Here is an update on a few projects we have recently launched. http://snarkthis.com is a celebrity and entertainment gossip blog that my wife has been working as a contributing author and co designer.

In November we rolled out http://acremortgage4seniors.com for our long time client ChoiceOne Mortgage. Acremortgage4seniors.com is focused on the Reverse Mortgage niche market.

Yahoo Marketing is undergoing an upgrade. They have been doing a rolling upgrade of accounts for several months now. The upgrade to the account of one of the clients I manage was completed a few weeks ago. The changes were much needed. Yahoo Marketing is now on par with the service offered by Google Adwords. Page rankings are now determined by both the bid price and ad performance. Geo-targeting of ads is now available. The reports have undergone significant improvements. These changes were long overdue, but they will make a world of difference. I have generally gotten better conversion numbers with Yahoo Marketing than I have with Google Adwords for quite some time, but the lack of controls and inferior service deterred me from concentrating much money and effort to maximizing the Yahoo Marketing ad campaigns I manage. Now that YM has upgraded it is time to focus on getting the most of my Yahoo Marketing campaigns.

Our newest venture, Stellar Sellers, has been launched. Stellar Sellers offers consignment selling services on EBay. We have been accepted into the Ebay Trading Assistant Program.

An amusing story came across the wire today. It took the government seven years to complete a study on Internet traffic. Here is the link. The study was commissioned by Congress in 1998. The report was finally released today. This is not part of an April Fool's joke.

According to WebProNews, Microsoft is gearing up to launch a paid search service on MSN Search to compete with Google Adwords and Overture.

Winter is slowly giving way to Spring, and that means it is time to shift the focus of your affiliate marketing programs. I have found that the best products at producing commissions through affiliate marketing links are seasonal products. A site like The Snowboard Shoppe does very good business from October - February; once March rolls around, sales plummet. Now is the time to gear up for selling warmer weather products.

Last month Google implemented a new policy that effectively limits AdWords results to one listing per URL. Previously, affiliate marketers that identified their AdWords ads as "affiliate" or "Aff" could have multiple ads using the same landing page. For very popular affiliate programs, it was not uncommon to have 3 or 4 ads for essentially the same product appear in the same search. The new policy eliminates that. Also, under the new policy, an affiliate no longer has to be identified in the ad copy. There was much speculation that this would bring an end to affiliate marketers trying to use AdWords, but that really hasn't been the case. It has eliminated underperforming ads from affiliate marketers, but the cream has risen to the top. I've actually seen an increase in both clicks and conversion rates since the policy went into effect. Using AdWords for affiliate marketing is now a survival of the fittest. Those that take the efforts to cultivate strong ads will reap the rewards. Read the Google announcement on the affiliate policy change.