Coupons are a pretty big deal these days (understatement of the year).

Even the Schaffer brothers Steve and Howard got their own Offers.com mentioned in a TechCrunch article yesterday. Techcrunch covering a coupon site? Really? There’s the power of a great domain name. And Steve’s ability to get press. Well done guys.

In a timely fashion for this holiday season, yesterday, Linkshare announced a new coupon API for their affiliate publishers.

To sign up for their coupon API, go into the Web Services section of the Publisher Dashboard:

Coupon and promotion management is one feature that has never seemed to evolve to its potential in the affiliate space. At first glance, this one seems to be up there in functionality.

I was chatting with fellow publisher Michael Coley of Amazing-Bargains.com recently about network coupon solutions and reminiscing about the old Be Free Offer Management system, which I affectionately refer to as the industry’s best coupon management system to ever land in the trash heap.

*sigh*

It had features AND an editorial process that enforced quality.

The Wildcard is Data Quality

Lest we get too excited. Everything hinges on data quality.

Merchants can sometimes get overzealous with what they put into a coupon management system and without good policies and enforcement, the whole thing could be useless. That’s worth highlighting.

Merchants tend to push the limits of what constitutes an “offer” and “coupon” just to get their products out there. My favorite was one that we rejected in the old Be Free days that went something like this, “Send your Thanksgiving cards with Stamps from stamps.com.” There were dozens of them. Seriously.

Data quality within fields is critical as well.

For example, with a single offer description field, merchants may try to put a lot of information in there. But publishers need that plus a short title. With only one description field, most publishers will need to hand-manage this data before it can be included on a website.

Offer restrictions is an area that can get complicated as well, and without good structure around how these are specified, it will unlikely be formatted in a way that can be easily automated. For example, many advertisers have restrictions on certain product Ids or brands. If this is written in plain text, it can easily be included in the offer presented to the user. But if I have an advanced coupon system and want to not even show coupons for the products it doesn’t apply to, there may be manual work involved in handling the coupons.

I’m glad to see new solutions appear that address some of the major pain points of offer management. At a first glance, this one appears to have many of the critical elements that have been lacking. If you like to geek out on API stuff, here are the juicy details…

Features

REST based

Linkshare’s APIs are a REST-based Web Service. You make a simple API call with a single URL with several name-value pairs in it. As far as web services go, this is about as simple as it gets. You’ll need to be able to deal with XML, which falls in the “advanced web develeopment” category.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<couponfeed>
  <link type="TEXT">
    <categories>
      <category id="983">computers</category>
      <category id="12">electronics</category>
      <category id="14">gifts</category>
    </categories>
  <promotiontypes>
    <promotiontype id="22">percentage off</promotiontype>
  </promotiontypes>
  <offerdescription>15 percent off</offerdescription>
  <offerstartdate>2009-04-01</offerstartdate>
  <offerenddate>2009-05-31</offerenddate>
  <couponcode>KJEISLD</couponcode>
  <couponrestriction>New Customers Only</couponrestriction>
  <clickurl>http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=XXXXXXXXXXX&offerid=164317.10002595&type=4&subid=0</clickurl>
  <impressionpixel>http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=XXXXXXXXXXX&bids=164317.10002595&type=4&subid=0<impressionpixel>
  <advertiserid>000</advertiserid>
  <advertisername>Sample Advertiser Name</advertisername>
  <network id="1">Linkshare Network</network>
  </link>
</couponfeed>

Query Options

You can retrieve coupons by querying on a few different paramaters, Category, Promotion Type, Network, and Merchant ID. Multiple parameters and values per parameter can be requested.

Categories

Coupons are categorized in their vertical, such as Travel & Vacations, Toys & Games, Sports & Fitness, Software & Downloads, Shoes, etc. I presume that these categories are specified by the advertiser per coupon.

Promotion Types.

There is a rich set of promotion types. Here’s the list that I’m getting

• Percentage off
• Other
• Gift with Purchase
• General Promotion
• Friends and Family
• Free Trial / Usage
• Free Shipping
• Dollar Amount off
• Deal of the Day/Week
• Combination Savings
• Clearance
• Buy One / Get One

Included Data

Most of the important data elements appear to be included. In addition to category and promotion types, there’s an offer description, start date, end date, coupon code, restrictions, and all of the necessary image, impression, and click URLs.

All this talk makes me want to launch a new coupon site.

Have you created a Facebook Fan page yet?

If not, why not? Here’s twelve reasons why you should.

Why You Need a Facebook Fan Page…

1. To many people, Facebook is the Internet. If you’re not there, you’re nowhere. (We need to help them.)

2. Social proof. Get a lot of fans and it looks good on you. (As opposed to me and my four fans, including myself. Help!)

3. People use Facebook. Every. Single. Day. Do you wish you had more interaction with your users? This is an easy way to get that. (The hard way is using Facebook’s API. Cue number four…)

4. It’s easy. As opposed to developing a Facebook application which is about as fun as performing root canal surgery on yourself. (And not nearly as well documented.)

5. It’s free. Next…

6. Fan pages have a great widget that integrates with your own websites. (If you’re reading this on AffBook.com, it’s over there to the right. If not, get over there.)

7. You can post messages to your fan base like a powerful mail list. People actually respond to Facebook messages in a creepy Pavlovian way.

8. A fan page is like Facebook for your business (or a website.) You can have an unlimited number of Facebook pages. You can only have one personal page. (Don’t try, they will get you.)

9. You can get all your website promotion and business off of your personal Facebook page and stop annoying all your family and friends from middle school. (They don’t get what you do anyway and they never will.)

10. Facebook fan pages are very customizable. You can add custom tabs and boxes in the sidebar, including FBML and HTML, drive visitors to your newsletter signup, websites, etc.

11. No walled garden! Your fan page is available to the world (including search engines. ahem!) Your profile page is private only to your friends.

12. You’re going to do it someday, you might as well do it now. Don’t be like me one year from now and be just starting out.

I’m embarrassed that it took me this long to set one up for our websites. I’m currently working on my Jangro Facebook fanpage. You can see it over on the right sidebar.

Seriously, fan me up! Do it. Now.

Want to create your own but don’t know where to start? Facebook can be really difficult to navigate for stuff like this. I’ll be following up with another post on how to create your own fan page, but you can get started here.

Do you have a website? (yah.)
Do you like free traffic? (of course.)
Do you want to rank well in Goole? (duh.)
Do you religiously use Google Webmaster Tools? (beuller…beuller…)

No? You need to start. Really. Every week, it seems that we find something that we need to tweak about our websites.

This week, Google has launched two new “Labs” features, Fetch as Googlebot and Malware details.

If your website has been hacked and is distributing malware, Google will tell you.

If you don’t have any problems, it is much less interesting. Thankfully, this is what we see…

A problem like this probably get your site de-listed from Google’s index and will certainly land you on McAfee’s website blacklist.

I’m having a bit of a Deja Vu moment here. It was this same exercise I went through almost three years to the day…collecting an updated list of excellent affiliate marketing blogs to read and keep up on.

The last time I did this, the result was BumpZee.com, remember that? While I’m not going to let that small distraction happen again, I am looking to update my affiliate blog reading list which has grown rather stale.

What makes a great affiliate marketing blog? Like any blog, I prefer one with a personality. And one that doesn’t seem to be pushing the latest mo-traffic, mo-money ebooks on me.

I want real, authentic content.

I’m looking for pointers to the best of the best. Share your favorites in the comments.