There’s just a whole bunch of stuff going on here and while it’s not normally my style, I thought I’d throw a bunch of stuff together in a composite post.
It’s Halloween!
Here at MechMedia (my company), Halloween is our Christmas. Our most popular website is a costume ideas and community site called CostumZee. (yeah, we have a bit of a -zee suffix thing going on here.) We’re just pleased as punch with how popular the website has become and while we just did a redesign, we’ll be doing another one after this season is over.
You’ve heard of the digg and slashdot effect. Well, we got Yahoo’ed this week. We were mentioned in a Yahoo Tech Blog post a week or so ago titled Halloween Ideas on the Web. Two nights ago that post was featured on the Yahoo homepage. The traffic was pretty heavy, hit an achilles heel (an unoptimized query), and brought our servers to their knees. By the time I got things fixed up in just an hour, it was gone. Yahoo!, if you’re reading this, go ahead and do it again, we’re ready for you this time.
One exciting new development is a Virtual Costume Party widget that we just released. It started out as a Facebook application that I developed with a lot of help from my good friend Brian Littleton at Shareasale. Brian has a love affair with Facebook and enjoys developing apps in his copious spare time so I asked him to help me out.
And now you can now add a widget to your own blog. Check out my widget over there to the right in the sidebar. Comment on it in my CostumZee profile and get your own! Fun stuff.
On a more serious note, after doing this costume thing for three years now, we’ve got halloween and costume trends information coming out of our ears, both from an overall retail industry perspective and from an affiliate marketing perspective. I hope to be able to write about some of that information soon.
And if you’re a Halloween merchant and want an honest assessment of your affiliate program, give me a shout. I’d love to chat with you.
Shareasale Think Tank
Speaking of ShareaSale, I’m heading to Arizona tomorrow morning for the second annual Shareasale ThinkTank conference, a small, invitation-only client event. Last year’s event was held at he Wynn in Las Vegas and was a very effective and productive meeting (not to mention fun) between network, merchants, and affiliates.
I expect even better this year as they’ve got some experience to build on. Several people who stop by here will be attending… I look forward to seeing you there.
Watch for me in Revenue Magazine
Lisa Picarille, editor-in-chief at Revenue Magazine mentioned this week on the blog that she’s been working on a piece featuring ME in the Affiliate Advantage Profile feature of the magazine. It’ll be in the November/December issue. Though I haven’t even seen the September/October issue yet, which apparently features my friend Kim Rowley.
It’s quite flattering to be featured in our industry mag. Though I’m a bit nervous to see it!
Affiliate Marketing Posts
In an effort to write a bit more, and more about affiliate marketing, a few of my recent posts have been highlighting some things that some merchants and affiliates could improve on. While I do have a history of calling a few networks to the carpet, I don’t really like to do that to merchants and affiliates so much. Actually, I don’t like speak poorly of anybody at all.
But, I do feel like there’s some educational opportunity here. In these a few recent cases I’ve talked about some things that merchants are doing that could be improved on. I haven’t even mentioned who they are in the posts, just to try and keep it more about addressing some issues and less about bashing anybody. I’m going to look to do that a bit more, and I hope to get feedback from the affiliate marketers who read this blog on whether that stuff is interesting.
Red Sox
And of course October means my local team the Red Sox are giving their loyal fans heartburn. They’re on the brink in a do or die game tonight against the Cleveland Indians in the American League Championship Series. You know, if they don’t advance, I’m ok with that. I don’t mind losing to the Indians who have been playing great, and they also beat the Yankees. And there’s always the Pats.
Go Sox!
Blog Redesign
Finally, if you’ve read this far (unless you’re comfortably reading this in your feed reader, in which case you’re missing out on my mug staring at you), you’ve also surely noticed that I’ve ditched the previous theme and grabbed a new one. It’s a freebie template, but I really like it. And I put my vast graphic design skills to work on a fancy logo. Let me know what you think of it.
I did this while I was already up to my elbows upgrading the blog to Wordpress 2.3. It was actually quite simple, especially using the Wordpress Subversion repository. I’ve written in the past about us moving to Subversion here in our development process. We’re finally there, and It’s been really REALLY useful. I can’t recommend that highly enough, though I may try in a post about that soon.
I also moved my feed over to FeedBurner, mostly so I can get that self-indulgent subscriber count thingy that everybody loves to show off on their blogs. If you don’t subscribe, c’mon, help me get that count up! I’m looking for four figures.
Wow, that turned out to be a lot. Why is it again that I can’t seem to write more?
