From the monthly archives:

June 2007

iPhone’s Quirks

June 30, 2007

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I picked mine up on the 29th @ 7PM without waiting by going to one of Apple’s flagship stores (University Village)…the great part is people who waited in a 1000ft line waited for nothing…and it only took about an hour to get through all of them. Anyhow…I picked up the 8GB and went home. Since I was on a Cingular family plan prior to my purchase, when I tried to activate it I encountered some problems; some kind of error because I was on a discounted plan through Boeing.

Since it was after hours, I had to wait until the next day until I could get the phone activated. My first impressions of the iPhone were great. Reading previous reviews, I was hesitant about the touch screen, but after using it, honestly, it’s a wierd thing to get used to but I don’t think I’ll have any problems as I continue to use the keypad.

I was able to sync all my iCals, contacts via Address Book, photos, and music without a problem. It’s unfortunate that the iPhone OS is approximately 700MB…

I was a bit worried when I heard there wasn’t a search function in the address book, but the scrolling in contacts is pretty simple. If you want to scroll slowly, you just flick up and down in the center of the screen, but if you want to scroll by entire letter groups all you need to do is flick the scroll bar up and down.

Animations are snappy and the phone is responsive, just like you see in the advertisements. One thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes the iPhone will forget how it is orientated, especially when I’m using Safari…so I have to wiggle it a few times. The keyboard is much easier to use in widescreen. Real browsers > mobile browsers.

EDGE isn’t SUPER fast, but I can hop on google maps or check email without a problem. 75% of the time I was in a free wifi hotspot today. Wifi really took a toll on my battery life though, and I was able to go through an entire charge before the day was over. My only gripes about the phone are that I can’t run certain things like Mail and Google maps in wide screen. I’d be nice because the keyboard is much easier to use in that format.

Mail is simple, and reminds me vaguely of OSX. One quirk I encountered was trying to set up POP access via Google Apps. Since Apple tries to make the iPhone as easy as possible to use, they may have tried a bit too hard. To log in with my GApps account, my ID is “jon@ngsthings.com”, but since the POP server is pop.gmail.com the iPhone thinks I have a gmail account and proceeds to add “@gmail.com” to my login ID (which would be fine if I was ONLY using Gmail). Obviously trying to log in with “jon@ngsthings.com@gmail.com” wouldn’t work.

To work around this problem, I had to delete all the mailboxes off the iPhone, reenter mail on the iPhone, click “Other” when I was prompted for the type of email I planned on using, THEN I was able to enter everything without the iPhone auto-completing. Only then was I able to get around the problem

I do have some gripes about mail…

  1. You can’t select all the messages and mark them as read…so that was a PITA since I have 500 unread messages now
  2. You can’t select more than one message at a time
  3. I can’t create folders to sort my mail
  4. It doesn’t do widescreen

    5. And finally, some gripes about the phone in general:

    1. When you type, sometimes you are able to move your cursor to edit your words, but in some places, you can’t do it for some reason
    2. No widescreen in all applications
    3. Dock connector pinout for audio doesn’t seem to work with my dock connector in the car
      It seems Apple has disabled the lineout for anything other than the included Dock connector! :( This is a GIANT PITA!
    4. Can’t sync via bluetooth

    Everything considered…it’s basically the best thing I’ve purchased in a while. This is the Rev A, 1.0; I’m excited for the applications and improvements in the future.

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Remove DMOZ Descriptions from MSN Search

June 26, 2007

We have some clients that somehow back in the day were able to get their website listed with DMOZ.org. DMOZ has grown to be one of the most inactive and inaccurate directories that some of the engines still seem to crawl and use for their default directory listings and to show as the abstract on the SERPs. DMOZ is also known as the Open Directory Project or ODP.

MSN Search is now recognizing a new meta tag that allows you to request to opt out of showing the DMOZ description field as your search abstract listing. Why would you want to change this? DMOZ editors have been notorious in writing non-sexy decriptions for websites which will hurt your click through rate on your natural search placements.

Since most search engines aren’t even crawling or given any keyword relevancy to the meta description tags, it is in your best interest to focus the messaging on your meta description tag to be more marketing friendly to your product or brand offering.

