The fine folks at Yahoo! did another good deed last week. They hosted one of the crazier power lunches I have ever attended in order to help some deserving small businesses.

Now I’ve been very lucky in my life. I did not attend an ivy league school, I’m not a billionaire and I don’t look like a model. But I have attended some pretty great lunches including the Diplomats Ballroom in the United Nations, a private chef’s tasting lunch in Napa Valley and a special event in the CN Tower. Yahoo’s power lunch is in a category by itself.

I was able to talk with Yahoo’s Chief Marketing Officer Cammie Dunaway, Yahoo’s Small Business Guru Rich Riley (who also created a successful million dollar startup) and oh yea I was suspended high up in the air overlooking the Manhattan skyline. This was truly a power lunch like no other.
What made this power lunch really great was that I was also joined by three really happy small business owners. Ya see Yahoo ran a small business contest and these three had won this lunch as well as a $25,000 Yahoo! advertising budget and a mentor to help them spend that free advertising the best way.

In addition to the great karma from this contest, it turns out Yahoo! has been quietly doing things to help small business. During the power lunch I found out they were in New Orleans right after Hurricane Katrina helping people get back on their feet and getting their online presence rolling again. A big tip of the hat to Yahoo! and a congratulations to the winners who won out of 10,000 entries.

It seems to be harder to deliver interesting information about internet marketing nowadays.  That is one reason I don’t blog daily (the other reason is I am lazy).   I do enjoy helping people and covering interesting information.  So I am asking for help to identify areas that you would like me to blog about or discuss on my GoodKarma radio show.  Get your thinking caps on and start shouting out ideas.  If you think you have good information yourself and want to guestblog on GoodROI or join me on the radio just let me know.
Just remember I want to cover interesting stuff that other people will find interesting.  Thankfully there is an overabundance of other sources (blogs and radio shows) compared with several years ago when there were just a few sources of information.

Microsoft Vista gadgets are a new thing.  Imagine a sidebar that is about 2 inches wide on the right side of the desktop screen of all Microsoft Vista users.  These users can pick and choose what gadgets they want in there.  Like a clock, calculator.  Gadgets can use live feeds so you can have a gadget that shows the daily news headlines or stock prices.  Gadgets can also be automatically updated.  So if you release a gadget then you come out with version 2.0 of your gadget you can update your pre-exisiting users.

Microsoft expects 200 million Vists users within 2 years.  If you get 1% of those users to be interested in your gadget and download it you are talking about having real estate on 2 million computer desktops.  Now do you understand why everyone is interested in this?

Currently there are few gadgets out there.  It is easy to stake a claim and become the incumbent force.  Don’t wait too long since sites like http://www.gadgetspark.com are building gadgets for anybody with $600.  If you have a business and dont know how gadgets can help you, I am going to offer my brainstorming ability.  Just post your details in the comments and I’ll respond with what I would do.

Last week on my Internet marketing radio show GoodKarma I was discussing affiliate managers and the concept of skimming (the act of not paying affiliates for all valid sales). It seems I might not have been clear and some people might have misunderstood what I meant. My position is that every affiliate manager should know what skimming is NOT that every affiliate manager is skimming. There are many good affiliate managers that DO NOT skim, are very HONEST and are nice enough people I would take them home to meet my mom.
Affiliate managers have a hard job. They need to make sure the affiliates are promoting the program and not damaging the brand reputation. They also need to make sure their technical team is properly tracking sales and paying affiliates on time. Not to mention the many other things a good affiliate manager needs to do.

If an affiliate manager does not know what “skimming” is they can not keep an eye open to make sure it is not occurring. When an affiliate contacts them and wonders why their conversion rate has dropped with no obvious reason, the affiliate manager better know what “skimming” is and be able to truthfully say that is not the cause. I am lucky and have found several really good affiliate managers who do a great job running their programs and proactively finding sales that accidentally fall through the cracks and paying me for them. I have also found the occasional “rotten apple”.

The most humorous incident of dealing with a bad affiliate manager was when my conversion rate kept falling for 3 months until it was almost exactly 1%. When I confronted the affiliate manager, the person claimed to not even know what the concept of skimming was and said it was impossible for me not be receiving credit for all my sales. The next month my conversion rate rose to almost exactly 2%. And he still claimed he was not manipulating my affiliate account. Needless to say I stopped sending him my traffic and spent more time working on projects for the good affiliate managers that I know.

The foxiest lady of search, Vanessa Fox the product manager for Google Webmaster Central graced me with her presence again.  Here are some topics we covered and we also took live questions from the chatroom.

-Change in handling of subdomains on Google with the site: operator
-What is the best way to pour concrete
-Overview of how Google is structured (Mountain View office, Kirkland office, search, webmaster, adwords and adsense teams)
-Are Google employees given secret pills to counteract alcohol at conferences
-Difference between Google’s webmaster tools crawl error notices and Adsense site diagnostics error notices
-How many Kirkland ladies have the hots for Rand
-Google’s handling of robots.txt wildcards
-Why did they think it was ok to bring buffy back from heaven

Owen Byrne, the co-founder and senior software engineer of Digg.com will be joining me today on GoodKarma.  We’ll be talking about the history and growth of Digg as well as the best way to utilize it and common mistakes Digg users make.

We’ll be taking live questions during the show and the best question will win a free full submission to Best of the Web.  I’ll also be announcing a special promotion code so all listeners can get 25% off all Best of The Web Submissions.  Don’t miss out on this great show and giveaway.

On Thursday December 7th, Aaron Wall co-owner of Clientside SEM, author of SEObook, and keeper of ThreadWatch will be talking about the state of the online industry.  Also we’ll be talking about the best way of using ReviewME

As usual we will be taking live questions from the chatroom.  If you can’t make the live show feel free to submit your question to me.

Last night I was working on a project at 1am and I decided it was time to get some sleep and start fresh in the morning.  To ensure a fast start in the morning I left open a connection with a trusted source so a program could continue to run.  This will be known as mistake #1.

I wake up and my personal computer is showing the blue screen of death.  If you do not know what the blue screen of death is, it is when your computer is fried so bad it cant even run windows anymore or show a pretty error message.  It shows the most basic blue screen that says in nice words “this computer is ready to be melted down for recycling and has already started melting inside” Read the rest of this entry »

Kellie Stevens of AffiliateFairPlay will join me on GoodKarma to talk about adware. She’ll help explain the world of adware, who benefits, who loses and how to deal with it.  Some people may think it only impacts affiliates but as you’ll learn it also touches consumers and merchants.  Read the rest of this entry »

Congratulations to Darren Kay, Jim Hathaway and Liana Evans.  They are the happy winners of the GoodKarma WebmasterWorld Pubcon Pass Giveaway for the upcoming conference in Las Vegas. 

 Thank you to everybody you entered and better luck next time.  See you in Vegas!