Disqus - Latest Comments for Sam Harrelson

Re: BUMPzee turns 200

Sam Harrelson — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 15:24:28 -0000

You Yankees and your fruity beer. Drink a Sam Adams, Boston boy!

Anyway, congrats! I can't believe how quickly the site as grown, and continues to grow every day. The comments are really picking up there, which is just tremendous and fun to watch.

I look forward to your BusinessWeek cover!

Re: Buh-bye Askimet

Sam Harrelson — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 15:09:02 -0000

Thanks for raising the bar!

Hadn't even considered making modifications to improve the user experience, but that's a darn good point that I should have thought of!

Attempting to make the CPN process user friendly now...

Re: Blogs Don’t Hurt People

Sam Harrelson — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 11:49:25 -0000

It's not a pile on, Jeff.

To follow Scott's example in the post, I'll quote paraphrase something old and say it's more of a washing of hands.

Re: Have You Got an Affiliate Marketing Blog?

Sam Harrelson — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 17:45:41 -0000

http://www.costpernews.com

Re: CostPerNews Special: Are CJ and Linkshare Worth Their Salt?

Sam Harrelson — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 18:09:33 -0000

We're <strike>19</strike> 22 comments in (well, this is <strike>20</strike> 23), and I think now would be a perfect time to suggest taking this conversation/learning experience to the next level.

I have a proposal for anyone interested...

I want to bring together a number of different insights into a specific question brought up over and over on the podcast and in this debate. It's a question that I've been pondering for about three years since I was there at the launch of AdDrive (a CPA network) and have worked on but never come up with a satisfactory answer.

If you'd like to respond to the question, email me (sam@costpernews.com) and I'll send it to you. The catch is that I want a response from you by this Friday. That's not a lot of time, but the iron is hot, and we all need a good homework assignment. You should email me your response back as soon as possible (at least by Friday at noon est).
On Friday at noon est, I'll post all the responses (with links to your respective programs and your pic if you'd like) at once in an amalgamated post. I'll post your answer in full and respond to them as a whole and then to each of them individually with my own insights.

I'd like to get at least 10 of you to do this homework assignment. So, if you're interested in my important question and promise to respond by Friday noon, send me an email and I'll get the question (and a copy of these instructions) over to you immediately.

Looking forward to a good debate.
Sam

Re: CostPerNews Special: Are CJ and Linkshare Worth Their Salt?

Sam Harrelson — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 16:08:00 -0000

Don't forget, it's not too late to get in on the special publication post tomorrow about all of this.

If you've got thoughts on this subject and want to develop them in an extended form, see the post above this one (homework assignment).

So far, we're up to 8 responders to my question (high quality and interesting insights btw) so I'd like to get a few more to round out the discussion.

Sam

Re: CostPerNews Special: Are CJ and Linkshare Worth Their Salt?

Sam Harrelson — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 17:04:13 -0000

Jonathan-

This is not Jeff's site.

This is my site. I went to Jeff with this idea and asked for a podcast on these topics because I do think this is an issue that needs to be discussed intelligently somewhere, and I knew Jeff would be able to ask questions that got people talking. He did, and it has. I also want to hear insights from others of you who disagree with Jeff so I will be calling on you to do similar projects if I can convince you of the common good in doing so. I did not foresee the number of back-and-forth comments with no substance from both Jeff and others, but I am glad that people such as Shawn and Jeff Doak have offered up creative and insightful thoughts.

Jeff M may use this as an advertising tool somewhere else, but this is definitely not an advertisement for him or for anyone else. Please don't insult me by claiming such a thing. Scroll down and take a look back at the content I've provided here (for free) before you continue down that path of specious reasoning.

And no, I'm not a consultant. I'm a college professor and someone with a long past in affiliate marketing who is still very interested in the space. If that's not objective enough for you, I don't know what could be.

BTW, if anyone would like to advertise here on CPN, it's rather cheap. Check out the "Advertise" page accessible from the home page.

Re: Cost Per News Special: Affiliate Networks vs CPA Networks

Sam Harrelson — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 12:02:35 -0000

"I was hoping that CostPerNews.com would end up being a place where people came to discuss the important issues Sam decides to publish viewpoints on."

