Migrating up the California Coast from LowerMyBills to Riya

Two weeks ago I gave LowerMyBills.com my letter of resignation. The decision to leave had very little to do with LowerMyBills.com, but rather my desire to go back home to the Bay Area. I’d write more about what I learned at LowerMyBills.com, but the company is in a quiet period as Experian demerges from its parent company GUS this fall. So, untrue to my nature, I need to be, well, um, quiet.

The LowerMyBills.com affiliates will be well taken care by my soon-to-be-former team, including Damian Juarez-Mrazek who has been put in charge of the team. Everyone make sure to check in with Damian to say congrats to him at Commission Junction University! It’s simply awesome to see your staff grow and take on a larger leadership role.

I’m off to run various marketing programs for Riya back in the Bay Area. For those of you who don’t know much about Riya, the company has sophisticated and complex image recognition technology and the plan is to monetize the company’s technology.

As you might know, Riya’s cool technology and some good buzz marketing has made it the darling of the Web 2.0 crowd, drawing kudos from every corner of the Blogosphere as Dan Farber pointed out on ZDNet’s blog. And of course you can find out more about the company from Michael Arrington’s Tech Crunch. Also, the company has a blog called Jamboriya and the CEO, Munjal Shah, also has a blog and, as you might imagine, these blogs help me feel at home. You can read Munjal’s vision of Riya 2.0 — get ready to think about a new twist on the old game of search. And here is an example of the technology in action.

Riya has a tricky and challenging marketing road ahead of them. We need to figure out how to combined a mashup of what I call Advertising 2.0 — traditional hard core, direct response, online marketing anchored by strong analytics and multivariable testing — with a mix of Web 2.0, word of mouth, Seth Godin, Cluetrain, and a twist of Gonzo Marketing to drive tons of revenue. And just as a note, doesn’t that mix really sound like what was the true promise of affiliate marketing from the late 1990′s or even today?

Honestly, I’m not sure what the answers are for Riya, but I’m excited to go back to the Bay Area and help figure out them out. That excitement is paired with a bad case of new job jitters which everyone says is normal, but that still does not make the butterflies go away.

I also think it worth taking a moment to acknowledge the fine work of Tara Hunt, a Blogosphere star and Web 2.0 marketing thought leader. Tara led Riya’s marketing efforts until recently and she has left some pretty big shoes to fill. She did a great job running Riya’s marketing programs and because of her work, there is a strong base for me to help Riya drive revenue.

By the way, Riya true to its Web 2.0 nature has a bunch of free tools for affiliates to add value to their site including a very mashable API, so you might want to check it out. Also, I hope Riya will have an affiliate program up running one day.

Everyone who knows I’m changing jobs has asked what about ReveNews and will I still be blogging? Well, Munjal showed me the ReveNews feed in his newsreader during my interview — which I think must be my coolest interview moment ever — so it looks like I’ll still be blogging on ReveNews for a while.

What I write about tends to wander a bit depending on my job, so I’m not sure where this blog will go, but of course, I’ll write about affiliate marketing, online advertising, search, blogs and other old standbys. I might start to wander into the world of Web 2.0 since I’m jumping into it head first with this new gig, but I’m still a direct response marketer and I do blog on ReveNews where our mission is to discuss online revenue generation.

And I’m not sure I’ll write much about Riya or what I’m doing there, though the company will remain transparent thanks to both the company’s and Munjal’s blogs. Also, there may be a burst of blogs about lead gen after I leave LowerMyBills.com . And to my wonderful friend, Jay Weintraub, watch out because, at least for a while, I’m going to give you a run for your money for the best lead gen blog on the web — with, of course, great deference to LMB. Bloggers are a bit competitive and Jay and I are no different, but in this case, the winners will be everyone who reads both of us.