Hey fellow bloggers! Yesterday i applied for my press pass for the Affiliate Summit West 2008. I haven’t been on most of the day as its Super Bowl Sunday and everyone has to see the game (no matter if your a sports fan or not) .
Well to my surprise i found my press pass information waiting in my inbox when i went to check my mail. The summit will be held at the RIO in Las Vegas for those of you who don’t know and will run from Sunday 24th - 26th . I’m sure i don’t have to tell you all the major names that will be there so this is definitely a big thing for us as it will be our first summit.
I want to take a few questions from my readers so if you want something asked , just post it here in a comment and ill do my very best to get your question asked. Ill be having a video cam so your question will get posted here at gasmoney.net right after we get back and edit all the funny silly things well be doing.
Software giant Microsoft said Friday it had made an unsolicited offer to buy Internet search engine Yahoo with a cash and stock bid worth $44.6 billion. Now thats a good price for a company that has had a share loss of around 30 percent of their value in the past year( Earlier this week, Yahoo announced plans to lay off 1,000 employees by mid-February).
What do you guys think of the offer? Is it possible for these two companies to join forces to try and topple Google from its lucrative first spot on the web? I don’t know if that can happen as Google has been smart about everything they do. It seems they have a magic orb and see everything one step ahead of the competition.
I don’t see this happening with the government being involved. Monopoly comes to mind when i read this article.
The offer allows Yahoo shareholders to elect to receive cash or a fixed number of shares of Microsoft common stock with the total purchase consisting of half cash and half stock.
Yahoo shares rose nearly 60 percent in pre-market trading on news of the approach, while Microsoft shares were down 2.6 percent, CNN Money reported.
The announcement comes with Microsoft and Yahoo seeking to compete with Google in the lucrative online advertising market, currently worth $40 billion and expected to grow to $80 billion within three years. “Google has been faster and smarter in realising what the Internet can do,” CNN International’s Financial Editor Todd Benjamin said. “Microsoft thinks Yahoo can help it leapfrog into this huge, huge market.” Read Todd Benjamin’s blog
Okay, today i wanted to talk about customer service. I’m a some what dedicated reader of Jeromy’s Blog (Shoemoney.com) and i recently saw a post on how Customer Support Does Not Matter In Online Commerce . Now for him to say that tells me he usually gets what he wants lol jk Shoe. I also think he meant it doesn’t matter to him personally.
Customer Service is a very important thing online as it shows the company your dealing with or buying from actually cares about your satisfaction after the purchase. Here’s a good example of how customer service can change a business relationship from bad to good.
I posted an interview a few weeks back with CEO of Hostgator.com Brent Oxley and i didn’t quite go into detail on how we started talking. He contacted me and saw I wasn’t speaking to good on Hostgator as a hosting company. My experience with them years ago had me convinced they weren’t any good and that anyone should just stay away.
Brent asked me why i was telling people they were no good and i told him. He didn’t get offended and right away started to look into my account back then. He then wanted to see if there was anything he could do to get me to give him and hostgator another shot. So i told him i was actually looking for more dedicated servers and i was shopping around.
Right away he said let me set you up with a special promotion and see if we can change your idea of hostgator. I said “sure , everyone deserves a second chance”. Pretty soon i had the head of customer service contact me as well as 2 system administrators to help me get started and to make sure everything went smoothly. Now i can’t tell you how important that was , The CEO of a major company coming to get a hold of me and make sure everything was OK? That right there showed me i was important to his company and he would go far and beyond if necessary to make me happy. I still talk to Brent every now and then to see whats new and up coming. So you see , The customer service he gave me created a great relationship between two companies and needless to say he gave me a deal i couldn’t pass up.
So for those of you in selling yourself or a service. make sure you keep customer service a key element in your business.
Well i posted quite a while on JohnCow.com about his dropping EnterCard. It seems its still buzzing over there with a mixed review of things. Now i wanted to tell all of you what i thought on the whole situation since it seems to be a big deal on what other people do on their own blog.
Now first off , i understand every community stands together but if a certain blogger wants to remove a system or widget from his blog , He or she has full right to do with out having to get flamed or name called. I mean seriously! hes over there getting all sorts of posts in disagreement like:
Steve
January 29th, 2008 at 5:59 pm Wow, looks like your alexa has freakin TANKED since you dropped Entrecard you freakin idiot
And more i wont post but your welcome to check out John’s blog for more info. Entrecard has its pros as well as it cons. All you have to do is identify that with your own blog and forget what others think or say. Do your own homework with stuff , cause if you don’t then you definitely are in the wrong niche.
The entrecard system isn’t a big deal here on Gasmoney but if it was an issue like on Johncow.com then i would definitely remove it. I wouldn’t care what anyone would say as he really found there was no need for it on his blog.
OK I’m sure some of you remember my test run Post with John ChowsTTZmedia . Wellafter carefully reviewing the clicks and earnings, I have come to a conclusion that it definitely doesn’t belong on an internet marketing blog .( but thats just me ). I first questioned it when I saw several webmaster blogs publishing it and wondered if i was missing something since i didn’t see the match. I mean its all electronics and gadgets and yea we all love that stuff but its not really targeted advertising for what we do.
So i went ahead and changed it out with the new PepperJamNETWORK to see how things go. Gasmoney Blog was recently accepted by Kris Jones and team so that was definitely pretty exciting. These ads are all under every blog post so they should definitely get decent exposure. PepperJam is limited to the webmaster/affiliate stuff but I’m sure in the next few weeks or so it’ll start to grow dramatically. If you recently applied for it then post here on why you think it’ll do good for your blog and why.
The PepperJam system is very nice and way more advanced than ttzmedia. Here is just a screen shot for those of you interested in the Pepperjam network. Hope to see more people using the system as we all can learn from each other.
search engine Yahoo with a cash and stock bid worth $44.6 billion. Now thats a good price for a company that has had a share loss of around 30 percent of their value in the past year( Earlier this week, Yahoo announced plans to lay off 1,000 employees by mid-February). 
Well i posted quite a while on 
). I first questioned it when I saw several webmaster blogs publishing it and wondered if i was missing something since i didn’t see the match. I mean its all electronics and gadgets and yea we all love that stuff but its not really targeted advertising for what we do.
January 29th, 2008 at 5:59 pm Wow, looks like your alexa has freakin TANKED since you dropped Entrecard you freakin idiot