Vinny Lingham’s Blog

Clicks2Customers has commissioned Ben Edelman to investigate
the impact of anti-spyware products on search engine & affiliate marketing
cookies.  Many reports have come out on this topic, but we wanted to get the
facts out in the open and deal with the issue head on.  I don’t want to say
too much at this stage, but the report should be available as early as next
week and I will be posting an analysis of the report on this blog when it is released.

I attended CJU UK yesterday (after that Red Eye flight from Orlando on Tuesday) to attend the Commission Junction UK Conference in London, with Joanne Shapiro, who runs our UK operations and account management. I’m very pleased to annouce that we received the Commission Junction UK 2006 Award for Leadership in Innovation.

I also spoke at the final session on “The Future of Online Marketing”, and Linus from e-Consultancy covered this topic and more from the event on their blog.

Well, Jenna (a non-techie) from ClicksCustomers put together a very nice and concise explanation on their blog.

Also, Synthasite, which is another division of incuBeta, has just launched their new website & blog. Synthasite is built using AJAX and is considered to be one of the most advanced Thin Client technologies around website development around. Synthasite recently ended it’s Beta program and we’re putting the final touches on the product - so keep an eye out for when it launches.

Some other popular examples of the use of AJAX is Gmail & OddPost (which is soon to become Yahoo Mail’s new email client). We only begun to scratch the surface of what AJAX can offer - so best to keep abreast of these new technologies. AJAX is one of the main technologies used in the new “Web 2.0” era.

How can performance marketers (aka Affiliates) make money using AJAX? Well, by building applications like Widgets which drive traffic to websites which can then be monetized by using affiliate program! AJAX skills are in high demand (although Widgets can be built in other languages too), and this is a good opportunity to build all sorts of innovative widgets for companies before they are able to do it themselves. To this end, we are launching Widgetopia very soon to facilitate relationships between developers, merchants, end users & distributors with the hopes of creating a marketplace where creativity can flourish. And this (creativity) is the foundation of affiliate marketing…

I’m sure that most people are not even aware of how smart the team that sits behind the Clicks2Customers division of incuBeta. They are amongst the best PPC marketers in the world and they get to travel to conferences globally. We run campaigns in over 6 languages, including Chinese & Japanese. The Clicks2Customers blog was launched about a year ago, but with all things, it’s taken a while to get going internally. The guys are blogging almost daily, and I suggest that you add it to your rss reader for some fresh, and off-beat views on the online marketing space.

The blog is located at:

http://blog.clicks2customers.com

RSS: http://blog.clicks2customers.com/atom.xml

After about 2 years, we finally launched new corporate websites, which will hopefully have a better reflection of our business going forward, which like any other Internet business, is constantly evolving. People always ask what the difference is between Clicks2Customers & incuBeta, so here goes:

incuBeta:

incuBeta is a South African company, with offices in Cape Town. We employ a total of 50 staff to work on different online technology products, services & companies such as Desktop Search Bars, Synthasite & Clicks2Customers. incuBeta develops the technology solutions that power the Clicks2Customers business.

Clicks2Customers:

Clicks2Customers is a US registered subsidiary company (100% owned by incuBeta, with a small satellite office in California) which operates as a Paid Search Engine Marketing Affiliate. This is a very specific team of about 25 people within incuBeta who work in, and fully understand the PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing arena. We are currently in the process of setting up UK offices as well. This is incuBeta’s most successful business to date. We work with a few, very select merchants to drive them over $100m/annum in sales via the Pay Per Click search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, etc.

Synthasite:

Synthasite is a Proprietary Web Development Platform which we have created to assist us, and other affiliates in deploying websites which are largely built around product feeds, such as MeetPersonals. We have just finished round 1 of our Beta testing program and Synthasite is definitely a long term project for us. It’s a unique piece of intellectual capital that competes head on with products like Dreamweaver, Frontpage and the like, and something that we believe to be far more efficient in building affiliate websites.

Other products:

incuBeta is always investigating new and exciting products in the Internet space, focusing primarily on B2C marketing, and consumer driven applications. Desktop Search Bars is simply a forerunner to a new project that we are launching very soon…