What Makes An Awesome Product Site?
Is the social shopping stuff a fad? Should the product site have profiles and that jazz or just basic info.
This is just one of several questions that get discussed in the post and comment thread. It makes for some good reading, especially if you’re just about to sit [...]

What Makes An Awesome Product Site?

Is the social shopping stuff a fad? Should the product site have profiles and that jazz or just basic info.

This is just one of several questions that get discussed in the post and comment thread. It makes for some good reading, especially if you’re just about to sit down and revamp some of your own affiliate sites.

Single Serving Sites
Lately I’ve noticed a pattern of people building Single Serving Sites, web sites comprised of a single page with a dedicated domain name and do only one thing. Here are a few examples:
Sometimes Red, Sometimes Blue. Sometimes the page is read, sometimes it is blue.
D-E-F-I-N-I-T-E-L-Y helps you spell definitely correctly.
The Abe Vigoda status [...]

Single Serving Sites

Lately I’ve noticed a pattern of people building Single Serving Sites, web sites comprised of a single page with a dedicated domain name and do only one thing. Here are a few examples:

Sometimes Red, Sometimes Blue. Sometimes the page is read, sometimes it is blue.

D-E-F-I-N-I-T-E-L-Y helps you spell definitely correctly.

The Abe Vigoda status page. Currently alive.

There are a lot more examples if you click over. Seriously: wtf? Some of them are at least sort of useful, like the one that tells you if the next episode of Lost is a repeat, but there are about 5 million other ways to obtain this information. Can anyone explain this to me? Have people lost their minds? Lost bets?

Pepperjam Jammed
All of these large affiliate networks offer affiliate program management services. None of these large affiliate networks manage programs in the other large networks. If Pepperjam is this caliber of network, they have backed themselves into the situation that would be akin to Performics or Linkshare managing a program in the Commission Junction [...]

Pepperjam Jammed

All of these large affiliate networks offer affiliate program management services. None of these large affiliate networks manage programs in the other large networks. If Pepperjam is this caliber of network, they have backed themselves into the situation that would be akin to Performics or Linkshare managing a program in the Commission Junction network, or vice versa. That notion is absurd to anyone who knows this space, and anathema to the networks themselves.

This is interesting in light of Google’s attack on Text Link Ads last year, which forced me to think harder about where the line is between aggressive competition and monopolistic behavior. Is it ethical to tell people they can’t do business with you if they do business with X when you don’t have an exclusive arrangement in place? That’s a tough question to answer in the Google situation - no marketer pays Google for a certain spot in the SERPs, so they can’t really argue they’re being denied anything they have a right (paid for) to when they lose their spot in the SERPs. But it seems to me CJ should either demand that all clients be exclusive with CJ, or none. For them to single out Pepperjam clients strikes me as harassment.

Digg for sale, time to cash in your pennies
Michael says that a very reputable source has informed him that Digg has been valuated at somewhere between $200 and $225 million (down from what they were worth last year).
Will the acquisition change things for people relying on Digg to promote their sites? Or is anyone still [...]

Digg for sale, time to cash in your pennies

Michael says that a very reputable source has informed him that Digg has been valuated at somewhere between $200 and $225 million (down from what they were worth last year).

Will the acquisition change things for people relying on Digg to promote their sites? Or is anyone still doing that?

Quick and dirty way to show random banners
Initially I just threw up AdSense, the old chestnut that it is, but I thought it might be nice to try to show some other ads as well. I know there are probably plugins out there that randomise the showing of banner ads, but I reckon the way [...]

Quick and dirty way to show random banners

Initially I just threw up AdSense, the old chestnut that it is, but I thought it might be nice to try to show some other ads as well. I know there are probably plugins out there that randomise the showing of banner ads, but I reckon the way I’m going to show you is quicker and simpler (plus, how do you know, I mean really know, that the author of that plugin is not showing their own ads from time to time on your blog?)

It really is pretty simple, and he’s right about trusting this method over a plugin. A lot of the plugins don’t work that well, either.

This looks like an interesting tool for polling your visitors.

This looks like an interesting tool for polling your visitors.