Affiliate Marketing Blog from UK Offer MediaWelcome to Kieron’s blog - the life and times of an Internet Marketeer

Facebook Places privacy settings. How to stop your friends from checking you in

Today Facebook launched Facebook Places, although not live in the UK yet it will be soon. Basically Facebook are bringing checkins and location based services to the masses. Until now, this area has been pretty much dominated by FourSquare and Gowalla. Now while I love FourSquare and use it a lot, and I will undoubtedly use Facebook Places, one aspect did worry me. Namely the ability for friends to check you into places. I guess the idea could be that you’re at a  conference or party or similar and the organisers can check you in, to save you time. For me this is the only option of FB Places that I’m uncomfortable with, so here’s how to switch it off as it’s on by default.

1. Go to Account, Privacy Settings

2. Click Customise Settings

3. Scroll down to “Things Others Share” and select Disabled from the “Friends can check me into places” drop down box, see image below. Done!

You may notice that the “Include me in “People Here Now” after I check in” box is sent to enabled as default. This is fine by me as that’s the whole point of location based services, but the tin-foil hat brigade may want to turn this off

BTW notice how the Facebook Places logo (top of page) is a 4 in a square? Lol.

What I’m listening to right now: Southern Soul, the essentials

Twifficiency: An unoriginal idea that spammed Twitter but got the creator mentioned in Time

It would seem that all you need to be classed as an entrepreneur and get loads of media attention these days is to copy an idea and spam Twitter. Great.

Over the last couple of days everybody from TechCrunch to Time have been writing about Twifficiency as it “sweeps” over the Twitterverse cluttering up our Twitter feeds. In case you didn’t know it, Twifficiency is a poor man’s Twitaholic, Twitter Grader, TwitPwr and countless other Twitter tools that tell you your “social reach” or other such gubbins that some people think is important. BTW it’s not.

What surprises me is that the whole reason the press has picked up on it so much is because the creator @JamesCun somehow managed to “forget” to code in the bit of the site that asks permission for anyone who uses it to tweet out the results. And because of this people’s Twitter stream’s were inundated with this crap until he fixed the issue today.

So let’s get this straight, he builds an inferior version of Twitter Grader with less features, an ugly interface and builds it wrong so he spams Twitter and then he gets called an entrepreneur by Doug Richard’s (ex Dragon’s Den) School For Startups?! Really?

Don’t get me wrong, the guy obviously has some average coding skills and he is after all only 17. And who knows he may go on to develop bigger and better things. I’m just a bit bemused by all of the media attention he’s gotten. Mind you there has been a lot of negative stuff too but to have TechCrunch. School for Startups and Time to write about you is pretty cool. My advice to James would be to milk his 15 minutes for all it’s worth, build up some industry contacts and then go and build something that’s really cool (and original).

What I’m listening to right now: Get Ur Freak On

Think Visibilty is nearly here

This year’s Think Visibility conference is on the 4th September in Leeds and tickets are only £119.

Think Vis is one of my most favourite conferences for lots of reasons. They don’t have the usual suspects that you see touted around at other SEO conferences. In fact it’s not an SEO conference (thank goodness) at all. The whole idea of Think Vis is that it’s about how to get your website more visible (geddit?) via not only SEO but PR, monetisation and other good stuff. There’s even a session from PR expert Karyn Fleeting entitled “Launching your site with proper PR” which I think will be fascinating. No pressure Karyn

I’m on a panel too

I’ll be part of the Site Clinic where I will be advising site owners on monetisation of their sites. These types of clinic are always really good and when I’ve done them in the past at the A4U Expo they’ve been well received. If you’re a ticket holder you will have been given the chance to submit your site for review, thanks to those who have applied so far, I’ll be having a look over the submissions next week in preparation for the conference.

There are only a few tickets left so grab one before it’s too late. Think Visibility is deliberately a small scale conference so there’s no need to feel intimidated by large conference halls and lots of people milling about. Maybe it’s because this is a Northern conference and we’re all friendly folk but there is always a really good atmosphere at the event.