That is the goal of this site, Jeff. Realize, however, that is not the result of all of your comments or the comments of many others.

I view CPN as a symposium of sorts to catalogue important issues and industry responses to them, in hopes that we may build upon a body of knowledge going into the future and provide for a better understanding of what we are doing, both from inside the industry and from outside the industry.

I refuse to make this a gated community and require a subscription to comment or read. These discussions are potentially too valuable for the industry as a whole to build up those fences, although those platforms do have their validity and I do participate in them. In my reluctance to create these barriers, people are transferred a very powerful responsibility to keep themselves in check. Sometimes people adhere to that responsibility and sometimes they do not.

What I hope CPN becomes is a platform for conversation where readers take that responsibility with the utmost respect and allow for intelligent conversation about industry issues to flourish. I've seen glimpses of that over the past two weeks that this site has been operational, and I hope to see that flourish in the near future.

Ultimately, what is happening is that readers who do have insights and valuable thoughts into these (and future) topics are being discouraged from participating because of this back and forth exchange.

If you are going to leave a comment, and I encourage you to do so, please keep it to the realm of the prescribed issue. That does not mean that you cannot challenge someone's viewpoint or bias, but please do so in a professional manner. There are ways to intelligently disagree with someone by making a clear and coherent retort yourself, which does not include petty name calling. See any academic or professional peer edited journal if you are unsure of how to do such things.

In my academic field, we've been politely yet sharply disagreeing with each other for over 500 years, yet the format of our disagreements lends to a rich conversation rather than what has been oozing up from the primordial baser instincts of human nature here.

Moving forward, in the rare case that someone makes a mean-spirited or off topic personal attack after I post this, they will not be able to participate further in this conversation or others in the future, without warning and no matter who they are.

This is not meant to protect anyone, including myself. This is meant to protect the sanctity of conversation and what is possible, and has been evidenced in some of the comments, on the site.

I do not see these off topic back-and-forths being a problem now that I have established the ground rule.

Please realize that people outside the world of affiliate and our niche of online marketing are reading and would like to participate, but they are wise to stay out of this mess because all it does is harm your brand, and the brand of affiliate marketing.

So let's raise the bar, shall we? Thanks for reading, and keep participating-

Sam

Re: Cost Per News Special: Affiliate Networks vs CPA Networks

Sam Harrelson — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 10:55:51 -0000

For Deanna...

Are CPA networks a threat to affiliate networks?

No.

Should you use CPA networks in conjuntion with what you are doing at CJ or Linkshare or SAS?

Yes.

Why?

It's not just because of the volume. There is more transparency in (good) CPA networks than Ms. X says. The presentation she gives of these entities from Molander's prompts seems a little too idealistic for my experience in online marketing, the bulk of which has been spent in the deep trenches in CPA networks. There were a few more inconsistent leaps (pure performance, etc) made in the interview, but overall I think the point of raising CPA networks to a level of serious inquiry in your marketing spend is a good one.

Most CPA networks have moved beyond their "super affiliate" status into something else that we haven't completely defined or located. So, spend some time in a few networks, talk to the people behind them and see what they can do for your program or service.

By the way, the argument that CPA networks can't do rev share (which I keep hearing on and off the comments here) is wrong. Having helped build a network, manage a couple and worked as an affiliate manager in another, I can reassure you that there are ways to convert a rev share % into an effective CPA payout scalable to the performance of affiliates. Even DirecTrack can handle this. So, make sure you do your homework and see how these things work before relying on four year old arguments.

Re: Superman and Time Warner Cheating YouTube?

Sam Harrelson — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 15:12:48 -0000

Hi Maximilian-

Not sure what the problem is... I use a G5 with Firefox and Flock to work on the site but haven't experienced that problem with this site or others, and I watch a lot of YouTube vids and embeds. Do you have the same problems with Revver or Magnify embeds (for instance www.zefrank.com/theshow)?

Outside of some security or macromedia setting that is restricting your sound on flash, I'm not sure what the problem could be. I'll check to see if there's anything on my G5's setting which could show a similar problem.

