The reason I’m taking time out of my life to flame Linkshare is because of their complete disregard for the quality of their system in its entirety.  It’s a mouthful, but I can write something negative about everything Linkshare does… they’re amateurs, simply put.  

Linkshare, a United Kingdom company, can be compared to the United States based Commission Junction (cj.com) only for its functionality.  CJ far surpasses Linkshare’s ability to unite both publisher and advertiser successfully.  Linkshare has no incentive to make you, the publisher, any real money.  Linkshare’s goal is money alright, for themselves.    

#1.  Linkshare.com is down as of this post.  I figured this is a good start to my list.

#2. Linkshare does not respond to support tickets.  What?  Did the postman lose my letter in your online support ticket system?  Of course when I asked them questions regarding my tax information (i.e money), they respond in under an hour.  

#3. Almost all of Linkshare’s advertisers are second teir, meaning less likely to bring YOU in any profit.  YOU ARE A TOOL TO LINKSHARE!

#4. Linkshare’s portal for tracking and managing publisher sales is complete dog-sh*t.  Let me show you this screenshot: (oh… wait, their site is currently “performing maintenance”).  I was going to show how their dashboard does not display at all using Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.  Really? IE only?

This rant is a result of many, many months of using Linkshare actively, earning money along the way.  I’m still not happy, Linkshare does a poor job of handling their clients, both advertisers and publishers.  Commission Junction still needs a nosejob or two, but not compared to Linkshare who looks like they just got out of a 30-car pile up on an icy bridge.

Sorry for the lack of posting.  I’ll be short and just take this post to recommend a book I’ve been reading, titled ‘Predictably Irrational‘ (home page).  The book basically covers a wide scope of consumer and social behavior.  For example, every buyer decides whether or not to purchase something by weighing the positives and negatives.  By including the word “FREE” into your promotions (like free car wash with gas, buy one get one free, etc), you greatly decrease that negative consciousness and thus increase your sales.

Definitely a book worth reading for 2009.

peace

“The core businesses of CNET Networks and CBS Interactive represent near perfect category symmetry in premium online content,”
Quincy Smith, President, CBS Interactive.

Blah blah blah… it’s another corporate buyout. This acquisition will make CBS one of the top 10 internet companies in the United States with a combined 54 million unique users per month (my sites get about 100,000), and approximately 200 million users worldwide.

On Saturday May 3rd, Yahoo received another counter bid for the acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft. Yahoo declined their offer (again)…

At the meeting, which also included Yahoo’s other founder, David Filo, and a Microsoft president who oversees its online unit, Kevin Johnson, Mr. Ballmer increased Microsoft’s offer to $33 a share, or a total of about $47.5 billion, from $29.40 a share. Mr. Yang told Mr. Ballmer that Yahoo would not accept an offer below $37 a share, this person said. -NyTimes

Yahoo was simply milking the cow, but it looks like they either got greedy or they overvalue their assets. Microsoft’s Chief Executive went on to say: “After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal.” Tough love Yahoo! Not to worry though - Yahoo shouldn’t have any problem selling their company for a couple billion - it’s only a matter of who offers the most dollars.

A few other companies who have showed interest in the acquisition of Yahoo is AOL (Time Warner), MySpace (Fox), and this guy. Should be very interesting to watch how this unfolds in the next year or two.

Keyword Research

I use Google’s Adword’s keyword volume tool to look to see if a keyword is even worth targeting in the search engines.

[ https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal ]

Backlink Analyzer

I use this tool every so often when I want to see how many backlinks my site is getting.  Occasionally I’ll use it to spy on a few of my competitors - but don’t tell any one that :P.

[ http://sitening.com/seo-tools/backlink-analyzer/ ]

Page Rank Checker

Okay, page rank has NOTHING to do with how well your website performs in the search engines.  Are you sure Kyle?  Yes, I’m sure.  I’ve experienced a complete page rank stripping (from PR4 to PR0) overnight, and my website’s search engine result pages (SERPs) continued to go UP!  Page rank is simply Google’s attempt at giving a website a “rating”.  I do use it occasionally because advertisers consider page rank when buying links from you.