Think Visibility Fringe “Conference”

Like all good conferences there is always an offshoot conference. This can be found every year during breaks and lunchtime etc. in the local Pizza Express round the corner where they sell Peroni, I’ll be there throughout the day too

So what more do you want? Get your tickets now!

What I’m listening to right now: The Think Visibility Playlist!

Books you must read: Twitchhiker - how one man travelled the world by Twitter

I thought I’d start sharing some of the books that I’ve been reading lately as a few people I know have been asking for reading recommendations. All of the books I’ll discuss are to do with the web/entrepreunership so hopefully of interest to my blog readers.

The first book is the excellent Twitchhiker from Paul Smith. For those of you who don’t know the story, Paul decided to travel the world in 2009, raising money for charity and using nothing else but Twitter. The idea was that he would see how far he could get around the world using Twitter and people’s generosity in donating transport and accomodation. Remarkably he ended up travelling 11,000 miles from Gateshead right to new Zealand.

This paragraph from an interview Paul did in the Guardian really summed up the idea to me:

Beyond my social experiment, is the potential for Twitter to change the way we all travel. If you find yourself in an unknown city, a quick tweet will see followers suggest how you can best spend your time. Offering reviews of hotels and airlines, real-time travel updates, a spare sofa for the night, Twitter is an infrastructure that facilitates a global conversation, a social club, a newswire, a group hug, a support network, a human search engine - all at once. And it’s growing exponentially. Spend a while cultivating your Twitter account, and you could develop contacts in every timezone.

Paul is also a freelance journalist and a very good writer. The book is full of great stories of his adventures around the world and some of the weird and wonderful people he met via Twitter. Oh and did I mention that I’m in the book too? Albeit briefly.

It’s only £5.92 at Amazon right now too. Bargain.

Links:

Interview with the BBC
The Guardian feature on Twitchhiker
The Daily Mail feature on Twitchhiker

Next, watch out for the movie

What I’m listening to right now: Funk, Soul and Disco

Brown paper bag money

So they’re making a movie of Ben Mezrich’s book “The Accidental Billionaires” all about the early days of Facebook and the enemies that Mark Zuckerburg allegedly made and the meteoric rise of the social networking site that we all now accept as part of our lives. I’ve read the book and if I’m honest wasn’t that impressed. A lot of the book is pure conjecture and speculation. Ben Mezrick uses quite a lot of artistic licence in piecing together what might have happened early on in Facebook’s life. But given that Mark  Zuckerberg hasn’t written his autobiography yet, this is the best that we’re going to get to the real story of how Facebook started. BTW I love the subtitle of the movie, “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies“. Brilliant.

This got me thinking though, I think there’s a much better story out there waiting to be told and it’s all about eBay and affiliate marketing. For those of you who don’t know, in August 2008 eBay filed a civil suit in America against Shawn Hogan, Brian Dunning and Todd Dunning from Digital Point. eBay alleged them of “cookie stuffing”, in other words generating hidden forced clicks of their eBay affiliate links. No big deal I hear you say, I know loads of affiliates who participated in cookie stuffing “back in the day”. Yes, so do I. But get this, between 2006 and June 2007, Shawn Hogan earned approximately $15.5 million in commission from eBay. Shawn was eBay’s number one affiliate. Yes that’s $15.5 million in commission from one programme in just over a year. So it’s unsurprising that eBay are taking this seriously. To make matters worse (for the affiliates in question) criminal charges have now been filed and if they are found guilty they could end up in prison for up to 20 years. 20 years in prison for cookie stuffing, can you imagine? You can read a much more detailed account of the whole case here.

What makes this case really interesting to me is that having been around the affiliate business for 10 years or so I can remember loads of affiliates who did the whole cookie stuffing thing. In particular one or two of the early voucher code sites were a tad naughty. I’m pretty sure none of them generated as much commission from it as the Digital Point guys though, still, it’s food for thought. And before anyone asks, no I won’t name these affiliates on here. In fairness though, affiliate marketing was a bit “wild west” a few years ago and things like cookie stuffing were very much a “grey”  area as no real rules existed. Brand bidding was also open to pretty much anyone, ah those were the days.

