goodroi's blog

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In the last two weeks there has been a campaign amongst bloggers to googlebomb for the Online Poker Wiki page. As we have known for a long time if you have thousands of bloggers linking to a site, it will gain a top ranking. This stunt is turning into a problem for blogs, wikis and Google.

Follow the title link for the full post.

Yahoo launched their Small Business Resource Center. It is aimed at helping entrepreneurs run and market their online businesses while at the same time creating a community that big advertisers can market to. This resource has over 1,000 articles, with most of the information I saw dealing with search. This is very smart on Yahoo's part, it helps diversify them, creates more potential Oveture accounts and increases the revenue from their big accounts.

I am a businessman and I want to ensure my long-term success. At times I will go beyond my responsibilities and provide free help in order to make an affiliate program better in the long-term. For example I have reported usability issues with order forms, tested the order process and helped design affiliate program websites to drive up the conversion rate.

I strongly feel that it is the affiliate program's responsibility to have a good website that will convert and track the targeted traffic I drive to it. The reason I provide this free help is because I know my commission check will grow as a result of a better user experience.

With so many affiliate programs and other revenue streams available, I have a hard time justifying this free help. I want to deal with professionals who can carry their weight. But often the best money is offered by good business people who are terrible web designers. Sometimes they are not even good business people but just have a monopoly on a very profitable product.

Where do you draw the line?