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It’s time to make your business a business. If you’ve been using your social security number when you join affiliate programs and conduct other business, you may want to rethink things.

As your business grows, there are a number of reasons why you might want to incorporate.

Reasons to incorporate your business include people taking you seriously. When you add “Inc.” to your company name, it makes your business appear bigger and more established than somebody working solo in their home…

While far from solved, there is hope on the horizon for email deliverability problems. Authentication methods are more and more becoming the norm. (Discussion by ClickZ Kevin Newcomb is here.) They’re expected to be followed later by increased use of reputation methods.

Email marketing gurus Loren MacDonald and Kirill Popov discuss the trends and the distinction here. They describe the two major methods thus:

“Where authentication methods like SIDF and DKIM verify that a sender is who they say they are, reputation services take that sender’s identity and check it against a database of their sending practices, checking for things like bounce rates, unsubscribe practices and user complaints.”

In the article, the authors state that authentication is up 60% in the last year. Also, that:

“35 percent of all Internet e-mail is authenticated using SenderID framework (SIDF), a protocol identified with Microsoft.” Also, that “10 percent of all Internet e-mail uses Yahoo!-developed DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM).”

That’s good news, but the battle will be uphill if some of their other statistics are accurate. They write, “10 of every 12 messages tracked by the Postini Threat Identification Network is spam.” Also, that “At the recent E-mail Authentication Summit, representatives from AOL and Microsoft stated 90-95 percent of all inbound e-mail they process is spam.”

Those numbers are considerably higher than others reported elsewhere. But despite what must be a large overhead on MSN’s and AOL’s servers, the fact they are trapping that many is a good thing. The alternative would be to have them wind up in the Inbox where they’d clutter up the genuine marketing messages from affiliates and merchants. (One of the problems with marketing is always the signal to noise ratio.)

So despite the many hurdles email marketing continues to face, its future looks better than ever.

I keep promising myself I’m going to write a post full of bad news. Something full of gloom and doom, or at least wonder and worry. (That seems to have worked well in journalism for decades, and of course we’re always looking for ways to increase readership.) Unfortunately, events just keep refusing to cooperate.

Pew has just released a report that contains the results of another of their excellent surveys. In it the author, Mary Madden, discusses the continuing rise in Internet and broadband use and the increase in online shopping confidence.

“[O]ur latest survey, fielded February 15 – April 6, 2006 shows that fully 73% of respondents (about 147 million adults) are Internet users, up from 66% (about 133 million adults) in our January 2005 survey. And the share of Americans who have broadband connections at home has now reached 42% (about 84 million), up from 29% (about 59 million) in January 2005.”

When I think about the fact that broadband users tend to spend more online, I find it hard to be sad.

Here’s another interesting tidbit:

“91% of adults living in households earning more than $75,000…” use the Internet.

When I remember that jewelry, luxury, and other high ticket items are one of the largest dollar amount affiliate marketing segments, it’s difficult to be depressed.

But, I’ll keep trying…

It sounds like the just ended Ad-Tech San Francisco was a big success. Insane growth has been a hallmark of the conference for years, but making the leap from hotels to the Moscone Center - that’s big.

There are some recaps of the show up on ReveNews. Beth Kirsch, who pinch hit for me on the panel, How to Grow a Profitable Affiliate Channel: Recruit the Best Partners for Your Business, touches on issues from the panel in her post on Web 2.0 and Affiliate Marketing.

Dave Cole, a first timer…

Internet marketing is booming in the U.S., but not only there. Even the (for a while, relatively) weak Japanese economy is improving with Internet marketing as both cause and beneficiary.

Japan has the third largest Internet population in the world. (Second, if you discount the heavily censored Chinese market.) Estimates put the number in the neighborhood of 73 million individuals.

Not only numerous, the Japanese are highly industrialized, strong on financial services and technology oriented. Most consumer electronics products see their introduction there prior to the rest of the world. (And the Japanese consumers often pay a significant premium for such items.)