[ http://sitening.com/seo-tools/page-rank/ ]

Google Analytics

Are you not running Google Analytics or some other kind of website statistic harvester?  The information I get from my Analytics reports dictates to me about 75% of the work I do.  It’s free and awesome.

[ http://analytics.google.com ]

SEO Analyzer

This tool tells you the top 5 keywords you’re getting traffic from, as well as a wide array of other useful information about your web presence.

[ http://sitening.com/seo-tools/seo-report/ ]

Again, these aren’t just any SEO tools.  These come from my own, personal collection of bookmarks that I visit frequently.  Consider them very resourceful for you and website(s).  Hope this helps!

I’m all about major upgrades.  Did you know that Wordpress has received almost 2 Million downloads since 2.3 was released?  Wordpress is free, easy to use, but most important, stable.  Since Wordpress has become such a widely used Content Management System (CMS), the coders on the dark side are always trying to breach its security to take advantage of people’s websites.  So, here is 2.5 to keep up with the security issues, as well as a few more features the Wordpress team added.

If you’re upgrading: ALWAYS backup your MySQL database and your Wordpress directory files.

WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

Lyrics:
Your site design is the first thing people see
it should be reflective of you and the industry

easy to look at with a nice navigation
when you can’t find what you want it causes frustration

a clear Call to action to increase the temptation
use appealing graphics they create motivation

if you have animation
use with moderation

cause search engines can’t index the information
display the logos of all your associations

highlight your contact info that’s an obligation
create a clean design you can use some decoration

but to try to prevent any client hesitation
every page that they click should provide and explanation

should be easy to understand like having a conversation
when you design the style go ahead and use your imagination

but make sure you use correct color combinations
do some investigation, look at other organizations

but don’t duplicate or you might face a litigation
design done, congratulations but it’s time to start construction
follow these instructions when you move into production
your photoshop functions then slice that design
do your layout with divs make sure that it’s aligned
please don’t use tables even though they work fine
when it come to indexing they give searches a hard time
make it easy for the spiders to crawl what you provide
remove font type, font color and font size
no background colors, keep your coding real neat,
tag your look and feel on a separate style sheet
better results with xml and css
now you making progress, a lil closer to success
describe your doctype so the browser can relate
make sure you do it great or it won’t validate
check in all browsers, I do it directly
gotta make sure that it renders correctly
some use IE, some others use Flock
some use AOL, I use Firefox
title everything including links and images
don’t use italics, use emphasis
don’t use bold, please use strong
if you use bold that’s old and wrong
when you use CSS, you page will load quicker
client satisfied like they eating on a snicker
they stuck on your page like you made it with a sticker
and then they convert now that’s the real kicker
make you a lil richer, your site a lil slicker
design and code right man I hope you get the picture
what I’m telling you is true man it should be a scripture
if it’s built right you’ll be the pick of the litter
everyone will want to follow you like twitter
competition will get bitter and you’ll shine like glitter
if you trying to grow your company will get bigger
design and code right man can you get with it

What else can I say? You can spend the rest of your life at your computer gazing at the Heavens.

What are we?

“The winning bids totaled $19,592,420,000. That’s nearly double the amount the commission had hoped to raise from the spectrum being abandoned next year as television stations switch to new frequencies”. -NyTimes.com

Why is this such a big deal?

If you aren’t aware, the wireless spectrum up for grabs here will give the winning bidder

access to some of the best remaining spectrum — enabling them to send signals farther from a cell tower with far less power, through dense walls in cities and over wider territories in rural areas that are now underserved. - NyTimes.com

What we the consumers can expect…
Expect a higher demand in mobile devices. Data will be pushed across this wireless spectrum much more freely.  I predict to see a massive explosion of mobile internet browsing and sharing (right now, only about 10% of mobile phone users use the internet).  Bittorrent P2P sharing will boom as people will be more willing to share data if the speeds are faster.  Very exciting stuff…