Wow, 6 months since my last post! That really is unpardonable in the world of blogs.

I won’t bore you with my various excuses, but I’m back now . . .

Even though I’ve been up to my eyeballs in product launches and other client work, I’ve still been buying all kinds of internet marketing stuff. I’m frequently amazed at the low cost for resale or private label rights these days. 20, 45, 100, or even 300 products with resale rights for just a few dollars.

Now sure, lots of the offers include products we’ve seen before, and much of it it total garbage. But there are definitely some diamonds in the rough. So I keep collecting it and someday I may actually get some sites up there and start selling the stuff.

Last week I found a pretty nifty tool for “Link Effects“, and was surprised to see it was selling for just 5 bucks, so I dashed off a quick email to my list. It had been 6 weeks since I had emailed my list, so I was curious what the response would be. I also tried a split test of a straight-text email vs. a text/html email. Check out the stats from my Aweber account:

Now remember that Aweber can’t track the “open rate” of a straight text email. But the clickthrough percentage was pretty comparable for both versions. What I found interesting was the number of complaints — the text-only email resulted in almost double the number of complaints as the text/html email.

That may be because the link was visible — it was an Aweber-tracking link, which is pretty ugly and has a certain “commercial” feel to it (in my opinion).

Aweber recently added the ability to track clickthroughs while using your own domain for the link URL — you do this by adding some Javascript to your page and notifying Aweber via your control panel there, as shown in the video on this page.

This is a step in the right direction, but Aweber still tacks some tracking code onto the end of your link, something like this: “?awt_l=9YfeG&awt_m=8WL4Mnm0rvusc”. So it still looks a bit on the ugly side, as links go.

Another thing to consider is how this appended code will affect your affiliate links. If Aweber’s algorithm is intelligent enough it will detect an existing query string in your link and just append to it with the common ampersand divider.

For instance, if this was my affiliate link:

http://www.biztoolsbrief.com/?12345

Then Aweber would make it like this:

http://www.biztoolsbrief.com/?12345&awt_l=9YfeG&awt_m=8WL4Mnm0rvusc

But even that might mess up the afiliate tracking system, depending on what it’s expecting to see.

So if you’re going to use Aweber’s new tracking system with an affiliate program, make sure it’s not going to mess up the affiliate tracking!

One more thing about Aweber I discovered a little while back . . . they allow you to collect “custom” data fields on their optin forms, and merge that data into outgoing emails. That much you probably knew. But what I found out is that you can’t include that merged data into a URL if you’re going to have click tracking turned on — the merge code is not translated to the correct subscriber value in that case.

That’s a shame, because we don’t always use their “meta_adtracking” form field to hold the affiliate ID — but that’s what you’ll have to do if you want to include the affiliate ID in the URL and at the same time use Aweber’s click tracking system.

With the new tracking system via your own domain URL, this may not be an issue . . . check with Aweber to find out for sure.

Okay, now I need your feedback . . .

I’m working on a book (to be published by Wiley this fall) and while I was reviewing various online communications tools, it occurred to me that it might be fun to have an online chat with my readers. I was thinking maybe every Wednesday night from 9 PM – 10 PM central I could open up my chat lines and we could talk — any question goes . . . is that something you’d be interested in?

Let me know!

Best,

Paul

P.S. In case you’re interested, here’s the latest (about a month old, actually) picture of our latest addition:

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 8:42 pm and is filed under Business Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.