EricEwe.com

I suggested a custom Biz Card via Office Depot during one of the AS and I think a lot of affiliates went for it.

How about this? A custom shirt with your logo.
i.e. EricEwe’s Coupon shack Logo during ASE

Custom t-shirt for $2 + s/h ($6.99 total) – Use your own design/photo. Custom Shirts
A few restrictions:
- graphics only on one side
- only white shirts
- only one per person

Link

Disclaimer, I do not work for that company. I am not an affiliate of their nor do they have a program. Just passing a great deal to fellow affiliates

Google took a bold step today and is in the process of moving out of China. In the controversial move about over censorship by the Chinese government, Google is currently redirecting all of the traffic from www.google.cn to the HK domain. Other than censorship, Google was hard hit by hackers which they believe that it came from China.

In Hong Kong, Google should technically enjoy less censorship as Hong Kong which is is a special administrative region of China and enjoys more freedom, including an uncensored Internet, than mainland China.

On that note, web users in China are still having their internet searches filtered at a higher level with the Golden Shield Project aka Great Firewall of China.

Unconfirmed reports are saying that Google will exit China by April 10, 2010. I am wondering about how is Google going to make up the est $600 million / year revenue that Google generated in China. Either way, this will absolutely help Baidu defending its marketshare.

 

It’s been quite some time since I posted on here. With the extended vacation which I have yet to find and upload the pictures to my new position, it’s been a hard hitting Q1 2010.

Somebody sent this to me and I thought I would share the quiz.

FIRST, do the simple math below.
THEN, scroll down to find your hero.

It is truly remarkable just how accurate this is!
1) Pick your favorite number between 1 and 8
2) Multiply your choice by 3
3) Add 3
4) Multiply again by 3
5) You’ll get a 2 digit number…..maybe 42, for example
6) Add the digits together. Example 4 and 2 = 6

Now Scroll down.
With that number, see who your ROLE MODEL is from the list below:
1. Albert Einstein 2.
2. Oprah Winfrey
3. Mother Theresa
4. Ronald Reagan
5. Bill Gates
6. Gandhi
7. Eleanor Roosevelt
8. Babe Ruth
9. Eric Ewe
10.Winston Churchill
11.Barbara Walters
12.Dalai Lama

If you have some spare change and would like to own part of history, you can put your offer in for an authentic space shuttle at 31.43% off the asking price. There are some strings attached and you have the next 30 days to look under the matress to find the money before putting in the offer.

Here is a fact that you might not know about the Shuttle program. The first space shuttle developed by NASA was the Enterprise (aka OV-101) and was rolled out on Sept 17, 1976, but it never made it into space.

In an article reported by Associated Press on Jan 15, 2010:
Nasa has slashed the asking price for its soon-to-be-redundant space shuttles from 42 million dollars (£25.8 million) to 28.8 million dollars (£17.7 million).

The shuttles are for sale once they stop flying, supposedly this autumn.

When Nasa put out the call to museums, schools and others in December 2008, seeking buyers, about 20 expressed interest.

Nasa spokesman Mike Curie expects more interest, especially with the discount. “We’re confident that we’ll get other takers,” Mr Curie said.

Discovery is already promised to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. Atlantis and Endeavour are up for grabs. It’s possible that Enterprise, a shuttle prototype that never made it to space, also will be available. Enterprise currently is at the Smithsonian.

Mr Curie said no decisions will be made before summer.

The new lower price is based on Nasa’s estimate of the cost for transporting a shuttle from Kennedy Space Centre to a major US airport, and for displaying it indoors in a climate-controlled building. The travel cost may vary based on location. Nasa moved up the delivery date to the latter half of 2011, instead of 2012.

Potential customers have until February 19 to put in a request.

As for the space shuttle main engines, those are now free. Nasa advertised them for 400,000 to 800,000 US dollars each in December 2008, but no one expressed interest. So now the engines are available, along with other shuttle artefacts, for the cost of transportation and handling.

Assembly will be required, however.

With the recent development of Chinese nationals hacking Gmail – Google’s Free Email service, this lead the world’s largest search engine to rethink their strategy plus take swift action by enabling HTTPS for all Gmail users.

The hackers targeted Chinese human rights activists where these Gmail users believe that their Gmail accounts were compromised by the Chinese authorities. A law professor and human rights lawyer in Beijing, Dr. Biao stated that “At the end of last year, I received an email invitation to a human rights conference in Ireland. Two weeks later, our university officials came to me and said that the heads of the university had heard I planned to visit Ireland and that it was better not to go.” He elaborated “How did you know that? I have not told anyone” and was told: “Who do you think we are?”.

The hacking of GMail also put a strained on Google’s relationship with China as Google worked hard to tap into the Chinese market over 1.3 billion people and internet users of 384 million, according to Reuters on Jan 15, 2010. Revenue for Google in Q1 to Q3 for 2009 amounts to $16.9 billion and China’s est. revenue for 2009 is only $600 million, Google sees a huge growth potential in the country due to the sheer size of internet users and also the rise in disposable income for the Chinese middle class.

I do not think that the world’s 900 lbs search gorilla which is still trailing Baidu, China’s #1 search engine will leave the land of opportunities.

