Pay Per Click & Affiliate Marketing » Personal

Google Finance has broken Links

Christoph — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:22:11 +0000

Jut tried to create a new stock portfolio at my favorite financial website (Google Finance), and had to find out that the Google team missed either a function or a file. I cannot create a new portfolio at the moment. Does anyone know how to notify Google about this?

1 Week After the “Amazongeddon”

Christoph — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:55:15 +0000

It’s now roughly 1 week (10 days actually) since Amazon terminated the business relationship with affiliates in Colorado. I have spent a lot of hours replacing links to Amazon’s website with product links of other merchants. I still have hundreds of links to go through. That’s what you get for going deep and dirty into niche markets – it works great as you go, but if the merchant underneath pulls out, you’re stuck in the shithole.

In many affiliate forums and blogs where people talked about this scenario they said to replace Amazon links with links of other merchants. So, I went out to Shareasale and CJ and Linkshare looking for merchants with matching products. With many merchants I was already active and with other ones I had to apply for their affiliate program. For my most successful websites where I had links to Amazon I was able to cover roughly 80% of the links – for the remaining 20% of the product links I did not find a replacement.

Now a week after this Amazongeddon thing happened I have to declare that replacing Amazon links with links for other merchants is bad move. As a matter of fact I have ZERO conversions to record. Zero. Null. Nada. Zipp. Zilch.

I still have some merchant product links I can use to replace the merchants that were supposed to see the best conversion rates; pretty much the next tier down following the generic stats of each network (and a lot of guessing). While 1 week is still short, having zero conversions is pretty depressing. I have started removing affiliate links altogether from 2 sites now and rather redirect the links side-internally. Those sites are now running Google Adsense ads instead which is at least making up for some of the losses.

If you are an affiliate in one of the other states that is still fighting active attempts of those darn lawmakers to tax the Internet, you a) better get involved and b) you better start working on a real plan B. If you depend a lot on Amazon.com for your business income, you might face the same fate that my sites have experienced. I am sure some of the merchants have converting products, but are those the products you successfully promoted through Amazon.com’s affiliate product?!

Not only has this Amazongeddon cost me dozens of hours of time where I was writing emails to stupid politicians or waited 12 hours at the Colorado State Capitol to testify in front of the Senate’s Finance Committee, it has also cost me dearly financially. Hundreds of hours of work vaporized instantly. Hundreds of dollars of software investments now sitting useless on my computer’s hard drive. In this case I have nothing positive to put against this issue.

I am not easily to demotivate and so this is a bump in the road, but not the end of the world. What frustrates me a bit is the time I lost. The time could have been spent so much more productive growing my business to the next level. That’s the part that bothers me most. I am diversified to a certain degree and I can make up for the loss of income, but I do hate wasting my time. It’s hard to focus when you’re full of anger.

I am slowly getting back into the right work mood and I hope that I will laugh at Amazon and those stupid Colorado Democrats and show them the finger. One thing they can be sure of is that I will also work towards a goal of not giving them what they are after. At one point I might just move myself and all business operations out of the state of Colorado with satisfaction on my mind.

Done – Ready to Move on

Christoph — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 05:28:58 +0000

Done. I am done with it. I am ready to move on. Hold on before you leave this blog now. I am done with my year end accounting for 2009. I always dread this kind of work, but it needs to be done. So, for the last 2 days I have been working on my accounting and I just finished the books for 2009. All I need now is the tax paper work from all the different affiliate networks and I am ready to file my taxes for the last year. So, I hope by February 15 all that is done, too.

So, when I start working tomorrow I have all the “baggage” cleared and I am ready to rock and roll.

2010 – here I come. Many things will be different, but the main thing is that I have a much clearer path ahead of me. Last summer I started a new way of making money and it has turned out to be an excellent choice. My mistake over the last few years has been that I have been working on too many different things at the same time. The result was never a 100% – it was always some halfway baked thing and I could kick myself in the rear quite a bit that it took me so long to finally realize this. One of my main goals is to avoid too much distraction and to disregard the so-called shortcuts that I have tried in the past. I have never been lazy and I always put in a ton of work, but if you try 30 different things over the course of a year, the result can only be mediocre and not great. I am going to dump a few things and concentrate on what I have been doing.

2010 will also see some changes to this blog – in a good way. So, stay tuned for what is there to come.

Have a great 2010.

Christoph

Recommendations Gone Wrong

Christoph — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 05:23:59 +0000

About a month ago I moved into a new house. While the previous owner had done a lot in regards to energy saving and energy efficiency, he had done nothing in regards to conserving water. The toilets as an example are from 1992 back when the house was built. Every flush means flushing down about 4 gallons of water. So, I found out that my local water utility promotes toilet replacements with a $75 rebate per toilet. I found some nice looking toilets that qualify for the program at my local Lowe’s Hardware Store.

Since I do a lot of things around the house myself, I never replaced a toilet before. Replacing a toilet is not so hard. I started watching some videos on Youtube.com, About.com, and eHow.com. eHow.com had a whole series of videos about how to remove the old toilet, clean up the wax (putting a toilet in includes placing a wax ring at a certain location as part of the process), and how to install the toilet.

So, I went through the videos and the “instructor” had just cleaned up from the old toilet – including removing the old wax. The video was done and as usual the next video recommendations showed up and I was ready to continue. Since we had just dealt with wax removal I found the following recommendation “Preparing for waxing” and clicked on it – just to be very irritated when instead of prepping the toilet wax for the installation of the toilet, the video showed how to prepare a man’s back for hair removal by using wax.

So, I hope it is not a requirement to have my back hair to be removed first before I can finally install a new toilet. Thank you eHow.com for this laugh

Flush Windows 7 Down the Toilet?

Christoph — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 03:19:12 +0000

I am not too sure about this one. I was doing research on water saving toilets this evening when I stumbled upon this. You know, when you go to Amazon.com and look at a product – Amazon shows you related product results of what other customers ended up buying. Well, since I was looking for water saving toilets I was quite surprised to see Windows 7 Ultimate on the list of recommendations. Does that mean Windows 7 is that bad?

Click here for screenshot.

By the way – I am using Windows 7 since last August and I love it. It is a great product, very stable, and I had no problems moving all my stuff over from Windows Vista.