TheWayoftheWeb

Whether or not you’re trying to make money from publishing content online, most people have wanted to use affiliate links for products and services at some point. Either to earn money, or to raise cash for charity, for example.

Money pic by AMcGill on Flickr (CC Licence)

The problem is that it can be a hassle to grab the affiliate links from just one merchant, and then implement them in a decent way, let alone allowing using several – and how do you know which shop someone prefers to use?

And although this particular site isn’t designed to make money, both www.140char.com and www.onlineracedriver.com are more conscious efforts to experiment with how online content publishing can work.

If you look in the bottom right, you’ll see a handy disclosure widget which reveals I’m now running Skimlinks on my main blogs. Put simply, it matches any links to merchants I post with the merchants in the Skimlinks database and tracks when anyone clicks through and makes a purchase, without me having to visit all the different sites, sign-up for all the different programmes, and find all the relevant affiliate codes.

Which is handy.

So far it’s only been live for a week or so, and the purchases can take a while to feed through as the affiliates need to report back to Skimlinks after users have paid the deals have been sealed. But already it’s been useful for seeing how many people are actually going through affiliate links on each site, and what links I’ve been using without monetising them, for example. And it’s all automatic.

So if you’re someone who isn’t going to micromanage every single affiliate link, then I’d highly recommend Skimlinks. They’ve also got some interesting additional products to use, and set-up is either as simple as installing a WordPress plug-in, or just pasting one line of Javascript into your page template (s). You can also specific pages and individual links it should ignore, for example.

The main alternative is Viglinks, which I’m also using on some of my other sites – so far it’s performed in a similar way, but the main difference is around reporting and tools which aren’t as comprehensive or detailed with Viglinks.

Interestingly Viglinks is backed by Google Ventures, and has a number of big names involved, including backing from Angel Investors such as former LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman.  Meanwhile Skimlinks also has significant investment, and CEO and co-founder Alicia Navarro is known as one of the few female tech entrepreneurs in London.

But putting patriotic loyalties aside – both services are well worth using rather than missing a load of links, especially for larger sites (And because they’re managing so many links, they can arrange comission rates which are still an improvement on the normal rates, even after they’ve taken a cut). And if you fancy trying them, I’ve love you to use the following links:

Skimlinks

VigLinks

And they’re both free and easy to remove/disable if you decide you don’t like them…

One of the very brightest and best people I’ve had the pleasure of knowing, working with, and becoming friends with, had some news to share yesterday. He and his great wife are now parents of a beautiful child…

And it summed up how things have changed – even in the short time since my own son was born. The last update before birth was via Skype, the news and images appeared first on Facebook, and rather than everyone heading to a pub to wet the babies head, we all shared congratulations via Xbox Live.

It’s a great time to be a parent. Despite how much of politics and the media can try and achieve their aims by propagating scare stories and propping up things they shouldn’t with cash that really should be used elsewhere, the rapidly changing nature of the world means I have no idea what job or life my son will have. I’m not going to be hoping he’ll become an indentured servant to a feudal Lord, or go into an apprenticeship to have a lifelong career in one role which will never change.

Instead I’m hoping to pass on the ideas which not only seem to be increasingly important in terms of working but also living – embracing change, constantly learning, being willing to take some risks but with the knowledge of how to minimise the danger where it makes sense, connecting to trusted global networks of people with brilliance in a huge variety of ways, and helping others to achieve their aims and ambitions. To be able to effectively share knowledge and wisdom for the good of others and of yourself. To strive to make some kind of positive change for those around us, whether it’s one individual or a whole network. To always work towards doing cool stuff. To experiment. And to take advantage of the fact more information, conversation, connections and progress are enabled by new technology even as it raises new challenges to privacy, security and existing business.

And lastly – to encourage him to tinker with technology and particularly code. If only I’d made the link between my small natural ability in maths and the creativity that can be achieved with it, I might have continued with it far more, and had more of a balance with the more traditional creative outlet of writing (Which I still adore, and don’t regret pursuing – and it’s never to late to start playing around more!)

