The past few days I haven't been blogging much. This blog post is probably one of the few I've written since then.

I'm busy changing out all the affiliate marketing links on Interment.net, my big website. A lot of big changes are taking place with the affiliate program for Ancestry.com. Can't talk much about specifics, as I'm still bound by a non-disclosure agreement with them (which expires in another year).

And speaking about NDAs, I ain't gonna sign 'em anymore. There isn't any piece of information I need to know that's worth taping my mouth shut. People who know me, know that I wear my heart on my sleeve.

I've also been running a banner for Footnote.com, a competitor of Ancestry.com. I've already earned some sales from them after referring only 453 clicks. So I'm encouraged by it. I'm also testing Google AdSense on Interment.

Interestingly, Footnote.com held a conference call for its affiliate marketers last night. I sat in on the call, but didn't say anything. I don't really know much about the program. Their website doesn't look very "genealogist friendly", it's more designed for the web-savvy user. Going through it myself, I felt rather challenged. And I suspect it's the senior audience they're trying to go after.

In the conference call, they appealed to us for advice on how to make improvements to their website. I'll be giving them some.

I've also quit using Hitslink, a web traffic analyzer. It costs too damn much. It does provide some very detailed statistics however. I used it with Interment.net. I particularly liked the search engine reports, showing you for which search engine, what keywords were searched, and which URL they landed on.

I actually like Statcounter better than Hitslink, but Statcounter isn't scalable enough to handle Interment.net's traffic.

So, I'm moving Interment.net's stats tracking to Google Analytics. Not quite as robust as Hitslink, and not real time either, but free, and scalable enough to handle Interment.net's traffic.

I'm also adding Quantcast tracking to Interment.net.  

Labels: Ancestry.com, Footnote.com, Google Analytics, Hitslink, Statcounter