Brazil is coming on strong as well. With a working population over 123 million, 14 million of whom use the Internet regularly, Brazil is the largest Internet market in Latin America. It grew by over 6.5% from February 2006 to March 2006 alone.

Canada, for a long period a relatively quiet Internet marketing arena, is now also seeing significant growth.

“According to the latest figures from Statistics Canada, Canadian online sales recorded their fourth consecutive year of strong double-digit growth in 2005. Combined private and public sector online sales increased by 38.4% compared with 2004, to reach a total of CAD39.2 billion (US$32.4 billion).” (eMarketer)

At a time when worldwide PC shipments are up over 13%, and economic news around the world in general is mostly healthy, this trend is likely to continue.

It may be time to learn another language.

RevenueScience reports on a study that shows a 55.6% drop in people who frequntly deleted their computer’s cookies.

“Bolstering these findings were strong indications that cookie deletion is on a significant downward trend. When asked how often they delete cookies form their hard drives, only 8 percent answered “very frequently” compared to 18 percent in a 2004 survey; while 24 percent indicated they “never” delete cookies—more than double the 11 percent from the previous survey.”

Read the article at: http://www.revenuescience.com/news_releasesdetail.asp?prID=060427

And more than DOUBLE the people (from 2004) said that they NEVER delete their cookies…

Performics has announced that they are now providing network level data for advertisers in the ConnectCommerce SM interface.

The network level statistics now available in ConnectCommerce are Earnings per Click (EPC) and Payout Rank. See example below.

3-Month EPC: Three Month Earnings per Click is the sum of fees paid to publishers in the past three months divided by the total clicks over the same period.

7-Day EPC: Seven Day Earnings per Click is the sum of fees paid to publishers in the…

A third of the way through, 2006 is shaping up to be a banner(less) year. New forms of advertising, far surpassing the effectiveness of those of yesteryear are growing in popularity. (Ok, so we work in a medium where yesteryear is really only the year before, like yesterday is the day before today, but still…)

Blogads are becoming more popular and more lucrative, as 75,000 new blogs per day are coming into being. (I’m still looking for figures on those that become inactive daily.)

RSS ads — despite continuing controversy about when, whether, or if it should largely replace email — are rising, too.

And podcasts are marching along, with monetization via accompanying ads growing all the time.

So now Microsoft is buying Massive, the in-game advertising company for between $200 and $400 million dollars. With its fanatically popular Xbox, the rejuvenated giant of software should find a fine synergy there.

A much overused and ill-understood concept, it fits here. “The effect of two or more agents working together to produce an effect that is greater than the sum of the parts,” as one site defines it. Think of pushing a child on a swing in time with her rhythm.

That amplification is just the thing that will push gaming to new revenue heights. And gaming, let us not forget, is one of the highest income generating affiliate markets around.

Ads served within those games offer a double or triple whammy. The games are typically Internet-enabled, so the feeds are live and contextual. They hit the most active online segment — males between 18 and 34 (though females make up a large percentage of gamers, as well). And the ads, along with the games, have spinoff potential for music, movies, and other high revenue generating segments.

Me? I’m warming up my Microsoft Flight Simulator. ‘Cause 2006 is going to take off.

So you missed the big land grab of the 90’s when all of the good .com address were snapped up? Don’t fret - there’s a new frontier, and you (may) still have time to get some great names.

The place to claim your name, your brand, your site, etc. is MySpace. The way your name is represented on MySpace is like so: www.myspace.com/yourname

Why MySpace? Well, that’s where the masses are going. According to Alexa, MySpace is one of the top sites, right behind Google, MSN and Yahoo.

If you check…

There is going to be a get together for affiliate marketing in the NYC area on May 4 at 7:30 PM.

Location is Churrascaria Plataforma, located at 316 West 49th Street (between 8th and 9th Aves.).

This affiliate marketing dinner is open to all in the industry. If you’d like to be added to the reservation, please send an e-mail to Amanda Lucas at amanda(at)partnercentric.com

There is no host for this event - everybody is responsible for their own tab. It promises to be a fun night of…