wangarific

Hotlinking is the practice of loading a image on your site that resides on a different server. Back in the days when hosting companies metered your bandwidth, which is much rarer these days (or at least the caps are much higher), people would “steal bandwidth” by hotlinking to images. Rather than download them to your own server, you’d simply load the image from the remote server and thereby having them pay for the bandwidth.

These days, the bandwidth cost is less of an issue and it’s more about processing. While it’s often better to load the image from your own site, you trade bandwidth for a DNS lookup, it still happens. Most often it’ll be a content scraper but every so often you get a naive blogger or site owner who just doesn’t know any better. The easiest way to prevent this is to modify your .htaccess file. The server will know if someone else is trying to load an image from your server, so you can tell it to load another image or return a 403 Forbidden error.

Stop Hotlinking Entirely

These directives tell your server to only load images on your server if your site requests it, replace “mysite” with your domain. This code will return a 403 Forbidden error anytime another domain tries to load an image from your server.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ - [F]

The directives instruct the server to do this for JPE, JPEG, GIF, BMP, and PNG files. If you want to extend this to other filetyles, simply add a pipe “|” (it’s the shift-letter above the backslash underneath the backspace key) and the extension. If you want to return an image, rather than a 403, replace the dash in the final line with the path to an image.

Stop Hotlinking from Specific Domains

If you want to allow some hotlinking but not others, you can specifically pick them out:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?blogspot\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ - [F]

This prevents hotlinking from blogspot and myspace domains. The NC tells .htaccess to ignore case sensitivity (so MySpace is the same as myspace) and the OR tells it to prevent blogspot OR myspace. If you want to add another line, make sure it has an OR in the arguments (unless it’s the last one in the list).

Finally, don’t hotlink to other people’s images. I think it’s OK if it’s a huge site like Flickr or Imgur, which is designed for and expects it, but not if it’s an individual’s own site.

Found via reddit.

Between Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno, I liked O’Brien’s style of irreverent humor a lot more. I guess it’s a generational thing but Leno’s jokes just weren’t funny to me. So when NBC handed the reigns of the Tonight Show over to O’Brien, I thought it was great. To be honest, I rarely watch the late night shows because I’m usually asleep by them (or watching Sportscenter before I go to sleep) but I was still a little annoyed when NBC took the show away. They were claiming that O’Brien’s ratings numbers were worse than Leno and that they were giving the show back to Leno. Ultimately, Conan got paid big time but it was still a crappy situation that bordered on ludicrous.

Well, it turns out that Leno’s ratings aren’t that great after all.

The reality is that you can get your share of entertainment whenever you want, such as when you’re trapped at work. You don’t have to watch an hour long show for a few moments of potential humor at 11:30 if you know you can just get the awesome highlights tomorrow.

Yeah, me neither… it turns out that Ron Wayne was one of the co-founders of Apple, along with Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, and left with a payout of $800. His name is on the legal documents that created Apple and Wayne became friends with Jobs while both worked at Atari Corporation. Had Wayne stayed on, his 10% share would be worth $22 billion today. Wayne role was to be the documents and mediation guy and that role came with a 10% share of the company.

Eleven days after Apple was formed, Wayne removed himself from the company charter. He eventually was given $800 for his stake in Apple, and he let go of that valuable Apple stock, which has exploded in value since.

That… sucks.

The gambling man who co-founded Apple and left for $800 [CNN]

When you first start a site, you have no history. You’re like a baby who just got slapped by the doctor. No one knows who you are, no one knows what you’re capable of, and no one is willing to pony up a few bucks to see what you can do. That’s OK, that’s why performance marketing has flourished on the web and why so many people are making a living off it.

Performance marketing, or affiliate marketing, works because advertisers don’t have to trust you. They only have to trust what you are able to do, which is how it should be. They’ll pay you a percentage of a successful sale or they’ll pay you $20 if you can get someone to sign up or apply for something. They don’t pay unless you perform.

The Beginning

In the beginning, the struggle will be for you to get approval to run offers. Some advertisers are more relaxed than others about their approval requirements. Once you’ve built up a fairly respectable site, start applying for relevant programs. You’ll get into some of them, you’ll be rejected for others. Don’t take it personally, oftentimes it’s an automated decision process.

Cracking Picky Advertisers

If you are rejected, move on unless it’s an offer you feel is perfect for your site. If it is, try to find the affiliate manager’s email or telephone number and give them a call. Get a reason (or reasons) why you weren’t accepted and fix those issues. If the issue is performance (a manager only has so much bandwidth to cover their affiliates), ask them what they’d need as a minimum before they’ll accept someone.

One way to crack a picky advertiser is to find their competitor and promote them. In every niche there is always going to be a company looking to break out. Find them, promote them, and develop a performance history. If you can bring that history to the pickier advertiser, they may accept you on that alone.

