Free Stock Photography

If you’re artistically challenged like me then it’s likely that you’ll find free stock photography a god-send. There are a few sites out there that offer free stock photos but my personal favourite is stock xchng

There are absolutely thousands of categorised images to choose from so you should find the images that you’re after. Just make sure you comply with the photographers usage guidelines – if you don’t like the restrictions for a particular image,  rather than ignoring them just use another image. After I’ve downloaded an image I use the free and simple-to-use irfanview utility to resize/crop/edit the photo before uploading to my host server.

Where do you get your stock photography from?

Paid Content Is A Good Thing. Apparently.

A week or so ago I posted about free content being a good thing. But today I’m posting about an opposing view.

As many of us visit or subscribe to the same blogs you may well have caught sight of the new Brian Clarke (of copyblogger fame) site teachingsells.com? But if you haven’t, I recommend that you simply subscribe to the site and get a copy of the free pdf document. I didn’t bother until one of my favourite bloggers, Aaron Wall, gave it the nod today. It’s well worth the 15-20 minute first read.

There’s some obvious link bait headlining and content in it (suppose I’ve fallen for it of course by blogging about it!) but there is also some great thought provoking content too. Brian suggests that his reason for blogging is as an attraction strategy – I like that phrase and it’s why I started blogging about search marketing myself last year. As an aside, my own initial aims for publishing this blog (it used to be www.anotherjunction.com) were to:

• attract the attention of other blogging affiliates and search marketers
• join the community – to both share and learn useful information
• promote our search marketing company
• and a bit of me too, I blog

It isn’t my intention to make marginally significant money from this blog. Though as Brian says in his pitch:

To make money online, you?re always selling something?even if it?s just space on the
page.

That’s certainly true of course and what we’re all about on our commercial sites. Typically, on a site or page that includes content but no affiliate links I’d obviously consider monetising the page with adsense. Brian suggests that this method is flawed and is promoting his own view that you should charge for your content. I’m not in total agreement with his comment:

The people who do manage to make money with niche content and AdSense have to
be quite ruthless about getting people to click away as soon and as often as possible.
Beyond aggressive positioning of ad units that obscure the actual content, there is no
motivation to make the content engaging or even useful.

If you’re using adsense for commercial gain you do need people to click away but I’d argue that there is motivation to still publish content that is engaging or useful. But hands-up, on reflection I could do better on the engaging content front!

Don’t forget that Brian is concentrating on content that he believes can be paid for. He isn’t concentrating on earning money from things like credit cards, DVD rentals or mobile phones. My understanding that his proposed new platform is focusing on charging for information or intellectual knowledge. Free content or paid content aside, you still need eyes on pages …or at least eyes on your content. The latter is what Brian seems to be aiming at when he says:

When you have something to sell, you have leverage. You don?t necessarily need
traffic, because you can borrow someone else?s audience as long as you can offer that
publisher a compelling deal.

Knowledge is power perhaps.

Take a look at teachingsells and feel free to comment.

Rucku

I’ve developed a sort of compulsive disorder whereby I’m forever ripping snippets of articles from newspapers and magazines to keep as reminders for web ideas/research.

This cutting was taken from a copy of yesterdays Times that a previous train traveller had kindly left for me to read on my way to Liverpool for a couple of beers. Anyway this one was to remind me to look at Will Carling’s social networking site for rugby fans (not that I’m a big fan of the game) – subtly named rucku.com . There’s going to be a social networking site for just about every like-minded interest group that you can think of sooner or later. Each and everyone no doubt attempting to fund themselves with supporting ads.

Anyway my Guinness induced idea for a similar site for hockey enthusiasts – pucku.com – has fallen flat due to the domain being already registered and me not being prepared to offer a bid for it!

TradeTracker Affiliate Network

I was contacted this afternoon by TradeTracker UK who were after a little mention (unpaid of course!). It’s a new affiliate network from their Dutch parent company who have ambitious plans for the UK and Europe generally.

I’ve just completed my online registration and somebody else is working this evening because I’ve just been accepted. Note that some on-page text is still in Dutch prior to logging in.

The user interface looks good with a quite informative affiliate overview – it’s a dashboard style and on first impression it appears to have the info you’re after.

