Amazon.com just announced an open Beta Test of their contextual links program. They’ve completed a small beta with some large customers and have now opened it to all Amazon.com affiliates.

What are contextual links? Amazon.com can now look at the text on your web site and automatically insert links to relevant Amazon.com products. Basically they find keywords in your content and turn them into links so you can make money. The idea is that your users will also benefit because they’ll be able to find relevant content at Amazon.com.

I installed this on Home Business Blogs yesterday. My normal links are in dark red. My Amazon.com context links are in blue.

You’ll notice a few of the links are kinda wacky. Like my name is sometimes a contextual link but I’m not an author. It links to some book about Ben’s. Kinda weird. Some of the context links are cool, and if you highlight the link with your mouse a popup will come up which will show you a preview of the item at Amazon.

All you have to do to activate the links are to put a little code from the Amazon.com affiliate program into your web site. You should put it near the closing >/body< tag in your HTML. If you have a blog this is easy, just insert this text into your footer. If you have a static HTML web site it may be a bit harder. If you do, check out my free tutorial at Marketing ICE on How to use PHP Includes. It sounds complicated but several people have commented on just how amazingly easy it is to do!

If you try out the contextual links would you mind leaving a comment, by clicking on the little comment on the lower right hand side of this post? That way you can let us know how your experience with the links are. Thanks!

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 8% [?]

My friend also bought a Cingular Blackjack and he just told me that he got a free extended battery for his phone.

Apparently Cingular got a lot of complaints about battery life. Since these phones are using Bluetooth and many of us also have them setup to use “Edge” or “3g” for data transfer they really eat through the batteries. So Cingular started to include one extended and one regular battery with phones instead of 2 regular batteries. As a way to make it up to existing customers they apparently initiated a rebate where you could get a free extended battery. Of course they didn’t want to promote it too much!

So I guess it’s our job as Cingular Blackjack owners to let everyone know about the extended battery rebate! If you have an older model Blackjack you can qualify for a free upgrade. (Ie: if you didn’t get an extended battery included for free with your phone.) Here is the Cingular Blackjack extended battery rebate site to get your rebate.

If you think you deserve a rebate, shut down your phone. Remove the battery cover and battery. Then you’ll enter in the numeric serial number which is the 15 digit number right above the upc code on the inside of your phone.

Good Luck with your rebates!
- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 7% [?]

I thought some of you Internet Marketers might benefit from me sharing my experiences in our beta test for our new Internet Marketing Videos site.

One of the things we wanted to do was offer free videos. A few of the free videos are introductory level things. A few are higher level that provide some really powerful training. We wanted to have at least a couple of “wow” videos that people got excited about.

So far only one of the videos really seems to be a “wow” video. So that’s something we may need to work on. We may need to make a few more videos free videos as well.

We also decided to make the free videos YouTube videos. We thought this was clever because we wouldn’t have to pay for the bandwidth associated with all the free members watching those videos. We also thought it would help us with viral marketing because YouTube videos all have a “send to a friend” link. In addition to having lots of people watch the free videos our total views of those videos would go up and it might help some of our videos become Popular videos on YouTube thereby helping us promote the site even more.

Unfortunately there was a lot of negative feedback!

The YouTube videos were roughly half the size of the paid videos. This wasn’t clear to our members so a lot of the free members began to question the quality of our videos. Additionally because the size was so much smaller the text within the videos was hard to follow so our users weren’t learning much. What’s more is because of YouTube’s requirements for our videos we had to compress them and it made the quality of the video rather grainy looking. Finally we had users complaining because they felt YouTube videos were public domain videos and some users were confused as to the difference in Paid Videos vs. Free.

Needless to say last night we decided to take down all the YouTube versions and only put up the high quality videos. We wanted our videos to be so power packed that people were learning a lot and actually craved access to the full line of tutorials.

So far the response has been overwhelming since we got rid of the YouTube videos.

This is an important lesson for us as well as for our readers. By beta testing and doing a small launch to a few people we know personally we were able to test out something. If we had launched to a wide audience and had this problem we probably would have hurt our reputation and it assuredly would have had a negative impact on our launch and how many subscribers we will get.

