(Official Press Release)

Affiliates and webmasters all around the world have been anxiously awaiting the beta launch of TextShark.com. TextShark is the first product of its kind to introduce text messaging and SMS technology to the affiliate marketing industry.

TextShark.com is excited to announce that their revolutionary new affiliate SMS product is now live for beta testing within the European market. Until now, internet marketers and online affiliates have not been able to harness the power of text messaging and SMS technology.

The TextShark.com platform will allow affiliates to monetize their online campaigns and promotions by utilizing one of the most popular forms of communication in the world, text messaging. As an affiliate with TextShark.com, marketers will now be able to drive conversions and earn commission by having their traffic send a single text message. Affiliates can use this technology to additionally brand and monetize their specific offers or promotions.

There are two ways TextShark.com affiliates and internet marketers can incorporate SMS technology into their campaigns. Affiliates are always welcome to take advantage of one of the many pre-set promotions which can be found in the member’s area. Or affiliates can set up their own custom promotions by contacting the TextShark.com staff.

Below is a testimonial and an example of how one TextShark affiliate is using the TextShark.com affiliate program to increase his overall campaign value.

I am a poker affiliate and host several poker freeroll events. I have always found it impossible to make money from these players until now. With TextShark.com, I simply display a banner on my site that instructs my traffic to send an SMS message in order to receive the secret password. I will definitely continue using this service for years to come.

John Goldie – CardKings.co.uk

TextShark.com also utilizes a state of the art affiliate reporting system. Affiliates are able to view their campaign performance and statistics in real time. During beta testing in the European market, the staff at TextShark.com is asking all affiliates to log their questions, comments, and suggestions in the TextShark.com support forums. Affiliates or affiliate programs interested in working with TextShark.com can contact the sales department by email at info@textshark.com.

As a poker affiliate myself, I have struggled for years trying to figure out how to extract ANY income from the habitual freerollers. If you are a forum owner like me, then I’m sure you can feel my pain. Every time over the last 3 years that I’ve hosted a freeroll for my community, the day of the event I get 20-30 new sign-ups in my forum just looking for the password.

For the longest time this used to make me so mad. I mean let’s be honest, even if these people do follow your affiliate link, most will never deposit or generate you any income. This is where TextShark comes into play. Now there is a way to actually monetize what we call the “freeroll whore” in the poker affiliate industry.

Most of the time the people that play in poker freerolls online simply chase these events because they do not have the means to deposit. Most have money but simply do not have credit cards or one of the various forms of ewallets necessary to deposit at online poker sites. But, what most of these people do have are cell phones.

The reason our Text Message Affiliate platform has been so successful is this. Poker players in general are compulsive. When they see a tournament or game that looks good, they want to get in it immediately. Now look at some of the GREAT promos TextShark runs; For a couple of bucks (that are completely transparent via SMS) these players can get in the action right now.

And even for the players that really have no way to deposit, as an affiliate you are providing a great service.

If you are a poker affiliate and would like to learn more about promoting via SMS, we want to hear from you. The best way to correspond with us is via our SMS Marketing Support Forums or by email at info AT testshark.com.

It is with great pleasure that the staff of TextShark.com is announcing its mobile affiliate platform is now LIVE for beta testing. Over the next few weeks, we will be allowing a select number of affiliates to beta test our platform and begin earning commissions through this revolutionary new affiliate product.

At this time we are entertaining custom affiliate promotions brought forth by our beta testers. To set up a custom promo, you can email us at promotions AT TextShark.com.

We have also set up a great promotion through FullTiltPoker.com for our TextShark affiliates to promote. This will be a poker freeroll event taking place at 19:00 GMT on March 16th at www.FullTiltPoker.com. The winner of this event will receive a brand new Xbox 360.

Once you have an account set-up through TextShark.com you can simply add this promotion in your affiliate backend, choose your unique text code, and begin promoting the event.

Once a text message comes through, your players will get a response informing them that the password will be sent 1 hour prior to the start of the event.

As this launch is in beta mode, we realize that there may be suggestions, comments, or bugs brought forth by our beta testers.  We encourage all feedback and ask that our beta testers or interested affiliates utilize our TextShark Support Forums.

SMS, or Short Message Service, is the technology behind what we frequently refer to as ‘text messages’ or ‘SMSes’, as well as what allows for news alerts on cellular phones. In recent years SMS has ballooned to over a 50 billion dollar industry and is quickly taking the communications world by storm.

Short Message Service actually refers to a framework that uniquely allows computers, or in this case phones, to communicate with each other without the need of a central hub. With SMS, phones can find each other, send short packets of information back and forth, and do it all without any central computer to guide them. But because the system does not rely upon fixed lines like a land based telephone system does, the amount of information that can be sent at one time is limited in size. This depends on the language spoken, but for English letters this typically means around 150 characters (Chinese and Japanese letters are limited to 70).

