I came across a new search engine beta. I signed up just to check it out, and wow this search engine is really cool. It is called SearchMe Visual search. It is such an original idea, and works great. Check out this screenshot:

You scroll through the search results really similarly to an ipod touch or an iPhone. There are alot of other features that are similar to google, such as a blog search option and a children safe feature.

SearchMe.com is still in Beta, and they are accepting everyone into their beta, as it is just instant approval. Obviously no one will take out Google, but at least SearchMe is something different and unique, and not just the same thing over and over with a different logo….

Check SearchMe out and tell me what you think!

Popularity: 51% [?]

Blogs are everywhere, and aren’t going away anytime soon. My question to those who currently aren’t blogging is, what are you waiting for? Why don’t you have a blog?

Blogs are more than just a place where you can “express” your thoughts about what you do or pretty much anything. They are something that is now essential for your business. Even if your business is offline, having a blog to update certain specials or deals going on within your business can help a great deal. If you are an affiliate marketer, having a blog really helps with networks finding you. The only reason I started this blog was because I always wanted to own my name in a domain name. I wasn’t using it so I just decided to throw wordpress on it. Even though this blog is not that popular, I still enjoy blogging and it gives me something to do in-between building/modifying campaigns.

A few months back, I interviewed Jim Kukral, and I love this quote by him:

“Do you think blogging is having a good effect on internet marketing?
[Jim] Absolutely. I’ve been blogging since 2001, and I’ve seen it grow from a handful of grass roots bloggers, to millions of people using it. Blogs have become a must strategy when discussing a successful internet marketing campaign. Frankly, if you don’t have a blog now, people are going to wonder why not. It wasn’t that way a few years ago.“

So why don’t you have a blog? You have a Facebook/Myspace, what is holding you back?

Popularity: 57% [?]

Tracking202 is amazing. I just interviewed their CEO, Wes, and use their free PPC affiliate tracking tool on all my campaigns now. I remember there was alot of talk going around that the only reason they created the software was to steal everyones data and become billionaires. This is not the case! Even “if” they took your data, I mean do you really think two people are going to dent your stack? Doubt it. On top of that, their servers are top of the line and if you check out their blog you can see them actually taking the servers to the data center and installing them. (I do however understand that some people just don’t want to put their data out there, or simply don’t trust anyone elses servers but their own, and that’s fine.) Also, I must say the support is amazing and I find myself bothering the hell out of them with questions, and they dont seem to mind. Even if for some rare strange reason I can’t get ahold of them, I can always post on the their affiliate marketing forum.

Besides Tracking202, they have some amazing new stuff coming out so subscribe to their  affiliate marketing blog so you stay up to date. AND they just released Export202that is now in Beta. This tool is great! You can take a campaign from Adwords and then import it into adCenter or Yahoo. Should save a ton of time and be a great tool for scaling campaigns.

Anyways, the point of this post is to tell you about a great contest they are running. You can win a Nintendo Wii, and a fresh Tracking202 t-shirt. All you have to do is write a blog post about the contest and you get your entry!

Here are the rules taken straight from the post:

RULES

1. The contest is only valid if we get 100 or more linkbacks aka participants.

2. Contest will end at Midnight PST on April 15th, 2008 (Tax Day). Winner will be announced within a week. IF for any reason we do not reach our goal of 100+ participants due to the short contest date, we may extend this to give more people a chance to enter but we may not so don’t count on this.

3. You must complete the requirement for the Bonus entries to count (more on bonus entries below).

4. Contest is open to everyone WorldWide so we’ll ship anywhere. However if there is a duty fee or tax fee for your country if you live outside of the US, you’re on your own. We will ship it as a gift in situations such as this and help alleviate any fees you might have to pay as much as possible.

And, here are the official requirements to enter the contest:

REQUIREMENTS

1. All you have to do is write a short blog post about this blog contest describing as best as you can the rules and requirements and the prize giveaway. The review must be a minimum of 250 words which isn’t hard if you include these rules. You must link to our homepage using the anchor text Free PPC Affiliate Tracking Tool, our blog using the anchor text Affiliate Marketing Blog, our blog contest using the anchor text Free Nintendo Wii, and our forum using the anchor text Affiliate Marketing Forum as shown here. Be creative on what you have to say. Do this and you’ll automatically get 5 entries to the prize drawing. Once you’ve completed the above, leave a comment on this blog entry with a URL to your post so we can verify your entry (this is important otherwise you will not get credit for the drawing; do not email us or send us the link on AIM).

