If you are a budget blogger, you may already be aware that MySavings Media and Logical Media have been experiencing an outage since late last week. This likely means you are not earning much money this weekend. It also means you have a lot of broken links on your blog right now. I’m creeping towards 500 last time I looked.
I was trying not to become too concerned about this outage. Surely they would get things fixed quickly. What I am able to pull up this morning gives me this message:
Unfortunately, the efforts to restore operability of the storage area network (SAN) have stalled. This is impacting all Digital River platforms, including DirectTrack.
Senior engineers and technicians from Hitachi and Sun Microsystems, the SAN vendors, are on site in the Digital River data center. All possible measures to restore operability of the SAN are being taken.
While all teams and resources are working to correct this problem as quickly as possible, we do not anticipate an immediate resolution. ~ Original Source
Lovely! It’s time for me to start changing out links. It may be for you as well if you have been stalling. Sooner or later the search engines are going to notice all of these broken links and that is really not going to be good.
What to Do
If you are a budget blogger, hopefully you are already with Escalate Media. I’m going to be grabbing links from here when I can.
If you are on WordPress, install Broken Link Checker. This plugin will tell you where those broken links are at.
You can change out the links from within Broken Link Checker, or you can head over and edit the post itself. I’m editing the post.
What I can’t find in Escalate Media, I’m either linking to the site directly or removing the hyperlink and making a note that the offer is no longer available.
I’m reinstalling VigLink on that blog. Hopefully they will have access to a few of these direct affiliate programs that I don’t have time to go digging for right now.
Am I still going to be missing out on some money? Probably. The upside here is that many of these are older posts. They likely aren’t getting the traffic they were at one time anyway.
Will the outage end right when I finish switching out my links? Probably. But, I am a little perturbed that I haven’t heard a word from either of these companies. Not a peep. A little communication here would be nice. It surely doesn’t reflect well on these companies that the one person I did hear from was my Escalate affiliate manager offering their assistance where they could.
Are you with either of these companies? How are you handling the outage?
About Angie
Twitter: RealWaystoEarn
says:
I’m with Panthera and they are also out. I have not heard a word from them and have a ton of broken links on a few of my sites. I’m also with MySavings Media, but I don’t use them that much so there aren’t as many broken there.
I already changed out a few from them over to what Escalate had. I think it’s really odd that these companies aren’t communicating with us at all! I hope they get this fixed.
Anna recently posted ..Get Paid to Pick Out a Company Name
Twitter: thewahwife
says:
Thankfully, it didn’t take me as long as I had expected to change out the broken links. Things come to grinding halt when something like this happens. You really don’t want to promote your site much as you know people are going to be wondering what is going on when everything they click is dead.
I also wish something was being communicate to the affiliates. If they would have said, “hey, we think that will be fixed by Monday,” I am sure I could have found something a little more fun to do with my Sunday morning.
I’m also unhappy that we haven’t heard anything from the affiliate managers at these networks. They communicate DAILY when they’re promoting a new offer they want us to push, but nothing on this. I wondered if something was wrong with my computer or browser when I had trouble with these links, so I am very annoyed. I have switched out most of these links, but this doesn’t speak well for MySavings and Logical Media. All it would’ve taken is an email!
Twitter: thewahwife
says:
I know, Teresa. At first I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt that perhaps they had no access to anything, emails included. However, I see that some managers have responded to emails affiliates are sending to them. Obviously there is no valid excuse.
Wow, I did not realize it has lasted so long and that it reached other networks as well! I love the Escalate Network and I am thankful I have only used them so far. I get bogged down with so many Affiliate places, I think I am going to continue sticking with Escalate for the long term. Its easiest to manage for me, since it is not the heart of my site.
Miranda Grimm recently posted ..How to Advertise my Online Business
Thank you for posting this information. I thought I was going crazy and something was wrong with my browser. I too am a bit upset that I received no email from anyone in over a weeks time to inform the affiliates of this matter. I sent several emails to MySavingsMedia but never got a single reply. Thank you as well for the information on the WordPress plugin. Hopefully that will make this process easier for me. Ugh!
Twitter: thewahwife
says:
Hey, Alicia. I see Logical Media says they are back up this morning. I haven’t been able to get into MySavings yet though. This is one of those times I am glad I have quite a few networks that I use. If someone is down, hopefully another is still up.
Twitter: frugal4four
says:
As a newer blogger, I too thought the issue was something on my end. I like everyone else first got the news from my Escalate affiliate manager on Friday. I was very amused by the follow up e-mail from Escalate on Monday telling why they were not affected by the outage and how they would never have left everyone to wonder all weekend what was going on and when it was going to be resolved!
Thanks for the info on the plug-in too!!
Twitter: thewahwife
says:
You are welcome. Thanks for stopping over.