I want to do a few posts about the importance of analysing your server logs / website statistics, but in the mean time let me tell you a bit about the referrer data I’ve been seeing lately.

Firstly, how cool (or scary) is it to see people searching for your name? Granted that I am certainly not the only Paul Cherry in Australia, but I’ve seen several searches for “paul cherry” coming in on my logs. Am I the Paul Cherry that user was looking for?

Last night I posted some ads for staff we need at Boomerang, and “Paul Cherry, Business Development Manager, Boomerang.com.au” is on the bottom of the advertisements on Seek. Since then I have seen a few visitors coming in from Google who have searched for “paul cherry boomerang”. Those ones are definitely looking for me, but why? Maybe they just want to know if I’m a cool guy to work with? Of course I am! Just ask all the people that have worked for me that haven’t been fired. Or maybe they were looking for my direct email address to get a leg up? If that’s what you’ve visited for, here’s a hot tip: the Seek email comes directly to me anyway.

Here’s some more data I’ve been seeing:

A few hits here and there for how to cook steak and herbs to use with roast lamb, the traffic came in from terms including:

• cooking roast eye fillet steak
• roast lamb with bitter herbs
• how to cook eye fillet steak
• cooking roast lamb
• how to cook steak
• roast lamb herbs
• roast lamb

My post about ABN cancellation has attracted a few other affected Aussie’s who are searching for more information:

• abn cancellation
• cancellation of abn
• abn cancellation letter

And with my history of building high quality poker tables and providing my poker table plans on the internet, I am now seeing some traffic for:

• how to build a poker table
• cherry table plans
• making a poker table
• how to make a poker table

Of course, this is just the referrer data, there is so much more to learn from this than just what traffic you got. You can use this data to optimise for the traffic you want to get! Stay tuned for future search engine optimisation posts and I’ll teach you how analysing the web statistics you’ve got will help you get the statistics you want.
At the moment I am using a free web statistics tracker available from http://www.statcounter.com. It’s worth noting that the StatCounter website has a prestigious PR10! Clearly from all of the backlinks from people using the system and posts like this saying how good they are!

Update: I just checked the statcounter website, they’ve lost their PR10! OMG! It’s now only a PR9, buy hopefully getting another inbound link from the all-powerful Paul Cherry Blog (currently PR0) will push them back up!

I really loved the version of Downfall dubbed with the poker / collusion theme. I think this one is just as good.

Tonight on ACA they reported about all of the “stars” at Aussie Millions. They spoke to Aussie comedian Stephen Curry and Hollywood actress, turned poker pro Jennifer Tilly. Phil Laak was sitting right next to her the whole time, but they never introduced him or asked a single question. So according to A Current Affair, the only stars of poker are Hollywood celebrities, surely they could have mentioned a few of the best in that “sporting” field. They did touch on Joe Hachem for about 5 seconds, but the reporting always seems like they don’t really know what they are talking about and/or throw in too many puns. “This guy certainly knows when to hold’em and when to fold’em”.

Anyway, for my update. Apart from the fact that they ran a story about the Aussie Millions the night after I mentioned it in an email about the Phil Ivey identification mistake, they also apologised! At the end of the episode they said sorry for the error mis-identifying poker play Phil Ivey as James Blake. I win!

Tonight on A Current Affair they reported about all of the famous tennis stars you can see in Melbourne during the Australian Open events. Usually at this time of year, I would be knocking about Crown Casino in Melbourne for the Aussie Millions (Australia’s biggest poker tournament). I am not going this year, but for the past 3 or 4 years I have seen many of those tennis stars in the Crown hotel complex.

Anyhow, on tonight’s show of ACA, they reported spotting “big hitter James Blake” in Melbourne. They showed footage of their crew interviewing “Blake” outside Crown as he stepped into a limo. They must have asked him “What are you doing?” as he replied “Oh I’m just going off to play some golf, I might play some poker in the car”.

Unbeknown to the ACA reporter, they were in fact speaking to professional poker player Phil Ivey (pictured below in the shot of mine from Aussie Millions 2006). Phil loves two things, poker and golf. I am not sure if James Blake likes golf or poker, but it seemed to make sense enough for ACA to air it.

I can just imagine the Nine ACA researchers or reporters typing “black male tennis star” in to Google, to which they are presented with the first result which talks about James Blake. “Yeah that looks like him” they must have said to themselves. Or maybe they thought, “How many rich black people can there be in Melbourne? It has to be him”.

According to Wikipedia, Phil Ivey has over $8 million of recorded poker tournament winnings, a few million more than his stunt double James Blake, who has won over $5 million playing tennis.

I shot ACA an email to tell them they confused the two, it would be interesting to see if they say anything about it.

Phil Ivey has often been referred to as “the Tiger Woods of poker”, maybe James Black has been called that in the tennis world at some stage too? I am surprised ACA didn’t say they caught up with Tiger Woods.

So the Blu-ray / HD DVD war has been raging for well over a year now. A format war very much like the VHS / BETA conflict of the 80s. I had been hanging back waiting until one of the formats got crushed. However, the fight was taking far too long to decide a victor. I couldn’t bare to have this 1080p HD projector sitting here burning up watching only high definition television content any longer.

So I jumped in head first, Paul Cherry has signed exclusively to Blu-ray.

On January 3, our local computer store Umart re-opened after the Christmas break and I purchased a Blu-ray drive for my PC media center. News spread like wildfire! Within hours of my decision, news had hit over at Warner Bros. Entertainment and by the next day (January 4) Warner announced their switch to support Blu-ray exclusively too.