Let us know how it turns out-

Sam

Re: ValueClick’s Video Advertising Network Coming

Sam Harrelson — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 16:34:19 -0000

>That’s a rhetorical question, right?

Haha... yep.

Re: Shawn Collins Ornament Meme

Sam Harrelson — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 19:09:52 -0000

Haha… sort of.

We are Baptists but one of our dogs says he is Dogist.

We use a chair b/c I’m a hippie nut at heart and can’t bring myself to cutting down a tree to put inside our house. I also decorate an apple tree out in our backyard but we have the chair for inside purposes.

Re: iPhone To Be Sold Online: What Does This Mean For Affiliates?

Sam Harrelson — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 09:37:30 -0000

Oz-

There is a program on CJ for selling the iPhone and accessories, but there are currently not any affiliate programs on the iPhone itself. That may change with the just released SDK, but we'll have to wait and see if any developers hop on that.

Sam

Re: Making My Readers Famous: Sam Harrelson

Sam Harrelson — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 15:28:11 -0000

Thanks so much, Vlad!

Keep up the great work. I'm subscribed to your feed and enjoy your content as well-

Sam

Re: Sam’s Blog is worth…..

Sam Harrelson — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 16:30:45 -0000

Great tool! I'm going to put this up on CostPerNews as daily inspiration to keep it going higher and higher.

ReveNews is worth over $200k, so let's all beg Wayne and Jim for a ride in their limo at Affiliate Summit :)

Re: Affiliate Marketing Carnival

Sam Harrelson — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 12:44:25 -0000

Great idea!

I've seen these used on some of my favorite science (Pharyngula, Cosmic Variance and Bad Astronomy) blogs as well as some of the religion blogs I keep up with.

Doing a carnival centered on the Summit will be a great experience.

Nice work!
Sam

Re: Growing the Tail

Sam Harrelson — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 17:09:58 -0000

Thanks for the tip!

I've been looking for something like this to augment the Wordpress Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin to help with keywords, etc.

Great post-
Sam

Re: Wikipedia’s Nofollow and SEO

Sam Harrelson — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 13:47:58 -0000

Good insight.

I need to look into the SEOmoz site to see how the nofollow fad could really shake things up.

Thanks, Vlad!

Re: Cost Per News is Having an Impact- As Leaders Tend to Have

Sam Harrelson — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 17:37:02 -0000

Wow, Vlad. Sometimes I wonder what the heck I'm doing devoting all of my time to CostPerNews, and then inevitably something interesting happens, someone interesting calls or a post like this pops up.

Thank YOU for keeping me inspired and keeping me going with your tips, your insights and your great posts. Out of the 400+ blogs I subscribe to and read on a daily basis, I count this yours as one of my top 10 favs.

So, keep it up and don't loose the faith.

Thanks again... I can't tell you how much your post made my day/week/month!

Sam

Re: New BumpZee Widget.

Sam Harrelson — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 16:39:39 -0000

I'm with you, Vlad... taking down MyBlogLog as we speak b/c it just doesn't compare in feedback or features.

Great job, Scott!

Re: Do Kontera Ads Bother You?

Sam Harrelson — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 16:22:40 -0000

Hey Vlad-

Personally, I strongly dislike the Kontera (and Snap.com) ads. That's my own taste and should have no impact on your decision as to include them here.

Do what you are comfortable with. If you like them, keep them. If you think they will get in the way, take them down.

ReveNews went through a similar experiment with these intellitext ads and I think they are mostly gone now. I imagine if you poll readers, they are going to say they are annoying as well.

That's why I encourage people to use feed readers and to subscribe to great content such as what you present here!

Re: “Ubuntu Is Really Not Just an OS, It’s a Lifestyle”

Sam Harrelson — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 17:06:35 -0000

Great idea on the Ubuntu BUMPzee community, Vlad! I'll get with Scott and see if we can get that set up soon.

Congrats on the switch!

Sam

Re: “Ubuntu Is Really Not Just an OS, It’s a Lifestyle”

Sam Harrelson — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 18:13:51 -0000

Oddly enough, you can download Ubuntu through Microsoft.

http://www.windowsmarketplace.com/details.aspx?...

