RSS-Powered Affiliate Program: An Old Idea Whose Time May Have Come
Up until 2003, I used to run ISPcheck, a pay-per-click web hosting directory that became HostingCatalog under INetInteractive's management.
ISPcheck got some of its traffic from an affiliate program. In mid-2002, my friend Vlad from AITOC, an outstanding offshore development firm, suggested that I could help affiliates - and ISPCheck itself - generate more revenue by pushing top bids out to their sites via RSS. He explained that affiliates would be able to get a feed that dynamically synchronizes sponsored links on their sites and ISPcheck.
4+ years later, I finally see what a clever idea Vlad had. And I think it's applicable not just to ISPcheck, but any web hosting provider's affiliate program. Instead of regular banners, you could set up a marketing feed and give affiliate partners/ad venues the ability to promote multiple offers through a a customizable RSS widget (kind of like so). Any updates you make will instantly and automatically be pushed out to every affiliate partner's website.
By the way, I think every hosting provider should set up a network status feed also. And allow customers to receive support ticket updates, invoices, newsletters, etc via RSS in addition to email. RSS is 100% opt-in, and you can communicate with subscribers without worrying that your messages are being spam-filtered.
Oh, and give Vlad a call if you'd like to get a head start on cool marketing ideas for 2010 :)
One of the Web hosting industry's longest-standing citizens, Isabel Wang is also a high-tech enthusiast. Through her WHIR blog, she examines the impact emerging Web technologies will have on the Web hosting business, and on the motivations of hosting consumers.
Isabel has been in the web hosting ... (Read full bio)
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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