One of our favorite days at LinkWorth is April 1st, or April Fool’s Day. And when I say “our”, I’m speaking of Matt and I (Ron). Each year we try to out perform our previous year of gags and jokes we play on the staff. This year I am 100% sure we topped all previous April Fool’s Day performances. I’d like to thank our staff for putting up with the full day of non-stop craziness and watch out for next year, because we already have the next 2 years planned out!!!

Let me run down a quick bullet list of what we did yesterday:

• We turned LinkWorth into ShrinkWorth by shrink wrapping the entire office
• We removed cubical dividing walls in the sales pit creating shared spaces
• We snuck keys away from many and moved their cars in the parking lot
• We ran video on everyone walking in first thing seeing it all and giving them an early morning blow horn
• We ran a looped audio of a sneeze we recorded from Matt Baker, who is the loudest sneezer in the world, through the phones for much of the afternoon
• We made a pot of coffee with half a container of sugar in it
• We caused our admin backend to appear to be crashed giving errors
• We had outsiders tell people they had live snakes in their drawer
• We sent fake emails to each Account Manager making them think their biggest client is canceling and complaining about them…and took video of them explaining themselves

As you can see, while it’s not a recognized holiday, there isn’t a lot of work that gets done on April 1 each year. There might be other spur of the moment ideas we put in place that I’m forgetting, but you get the point.

We have lots of pictures and even more video. The pictures are below and the video will be soon, once I figure out how to edit and put it all together in a nice looking format.

Hope you had as good of a day as we did!

Here’s a video tour of ShrinkWorth

LinkWorth will be exhibiting at the Ad:tech conference in San Francisco on April 20-21. We’ll be located at booth #5973, which to most of you, will mean absolutely nothing. I honestly can’t say I’ve ever visited a conference and paid any attention to booth numbers. This is where we’ll be, so if you’re attending, please stop by and ask Robin to sing you her original “Linky” song. She has a great voice and the song is really good too. Also be sure to ask David why they call him “Ace”.

If you have not signed up to attend Ad:tech and want to go, we have a nice little offer for you. Just follow our special link here and you’ll get a $200 discount on a full conference pass. They’re not cheap, so discounts are always great. If the link doesn’t transfer our code, use this:

Ad:tech San Francisco Discount Code: LWADTEC

Just remember…”Have a DrinkWorth with LinkWorth which could lead to InkWorth, and then you’ll wake up in a StinkWorth probably needing a ShrinkWorth.”

Last night we made a pretty sizable update to our system that is significant enough to let you guys know about. Up until last night, we’ve considered listings as “sites” or “blogs”. Blogs were setup more for LinkPost where the rest of our products were geared towards a regular “site”. With the majority of sites being a blog these days, it was more of a headache than anything else, so I say with great pleasure, it’s all one listing now!

You no longer have to submit your blog as an entirely separate listing! (insert crowd raawr!) If you had a blog listing previously, no worries, we’ve merged everything over to the “site” side of things and this is how you list everything now. There’s no more managing your blogs or anything else that used to come with the blog listings, it’s all been merged with your normal site listing.

As we’re testing and really getting a good live run-through today, we’re on the hunt for any bugs or problems that we might have missed during testing, so if you see something, PLEASE click the “FEEDBACK” icon in your lower right-hand corner and let us know. Include errors or pages, as much detail as possible so we can quickly jump into action.

This is one small part of several big improvements we have on the list. Soon, our control center will be as simple as pie…something we’ve “ALL” wished for, for a long time.

Apparently the cause of our entire office building being down yesterday was due to a pesky rat! It evidently chewed through a main power cable and not only ended its life, but ended the power for an entire work day for us.

The good thing is, they fixed the problem yesterday afternoon and everyone is back to work today. We apologize for any inconvenience us not being in the office might have caused. LinkWorth.com was not affected by this outage, thankfully.

The LinkWorth corporate offices are currently without power. I’ve been told we may be down all day, but that has yet to be confirmed by the electric company. We will update you when we get more information and we appreciate your patience.

If you’re attending SES in NYC right now, stop by and say hi to our crew!

Office Pranks are usually our fun around the LinkWorth office. Whether it’s sounding our large air horn to startle people when they least expect it, filling up cubicles with whatever we can find, or one of our favorites…scaring Jeffrey Marek, aka “Operation Scarek”.

We’ve tried about every place we can find to hide and scare Marek, until today, when I realized we haven’t tried a certain spot. After talking to Matt, he chose to execute Operation Scarek and I decided to record it. Here’s a little peek into the LinkWorth fun at the office…

For all of our International Partners who have problems getting your money with the payout methods we’ve always had, we’ve listened and now offer Moneybookers as a payout option!

To setup your next payout, be sure to login to your account and go to MY ACCOUNT > PAYMENT SETTINGS and look for the payment method drop down and select “Moneybookers”. Also make sure your minimum payout amount is what you wish. In the next section below it, you’ll need to add your Moneybookers email address.

Please be sure to make changes before the 1st of February if you wish for your next payout to be sent to Moneybookers.

If you’re a current LinkWorth advertiser, or a potential advertising client, why would you want to spend all of your time managing your campaigns? Let LinkWorth Account Managers manage your campaigns for you!

You might have already noticed the new feature that’s now available in all Advertiser accounts. It’s the new “Account Manager” tab located on the top right side of your Control Center, as illustrated below:

Once you click this menu option, it will take you to the new page that allows you to convert your Advertiser account to a “managed” account:

You’ll also have access to your Account Manager’s contact information:

There are also additional tools that will be available to help you communicate with your Account Manager, request proposals and other features.

Advertisers will now always have an Account Manager at their fingertips when they need them. Once you convert your account, a message is sent to them and they will get in touch with you as soon as possible. Our staff is here to help however you see fit and we look forward to helping.

We’ve completed the update that was causing our database issues and it appears everything is working as usual now.

If you spot something out of the ordinary, please let us know.