Travel, Affiliates, and Emoticons

I was listening to Ram Dass on Experiments in Truth again a few months ago. I first heard the program several years ago, but it's one audio that I like to revisit from time to time. You don't have to listen to the whole thing, you can just dive in anywhere and pick up nuggets. He's so great, so funny.

So I was listening to him talk about how his spiritual teacher had said he's the kind of person that needs to be constantly moving around, or he'll grow moss. Or something to that effect. I'm paraphrasing.

It got me thinking. Because I much prefer staying in one place and not having to travel anywhere. Yet each time I do travel, I find that the experience was so valuable. It draws a line in the sand. It brings distance and perspective. It allows me to make big and important decisions with more ease and clarity.

Last week's travel to Copenhagen was no different. It changed my perspective on many things, and I feel much more determined moving forward now.

It's a great reminder for me to remember to travel, even though I hate planning it, and I hate the idea of travel. No matter. Just schedule it and book it anyway.

Thankfully I'll be going to LA next month, so I already have the next one booked.

Despite how unpleasant the experience can be at times, it's a true miracle that we can hop on an airplane and be somewhere else in the world in a matter of hours. We'd do well to take advantage of that fact.

New Features in Simplero

Plane rides are always great opportunities to be productive.

This time, it allowed me an opportunity to implement more flexibility in our affiliate system, specifically that you can have multiple affiliate programs for the same product, and different default commissions for each product.

More details here.

I also added details of purchases, charges, and thus how the commission breaks down, to the affiliate center page for each affiliate.

And I added tracking of clicks on affiliate links, so that each time we see a request with that person's affiliate link, it's tracked, and the total number of clicks shown on the affiliate center page.

Later on, we'll add more details about those clicks, such as what links specifically, when they were clicked, and by whom. For now, we've started tracking all of that. This should give your affiliates way more insight into how well they're doing.

Another change: Your embedded opt-in forms can now also add custom tags to the contacts that are subscribed. Simply supply a parameter named "customer[tag_names]" and we'll interpret that as a comma-separated list of tags.

We've also enabled emoticons in ticket comments and text content in spaces, and we're now sending those emoticons out in email notifications as well.

Lots more small tweaks and updates, but that's the bulk of it.