Comments (1) Sixteen years ago, I received a call from someone who worked for a large computer manufacturer, which was planning to add an online direct-sales program. The caller was creating a business plan for this new division of the company, and wanted to hire me to design an affiliate program.
My first question was, “What about channel conflict?”
Comments Off on In Praise of GTmetrix.com GTmetrix.com is an awesome web site: it analyzes your web site and provides detailed suggestions for how to improve the page-load time; this is incredibly useful when trying to diagnose the issue, “why is my web site loading to slowly?”
Note that there are multiple tabs with information: make sure to click on the “YSlow” and “Timeline” tabs to see more information.
Here are screen shots showing the information for this site (markwelchblog.com). Read more »
Comments Off on Book Review: How to Make Money With Affiliate Marketing Even Without a Website How to Make Money With Affiliate Marketing Even Without a Website (an ebook by Joan Mullally with Evelyn Trimborn) is mostly sincere — but quite misleading. The authors know and share a lot of information about affiliate marketing, but much of their advice is incorrect or incomplete. And ultimately, their advice won’t work for at least 95% of their target audience.
This week, I received two emails promoting new “Cloud Computing” services, with incredibly low pricing and promises of unlimited wealth if I become a reseller. They’re scams. Don’t flush your money into the sewers where these crooks are.
The breadth and depth of the advice in Geno Prussakov’s book, Affiliate Program Management: An Hour a Day, is exceptional.
Comments Off on Risks of Hiring Interns and Students Over the past 15 years, I’ve often heard clients suggest that they intend to hire “interns” or “students” as temporary workers, and I’ve always offered warnings. The problem isn’t really hiring the interns or students, but instead assuming that they understand and respect “the rules.”
Students and other temporary workers “assign far more value to [their own] potential short-term earnings than to the merchant’s long-term reputation” (quoting myself).
Comments Off on Weird Characters after cut-and-paste A teacher asked about “Weird letter characters appearing when viewing [her] product description online.”
For the past month, I’ve been trying to find evidence of any benefits earned by states which have enacted an Advertising-Nexus Tax Law (“Amazon Tax”). Even after appealing for help from many sources, I’ve failed to identify any benefit. Except for New York, no states have collected any additional sales taxes due to these laws, which have reduced the states’ income-tax revenue and jobs.
As expected, Amazon.com yesterday terminated its advertising relationship with 25,000 California web publishers, including me, after Gov. Brown signed an “Advertising-Nexus Tax Law,” which would use advertising relationships as a “hook” to try to force Amazon and other out-of-state retailers to collect California Sales Tax. I’ve posted separately about this on my separate blog for LessonIndex.com: http://blog.lessonindex.com/2011/06/california-forced-amazon-to-stop-advertising-here/
I’ve recently noticed several merchants who’ve created in-house affiliate programs with alarmingly high payment thresholds. Here’s why it’s a bad idea.
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