Affiliate Marketing Blog by James Little

From VNUNet:

The government of Cuba has announced plans to take the whole country open source as soon as possible.

Communications Minister Ramiro Valdés announced the plan at a conference in Havana, and said that Microsoft had cooperated with government agencies and intelligence services in the past.

Valdes insisted that the information technology industry is a “battlefield” on which Cuba must fight.

He also highlighted a quote from Bill Gates, who described open source enthusiasts as “some new modern-day sort of communists”, pointing out that this would be a badge of honour for Cubans.

The article goes on to say that Cubans are developing their own linux distribution called Nova, based on Gentoo and that estimates are that there are around 3,000 Open Source developers based in Cuba.

It’s an interesting article on a number of fronts - linux is known to be more secure than windows and I’m sure it’s not the first national that has decided to move towards this technology (although I suspect that most would chose Sun).

With the advancements being made with GUI’s like KDE4 it will be interesting to see if some of Microsofts dominance starts to buckle - especially in the corporate environment.

Not sure if this is old news or not, but found this today:

Wordtracker to launch UK Keyword Service

The new service will be launched at SES London, February 13th - February 15th, 2007.

You can register now to get the latest news on our UK keyword service. We’ll also send you:

• A fabulous launch offer
• Access to a free exhibition pass
• A 20% discount on any of the three conference days at SES London

The new UK service will provide essential keyword research for:

• UK websites serving the local market
• Businesses wishing to target the UK (the world’s fifth largest economy)
• Search engine optimization companies and design agencies with UK clients.

Wordtracker has built its reputation on good quality keywords from a reliable source - the metacrawler search engines Dogpile.com and Metacrawler.com. We have now sourced a reliable source of UK keywords that has passed all our keyword quality tests and we are rapidly building an extensive database of UK keywords.

The UK keyword service will be incorporated into our existing database from the middle of February and you will be able to choose from Global or UK only search terms.

If you already have a Wordtracker account, then you will automatically have access to the UK keywords when we launch in February.

If you don’t have a Wordtracker account, there really couldn’t be a better time to take advantage of our fabulous launch offer. Register to get immediate details.

I’ve spent the past year at St. Minver Ltd; a white label gaming operator based in London & Gibraltar working with companies like Yahoo, Virgin and lastminute.com.

I’ve really enjoyed my time here - launched a very successful affiliate product and contributed to a huge increase in the Affiliate recruitment and deposit levels, but have decided that it’s time to move out of the gaming industry and try something a little different.

Ignoring the obvious joy that the increase in volume has given, some of the other highlights of the year definitely include being featured on Fraser’s Affiliate Marketing Podcast, going to Barbados with Affiliate Future and the journey across to Amsterdam for the CAC 2006.   I’ve worked with and met loads of new people and have hopefully formed some great long term relationships.

I’ll be at St. Minver until the end of February and still have quite a few bits to close off and work on before venturing to pastures new.   When I do leave I’ll still be in the Affiliate Management arena, still enjoying a few too many drinks at the affiliate events and still spending far too much time working and far too little time keeping the house tidy (according to my wife).

A big thank you to anyone I’ve worked with over the past year and if there is anything you are waiting for from me you should probably remind me before the month is up!

Just one week after Buy.at announced their new branding it’s now TradeDoublers turn to do the same.

Here’s the press release.

Newly designed product and service portfolio supports expanding needs of digital marketing community.

TradeDoubler, the pan-European digital marketing company has redefined and developed its product offering and image to address the growing demand for performance-based, online marketing.

The product range caters to advertisers and publishers who are looking to fully exploit the various marketing and advertising opportunities presented by the internet. TradeDoubler’s range of digital marketing solutions accommodates advertisers across multiple industry sectors whether they are looking to generate increased brand awareness or drive direct response in the form of clicks, sales or registrations.

Advertisers are shifting large portions of their budgets online in response to the ever increasing amounts of media time that consumers are spending on the internet. Leading advertising forecaster, ZenithOptimedia noted in a recent quarterly spending report: “Internet ad spend will grow 28.2 percent in 2007, while the rest of the market grows 3.9 percent.€

The revamped product range represents an expanded portfolio for TradeDoubler which has grown from an affiliate marketing specialist to a digital marketing services company delivering brand marketing and direct response campaigns online. The newly branded range includes:

€¢td Pull (Affiliate network)
Long-term partnerships between advertisers and publishers. Publishers are paid a commission by an advertiser when advertising on their website results in an actual sale or registration for the advertiser.

