Vinny Lingham's Blog

Finally – MSN has launched their proprietary Search Engine!! Now things are going to get interesting. They have 5bn pages, slightly less than Google’s 8bn.

More commentary to follow, but initially it looks great!

Visit MSN Search

This just in:

Google has just updated it’s index to include over 8 Billion Pages!! View the latest press release on Google’s Blog.

Hey All

We made it to the big Apple, safe and sound – what a trip (not going into details now!). Eric and I are here for Ad:Tech, the largest online marketing conference of the year! We had lunch (err…Dinner) at a nice Turkish restaurant called Dervish – must be one of New York best kept secrets – it seems touristy, but it’s actually a very nice, quaint restaurant.

New York is in Autumn – cool, not yet too cold, and the New York City Marathon starts today! It’s so hectic in NY – I have not every seen it this busy! All the hotels are fully booked! Good luck getting anything under $200/night!

For those of you following the GoogleBot (Google’s Search Engine Spider), we’re had RECORD spidering the past few days. Typically, our log files average around 30MB/Day, it’s currently averaging 150MB/Day. Good news for us – as we currently have over 50,000 pages indexed on BidThenBuy Auctions.

I’m won’t be attending the Ad:Tech conferences, just the exhibition – I find the conferences to be pretty uninformative to the experts, but instead more of a sales pitch to potential customers. The beauty of Ad:Tech is that it’s what you want it to be – we want to use it as a source of new partners and leads from just social networking – therefore, it is… and we save $1250 on Conference tickets and rather, get free exhibit hall passes where everyone meets anyways

Another article I have written has just been published in Associate Progams, run by THE Affiliate Guru – Alan Gardyne!

Quick Preview:

Affiliate marketing through the major search engines is becoming a tough space to live in. Search arbitrage is in, which means more competitors and lower margins. More merchants are climbing into Google and Overture and buying up traffic at exorbitant rates.You must remember that if a merchant is paying you $20, and the affiliate network is getting somewhere between 20% and 30% of that payout, there’s a problem.If you’re getting less money than the merchant to market with, that simply means that the top affiliates (the ones on higher payouts) and the merchant can easily outbid you on the major engines, because they have more margin to play with.It’s simple maths – assuming everyone sends traffic to the same site from the same exact match keyword, conversion rate should be static (ignore ad copy), and therefore it’s about who can pay the highest cost per click.

Lowest Bid = Lowest Traffic = What To Do???

Well, there are 5 ways to outmaneuver the merchants. To read the rest of the article, view the whole article on AssociatePrograms.com.