out and inspires many like us who dream to achieve something special!

- Archit

The internet has made it simple for people to copy content… but search engines like Google and sites like copyscape have made it even simpler to find these guys. The question once you find them is whether you want to go through the trouble of getting them off the search engines or the internet.

Personally, like every other person who spends time thinking and coming up with original content, I hate people copying stuff from our site. However, a sentence or 2 here or there is something I tend to ignore. However, there are a quite a few folks out there who have copied entire paragraphs of content. There are a few who have copied our entire pages, including references to our inhouse web analytics tool, Hitstatz. I wonder how they can call themselves genuine business practicing ethical SEO.

While I don’t want to mention all the sites that have copied our stuff here, I have to mention this one guy - http://www.magicinfomedia.com/search-engine-optimization-india.html.

This guy has copied our entire front page, including screenshots of Hitstatz reports and has the audacity to refer to this image as a screenshot of their inhouse analytics application. I would love to meet this guy and ask him to prove that he has developed an inhouse analytics application that produces reports that look like that picture.

I sincerely pray and hope that people, who want to do business, understand that setting up an online business is hard work and you cannot just copy original content written by other people if you want to genuinely grow and survive in the longer term.

There has been a lot of discussion on what determines if your site is displayed in the “pages from a region” result page of Google. i.e. - what determines if a site will show up in the “pages from UK” or “pages from India” Google results?

While we’ve been pretty sure that your site qualifies for listing under this section only if your site pages are hosted in a particular country, we’ve noticed that there is still a lot of discussion going on with people speculating whether other sources determine listing.

Another question that I am frequently asked is whether a .com domain can rank on a regional Google result i.e. - A result page on google.co.in or google.co.uk. There had been an issue about ranking a .com in a regional Google result page, but I believe that that has been sorted out in January this year. A major factor that determines if your site ranks high on Google.co.uk or Google.co.in is your WhoIS data and not the .com or .co.uk or extension of your domain.

Anyways, since there is still a lot of noise out there with a lot of people speculating, we have now decided to go out there and run a comprehensive test to determine the major factors that dictate if your site will appear higher on a regional search result page and if a site will show up in the country specific page results. Stay tuned for more…

Google analytics has informed that there is a temporary reporting delay since Saturday night. Their blog states that “no data will be lost - data will continue to be collected and processed during this time.” 

Further, they expect updates for all accounts to continue through Monday night into tomorrow and will update their blog when reporting is fully restored. 

Yahoo announced the rollout of a new feature that they call quality-based pricing. They claim that this is an ongoing effort to raise the value of their sponsored search and content match products.

So far all traffic for a particular keyword was billed at a certain amount. Now, with the introduction of Quality based pricing the cost per click will differ based on the quality of the websites that are providing traffic to you.

Yahoo claims that “Quality” is calculated based on conversion rates and other measurements of the ability to deliver more interested and valuable customers to you from particular distribution partner sites and discounts will be automatically applied to your account.

They also claim that cost per click should decrease. Its too early to conclude if that is going to happen… Lets wait and watch!

Dealing with clients is never easy - especially those who haven’t had any previous experience or knowledge of Affiliate Marketing. A few things I recommend are non-intuitive, and seem to go against accepted wisdom - but are essential to distinguish a mediocre campaign from a great one. What commission to pay is frequently an area which needs explaining.

Commissions aren’t everything. But when presented with a competitor campaign analysis, a client will point to his biggest competitor and insist on matching or bettering the commission he’s offering his affiliates. Obvious? Things aren’t as simple. Is a program that pays 15% comission necessarily more attractive than one that pays 13%? No.

What you really want for your client is a low cost per conversion - to sell as many items as is possible while paying out as little in commissions as is possible [1]. In that case, what you want to look at is the EPC, or earnings per 100 clicks [2]. The EPC for the affiliate is the cost per conversion (CPC) for the merchant.

We begin with an EPC value equal to or lower than, say, the client’s current EPC for his PPC (Adwords/Overture) program. Now we calculate what commission the client should offer:

EPC = (percentage of clicks that result in a sale) X (average value of a sale) X (commission) X 100

Now we know the EPC, the average value of an online sale (the client can tell you that, based on his past sales records). That leaves only the sales-to-click ratio to be estimated. This is where past experience is invaluable. I rely on past campaigns that I’ve run and use those as estimates (which turn out to be fairly accurate).

Now you know better than to rely on simply matching your competitor’s commissions - your client could be paying a lot more than he needs to for the same sales volume!

Notes:
[1] Note the difference - “as little in commissions” is a dollar term, while “percentage commissions” is a numerical term.

