Business: January 2006 Archives

I'm not sure who first came up with the concept of the affiliate, but in the e-commerce world the master has to be Amazon. Amazon has grown to be one of the most important e-commerce portals in the world and a lot of that growth can be contributed to its gigantic affiliate base. But what about smaller businesses? Can affiliate marketing work for them? What of companies that do not have the "global reach"? I'd love to know how other people find it. From a publisher perspective the number of Irish companies offering affiliate programs has definitely mushroomed since I first looked into it back in the late 90s. However if there has been growth for some there have also been failures for others. At a global level it "must" be working, or how else would you explain the growth of cj.com and others. What kind of strategy should you adopt? What does it take to win market share through your affiliate network? How can you recruit new affiliates? When you are selling products and services that do not have the global appeal of the likes of Amazon I think it's only natural to feel mildly frustrated...

John Collins linked to a report of a German court which has ordered a German ISP to destroy all non-invoice related data. Full story here  What does this mean in the context of the recent data retention debacle?

We've just added asp.net 2.0 support to our windows 2003 hosting plans

There's a lot of hype around business blogging and at times I think people tend to forget that it is not without its downfalls.

An industry colleague pointed out a rather intriguing thread on boards.ie to me where one of our competitors service and pricing is criticised. When the competitor in question replied with the following I nearly fell of my chair:

The Irish Domain Registry has made some changes to its price structure earlier this month in response to public pressure from our company. We will shortly be passing on these benefits.

I'm sorry, but which company did you say you were again? I've already gone into IE domain pricing more than once, but if you haven't read them my previous pieces are here, here and here (you'll find more in the archives) And don't forget.. With Blacknight our pricing is real and transparent unlike with other companies .....

Several weeks ago I posted about email marketing techniques and how some marketers do it better than others. I would not like to be considered a hypocrite, so I decided to apply some of their techniques in a newsletter.

I know there are a lot of discussion forums already, but some areas seemed to be a bit lacking, at least in the Irish market. I'm not sure how successful a dedicated webmaster site would do, as I've seen quite a few of them start up over the years and then fizzle out.

Although I have my reservations about the merits of business blogging I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that the Infacta team have started a blog.

I've had to review prospective candidates' CVs on and off over the last few years. In some rare cases both the CV and the covering email (or letter) has been inspiring. Unfortunately those were rare cases. The average CV that I have the "pleasure" of reading, however, is anything but inspiring.

This month's Computers in Business (the IT supplement from the Sunday Business Post) has an interesting article by Barry McCall which covers the "marriage" of open and closed source solutions in the corporate environment. Some of his reflections are quite incisive:

Some competing Linux distributors are blindly following a pure open source path while some proprietary vendors are doggedly fighting the advancing tide of open source. It is hard to see either succeeding in the face of a growing move to mixed-source strategies

The full article is definitely worth reading: Best of Both Worlds

Just before Christmas Frank from BifSniff did a lovely graphic for us to use on some Blacknight merchandise.

Last year GoDaddy ran a "risque" advert during the Super Bowl. I put risque in inverted commas, as by European standards it would hardly have qualified as such. It may be mildly sexist, but it would hardly upset a European audience.

In the runup to Christmas a new term came to the fore in the Irish media - "risk equalisation".