If there is only one blog post you read today you MUST read this one

In response to the eBay allegations Shawn Hogan has written a blog post about his experience with eBay as an affiliate. You simply must read this, it’s absolutely fascinating and reminds me so much of years gone by when while not commonplace there certainly was an element of the “brown paper bag business” about affiliate marketing.  Now that would make a good movie….

What I’m listening to right now: Strictly Bass, part 6

Fhoke

A few weeks ago I launched BigAudioAds.com and since then I’ve had lots of requests from people asking who I used for the design. Well to save time replying to every email I’m posting this here, the guys are Fhoke.com. Not only do they rock at design but they can also buid the site too. So if you want an awesome site you now know where to go. Right?

P.S. They also did this rather cool icon set for ShareMyPlaylists.com.

What I’m listening to right now: Monarchysound

Help Shak raise $200k for Charity:Water

My friend Shak is on a mission to raise $200k for Charity Water and needs your help.

A frightening statistic, but almost a billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water, That’s one in eight of us.

Unsafe water and a lack of basic sanitation kills 42,000 people every week, That’s more than all forms of violence, including war. Sadly, 90% of these deaths are children under five years old. As a parent, this statistic really moved me, I can’t express how sad this makes me feel.

So far Shak has raised a staggering $159k. However he wants to reach his goal of $200k before the 10th June 2010 which is when he sets off on a visit to Ethipoia to see the work Charity Water have done. So from now until the $200k is reached Shak will personally match every donation mate. So if you donate $100, Shak will also.

I urge you all to click here and make a donation. Every single dollar raised goes directly to project costs and you’ll be able to see the wells built on www.charitywater.org once they’re complete.

Finally, a massive well done to Shak on raising such a phenomenal amount of money, and good luck on the trip.

What I’m listening to right now: Strictly Bass part 1

BigAudioAds.com launches today

Today sees the launch of my new business venture, BigAudioAds.com.

As regular readers of this blog will know I’m a big fan of Spotify, I genuinely think it will revolutionise how we consume music, which of course leads to business ideas and opportunities. The idea for the site came about last year when I was looking to create my own audio ad to be broadcast on Spotify. I didn’t want to go to one of the large advertising agencies as I knew that they would charge me at least a couple of thousand pounds for an ad, which made the campaign prohibitive, but I didn’t know where else to turn. That led me to think that if I have that problem then I’m sure others will.

So after a bit of research I found that there wasn’t really any companies that offer high quality audio ads at a reasonable rate, aimed at small businesses - so I decided to set one up. The idea would be that I pull in a team of talented voice over artists and producers to create the ads and then put together some ad packages to offer potential clients. The system works like this, I have 4 voice-only packages that clients can choose from:

Buzz - 20 second voice ad £395
Flash - 30 second voice ad £425
Blast - 40 second voice ad £450
Roar - 50 second voice ad £475

These costs are for a single voice ad and form the core product. You can add sound effects from £25 and music from £30 to make the ad really come to live. They can offer professional script writing for only £45 per ad. Once ordered, we aim to write, record and produce the ad within 5 working days.

At the moment I have a team of 11 very talented voice over artists who between them have decades of experience in audio advertising. You can hear showreels of their work on the Voices page. The team are highly professional and I’m confident we can meet the needs of any potential client wishing to create an audio ad.

With services like Spotify and We7 now broadcasting to tens of millions of users and growing every day I’m confident that there is a mass market opportunity here to offer a professional high quality service to small and medium businesses who want to dip their toe into audio advertising but don’t know how. That’s the position I was in a while ago and I’m hoping that BigAudioAds.com will solve that problem.

All feedback and questions are most welcome in the comments below.