In the long run paying for the extra bandwidth is worth it to us, since our users are very pleased with the high quality free video content as opposed to the junky YouTube versions we had up originally.

Want to see the videos for yourself? Check out Marketing ICE. (ICE Stands for Interactive Creative Education)

- Benjamin Fitts

Popularity: 7% [?]

I thought we’d have a little bit of fun today.

A friend sent me this link to Killer Quiz.

The idea is simple. You look at a photo of a person and try and decide if they are a serial killer or if they are a computer geek. You view 10 photos and vote on each one. Some of the answers might surprise you!

I’m a computer geek myself and I’ve also seen quite a few Biography type shows on serial killers and yet I only got 6 out of 10 right!

I’d be interested to hear your results (click comments in the bottom right to leave your own comment!)

Take the quiz: Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 8% [?]

The BETA is now LIVE

The beta of our new Internet Marketing Instructional videos site is now live.

Internet Marketing Videos at Marketing ICE

Check it out.

There is a special offer inside for people who help us beta test.

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 6% [?]

Countdown: One Hour Until the Webinar

The webinar announcing the beta test of our new Internet Marketing Tutorials web site will be beginning in one hour.

If you’re going to be online, you may want to register for the beta test here.

We’re only going to allow 100 beta testers to join us, if you dial into the conference call and webinar a bit early you might be able to sneak your way in

- Ben

Popularity: 7% [?]

One quick last minute reminder for you about the Beta Test
announcement we’re having tonight. March 20th at 9:30 PM (EDT – New
York Time)

Not sure what time it is in New York City?

The beta test will only be open to 100 people. Right now we have
over 150 people schedule for the live webinar and announcement call
tonight.

We expect some people won’t show up, but you probably want to be on
the call 5-10 minutes early.

The call is in two parts:

1. Webinar you can watch on your computer. We do NOT do the audio
through your computer.

2. The AUDIO is going to be on a conference call. You have to dial
in to the conference call.

To get the call in information please go to:
http://www.marketingice.com/members/betatest.php

You must register for the webinar. You’ll get an email within 5-10
minutes which will give you all the information for the call and for
the internet portion.

Please make sure you call in 5-10 minutes early. The call will fill
up and those of you that don’t get on the conference call portion
won’t hear any audio!

So remember: Tonight March 20th at 9:30 PM EDT (New York City)

Register here.

See what time it is in New York here.

I’ll see you on the webinar tonight!

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 7% [?]

Thank you so much.

I really appreciate every one of you.

We announced the beta test of our new SEO Training and Internet Marketing Videos site a couple of days ago. We only have room for 100 beta testers. So far we have over 100 (107) registered for our pre-launch webinar. That’s pretty amazing to me.

Without any real promotion we’ve “technically” filled up our beta test!

Thank you! That means a lot. That means you like what I have to say and you trust me. That means you feel I have something to teach you. That makes me feel good and I appreciate it.

The good news for you is this. Yes, we have 107 people registered. However my best webinars only have 61% attendance. So I can safely assume that we really only have about 70 people who will show up for the webinar and signup for the beta. That means at least 30 more of you could probably sneak into the beta.

If you haven’t see it yet, check out the official beta announcement on Marketing ICE – Interactive Creative Education.

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 9% [?]

As a part of Mark, Jack, and I preparing to launch Marketing ICE and our new internet marketing videos and SEO Training Course… We released a blog. On the blog we talk about our upcoming trainings and videos. You can follow along with us by subscribing to our blog at:

http://www.marketingice.com/blog/

We’ve also recently announced our BETA test will begin Tuesday night March 20th. Check out the blog for more details!

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 9% [?]

Would you want to help me beta test my new web site?

My partners and I are looking for 100 people to help us beta test
our new “HOW TO” do internet marketing and search engine
optimization. This is an interactive education site and we want
feedback from people like YOU. That way we can make the site
better before we officially launch.

Want to find out more? Join us for a live webinar next Tuesday. Get
all the information at the url below:

Beta Testers Wanted

Thanks in advance for helping us test the site!

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 7% [?]