2. Your blog must be at least 90 days old and have a minimum of 30 blog posts at the time of this contest. If you do not meet this requirement, we’re sorry, you can not participate. The main reason for this rule is because we want to weed out people making extra blogs just to get extra entries and we feel it’s only fair to link to those who have been active with their blogs. If you fall under this category but feel you should be qualified to enter, shoot me an email at steven@tracking202.com or contact me on AIM at T202Stevenand I will review over it with you. We will be checking whois to verify domain age as well.

Plus, there are a few ways to get yourself some bonus entries. Here they are taken straight from the post:

BONUS ENTRIES

You can earn bonus entries to increase your chance of winning. Here are some ways you can get additional entries:

1. If you were one of the people who signed up for Tracking202 early on prior to this contest and have been “ACTIVE”, you automatically get a bonus entry in our appreciation for being a user. This is merely a way for us to thank those who put faith in our services. (Keep in mind all bonus entries are only valid if you follow the requirements above; please contact me if you’ve entered with your blog so I can verify your username and bonus entry).

2. If you subscribe to our newsletter, blog RSS, or Stumble, Reddit, and Digg our site, we will add 2 additional entry for each of those earning you potentially 10 bonus entries. Just send us a screenshot proving your RSS subscription (feed and/or email), Stumble, Reddit, and Digg (and email us your user name for each) and the email used for verification of newsletter subscription, and you’ll get your additional entries. If you are already subscribed, we’ll count those entries too (If you unsubscribe, the entry goes away; please send all screenshot, emails, etc to steven@tracking202.com ).

3. Leave a comment! Please note leaving your post URL and following the above contest rules do not apply. By leaving an actual blog comment, we will include 1 extra free entry to the drawing as a bonus. Multiple comments will not earn you multiple extra entries.

There are some great blog contests running online right now, so write up a post and enter!

Popularity: 67% [?]

The contests over at WinningTheWeb.com just keep getting better and better. This time, Gyutae is really pulling out the big guns. He is running what he calls the “Craziest Internet Marketing You’ve Ever Seen“, and it sure is a big one. He is giving away $5348 in cash and prizes. Taken straight from the blog, here are the prizes you can win:

Prizes Recap - $5,348 Total

• $650 Cash from Azoogle Ads
• $500 Cash from PepperJam Network
• $250 Cash from NeverblueAds
• $200 Cash from BidVertiser
• 1 Full Conference Pass to Affiliate Summit East ($949 value)
• 3 Month Membership to Aaron Wall’s SEO Training Program ($300 value)
• 6 Month Membership to SEOmoz Pro ($249 value)
• 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan from Purple Internet Marketing ($800 value)
• Autographed Copy of Kris’ Jones Upcoming Book on SEO ($20 value)
• 8 PSD Custom Banner Designs from Banners Mall ($275 value)
• 2 Exclusive Blog Themes from Unique Blog Designs (2 winners - $100 value each)
• 2 Revolution Wordpress Blog Themes from Brian Gardner (2 winners -$80 value each)
• 1 Year Swamp Plan Web Hosting from Host Gator ($150 value)
• 1 Hour Blog Optimization Consulting from Daniel Scocco of Daily Blog Tips ($175 value)
• 3 Month 125×125 Banner Ad on AndyBeard.eu ($100 value)
• 1 Month Text Link Ad on Ades Blog ($90 value)
• 1 Paid Review on Winning the Web - sponsored by 1 Cool File ($100 value)
• 20 Winning the Web T-shirts (20 winners - $9 value each)

Very nice stuff eh? also taken straight from the post, here is how you can enter:

How to Gain Entries

• Sign up for the mailing list (required) - 1 entry
• Blog about this contest and link to this post - 10 entries
• Every 5 comments on WTW (now until March 31 with 5 comments per day limit) - 1 entry
• Subscribe to the feed and stay tuned for more opportunities to gain entries

There are a total of 39 prizes, plus 20 winners get a free t-shirt with the most entries. One catch is you must be a member of some of the sponsors products. For instance, if you want to win the $650 from Azoogle, you have to be a registered publisher. Personally I was one of the winners of the contest with him and Tyler Cruz, so lets hope my luck continues!

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Popularity: 62% [?]

I recently got the chance to interview the founder of Tracking202. This is some great software, and in this interview it explains a few questions many people have had about the software!

What was the initial reasoning in creating Tracking202?
[Wes] Although most people might think Tracking202 (T202) was originally created to track keywords, it was actually really designed to help track PPC costs. When I got started doing PPC marketing I had several accounts, multiple Yahoo accounts, multiple MSN accounts, two adwords accounts, an ask.com account, multiple looksmart accounts, and a facebook marketing account. When you have 10+ accounts, how do you expect to login to each individual account to check your costs? You can’t. It is impossible to login to each account to check costs, that alone takes over an hour. So simply put, I needed someone that would automatically track my costs for every PPC account I had in one location. So I created one for my personal use. I was always interested in developing analytics type software by watching my friends success over at getclicky.com, so out of need to simply cost tracking over multiple accounts I created the software for my personal use, and then decided to make it publically accessible. So T202 was originally designed, not to track keywords, which it does, but mainly it was to consolidate all of your PPC accounts into one location. One spot to check your costs for every campaign over multiple PPC accounts in a second. The system is not 100% accurate yet, although we will get closer and closer to 100% accuracy as time progresses. Although even though it may not be exact cost tracking yet, it does give you a very good rough glimpse on how about everything is doing, and it is extremely helpful when you have lots of campaigns, and lots of accounts going.