Follow BigAudioAds on Twitter @BigAudioAds
Find BigAudioAds on Facebook here.

What I’m listening to right now: Universal Robot Band - “Barely Breaking Even“

ShareMyPlaylists.com iPhone app now available

I’m really excited to announce that the ShareMyPlaylists.com iPhone app is now available in the iTunes store. Click here to download it for free (iTunes link).

The ShareMyPlaylists.com app is designed to work alongside the Spotify app. Use it to discover new music and ready made playlists from SMP members.

Features:

- Access to tens of thousands of ready made Spotify playlists
- Search by artist, track title and playlist title
- 1 click access to playlists, simply choose your playlist and the app will automatically open the Spotify app and play your choice
- Quickly and easily browse our Featured playlists from the homepage
- See the latest playlists listed by genre

Screenshots:

I’d love to hear your feeback, please let me know what you think of the app in the comments below. Coming next, the iPad app!

What I’m listening to right now: Great Hip-Hop Samples

Dear Apple, it’s OK I don’t want to join your affiliate programme because it’s too unfair

So, I wrote a review of the iPad. I wasn’t motivated by money to write the post, I didn’t plan to monetise it, I just wanted to put down some thoughts on the iPad. Then after the review started getting a lot of traffic I thought that out of interest I would replace my standard links to the iTunes store with affiliate links. With the apps in my review costing between nothing and £3.99 I didn’t do this to raise a lot of money but more of an experiment, to see if people would click through and buy/preorder these apps.

Anyway, I knew the Apple affiliate programme was on the TradeDoubler network so I hunted it out to see if I could put some links up. However once I got into the TD system I got an odd error message saying I couldn’t apply for a closed programme. Confused, I emailed TD support and was told it was a closed programme and they would ask the account manager to get in touch to see if they could help. Fair enough, there are lots of closed programmes on all networks and I don’t have a problem with that. To their credit TD came back promptly with an email asking for the following:

Please get back to me me the following details:

1. Site Name

2. General site description

3. Why your site is a good fit for the Apple program

4. Unique users per month

5. Page impressions per month

6. Estimate monthly sales you can generate

Hmm, so I was just contemplating if I could be bothered to answer these questions and especially pondering if they would accept 0 - 100,000 as an answer to question 6 when I came across Jason’s blog post entitled: Apple Not Paying Commission on iPads. Now I wasn’t planning on actually promoting the iPad via affiliate links but this attitude of Apple’s really annoys me. They seem to think that affiliates are good enough to promote all of their other products but when it comes to something as hot as the iPad then they don’t have to pay us commission because it will sell on it’s own without our help. Then I remembered that it had happened before, and before that, and before that. And it will probably happen again.

At this point I was about to go into a rant about treating affiliates unfairly and only giving commission on products that aren’t “hot” items such as games consoles, iPads, iPhone etc. is grossly unfair but I just haven’t the heart any more. It happens every year and it unlikely to change.

OK maybe I will a little bit…While writing this post I’ve been tweeting about this very situation and a couple of people have said that Apple will still sell a lot of iPads without affiliates so it won’t harm them commercially. Well yes and no. Yes they will still sell a ton of them but it’s about respect. It’s like saying, hey affiliates we want you to promote all of our other products but just not the iPad. It will sell a stink load without you guys so just back off OK? Not OK. I think it’s grossly unfair to treat your “partners” like this. Either we’re good enough to promote all your stuff or none. Make your mind up. People were also arguing whether or not my post (or others similar) will bring in incremental sales. Yes they will, I’ve listed some tweets below that I received in response to my review. Sure this is only anecdotal evidence but it’s the best we’ve got.

So, Apple, I won’t be joining your programme thankyou very much. To be blunt, I think you’re unfair for not offering commission on the iPad. Just so you know, more than one person has today told me that they pre-ordered the iPad as a direct consequence of reading my review. My review that cost you nothing.

Some tweets about my iPad review…

What I’m listening to right now: “Cool, groovy, soulful music” - awful name but brilliant playlist.