Content Ads Guide

eBay announced today the global affiliate platform: the eBay Partner Network.

The new platform will go live on April 1st, 2008 PST, at which point eBay will no longer be running its affiliate program through Commission Junction.Beginning April 1st, affiliates should register with eBay Partner Network and migrate their links from CJ to the new platform.

While CJ and ValueClick have been valuable partners to eBay throughout the years, Ebay decided to give their affiliate community a customized experience for eBay affiliates.

All the great tools and benefits of working with the eBay program will remain the same – access to the Editor Kit and affiliate API, the flexible destination tool, the great payout structure. In addition, the eBay partner network will provide several new features:
• Easy global registration to multiple countries simultaneously
• New, targeted banners and rich media creatives
• New landing page optimization and geo-targeting capabilities
• More detailed reporting capabilities for eBay’s programs

The eBay Partner Network and Commission Junction will run in parallel for one month through this process, so please plan to complete your migration by May 1st, 2008.

Chitika announced today that RPU is available now to all publishers. The RPU is designed to work exclusively for blogs and news/article based sites that works as a simple, non-intrusive text link format that integrates right in to your content.

The RPU has instantly become one of Chitika most successful ad units across their network of publishers. They report users experienced overall revenue increases and enjoyed it’s complete customization features. Publishers love this ad unit because it doesn’t “look” like an ad.

You can use the RPU to:

• Monetize space which has traditionally gone un-monetized
• Provide your users with a logical “next place to click”
• Keep your readers happy - the RPU is completely non-intrusive

Features & Benefits

• A simple, non-intrusive text link format that integrates right in to your content.
• Easy integration of ads at the end of blog posts makes for minimal design changes.
• Complements rather than cannibalizes revenue from other ad networks.
• Oh yeah! Like all our other products, as users click, you earn PPC revenue.

You can choose your RPU unit size, colors, product category, set channel tracking and grab your code.

The Amazon Widgets team announced many new features that will make your widgets even more fun and effective! Since the launch of Amazon Widgets last September, Amazon´s Associates have created over 200,000 unique widgets which have been displayed over 800 million times!

The development team picked the most requested features and implemented them in this release. Some of these new features include:

• Shuffle Products: While building ‘My Favorites’ and ‘Slideshow’ widgets, you can now select the Shuffle Products option to show your products in random order each time the widget is displayed. You can also go to My Widgets and enable this option in previously saved widgets
• Default Search Term: With the new ‘Use default search term’ option in the Search widget you can specify a search term that will be used to populate the Search widget when it is first displayed. Remember, you can always add a default search term to previously saved widgets by going to My Widgets and editing your saved Search widgets
• Delete Widgets: Is your My Widgets page cluttered with widgets that you no longer use? Use the delete icon besides each widget on the My Widgets page to permanently delete unused widgets
• Tracking Ids: Monitoring your widgets with custom Tracking Ids has never been easier. You can now easily change the tracking id associated with each widget by locating the widget on My Widgets and clicking the change link in the Tracking Id column.

To start using these great new features and build more widgets, go to http://widgets.amazon.com or log in to Associates Central and click Build Links/Widgets under the Tools menu.

Hi, today I’m going to announce a new web directory. MaxWebDirectory is a human edited free web directory organized with various categories and subcategories. Max directory may be a good solution for website owners when they seek to improve their link popularity and increase their traffic. By submitting your website you get a direct link from one of our inner pages, chosen by you. Your listing consists in your website’s title, URL and description. The pagerank is also visible.

Submission is free, however the directory owners may require for some specific categories a reciprocal link. The links are human approved, but approval is fast (usually 24 hours or less) but please be aware that their system rejects automatically submissions stuffed with keywords or submissions without proper punctuations.

The Max Directory project has a clear strategic validity, both in terms of free positioning on search engines, and ease of use, by allowing to it’s visitors to make the best use of the information for free. You can have access to valuable free articles, like: building your pagerank, SEO terms, Web directory types, Benefits of free Directory Submissions, etc.

The submission process is the easiest ever: just browse until you found the best category for your website, then you’ll see the “Suggest Link” button. One other thing that I liked and found very useful is the menu options to search, access new and top links, but also random links which may give your website extra exposure.