I use this system on a few offers and can’t believe it is free. Why aren’t you charging people?
[Wes] Tracking202 is free, because Tracking202 is not designed to make money. Even if we charged for hosted PPC analytics software the market isn’t that big so it wouldn’t even generate significant revenue anyways. So the real reason the tracking software is free is because we want Tracking202 to simply start helping us gather a user base of active affiliate marketers who use our software. Then we can develop additional products and services towards our users that will ultimately make more money than Tracking202 ever would be itself.
For those who have to see it to believe it, you will see more Tracking202 products before the end of the year. Think Google, think of all the free applications, they attract a lot of users, and now they have hundreds of free products and a couple that generate all their revenue for them. Tracking202 is a launch pad for future products/services that we will be offering this year, and for time to come. If anyone likes to dive into it further I wrote a really long blog post on my site further explaining my philosophies on why Tracking202 is free here: http://www.wesmahler.com/why-is-tracking202-free-my-mistakes-launching-under-fire/

A large question arose during its launch and that was “aren’t you guys just going to steal my data?”. What is your answer to that?
[Wes] As of right now Tracking202 has been live for over 8 months since its development, our team, and I have personally promised over 700 individuals that we would keep their data secure. We are not interested in individuals keywords data, we ultimately want to build a company that does one million dollars a year in passive residual income from various products and services we offer to the affiliate marketers.
On a personal level, I honestly do not want to have to put up campaigns all day to earn a living, although there is a lot of money in that, it isn’t what I do. I develop applications like Kevin Rose and Max Lechin of PayPal. Web 2.0 entrepreneurs that build massive applications that millions of people can use on a daily basis that simplify their lives. We do not generate money by stealing peoples keywords, we generate wealth by developing highly web 2.0 applications that millions of people can use. If I was in someone else’s shoes I would also look at Tracking202 with the same questions, “why is it free”? So I can understand the hesitation to use the free tracking service, I can understand if I was in their shoes. Sure, absolutely. And we don’t force anyone to use our software, and some won’t and that is all right. Those who do however will benefit ultimately because no one’s data is comprised and to this date not a single persons’ data has been looked at, and I promise everyone, it isn’t going to change. And if you want to take it further, if you were put yourself in our shoes, that you had promised over 700+ people that you would keep their data secure, wouldn’t you also keep your promise? We want users 10 years down the line, and we only do that by fulfilling our client’s needs to the fullest, and being honest with them. The reason we won’t ever look at anyone’s keyword data is simply this, the relationships we have built are more valuable than keyword data. So it becomes very simple, the keyword data isn’t worth that much; the relationships are worth more than keyword data. That is why the keywords don’t matter, the relationships are more important, so that is what gets focused on, building relationships with our users. The relationships we are building, are worth more than any keyword list we could possibly buy.

A few suggestions I have seen are that you should make a version in which the user can buy it and upload it to their own server. Any plans for something like this in the future?
[Wes] We are actually planning on developing some self-hosted applications in the future related towards tracking, although we can’t say when, we are confident that we will be releasing some self-hosted tracking applications in the future now, absolutely.

Does Tracking202 have any big changes or plans in the near future?
[Wes] Yeah absolutely! Although we can’t say everything that is in store, we do have some exciting new products that help affiliate marketers that will be launching within the next couple of months. If anyone wants to keep up to date, they can check out the Tracking202 blog, or the Tracking202 newsletter where we keep everyone up to date on what’s going on.

Thanks again to Wes for taking the time out to do the interview. If you have not checked out Tracking202, you need to! It is some amazing software!

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Popularity: 75% [?]

I have not posted in forever, however now I am back to blogging and will hopefully begin daily posts again. Since my last post, my blog actually got pagerank. Although I don’t think that matters, and I don’t really care, it is just something I noticed and was really surprised with.

Anyways, I have some interviews coming up with some super cool people:

Peter Bordes, CEO of Mediatrust (Advaliant’s parent company)
Wes Mahler who runs Tracking202 and,
Stephen Gill from AffSpy

Look out for these interviews as I am sure they will be interesting. Peace. 

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Popularity: 57% [?]