Many people think of affiliates as an added sales channel and affiliate ads as offering a branding bonus (how many text link ads affiliate banner ads have you seen?) but there are numerous benefits to running an affiliate program that many people never consider.

Exclusive Partnerships:

You do not have to let people know that you have an affiliate program unless it makes sense to. You can chose what partners to allow when special occasions come up, without risking watering down your brand equity and perceived value by chasing large distribution deals.

In today’s post, Darren Rowse at Problogger asks:

“If you had the attention of 400 internet marketers for an hour and were given the brief to talk to them about blogging – where would you take the session?”

It’s a great question, and a great opportunity to lay some important points out on the table. And why should you listen to me? Because I am a professional blog consultant who works with Alliance Software, a company whose clients are almost exclusively high-performance internet marketers. (We’re talking “gun” entrepreneurs running highly-leveraged businesses turning over millions per annum off online sales.) I am therefore in both worlds all the time, and never sure whether to call myself a blog guy or an internet marketing guy!

A little while I ago, I wrote an article on this blog titled

The New York Times Reader, a piece of software you can download to read the NYT on your PC, came out in beta last fall and I immediately downloaded it for a few reasons — including the fact that I am a geek, a newspaper journalist and a big NYT fan. And I have to admit that it was (and is) pretty slick. Thanks to Microsoft’s presentation software, it replicates the look of a newspaper, but updates itself when connected to the Web, etc.

Avinash Kaushik has challenged Web Analytics vendor ClickTracks to release more advanced features of their free analytics product: ClickTracks Appetizer. In exchange Avinash will be teaching next week’s ClickTracks Seminar: online marketing and web analytics techniques

Keyon Hedayati over at the Google Analytics Blog has posted about a useful option for a Google Analytics Resource: The Google Analytics Forum.

What is Habari?

It’s a new group that’s building new blog software. Why do I care? Because it’ll be interesting to see what a new group comes up with and because I saw several blogs (especially on Chris Davis‘ blog) mention it today.

I’ve seen this happen several times and new companies almost always result out of the effort.

Omniture, Inc. has announced the launch of Discover 2.0, analytic software designed to give companies the ability to visually explore large amounts of online customer interaction data in real-time.

Discover is a component of the Omniture Online Business Optimization Platform, and is a solution that Omniture claims can accomodate all levels of business users by generating everything from simple reports to more complex methods of data aggregation and analysis.

While online sales increased during the 2006 holiday season, some small online business owners found that they missed an opportunity to increase sales because they were not prepared to sell their products or services online.

Matt Aslett writes that Oracle may be considering Unbreakable Support for MySQL and that MySQL Co. is likely to IPO later this year.

Matt points to an interesting article about using an open business model.

Before we go too much further, let me explain a bit further what I mean when I say “competing with customers”.

By now, you’ve probably heard about or read Mark Shuttleworth’s view on keeping free software free. Matt Asay has a take on Mark’s post here.

Windows Vista works based on the capabilities of the hardware installed. Windows Vista Capable PCs and Windows Vista Premium Ready PCs both are geared for running Windows Vista but the experience varies with the “premium” delivering more advanced user experience.

Major corporate houses choose open source partly due to the economic gains and mainly due to the control the open source system gives to their hands.

In recent times, MySpace and sexual predators have become closely associated terms in the minds of parents and lawmakers across the nation. The social networking site is currently developing software designed to allow parents to more closely monitor their children’s MySpace activities.

Matt Asay has some good advice for folks asking him for career advice: “Work for an open source company.”

The next president of France may owe the blogosphere a debt of gratitude after toiling in “la toile,” the fabric of the Internet.

The odds are good that the LAMP stack is running somewhere inside your company.

A year ago, Opera announced Google would be the default search provider on its mobile browser. That has changed to Yahoo, a fundamental shift that seems surprising on the surface.

In 2006, we saw a lot of energy and interest in user generated content.