Newsbytes on InvestorBlogger: Apple Hot Air?, Affiliate Linking, Banner Plugins for WP and more…

Well, there’s a lot of little stuff that I need to share with readers this Friday… So we’re starting off with five stories that caught my attention.

A quick review

Here are my top (I like them!) stories this week:

• Guerrilla Marketing Your Blog with GMail, Reader And GTalk (2)
• PageRank: an intro, making money with PR, and recent controversy (4)
• Carnival of Making Real Money 8th Edition – January 13th, 2008 (2)
• Is Alexa a REALRANK? Well, it tracks traffic but… (2)
• What should you do when you strike it rich? – 7 ways to benefit from windfalls, bonuses, and other ‘found’ money! (2)

Do visit and comment on these stories!

Apple Air vs. Asus Eee II PC

Wow! My new friend Nam (from Nationwide and supplier for our school) and I were chatting about upcoming PC products as he was delivering my new PC Baby for my colleague. These exciting products are including the ASUS Eee II PC with 8.9″ screen (The Enquirer) and the MacBook Air. There are no real schematics on the first product yet, except it’s rumored to have WiMax support built-in and extra memory… But…

Still, this week so the announcement of the launch of the new MacBook Air priced at $1899 for the hard disk version and over $3K for the SD version. Enjoy looking at the pictures and watch the BBC video.

Lust for this device, if you must! Just keep your credit card away from your computer screen…

Of course, you know which one is cheaper and which one is cooler. But Nam was saying “It’s better for companies simply to launch products with as little fanfare as possible, otherwise they risk sales as people wait for companies to launch products in the future. This means no sales now for existing products and no sales for forthcoming products either!”

NetAudioAds News: Hide those affiliate links

I got this newsletter from Charles Heflin, which is something I hadn’t considered about affiliate links and the reasons why affiliate marketers need to hide their links. I’ve bolded the important parts.

Hello Kenneth,

As the PPP opportuity grows we are seeing an increased
level of people signing up directly under the default
account. sellingppp.com has not advertised the PPP
opportunity except for the initial launch back on
December 6th. We are leaving the advertising to our
affiliates (you).

The reason I bring this up is because the only way that
sellingppp.com would get any traffic is because of you.
With this fact in mind we find it interesting that we
continue to get sign-ups by the thousands under the main
account. Very little traffic comes from the search engines,
the rest is coming from affiliates.

The point I am trying to make is the only way we could be
getting that many direct sign-ups is because people are
ripping the affiliate ID off of affiliate links and just
going straight to sellingppp.com and bypassing the affiliate
all together.

This is a strong case for the fact that you should
“absolutely” cloak your affiliate link.

This is just a heads-up … If you are not cloaking then
you are losing sign-ups.

….

Thank you,

Charles Heflin
Marketing Director
PPP, NetAudioAds Group

I’m looking at the possibility of running these ads on this blog for a short while as a test on one of my other blogs to test for acceptability and revenue. But I will consider hiding affiliate links now, I think.

Plugins: Banner Rotators

I’ve been trying different Banner Rotators over the past few months, starting off with Shylock Adsense which would actually rotate a lot of things, because you just need to paste the code. It was easy to use with Adsense because its system naturally limited you to the number of Adsense boxes per page permitted by Google. Worked nicely, very flexible and stable. But when my demands changed, I had to change the software, too.

I’m currently using Wordpress Banner Rotator v2.1.3 to handle all the banners, and it seems pretty stable, though some functionality and documentation have issues. It’s commercial software though it won’t break the budget at $14.99 as a download. It’s working well in many ways, but there are some problems that I have discovered with features not working as anticipated. I’ll be doing a full review soon: active banner switch and future date expiry don’t work as anticipated (or not at all), but otherwise pretty stable. I’d like an option to weight ads, too. Some of these problems would be easily solved by setting up ‘ad management software’ and using that code within this software. Such software would manage the ads more effectively, such as OpenAds. It seems pretty stable, though.

Advertising Page

I’ve recently updated the Advertising Page with a lot more information, options and pricing. I’ve even added an ‘advertiser’s mailing list’ which will go live just as soon as I’ve figured out how to operate Zookoda.

Stories in the Works

I’m working on three stories that should come out in the next few days: including one on Technorati Rankings, Using your house as an ATM machine, and ‘E-commerce: Why are some sites so unfriendly to customers?”

Thanks… drop by again soon, will you?

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