I’m immensely happy for my my friends and their new child, immensely proud of my family (for which I can take little credit), and I’m looking forward to a new era of evenings of Call of Duty accompanied by more discussion of nappies, toys, learning to crawl, walk, talk and all that comes after…

One of my favourite marketing campaigns was for the Xbox game Halo 2, featuring the ilovebees website (which is thankfully still online – it’s so rare people keep sites like this online after the campaign has ended).

It was a massively intriguing and popular alternate reality game which saw a big number of people I know collaborating to try and get to all the details of the game etc.

So the marketing for the latest in the series, Halo Reach, has a lot to live up to – the ability to control a giant robot arm is kinda cool, but I’m not sure I’ll remember it as well after six years!

Incidentally, Halo 2 was one of the only times I’ve actually gone to a game store at midnight to grab one of the first copies of the game – I doubt I’ll manage it this time due to the fact I’ve had two original Xboxes RROD (hardware failure) on me so far this year… (Then again, there’s a special Halo: Reach Xbox available!).

Either way, it’s better than being the second game to try to latch onto controversy by allowing you to play as a terrorist.

There’s an interested debate to be had about blogging and entrepreneurship with the news that at least a couple of bloggers have been told they need to register as a business, pay for a licence, and pay taxes on their profits in the city of Philadelphia, with the licence costing $300 for life, or $50 for a year. The bloggers in question have earned as little as $11 in two years.

The initial response was that Philly was being ridiculous, as ReadWriteWeb and Marketing Pilgrim both show. But there’s an interesting alternative point of view from Justin Kownacki (shared by Chris Brogan via RSS).

As he says:

‘I don’t know many people who blog and don’t hope for lots of traffic.  But what do you need traffic for, unless you expect to (even indirectly) convert them into customers?’

You could claim you want to connect with lots of people to chat and benefit from their shared knowledge as your primary reason, but adverts in sidebars, and the indirect benefits of speaking, consulting, or getting a better job all factor into online publishing.

Justin agrees that the Philadelphia requirement is ‘opportunistic, short-sighted and comically petty’, but asks ‘why are we doing this anyway’.

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened – a laid-off lawyer lost unemployment benefits in New York due to $1.30 a day Adsense ads. Personally I think the most sensible route is the middle ground….

The solution:

Say we define blogging for the moment as sharing stuff for free online for fun, and online publishing as the big money content business. We all exist somewhere on the line between them.

The problem here is that the definition of a business is coming in waaaaaay too far down the line towards free and fun.

Taxation is a useful way for people to contribute proportionally to resources which are shared by everyone, and at a certain point, anyone making money online should be required to pay a set amount of their earnings in this way. But there is a huge difference between a blog which has evolved to support one or more people in a business venture (e.g. Techcrunch, Mashable, ProBlogger et al), and someone making $5.5 dollars per year. And most people running a couple of ads on their blog are going to be in the $5.5 dollars a year camp, meaning they’ll earn more than the licence after about 54.54 years.

If we accept that around 80% of bloggers and people running websites will earn next to nothing, a realistic level of taxation would be when that revenue reaches a significant level – at least 4 figures annually in dollars (And ideally in pounds sterling as well!).

That’s when it becomes something which pays back the cost of hosting, domain names, computer equipment, broadband internet, and conclusively becomes something which makes a reasonable amount of income for the blogger (and also for the city – how many people won’t bother investing time and effort to create revenue for themselves and the city now?)

But as Justin points out, we shouldn’t just dismiss the idea of taxation affecting those of us who are working online to build our own websites and blogs – as more and more people become employed or self-employed in radical new roles in a global digital economy, we need to work with governments and councils to ensure they understand what the hell it is we do, or we’ll end up facing worse decisions in the future…