[2] Earnings for the affiliate, not the merchant!

- Rahul.

Rahul Gaitonde is an Affiliate Marketing consultant with Convonix Inc.

Any good affiliate marketer hits the Long Tail Dilemma of publishers fairly quickly. On the one hand are large publishers with lots of eyeballs which could get the merchant huge volumes of highly focused audiences. For instance, an India-centric Moto-enthusiast website such as http://www.xbhp.com/ would make a fantastic publisher for a motorcycle company such as Royal Enfield. These form the “head” of your publisher base - they number a few, but bring in substantial sale volumes individually. As an affiliate program manager, you will work with each individual large publisher to best position your merchant’s offerings on their web “real estate”. Here’s where you get real innovation, where magic with data feeds can be wrought, where true integration with content is possible.

However, affiliate program managers are also acutely aware that there’s tons of data being generated every single day on the web - and that every website, blog, service that comes online is more web real estate, and every new user is a potential affiliate. These form the “tail” of your publisher base. For an affiliate program to really scale (and scale tremendously), it must ride the wave of this data. As a program manager, you won’t chase and cut deals with each individual fish that jumps into the web pool. Today, you rely on publisher registrations on CJ, Shareasale, Linkshare and that minnow in the news lately, Performics. As the read-write web gathers mass, the tail is growing inexorably larger in comparison to the head.

The Dilemma, then, is this: you can’t offer the tail as much as you can offer the head. And reciprocally, the tail can’t perform acrobatics with your creatives and data feeds either. All your tail does today is slap banner or text ads on their blogs or home pages. That’s about the limit of adoption. Where’s the differentiation? Not only for your merchant, but also for you, the affiliate program manager? What value are you adding? If the only interaction with the tail is going to be making animated GIFs and catchy text ads, writing up a “Join our Affiliate Program” page on the merchant’s website, and registering on CJ et al (and waiting for the tail to sign up), the merchant will soon realize that the middleman isn’t adding any value, and will cut you out. He’d much rather do it himself.

What we’re seeing is the commoditization of the process of traditional affiliate marketing. The guys who’ll make the real bucks in the future are going to be those who’ll put easy-to-use tools in the hands of the tail. Or even better, make tools for affiliates that auto-deploy themselves. Who bring in the innovation that belongs in the head today into the tail. Amazon began the process way back with aStore, but that isn’t going far enough.

Hold it. Auto-deploy? Doesn’t that sound like Search Engine Marketing? Well, it does, in a way. From the publisher’s point of view, what’s the essential difference between AdSense and Affiliate marketing? With AdSense, the publisher has no control over what ads will be displayed in the AdSense code box that he/she slaps on his/her page, merely that they’ll be more or less relevant to the page content. With Affiliate marketing, the publisher chooses from a clutch of creatives provided by a merchant. Once you talk about auto-deploying merchant creatives in innovative, “head-like” ways, the line between them gets blurred. Several startups have caught on already. This comment on Sam Harrelson’s blog lists a few of the more interesting ones.

We’re at a fairly interesting juncture in the Affiliate Marketing market. The next big opportunity belongs to whoever will have the gumption to target the Long Tail, and do it in a way that goes far beyond the tired, banal banner-text-ad process that’s been perfected into a science. Watch this space!

- Rahul.

Rahul Gaitonde is an Affiliate Marketing consultant with Convonix Inc.

So Google’s decided to take the plunge and buy DoubleClick. And what’s more, along with the big bird, they also get Performics as part of the deal. Performics was a bit player in the affiliate marketing space until yesterday, but under the Google umbrella it transforms into a potential 800-pound gorilla. Understandably, the affiliate marketing corner of the blogosphere’s gone ballistic over it. Every affiliate consultant worth his/her salt has a take on it. There are two things which everyone seems to have missed. The less significant one first:

1.) The Goog doesn’t seem too enthusiastic about Performics. From the takeover FAQ:

Q. What will Google do with Performics?
A. Performics is part of DoubleClick, and we are acquiring it as part of the transaction. We have no plans to dispose of it at this time.

What is pay-per-action advertising?
Pay-per-action advertising is a new pricing model that allows advertisers to pay only when specific actions that they define are completed by a user on their site. Rather than paying for clicks or impressions, advertisers can choose to pay when a user makes a purchase, signs up for a newsletter, or completes any other clearly defined action that they choose. Pay-per-action ads are eligible to appear on publisher sites in the Google content network, and publishers can choose specific pay-per-action ads
that are relevant to their site to run in new ad units that they create.

- Rahul.

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