Quite recently, however, new developments in the technology have allowed for even longer messages to be sent. Long or Concatenated SMS is a development that allows multiple messages to be combined to form a single message. In effect, what happens is that your phone actually sends out a few smaller messages and then the receiving phone simply compiles those messages so that for users on both ends, it appears as though the message were cohesive. While there are some limitations, the brilliance behind SMS is that because there is no need for central hubs, and thus the system can be expanded indefinitely without any concerns of it slowing down or becoming more expensive.

The most common form of SMS is ‘texting’. This usually takes place with a cellular phone in which individuals use the letters behind the number pad on their phone to spell out words and phrases and then send them out. Because many companies charge by the word, individuals have come up with a sort of ‘texting slang’ to cut down on the amount of words required to convey a particular message. For example, ‘gr8’ and ‘BTW’ mean ‘great’ and ‘by the way’. In addition, other words have just been shortened, such as ‘lata’ to mean ‘later’. Most users simply pick up the lingo through frequent use, and although some slang is widely understood and used, other shortcuts are developed within circles of friends and family.

The major advantage of SMS is its price. The price is typically $0.05 per message, a significant cut below that of traditional telephony and cell phone per-minute charges. The savings of SMS has its roots in the nature of the technology. Short Message Service, like SIP, is modeled on a peer to peer model and not a cog and wheel like traditional communication systems. This means that instead of having to route a message through a central hub, your text goes straight from you to its destination. This has radically cut down on the cost of SMS implementation and led to its overwhelming popularity throughout the world.

Short Message Service (SMS) has radically changed the face of the communications industry. While the practice has become quite common throughout the world, it has only recently become popular here in the United Stats, a growth partly predicated upon, surprisingly enough, its featured role in the show American Idol. The fact that ‘texting’ is quickly gaining both in popularity and recognition in the United States is not surprising however, due to its ability to offer users a cheap, quick, and frequently fun way to communicate with friends and family.

I find it interesting that with the vast proliferation of blogs, very few bloggers are making any substantial money.  I guess it is a labor of love to write about your interests to an adoring but small fan base.    The top tier bloggers have such a large following that they can monetize their traffic by relatively generic advertising.  That type of advertising, like radio or television, takes the shotgun approach hoping that a small percentage of the viewers will click.  Obviously this leads to excessive page waste as the ratio of impressions to clicks.

Here is the WSJ Article

I think a better solution is to couple niche advertisers to niche blogs in such a way that the bloggers are considered an ingress point to the sales cycle versus simply part of a shotgun advertising approach.  A variety of companies are trying to tackle this problem through contextual parsing and keyword matching, but I think users are well trained to overlook the google adsense box at the bottom of blogs.  Ideally contextual advertising should be enmeshed in the blog so that it is impossible to view it without absorbing the advertising. 

Some drawbacks I see currently are:

1.  the ability to format blogs in a newspaper-like fashion allowing inline insertion of advertising.   People are too conditioned to bypass the current text ad blocks or banner ads. 

2.  Contextual mapping just isnt there:  Google adsense content network is horrible (1m impressions to 100 clicks, seriously).  To do this effectively, the human element should be allowed to browse down to a niche market basis and select a group of related blogs on which to advertise which correspond to a general value/product set which the advertiser desires.  Market dynamics fix bogus or poorly placed ads.   ”

3.  More effective advertising methods: Banner ads and text boxes are a little past their prime.  I think their longevity can be lengthened by finding novel placement or better ways to weave them into the blog content.  What about interactive flash widgets and other types of multimedia?

 4.  Integration into blogging software:  This may already be out there, but there should be easy buttons to integrate external conversion ad blocks into the blog. 

5.  Who chooses the ad?  I think the advertiser is better suited to choose where to place their ad than the blogger is suited to choose which ad to place, but perhaps there should be a negotiation method where advertiser chooses a collection of blogs and then the bloggers can approve/disapprove the ad in their rotation. 

     The closer you tie a blogger to the end-consumer of the click as well as integrate them into the sales cycle at the mouth of the funnel, the more the advertiser will be willing to pay.   What I see is a nearly-transparent middleman which makes a business out of scanning and mapping blogs into context and convinces blog owners to give them a little real-estate to place rotating ads.  Once that network is mapped, advertisers will be attracted by the fine granularity they can map their advertising dollars and thus hopefully result in bigger gain for the advertiser and blogger.  The advetiser will be paying a larger amount per click or pehaps even CPA on sales, but they will be getting a more authoritative source for traffic.