Negotiating Higher Payouts

Once you’ve started to generate leads, even if it’s only a couple a month, contact your affiliate manager to find out about higher payouts. The vast majority of affiliates generate zero sales or leads. Once you’ve generated a few, you’re separating yourself from the pack and showing you can send people their way. Talk to your manager and find out what you need to do to bump up the payouts or the commission rate. You may be surprised to learn that 5 sales is enough to get you to the next level, but you won’t have a goal unless you ask.

Beyond Highest Payouts

Once you’ve developed a history of strong performance, you may have reached the highest level of payouts. Your quantity of the leads or sales is high, the quality of those leads and sales are high, and the advertiser is generally very happy with your performance. However, reaching the highest payouts isn’t the end of the growth in the relationship.

The next step is to look for ways to partner with the brand outside of performance marketing. You may need to bridge the gap between the marketing department and the advertising department, which are increasingly growing closer and closer together. Consider ways for brands to sponsor areas of the site, such as a section or topic category, sponsor email newsletters, or simply purchase display advertising.

When you have a history of strong performance, these sweetener type of deals may not convert more leads or generate more sales, but it solidifies a relationship. If you have a 6 month display ad with a company, how likely are you to swap out their offer for someone else, especially after you factor in the value of that ad from a blended CPA perspective? Less likely, especially if it’s an untested offer.

In the end, remember that the rules aren’t set in stone. If you can think of a creative way to build on a relationship, give it a try. The worst they can say is “no” and then you’ll at least know. I hope you’ve found these tips helpful, please share any of your own below!

Goldline, the company that Glenn Beck has shilled for, has come under a lot of fire lately because of their high markups on some gold coins. While I don’t personally believe Goldline is a scam, they are very open and upfront about their pricing, I do think that a lot of consumers may be taken for a ride when they buy coins with incredible markups.

It should go without saying that anytime something “hot,” there will be scammers. Cash4gold is a company that buys gold and they’ve been, on numerous occasions, shown to use less than 100% honest business practices. If you haven’t read anything about that, consider this insider’s look – 10 Confessions of a Cash4Gold Employee. (there are plenty if you search for it)

However, if you shop around, you can usually discover this very quickly. The problem is many people don’t and they get ripped off.

Did you know that Captain Jean-Luc Picard has been knighted by the Queen of England?

When I was younger (and to be honest, I am to this day), I was a huge fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I loved it because it showed a future where we traveled through the stars to far away places and met interesting cultures and creatures.

It wasn’t until later that I learned Patrick Stewart was a very accomplished stage actor and his mythology only grew. I feel bad for the kids who only know him as Professor X in the X-Men movies.

I salute you Sir Patrick Stewart!

Can you guess what would happen if a tablet of Alka Seltzer were “dropped” in a ball of water on the International Space Station?

Unless you’re a fan of science, you probably didn’t guess what actually happened.

I think the play-by-play is really fun… then again I’m a huge nerd.

I play a lot of video games and I can say with near absolute certainty, that Electronic Arts is the king of monetizing downloadable content (DLC).

Just today I learned, via Kotaku, that Madden 11 will offer the ability to scout your online opponents. Are you kidding me? I don’t play much Madden anymore, not since Madden 2009 where you’d just have Randy Moss run a fly route every play, but the idea of online scouting reports is really cool.

Until you realize it’ll cost you “coins.” You can earn coins for playing and completing online games or you can buy them. While it’s not known how much each report is (there are 50) or how much they cost, you can be sure die-hard players will be willing to pay for these coins.

Say what you will about EA and their DLCs (people were pissed at how expensive the first Modern Warfare 2 DLC was… then 11.1 million people paid for it), but they have figured it out and are making bank.

Oh and the best part about the scouting? You know when your opponent has scouted you.

‘Madden 11′ introduces online scouting [ESPN]

About two years ago I changed the name of my personal finance blog from Blueprint for Financial Prosperity to Bargaineering. Don’t ask me why it was named Blueprint for Financial Prosperity but I really felt that having the name match the domain was better than having such a descriptive title. In the last two years, pretty much everything has been changed to reflect the name change… except one thing – my PayPal account.

I don’t accept any payments related to Bargaineering/Blueprint anymore but the Paypal account still retained that name. I wanted to change it but despite my best efforts to find the menu option, I was out of luck. Fortunately, through the power of the internet, I learned that I only needed to load up this url:
https://www.paypal.com/us/wf/f=ap_namechg

Copy and paste that into your browser, log in, and you will be presented with a series of screens that will help you change your business name. Be sure to select “Business Name Change (business name)”, then enter the new one, click “Continue,” and you’re done. There’s no verification or any other confirmation needed, the change is instant.