Now that's funny!

Re: “Ubuntu Is Really Not Just an OS, It’s a Lifestyle”

Sam Harrelson — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 10:33:13 -0000

Here's why it's an error page now... Microsoft took it down!

Funny stuff...

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200706...

Re: “Ubuntu Is Really Not Just an OS, It’s a Lifestyle”

Sam Harrelson — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 16:32:26 -0000

Here's the BZ community...

http://www.bumpzee.com/ubuntulinux/

Let me know if you have any suggestions!

Re: Changing Things Around- Going Green

Sam Harrelson — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 23:45:32 -0000

Looking forward to the change! Cleaker is a great theme.

One day I'll fine my perfect theme and stick with it... it's all about experimentation!

Re: Green or red?

Sam Harrelson — Mon, 07 May 2007 22:22:45 -0000

Like the green a lot. Red means stop... green means go, right?

Nice logo!

Re: Making My Readers Famous: Sam Harrelson

Sam Harrelson — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 15:28:11 -0000

Thanks so much, Vlad!

Keep up the great work. I'm subscribed to your feed and enjoy your content as well-

Sam

Re: Sam’s Blog is worth…..

Sam Harrelson — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 16:30:45 -0000

Re: Affiliate Marketing Carnival

Sam Harrelson — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 12:44:25 -0000

Re: Growing the Tail

Sam Harrelson — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 17:09:58 -0000

Thanks for the tip!

I've been looking for something like this to augment the Wordpress Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin to help with keywords, etc.

Great post-
Sam

Re: Wikipedia’s Nofollow and SEO

Sam Harrelson — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 13:47:58 -0000

Good insight.

I need to look into the SEOmoz site to see how the nofollow fad could really shake things up.

Thanks, Vlad!

Re: Cost Per News is Having an Impact- As Leaders Tend to Have

Sam Harrelson — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 17:37:02 -0000

Re: New BumpZee Widget.

Sam Harrelson — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 16:39:39 -0000

I'm with you, Vlad... taking down MyBlogLog as we speak b/c it just doesn't compare in feedback or features.

Great job, Scott!

Re: Do Kontera Ads Bother You?

Sam Harrelson — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 16:22:40 -0000

Re: “Ubuntu Is Really Not Just an OS, It’s a Lifestyle”

Sam Harrelson — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 17:06:35 -0000

Great idea on the Ubuntu BUMPzee community, Vlad! I'll get with Scott and see if we can get that set up soon.

Congrats on the switch!

Sam

Re: “Ubuntu Is Really Not Just an OS, It’s a Lifestyle”

Sam Harrelson — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 18:13:51 -0000

Oddly enough, you can download Ubuntu through Microsoft.

http://www.windowsmarketplace.com/details.aspx?...

Now that's funny!

Re: “Ubuntu Is Really Not Just an OS, It’s a Lifestyle”

Sam Harrelson — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 10:33:13 -0000

Here's why it's an error page now... Microsoft took it down!

Funny stuff...

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200706...

Re: “Ubuntu Is Really Not Just an OS, It’s a Lifestyle”

Sam Harrelson — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 16:32:26 -0000

Here's the BZ community...

http://www.bumpzee.com/ubuntulinux/

Let me know if you have any suggestions!

Re: Changing Things Around- Going Green

Sam Harrelson — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 23:45:32 -0000

Looking forward to the change! Cleaker is a great theme.

One day I'll fine my perfect theme and stick with it... it's all about experimentation!

Re: Now with a New Custom Wordpress Template

Sam Harrelson — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 12:53:28 -0000

Love the new skin. Great job on the updates, Vinny!

Re: What Dataportability.org Wont Fix

Sam Harrelson — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 08:27:01 -0000

Small world, Chris.

Prof Dunlap was first my mentor and professor at my alma mater (Wofford College) and now he's the President of the College. He's an amazing man and this video captures a little of that but definitely not the full spectrum.

Great post and thanks for the video. I'll have to email him this and get his thoughts.

Sam