The Week in Review
Check out a few interesting articles and blog posts from the online marketing industry over the last week.
10 Questions Affiliates Should Ask Themselves
So, I was on CNN.com this week and came across an article on 20 questions that could change your life, or something along those lines. The questions turned out to be for women, so I forwarded the article to my wife (after making sure one of the questions wasn’t “Why am I married to this guy?”) and went back to what I was doing. But, then I started thinking about the idea of a bunch of big life changing questions and thought I would try to come up with 10 big questions that for affiliate marketers to ask themselves. (I shortened the list to 10 because people seem to like top 10 lists…and because it was easier to come up with 10 questions instead of 20.) So, here is my list of 10 life-changing (or maybe not) questions to ask yourself today.
The Latest Do-Not-Track Developments
In early December, the FTC released a report outlining ways to improve online consumer privacy, which included a recommendation to create a Do-Not-Track system that would allow internet users to opt-out of having their online surfing behavior tracked. The report quickly gained a lot of attention from legislators and privacy organizations, online advertising industry professionals and the general media. Within a week, Microsoft had weighed in with the announcement that their upcoming release of Internet Explorer 9 would offer consumers a new “opt-in mechanism (Tracking Protection) to identify and block many forms of undesired advertising.” An additional feature called “Tracking Protection Lists,” will give internet users control over what third-party site content can track them when they are online.
Google Looks to Root out Search Result Spam
Interesting blog post from Google’s Matt Cutts last Friday, regarding the search engine’s efforts to minimize “spammy” search results. He starts off with a little history about how Google has become much better at delivering quality search results (reducing English-language spam in Google search results by over 50% over the last five years). Then Cutts mentions that the company has seen a slight “uptick” in spam in recent months and goes on to discuss some new initiatives the company has put in place to improve search result quality.
The Power of White Space
There was an Interesting article in Forbes this week that discussed how Facebook beat MySpace. By this time I’m pretty sure we all know the story. Once upon a time, long ago (about 4 years) MySpace ruled the social networking universe. The site had risen to dominate the emerging social media industry, was backed by the deep pockets of News Corp. and certainly seemed to have an unlimited and rosy future at the top of the mountain. But, then along came a little upstart site called Facebook. Facebook wasn’t especially cool to look at (what do you mean I can’t customize my profile page!) but it started grabbing users anyway, by providing a mix of features that resonated with consumers…