€¢td Push (Campaign network)
Short-term activity with pre-defined deliverables. TradeDoubler will create a bespoke network of targeted publisher sites to meet the advertiser’s specific objectives.

€¢td Reach (Ad network)
A plug and play network with extensive reach. An advertiser €˜plugs’ into the existing network of publisher sites and ads are rotated across the network reaching a wide target audience.

€¢td Talk (Pay-per call network)
Advertisers can use the reach of the internet to drive sales and registrations over the phone. td Talk allows publishers to easily promote more complex products and services on their website and receive a commission for phone calls generated.

€¢td Toolbox (Marketing interface)
A tracking and ad serving interface. Advertisers and publishers can track, analyse and optimise the performance of all online marketing activity (advertisers) or advertising carried on their website (publishers).

€œDigital is becoming mainstream with online advertising now accounting for a larger percentage of total advertising spend. The appeal of the Internet is that it can reach a mass audience as well targeting smaller niche audiences but most importantly and uniquely its success in doing both can be tracked and measured,€ said Nicola Reed, Head of Marketing at TradeDoubler. €œWe wanted to underline this metrics-based approach in our own positioning and product portfolio and also respond to the fact that marketing online is now as much about branding as it is about generating sales. The new product names are designed to speak the language of modern marketers and simplify the process of advertising on the Internet.€

TradeDoubler has also refreshed its own image to underline its full range of performance-based digital marketing solutions. A new website has been launched today. For more information about TradeDoubler and to take a look at its new branding, please visit: www.tradedoubler.com.
About TradeDoubler

TradeDoubler is a Pan-European digital marketing company offering a range of performance-based marketing solutions. TradeDoubler’s products and services provide companies with the tools and expertise to drive results online whether they are looking to generate sales or drive brand awareness. Headquartered in Sweden, the company boasts a unique European reach with local offices in 14 countries across Europe and a presence in a further four countries. With a breadth of expertise across multiple industry sectors and a network of more than 100,000 website publishers TradeDoubler helps deliver online results for over 1,000 advertisers across Europe including a mix of local and international companies such as Apple Store, Dell, Telia Sonera, eBay and Kelkoo.

Please visit www.tradedoubler.com for further information.

Media contacts:

Aparna Choudhari Gray
Direct Line: + 44 (0) 20 8834 3416
Email: aparna.gray@bitepr.com
Bite Communications

Nicola Reed
TradeDoubler
Email: nicola.reed@tradedoubler.com
Direct Line: +44 (0) 20 7798 5814

Wordpress 2.1 is released as stable later today.  It brings some good new features, some of which you may have already seen if you my Free Affiliate Blogs site, as Wordpress MU seems to use a few of them already.

You can find a great overview of what’s new in Version 2.1 on the Technosailor site:  Ten things you should know about Wordpress 2.1

I’ve got quite a few plugins and am slightly reluctant to upgrade yet for fear of breaking them, so will probably give it a few weeks before I try it out on this site.

I’m in the middle of writing a guide on Optimising Wordpress for SEO, so hopefully I won’t see too much impact from this.

I should really note that I don’t for one minute claim to be an SEO expert, I know little bits and bobs from knowing a few really good people in the industry and reading sites like Threadwatch.

So today sees the launch of the SEO World Championships, sponsored by eastpoint, an SEO company.

The target phrase will be released at around 6pm GMT, which happens to be when I am on the train home, so I won’t be able to get the first .com registered.

The rules are quite simple and it’s all based on Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.    There are some nice prizes and it will be interesting to see how well it is picked up by the SEO community.

If you are taking part, please do comment and let me know.

MyBlogLog, which can be seen in the right column of this site, has been purchased by Yahoo. It really is a wonderful widget which I like a lot and it’s integration with Yahoo (meaning that you will be able to login via your yahoo id) will hopefully make it a lot more widespread.

A big congratulations to the owners of MyBlogLog who are expected to have sold it for around $10m.

2007 really is shaping up to be the year of the widget.

As a side point whilst we are speaking of widgets in the right column, I’ve now had the Buy me a Drink link up since before Christmas, yet no-one has obliged!

I can exclusively reveal that Paypal, the ebay owned payment provider, is in early talks with the Post Office about creating a Paypal card in the UK.

The card is expected to be an optional extra with an admin charge of around £5 per year. It will allow Paypal users to withdraw small amounts of money or pay for postage directly from their Paypal accounts.

The Post Office would charge a small admin fee for every transaction/withdrawal from this card.

The card is not expected to launch until Q2/3 2007. It will please many ebay users who have become frustrated with the long withdrawal wait when using the payment provider.