Warner’s sister company, New Line Cinema followed soon after with a release on January 5, stating their exclusive support for Blu-ray.

Back in August 2007, Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Animation announced their exclusivity with HD DVD. However, after hearing the news that Paul Cherry had bought a Blu-ray player and would be recommending high definition media on Blu-ray disc to all of his friends, Paramount pulled an ace out of their sleeve.

It seems that Paramount have a sinking ship clause in their contract with HD-DVD that would allow them to change teams in the event of Warner Bros backing Blu-ray Paul Cherry purchasing Blu-ray.

With Paul Chery and Warner Bros. now on the Blu team, alongside Walt Disney, 20th Century Fox and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,  Blu-ray will command about 70 per cent of all production output. If Paramount play their aces, Blu-ray will have a barnacles grip on Hollywood film content.

Given the money Microsoft and Toshiba have behind the HD-DVD technology, if it survives at all it looks likely to end up in desktop PCs and laptops as the popular choice for personal data storage.

So if you are planning a format war, or any type of multi-billion dollar consumer electronics decision, do the right thing and contact Paul Cherry first. It only takes one man to get behind your technology and the entire world comes crushing down on your competitors.

Many advertisers don’t realise (or care) that they are stealing from their affiliates. I am not talking about programs that shave valid sales, I simply referring to sites that have any kind of links or cross promotion that isn’t commissionable to their affiliates.

I have a few examples:

Case 1: Finance Products

At work we send a fair bit of traffic to credit card campaigns. Let’s say the bank pays affiliates for each credit card application, but has the traffic delivered directly to their main banking portal. My traffic suddenly clicks on a promotional advertisement for a personal loan and my traffic and commission has been stolen!

Solution: Create custom landing pages for the commissionable product only.

However, a few of the campaigns have successfully created custom landing pages but continue to steal traffic and money from me. How? They have links and phone numbers plastered all over the page for “call now”, “print an application form” or “go to your local branch” etc.

Solution: Get rid of those links! That really is the only answer, creating a special phone number, email address and applications forms with affiliate tracking is far beyond the capabilities of these programs so the only real solution is to remove them.

Imagine if you were a sales person working on commission in a television retail shop? Which way would you direct customers if the boss told you that only certain products in the store would pay commission? <THINK OF ANSWER HERE> That’s right! Of course you would!

Now, what if you worked with a customer, you provided all the information they needed in order to purchase a new TV, but then they spot one of the “other” products and pick up up one of those non-commissionable credit cards television sets? Would you be disappointed? Would you be angry? How long would it take you to go next door to another banks affiliate program television retailer who paid you commission on all TVs?

Maybe you could ask your boss to pay differently, maybe on a salary? After all, the bank boss doesn’t care what televisions get sold, he makes money on all products. As long as you convert those leads to sales, he’s happy! Maybe the banks should be paying me differently?

In this example, the St. George bank commits both sins. Traffic is delivered to their main banking portal and can go walk-about into other areas such as personal loans. They also have “call now” and “other ways to apply” buttons that are larger than the “Apply Now” commissionable buttons.

Case 2: Homewares Retailer

This one really is offensive. If you are an affiliate sending traffic to this program, close your eyes. The home couture affiliate program running in ClixGalore is a shocker! They have two very bad thieving mechanisms running directly in front of affiliates. Sure these guys are not the only ones doing stuff this, but it is just very easy to point out since they have it on their homepage and category sub-index pages!

1. eBay store - Home Couture auction some of their products (new) on eBay. If I send traffic to buy a new set of steak knives and then the visitor hops on over to eBay and Home Couture just happen to be selling those steak knives brand new and at any discounted price on eBay, who here is going to get the commission? It’s definitely not me!

2. Google Ads - OMG! Why am I sending my traffic to your program to hopefully make a sale and some commission when all you are doing is turning my traffic into CPC revenue for yourself? I don’t get a cut of that! Let me see how this works. I sent my traffic to Home Couture, they send my traffic on to one of their own competitors (faith in their own product?) and then help themselves (and Google) to a bit of revenue and I miss out completely. I think I am better off putting the Google ads on my own site. Sinner!

Solution: Whilst Home Couture does seem to offer an alternate landing page (for affiliate traffic) that does not have the eBay advertising on it, a simple click on the logo and you are back at the real homepage and off to bid on those steak knives. Home Couture, get rid of it! Maybe you make your pages smarter and put an “if” statement around the offending elements. IF (traffic = from_affiliates) THEN (dont_steal = true).

Case 3: Adult Product Programs

Most adult retail product websites use (read “rely on”) affiliate traffic. Many soon realise that the traffic doesn’t convert as well as they suspected so they start looking for other ways to cross promote to visitors. Linking off to DVD sister sites, dating sites, or straight up adult content sites. Some of those programs are in-house, but not commissionable and some even resend affiliate traffic directly to other programs! Many do this right under the nose of their affiliates; others do it behind closed doors. Sure this might not be considered “stealing” as direct as the other examples, but some sites will capture “leads” via newsletter signups, free trials etc and then remarket that traffic in the background (to their own site again, or to other programs as mentioned).

Solution: If you are going to steal from us, just do it behind closed doors. We can’t stand to see you rip us off blindly. Just remember that if you do rip off your affiliates, there are thousands of other adult programs who would love to get our traffic!

Affiliates: Take a good look at every site you are sending traffic to. If you think you could be bleeding sales like this, do something about it! Contact the advertiser, express your concern. If they don’t see the problem, or refuse to fix it for you, send your traffic somewhere else!