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Here’s a fun little email trick I came across recently.  Try the following:

YourEmail+AnyTextHere@example.com

Replace “YourEmail” with your usual email address.  Replace “example.com” with your usual mail server.  And try replacing “AnyTextHere” with, well, any text you want.

Believe it or not, this is a valid email address, and just about every email provider supports this format.

Think of the implications of this…conditionally add a “+spam” to filter email from some websites.  Have friends and co-conspirators add “+TopSecret” to keep emails on the DL.  The possibilities are endless…or at least numerous.

Bon appetit, faithful followers!

Here are some questions you can quietly contemplate on your drive home:

1. Are potatoes put in New England Clam Chowder only to fool your tongue into thinking they are clams?

2. Ultimate Food Combo: Steak + Poptart = STEAKTART

3. What if there were no hypothetical questions?

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While perusing my Adwords campaign today, I started playing around with the graphing options.  I normally let the numbers speak for themselves and ignore the graph, but today I found a particularly interesting tidbit.

Adwords CTR vs COST

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What I found is this:

DAILY CTR appears to be closely correlated to DAILY COST

How can this be?  By this hypothesis, the more I spend on ads each day, the higher my click-through-rate would be.   While this sounds like something I shouldn’t complain about, I don’t understand why these two items would be proportional.

Has anyone else experienced this type of oddity?

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Amazon Associates hasn’t always played nice with social media.  Rather, it has NEVER played nice with social media, at least publicly.

You might remember a couple months ago when Joshua from SearchEngineJournal posted about Amazon denying commissions from sales coming from Twitter.  Amazon, citing their Associates Agreement, stated that affiliates could only make commission on referrals that originate from “your site”.  The debate about whether a user “owns” their Twitter domain ensued, and Amazon continued to hang its affiliates out to dry on this policy…until today.

Today, Amazon Associates announced the integration of Twitter with the Amazon Site Stripe, which includes 2-click posting of links to specific products on Twitter (once logged into Twitter), including URL shortening via bit.ly.  Amazon also posted a Social Media FAQ for Amazon Associates which lays out its new policies with decent clarity.

Some users have reported that the “Share on Twitter” functionality is intermittently not including the affiliate tracking ID in the shortened URL, so be sure to test your links!

After a quick test, it appears that Twitter randomly chooses a “Just saw this on Amazon” or “Check this out” message, along with the shortened bit.ly link.  Here’s what it looks like:

To summarize, Amazon’s Social Media Policies are as follows:

1. URL Shorteners: You may now post links via URL shortening services, as long as page does not get framed by the service.  If the address bar shows Amazon.com, you’re probably okay.
2. Twitter: You may now post shortened links via Twitter.
3. Social Media Usernames: Your social media username may NOT contain any Amazon copyrighted terms like “amazon” or “kindle”.
4. Product Advertising API: You may use the Product Advertising API on social media properties, however, they must still abide by the previously established Product Advertising API Policies (which bar the use of the API on mobile devices!)
5. How to Best Use Social Media: Amazon ain’t gonna tell you!  Why they had to include that in the FAQ, I don’t know (see question #6 here)

All in all, I’d say this is a good step for Amazon.  I know that personally, it will alleviate many hassles for me in getting around Amazon’s formerly nay-saying social media policy (let’s just say that all URL shorteners aren’t equal…especially when you build your own and use “fancy” META tags).

Kudos to Amazon for addressing this issue in a less-than-outrageous amount of time.

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Today I was perusing Google for a site that compares the overdraft fees of different banks. I just assumed that Google would know that I only want results for US banks, since I’d rather not convert my money in to pounds (and flying 12 hours to see a banker in person seems inefficient).

The search that raised the red flag for me was a search for “compare bank overdraft rates“.  Here’s what my results looked like:

compare bank overdraft rates

Why would Google assume that me, a guy in San Diego, would want to see results within the UK?

To be sure that Google knew I was in the US, I did search for “wells fargo” and I was given a result for a bank just down the street from me.  Hence, Google knows where I am.

Has anyone else seen this behavior before?

October was a fairly average affiliate marketing month for me with a few exceptions.  Revenue was up about 15% from just over $900, which I don’t consider to be a significant jump by any means.

Improvements

What IS encouraging is that last month I had 9 days with negative ROI’s (only amounting to about $50), whereas this month that number dropped to 2 days and only $20.  This tells me I’m polishing my current campaigns and plugging the holes.  This is even more apparent when you tally my negative days in the month of August (10 days for a loss of $215)!

Even MORE encouraging is that my affiliate marketing ROI is up from 247% in September to 277% for the month of October.  I attribute this to thinning out my herd of campaigns and terminating paid ads for any that weren’t performing well (or performing at all).

Underachievers

One of the under-performing sites was my Sony Bravia V Series website, which didn’t convert well enough to be a good CPC campaign.  My focus for it now is simply organic traffic, as sparse as it may be.  It does, however, rank fairly well on bing for several terms (#7 on Bing for “sony bravia v series” and #5 for “sony bravia v series reviews”), and I’m seeing several hundred uniques each month.  This month, the site converted 1 46″ Bravia V Series LCD hdtv for a commission of about $45.  Nothing to complain about, but I definitely wouldn’t mind some more conversions.

Non-Affiliate Earnings

My Adsense campaigns are struggling, but I haven’t really given them much attention lately.  I did start blogging more often, but the site is still climbing its way up the search engines at this point.  Time and more quality content should help increase that revenue trickle into a revenue stream (or even better, a revenue river?)

I still plan to start marketing within some ClickBank niches, but I haven’t had time to start that endeavor quite yet (the 9-to-5 is keeping me really busy lately).

Break it Down (dancing optional)

Here’s the breakdown of revenue for this month:

Adsense Revenue (7 sites): $19.18
Amazon Affiliates Revenue: $1,437.14
ClickBank Affiliate Revenue: $0 (nothing done with this account yet)
Shareasale Affiliate Revenue: $0 (nothing done with this account yet)
Commission Junction Revenue: $0 (nothing done with this account yet)
TOTAL Gross Affiliate Revenue: $1,456.32
(Minus) Adwords PPC Spend: $367.75
(Minus) Adcenter PPC Spend: $13.16

Total Net Affiliate Revenue: $1074.24