Available merchants? Ah, well, there’s just one at the moment for the UK and it’s a custom adventure holiday company called shoestring.co.uk (aff link).  A little searching leads me to Stephen Pratley, a fellow search marketer that I’ve spotted in the forums once or twice. Stephen appears to be behind the shoestring offering and blogs about it and tradetracker in this post. So if you’re active in the custom holidays arena (unlike us currently) then there’s another opportunity for you.

Tradetracker have a news section but unfortunately they don’t offer a blog yet. Isn’t this one area where affiliates do much better than the networks they partner with?

Best of luck to both shoestring and tradetracker and here’s hoping they bring on board some more new UK merchants.

£30 For A Blog Post?

I was contacted yesterday by a London based digital marketing company yesterday offering me £30 to blog about their (major brand name) clients new viral marketing promotion. You might have been contacted yourself?

It wasn’t mentioned if the post could no-follow the link out but that would be my preference if I wanted to publish the post and take the cash (you know of course that paid for links and google don’t go together!). Aside from that link juice issue it’s not what I want to do with this blog. Whilst I’m interested in branding and marketing issues and I have blogged about related topics in the past (on my old blogger blog) I think it shows when someone is publishing a paid for post. That’s not what I’m after on this blog.

Postal Strike Hitting Amazon Associates?

I’ve seen a quiet couple of days with regard to transaction volumes with amazon UK. I’m guessing that the postal strikes are putting potential purchasers off spending. The last sentence in the graphic informing that Super Saver Delivery orders will be delayed is the problem I think.

I tend to rely on customers bulking their order value up to £15 in order to get the free delivery – I can target lesser value products and expect a certain percentage of buyers to spend that bit extra to bump the order value to £15 (on say the 7% performance tier that’s £1.05 in commission). It’s a simple strategy that seems to work, especially if your target product is around the £11-£12 mark, presumably that’s why amazon have pitched it at this level. Even at higher basket values, supersaver delivery is another big plus with amazon.

So, with some media reports predicting the Post Office equivalent of the miners strike of the 80’s, maybe amazon UK associates will be seeing lower volumes of transactions for a while? Regardless of the issues, I can only see the strikes damaging the Post Office and further increasing the pressures on the business. With post over internet protocol (poip.co.uk is one of my domains by the way) services from the likes of viapost on their way things won’t be getting any easier for The Royal Mail (even though they are current partners) in the years ahead and making their customers look for alternatives now can only harm the business.

GHD Could Make Your Hair Curl

We’ve promoted the GHD brand of hair straighteners for a few years now and it’s fair to say that we’ve had some success with them in our time. But we’ve endured the detrimental effects of google algo changes (or ineffective optimisation on our part) and seen a big hike in PPC costs too.

This week we’ve received emails from two ghd merchants (though we only work with one out of these two) indicating that commission rates are being reduced. Affiliates never like to receive news of commission reductions, so anyone in the beauty market may well have suffered a double whammy over the last couple of days. In fairness to Jason Shankey, their agency at least detailed why they have taken the decision to cut the commission rates on both the standard and performance tier. There was no such explanation from Beauty Sleuth this afternoon.

Whilst the ghd market is certainly getting tough we’ll be around for a bit yet with a couple of new ideas in the pipeline.

Is Free Content A Good Thing? Ask radiohead

Recently in the UK one of my favourite recording artists Prince gave away his latest album for free by fixing the cd to the front of The Mail On Sunday. Okay, it wasn’t one of his best albums in my opinion, but that’s not really the point. Last weekend the Scottish group Travis did a similar thing with a compilation CD that included their new single.

Now, Radiohead are receiving a lot of attention by allowing you to download their new album In Rainbows ( site seems to be having problems though) and you can choose to pay as much or (more likely) as little as you want. Actually, you may not get it completely free as there will probably be a credit card handling fee. I hope the album is another OK Computer.

Whilst I’m presuming Radiohead are still planning on making money from their new album (or at least generate publicity and raise sales from the back catalogue), it highlights how damaging for traditional recording and media industries it can be when the artist becomes the publisher too, bypassing the traditional route to market but still being completely in touch with the target consumer via websites and blogs. It must be hell being a music publishing company nowadays.