Affiliate newsletters

Good article by Jamie Birch on affiliate newsletters. The tip on including top 10 lists, in various categories, is a good one.

Like.com

Good post on Like.com. They launched a new shopping service with a twist; you can identify what celebrities are wearing, and then find out where to buy it, or similar merchandise.

Comparison Shopping Engines

If you're interested in Comparison Shopping Engines, I would highly recommend ComparisonEngines.com. Great insight into the industry.

Roboreptile sale

If you've been shopping at Discovery Stores, as you start holiday shopping, you may want to check today. The RoboReptile is now $79.99, marked down $20.

I spoke at AdTech yesterday. I heard two particularly interesting stats yesterday. Bill Tanner at Hitwise pointed out that 75% of search traffic comes from brand terms, and that advertising on your brand terms, beyond ranking #1 naturally, gives you 80+% of the traffic on those searches, while not advertising drops you under 60.
GarySmith, at YourAmigo.com, pointed out, on the other hand, they had a home decor etailer, and the top 100 phrases pulled only about 10% of their total traffic. I'm assuming their brand name wasn't particularly well known. This retailer had 32k out of 44k unique phrases get 1 click/month, and that the 3,4 or 5 word phrases had higher conversion rates. The long tail is alive and well, in this example :)

Ad Tech

I'm presenting at Ad Tech tommorrow. The blogroll down the left side of the nav has some of the sites I'll be mentioning. One of the most fascinating tidbits of data that I've seen recently is in one of the other presenters slides, that some of the major brands out there get 75% of their traffic from brand related terms, either paid or natural search.

Network Solutions ate my domain name. Last Tuesday, I loaded this blog, and discovered it had been replaced by a nifty Network Solutions page, with a list of paid click links. Turns out, they had my old contact info online, including an old email address. After many calls, it turns out there's an elaborate fax process to change your email. It tooks two faxes and three phone calls before a nice customer service rep agreed to extend the expiration by 15 days, allowing me to begin receiving email again. In case you were wondering why you got a strange page last week, that's the reason..