Tag Archives: split testing

Why Tweetmeme Sucks For Marketers

By Andy Beard | Published: May 9, 2009
The emergence of Tweetmeme during the period I wasn't blogging was interesting - I spent a fair amount of time reading content on sites, and even clicked the tweet buttons occasionally.
This post has now been updated with an official response from Tweetmeme - the features have now been added to the development timeline.
The Tweetmeme site is a useful content source, but this article is mainly about the Tweetmeme buttons. Adding something to your blog, especially something that can encourage viral behavior and add social proof is highly beneficial, and doing it correctly, without asking for passwords offers huge advantages. Twitter is also a medium that is marketing content tollerant, as long as the people following you are marketers, unlike Digg, Reddit, and to a lesser extent Stumbleupon. Thus I have spent some time delving into the code and API for Tweetmeme and the existing WordPress plugin. It has just been updated, thus if you download the Tweetmeme plugin, it will be the latest version.

Important New Features

  • Cleaned up cookie use a little, but it would be better if they set a cookie based on an action, rather than a display. The original RFC for cookies states that browser support for cookies should be a minimum of:-
    • 300 cookies in total
    • 20 cookies per domain
    • 4095 bytes per cookie
    To be perfectly honest, I don't want all those cookies, whether they are 1st party or 3rd party.
  • Ability to brand the retweets with @andybeard etc, though you still get "via @tweetmeme" at the end
  • The button is removed from excerpts using a filter on get_the_excerpt() - more on that to follow
However essential features of Tweetmeme and Tweetmeme Button are missing if it is going to be used by serious marketers.
Posted in marketing | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

HowTo: WordPress Multivariate Split-testing With Google Website Optimizer

By Andy Beard | Published: April 17, 2009

WordPress Sales & Affiliate Themes

I spent the better part of a week and a few hundred dollars ($300-$400) on various WordPress sales letter and affiliate themes - I came to the conclusion that they weren't something I would use.
  • Some I would class as pretty but lacking substance (polite version of crap)
  • Every single theme was designed around the concept that you run a single theme on your blog at a time
  • They all suffered from what I regard as a horrible plague - theme option pages - if you need to set up lots of options after you have uploaded a theme, you have lost a sale, unless I can also import and export settings.
  • The worst aspect of theme options pages is using them for the content that might appear on a page, because it is a nightmare to set up split testing, and when editing, you really want all the words on the page in front of you.
So I set about creating a solution for myself...
Posted in blog monetization, stats | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

  • RAP Bank

    I have just signed up for RAP Bank myself - call this a mini-review.
    It seems to be one of the smartest ideas for a long time as a great way to consolidate 100s of affiliate programs under a single entity for promotion.

    It is also one of the best implementations of WordPress I have ever seen.
    It is not without its bugs, as this is effectively pre-launch. For example I just found a bug in the keyword based search RSS feeds (yes RSS feeds for any term will be hot), but it looks like they might be onto a winner.
    Check it out - signup for the basic service is free.

    >Affiliate Program

    P.S. It is not immediately obvious who is running the site, but looking at my Paypal receipt (yes I signed up for Vendor Plus) I believe the site is run by Bill Ortell From Rap-Extras.com who is RAP certified and does the membership add-on that is highly popular.