I just stumbled across this. It’s a search box inside one of the search results. I’m not sure who’s privileged enough to get these, but it’s an interesting usability idea.

Yes, it’s true. You can get a guaranteed 5% increase of your ad campaign ROI.
While I’m not currently running any ad campaigns, I was reminded today that Yahoo! Search Marketing has teamed up with American Express (Open For Business) and is giving you 5% back on money you spend on ads. All you need to do is make your payments to Yahoo! with your American Express Business Card. What a deal!
(…time to queue up “Money for nothing“…)

My good friend Jeremy just opened up his forums so that anybody may now participate.  Previously, you had to buy his ebook to gain access to the forums.  There is so much information in there about affiliate marketing, networks, advertising and SEO that it’s definitely worth your time to go check things out.

You can browse the forums without registering, but will need to register (for free) to post messages to the forums.

I’ve been getting a ton of scam spam recently. You know the kind, “Let us transfer millions to your account and you can keep a percentage”

Today, I started getting new spam (in my view) from someone trying to buy advertising on my sites. At first I thought the email was legit, but when I got a few regarding a few different sites (and some duplicates) I realized that it’s someone I don’t want to communicate with…

Here’s a sample of the text:

“Hello,

Browsing on the Internet I came upon your website (mydomainhere.com) and I find it very interesting and useful.
My name is Daniel Lee and the reason I am contacting you is my interest in purchasing advertising spot on your site.
I will be very thankful if you tell me how much a text link or banner 120×60 / 125×125 on your home page or all pages will cost.Thank you in advance!

Daniel Lee”

Thankfully, it will only take Thunderbird a couple of clicks to start marking all of these as spam and I won’t have to see them in my inbox anymore.

I recently made a laptop purchase from Circuit City online. During the checkout process, my business American Express (AmEx) card was declined. I tried my personal AmEx card and got the same result. I actually tried each of them a few times just to be sure I didn’t make a mistake when I entered the numbers on the payment page. I ended up making the purchase with my Visa and thought they might just be having trouble processing AmEx transactions at the time.
Later that day, I got a call From AmEx about suspicious transaction attempts. It turns out that the transactions were declined by AmEx because they were suspicious. I guess my card had been locked as a result.

I have mixed feelings about this. The consumer side of me thought, “wow, AmEx is really looking out for me.” I’m a patient shopper, so little inconveniences don’t bother me too much. I’m sure there are others that would be totally frustrated with any sort of inconvenience while ordering online. I’d rather have to jump through a hoop or two if it means stopping someone else from making unauthorized purchases on my account.

The online marketer in me thought, “How many sales are lost due to these false alerts?” In affiliate marketing, this is something that is far out of our control. It’s even out of the merchant’s control if the CC company decides to decline a transaction based on suspicion. I guess it’s a good thing that most merchants offer many methods of payment.

By contrast, when I made my first purchase from Amazon’s MP3 store things went a little too quickly. I clicked on “Buy this album” and my computer was instantly downloading the new MP3s without any warning. It made me uneasy that it was so simple to make a purchase. I didn’t even have to enter in my credit card information, Amazon had that all stored for me since I had purchased from them previously. I’ve since enabled an option in my account so that I get a confirmation page prior to MP3 orders being placed.