Here is the “Say NO to DMOZ” meta tag:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”>
or
<META NAME=”msnbot” CONTENT=”NOODP”>

The first meta tag is for all crawlers and the second one is for the MSN Bot specifically. The change should take place once the crawler has re-crawled the page which usually from about one to four weeks.

When will someone just put a bullet in the ODP project please?

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Online Affiliate Program Networks Q&A

June 19, 2007

Picking an affiliate publisher network to manage your affiliate program can be tricky depending on what your main objectives are and the budget that you are willing to spend to build up your program.

Here are some of the benefits of using affiliate networks:

- They send out montly checks to your affiliates to save you from additional accounting work.
- They have sophisticated tracking and reporting systems that will tie into your internal reports.
- They have large reach to affiliate marketers that have a tendency to only promote vendors that are part of one of these networks.

Running your own internal affiliate program is another option that many top vendors take on as well. Here are some of the benefits of having your affiliate program in house.

- Lots of flexibility in your promotions.
- You have ownership of your affiliates contact information and have the ability to communicate with them at no cost.
- You can custom tailor reports to your business instead of having to adopt the affiliate reporting interfaces to your business.
- You get the benefit of 1,000’s of inbound links to your site if your tracking system is done correctly.
- You don’t have to pay the monthly management fees and a percentage of sale that most networks require.
- Running with a 3rd party network can cost you around $2,500 - $3,500 alone in service fees as well as the payroll of your affiliate manager.

Here is a list of the top tier affiliate program networks:
OneNetworkDirect.com - Run by Todd Crawford, Former VP of Commission Junction (CJ), they have more then 40,000 clients.
Buy.at - headquartered in London, England with offices also in the US
Commission Junction - (otherwise known as CJ) - Headquartered in Santa Barbara, CA with offices in France, Germany and the UK
Linkshare - located in New York City, NY with offices in Japan and the UK
Performics - Owned by DoubleClick, powered by ConnectCommerce and located in Chicago, IL.
ShareaSale - Currently host over 2,000 affiliate publishers and are located in Chicago, IL
TradeDoubler - Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden with offices all over Europe and Russia.
Zanox - They are the European market leader in performance-based multichannel commerce with a central office in Berlin, Germany and offices in Holland, Italy, Spain, Sweden, UK and the US.
CPAEmpire.com - CPA Empire is more of a performance affiliate network that will run your exclusive offers to their partner sites.

Q: Should we hire an someone to manage the affiliate program?
A: Yes. Yes. Yes. In a perfect world, your affiliate program should be your least inexpensive means of acquisition in your business and should account for anywhere from 20-40% of your overall revenue. This varies depending on your vertical of course but I have seen well run affiliate programs bringing in more revenue and orders then paid search campaigns.

Q: Are there businesses out there that manage affiliate program relationships for you?
A: Yes. Some full service interactive agencies have internal resources to manage affiliate programs. You will usually at least benefit using an agency during your contract negotiations with the affiliate publishers as they are quite familar with payouts and monthly service agreements and know where to push back.

Q: What are some things we should look for in hiring an affiliate manager?
A: Ultimately, the candidate that you select to manage your affiliate program should have worked with one of the two large vendors like CJ or Linkshare before and be very comfortable making calls and working the phones. This person should have the capacity to write newsletters and be organized enough to manage a promotional calendar to keep their affiliates engaged in your program.

Q: What are the downsides to running with the large vendors like CJ or Linkshare?
A: You have to be 100% committed to your relationship with these top tier vendors as their monthly service fees aren’t cheap and you need to be selling enough product/subscriptions a month to cover the fee and still have margin on your business.

Q: What are the upsides to running with the large vendors versus smaller niche shops?
A: Being an affiliate marketer ourselves we are always looking for new vendors to promote in certain verticals and the
large vendors tend to have the bigger higher converting brands.

Q: What are the upsides to running with the smaller niche affiliate publisher?
A: You will get more one on one service as well as a dedicated account manager that will help you grow your affiliate
network.

In the end, I have seen people become very successful with their affiliate programs when managed in house with a good tracking and reporting solution or using 3rd party networks like CJ and Linkshare. I will do a couple follow up blog posts on some tips and tricks to affiliate programs.

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