The Amazon affiliate program has launched Amazon Widgets, which are “small, visually dynamic, easily configurable tools that allow you to feature products from Amazon on your website, blog or social networking pages.” In as little as one minute, affiliates can populate a widget with their favorite Amazon products, their comments about those products, etc., and […]

The Amazon affiliate program has launched Amazon Widgets, which are “small, visually dynamic, easily configurable tools that allow you to feature products from Amazon on your website, blog or social networking pages.”

In as little as one minute, affiliates can populate a widget with their favorite Amazon products, their comments about those products, etc., and select from a set of color and layout themes to match both their mood and website.

Widgets are an extension to the classic Amazon affiliate link offerings, and as with other Amazon link formats, you can earn referral fees of up to 10% with the widgets.

My favorite is the Product Cloud Widget, which shows clusters of product titles that are relevant to your page. The font size of the title in the cloud indicates how relevant the product is to your page – the larger the title, the more closely the product should match the topics on your page.

This is a good widget for sites with frequently changing content like blog pages, as it dynamically updates for relevancy.

More details at http://widgets.amazon.com.

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Affiliate Blog by Shawn Collins - www.affiliatetip.com/blog

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Yesterday, Rand Fishkin came out with a SEOmoz article on what makes a good web directory versus a bad one. Some of his points were that manipulative directories may have the following characteristics: are too broad, allows everyone access, uses manipulative link building, stuffs content to look natural, interlinks with other directories, and allows link bidding.

Cre8asite Forums members dissected this post and gave their $0.02 on Rand’s take.

For example, Rand says that premium sponsorships on directories is shady practice. But some forum members do that.

it’s no different to paying to advertise on the front page of a print paper, rather than page 23.

Other members agree with this sentiment.

I believe that’s pretty much the only criticism they have on Rand’s points. There also is a slight reaction in the blogosphere. Overall, Rand’s article has a good direction, however, and I suggest you give it a read.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

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From Search Engine Roundtable - www.seroundtable.com

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I am always excited to attend OMMA. Not just for the people I get to meet up with at this twice annual event, but for the quality of the speakers, conversations and format of the event. I will be trying to capture as much of it as I can for you and will post it during the week.

If you are in town (NYC) come over and meet some of the EEC on some of the panels. I will be on a panel with Stephanie Miller (ReturnPath), Jeanniey Mullen (Ogilvy) and Lee Sherman (AvenueA Razorfish Monday at 4:45 at the Hilton.

Topic: ROI, What makes email valuable to your business!

Email has a great ROI, yet gets less than 6% of the marketing budget. Is ROI or attribution modeling the problem? Who gets credit for the sale when a customer is exposed to display media on a third party site, does a search and then opens and clicks through from an email? Come and explore how marketers address this very controversial issue of attribution modeling and how email marketers apply this to their ROI story.

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From The Email Wars - www.theemailwars.com

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From Email Marketing Reports - www.email-marketing-reports.com

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Via Search Engine Roundtable there was a landing page quality score update last night. I really didn’t notice any abnormal changes in any of my accounts except for an affiliate campaign I’ve been running. Even though that campaign was doing well for me in terms of conversions the landing page is just a affiliate loaded piece of junk. I’m not surprised it’s getting hit with high minimum bids…I Read more…

From PPC Discussions - www.ppcdiscussions.com

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Choosing a search marketing vendor requires careful consideration of how they will integrate with your other marketing efforts. Read more…

From Search Engine Watch - www.SearchEngineWatch.com

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From Viral Voodoo - www.viralvoodoo.com

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From Branding Voodoo - www.brandingvoodoo.com

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Our backlink anchor text tool was semi-broke for a while there, but today we got the new bugs worked out. I also figured that so long as we were doing work on that tool that I might as well add some updates to the tool. Here is what the new We Build Pages Backlink Text Analysis tool […] Read more…

Jim Boykin’s Internet Marketing Blog - www.jimboykin.com

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Here we are at the start of one of the busiest seasons for email marketing. With the holiday and end-of-year rush about to hit not only marketers but consumers on October 15th, the segmentation, development, design and behavioral elves are busy in workshops across not only the US, but the entire world. So why do we keep reading that email marketing is dead or dying?

The reason is other marketing media — direct mail, search, blog, PR, new 2.0 media, viral, broadcast and print — are all changing. These industries are trying, in essence, to lobby against each other to place themselves at the top or portray themselves as leading, or at least not losing, prominence in the minds of their audiences. It is the fight for dollars in the advertising business.

In truth, media are shifting. Not dying. Preferences on how people are reached are changing and we all need to change with them. We still watch TV, just in a different way in some households. We still read the papers, but they are not our go-to source of immediate information. We still subscribe to magazines and listen to the radio but for reasons other than our evolving desire of connectedness and immediate gratification. In a sense not only we have shifted this measurement as an audience, but marketers like yourselves have assisted with this always on mentality.

So what do we do? Trash one medium over another? Write studies claiming that one is dying while the other we are passionate about is thriving? Seems this is what many are doing.

We are here to let you know that yes advertising and marketing are changing, but one still does not kill off the other. They are interdependent. We actually, not sure if you noticed with all the summer events and daily noise in your own inbox, have not sent this ‘’monthly'’ newsletter since May, and here we are in September. Why? Well summer has been incredibly busy not only for us at eROI and our clients, but felt that everyone needed a little break. Is this close to what you thought it would be? Is email dead? Read some of the other articles to understand that it is only evolving right now to a medium that is working better due to marketers and companies taking it more seriously and doing it right by listening to their subscribers, customers and competition.

Long live media and strive to do better.

Stop lurking on the blogs and start interacting, leave your thoughts around this topic as a comment on this blog. If you want to share but don’t want them published, let us know in your comments and we will keep them hidden. (Thought I would spell that one out for you Ken)

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From The Email Wars - www.theemailwars.com

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