Do you?

This came as news to me when Friendster.com was acquired by a company in Malaysia. Friendster.com used to be the leading online social networking site and was often copied by the one Maga social networking site – MySpace.com (see book I finished on Stealing My Space).

I know that Friendster.com is a big hit in countries like Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Phillipines and maintains a strong foot hold in Asia, but the growth of the company within the last few years were very disappointing. According to an article in Wired.com (Issue 12.04 | April 2004), they valued Friendster at $53 million. After five years, Friendster was only able to double its value in comparison to companies like MySpace or the current social networking website titan, Facebook which is able to command a higher value and have seen a huge surge in growth.

A couple of days ago, Frindster was sold for a price tag of $110 million to a Malaysia company – MOL Global. MOL Global is an affiliate of online payment solutions provider MOL AccessPortal Bhd, which has Berjaya Corp Bhd chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) Tan Sri Vincent Tan as the principal shareholder.

An industry blog, TechCrunch, had in July valued Friendster at US$210mil, a fraction of Facebook’s estimated US$10bil valuation. According to Compete.com, Friendster is currently generating 1.1 million unique hits in Nov 2009 while Facebook is generating 128.3 million unique hits for the same period.

I doubt that Friendster will come close to what Facebook is doing but I am sure that MOL sees a value in Frienster to cough up $110 million, and if TechCrunch is accurate in their estimate, then Friendster was sold at 50 cents on the dollar.

Google announced today that they are taking an aggressive move to make reviews more accessible to those brick and mortar stores. Google will allow U.S. consumers to read reviews about local stores on their cell phones when they point and scan the bar codes on those local stores.

Google labeled this initiative as “Favorite Places on Google”, and Google sent out 100,000 bar codes to 100,000 most popular local businesses based on searches. That initiative spanned across 9,000 towns across the 50 states.

Businesses can put the barcode up in their window; searchers can scan it with any camera- and app-enabled phone, then read the reviews and other info on the Place Page, and even get mobile coupons on the spot. The QR codes can be scanned by a variety of mobile phones, including Android-powered phones, the iPhone and BlackBerry devices, provided that the user downloads a barcode-scanning app. Google suggests its own Barcode Scanner app for Android, and the $1.99 QuickMark app (iTunes) for the iPhone, among others. 

Google mentioned that the barcode initiative will be expanded with more bar codes being sent out, but there was no mention of a timeline. If you are keen on getting onboard, you can claim your own barcode via this Google Favorite Places link.

I have been in the affiliate realm for quite some time and I have seen a lot of changes, from the rise and fall of cookie stuffing affiliates to networks imploding. Within the last 3 years, I have seen a surge in not just super affiliates like Fatwallet, SlickDeals but rather what I would call MEGA Affiliates that make those super affiliates look like dwarfs.

Don’t get me wrong, in order to reach a status of a super affiliate, that particular affiliate should be driving a substantial amount of traffic to the retailer and generating a decent revenue. Commission Juction categorizes larger affiliates as “Top Performers” and it order to qualify, one must have a CJ Marketplace account and have been paid at least $10,000 USD in commissions per month for the last three months.

Over the last 3 years, companies that are typically merchants are getting into the affiliate game. A good example is DiscoverCard. They came storming into the scene and in 2007, Discover was recognized as the “Best New Affiliate” in the Linkshare Golden Links Award in NYC on June 19, 2007. It is no surprise that they are not only a super affiliates but Mega affiliates with their millions of DiscoverCard customer. One of their biggest angle is to offer a CASH BACK to the consumer for their purchase by clicking through the Mega affiliate’s link. Another notable Mega Affiliate is Bing which is supported by Microsoft.

What really puzzles me is the fact that the retailers have with these Mega Affiliates. Yes, it is imperative to have a relationship with them but at what cost? If you are paying your public affiliates 2% on all goods bought on your website and you offer these Mega affiliates more than 10% commission, where is the logic behind this? I have worked at an electronics retailer and competition is fierce and consumers are not only price sensitive, most tech savvy consumers will scour the ends of the world to save a penny. Thus, one is often squeezed by manufacturers to be competitive. I noticed that there was an electronics retailer offering 10% cash back to Bing’s users when they purchased through Bing’s links.

Today, I noticed that Wal-Mart is offering 20%. Yes, 20% on Bing.com. If you do some quick math, 20% is basically 1/5 off on a product. On Average, they are offering 1%-4% through their affiliate program on Linkshare and have been constantly shaving commission via their Linkshare program. So if Bing.com is able to offer 20% kick back to their customer base, then either Wal-Mart is offering at least 20% or Bing is subsidizing 16-19% on each transaction for their customer base.

Let’s look at this in a logical way, I am a firm believer in rewarding for performance but not to the extend where it cuts into your profit margin. In the long run, this is not a sustainable strategy where the merchant will bleed to death. And if the Mega affiliate is dumping money to promote a merchant, that is a great relationship for the merchant.

If you are having some issues with eBay search tonight, you are not alone. Apparently, this is happening to the eBay US and also eBay UK. Based on what I discovered on blogs, eBay will credit sellers for invisibility due to this outage.

A regular search term that I tested, “Toyota Camry”: