July 2007 archive
I’d like to thank MyBlogLog Community Manager Robyn Tippins for the invite to join the MyBlogLog Advisory Group (which I’ve accepted) and I’d also add on to my guest post on the MyBlogLog blog.
First the MBL Advisory Group: I’m looking forward to working closely with MBL to further bring the service to a new level. The other advisors are experts in their own right, like:
MBL is on the forefront of social networking especially for bloggers. In 2006, some naysayers were predicting that “blogging was dead, and Digg was the future”.
Uh huh.
Until Eric and the MBL team launched the MBL widget late last year which has become pervasive. In recent times, Scott Jangro’s BumpZee and BlogCatalog have launched their own variants of their social widget.
And lately you’ve got a number of wayward MBL users who’ve devised a number of dubious ways to generate income by comment or widget spamming the heck out of sites which use the MBL widget.
I think there’s a lot of bad information going out there. If you want to game social traffic or social media (depending on how you call it), you might like to (more…)
There’s gold in Internet Marketing podcasts from the perspective of a listener, and if you listen closely enough, you might sometimes catch bits of invaluable information that drip off stream-of-consciousness style from the podcasts hosts or their guests.
Daron Babin’s (SE Guru) WebmasterRadio.fm is home to a ton of great content and I listen to many of the great shows there.
This week, Affiliate Thing, hosted by Revenue Editor-in-chief Lisa Picarille and Affliate Summit co-founder and affiliate marketing fixture Shawn Collins talked about the new podcast shows like:
and the new Shoemoney Show. (I guess Jeremy might have a little more time following the sale of AuctionAds to Media Whiz)
It was great to hear that Shawn listens to my Friday Podcast and mentioned it on the episode “The British Invasion: Affiliate Style” as well as on his blog entry “The Podcasts on my iPod“.
Besides checking out Affiliate Thing and the Shoemoney show, I also recommend new affiliate marketers to check out the “Affiliate Marketing Today” podcasts. Although the show is currently inactive, it’s worth checking out the archive for episodes hosted by Super Affiliate Jeremy Palmer. The 2004-2005 episodes hosted by ABestWeb founder Haiko de Poel are an excellent primer.
Although it might sound like I listen to many podcasts, I usually have a couple of gig on my hard disk and listen to it when I can.
I have a Nokia N73 Music Edition smart phone with about 2GB of memory on it, at the moment I’ve got John Carlton’s “Kickass Copywriting Secrets of a Marketing Rebel” and Mike Litman/Matt Bacak’s “Ultimate Lifestyle Workshop” on it. The rest of the memory is taken up by video footage of my daughter, Bianca Wee.
Carsten Cumbrowski has podcast resources listed at his resource site Cumbrowski.com.
I just bought about $400 worth of used teleconferencing equipment off eBay (and had to pay about $30 in taxes when it got to Singapore), so you might hear more interesting Friday Podcasts in the near future.
In the meantime, if I had a wishlist of podcast shows, I would be interested in tuning in to (more…)
In this edition of the Friday Podcast, I reflect on what the “Internet Lifestyle” means, inspired by marketing whiz Yanik Silver’s new Internet Lifestyle blog and website.
Notes follow (click on “More”)
(more…)
Three young Malaysian Internet Marketers are raising funds for air travel and accomodation to the US to attend an Internet Marketing seminar, to achieve this aim, they’ve put together an Internet Marketing product firesale.
(Left to Right: Vince Tan, Gobala, Melvin Ng)
Dubbed the “7 Day Super Firesale”, Malaysia-based Internet Marketers, Vince Tan, Melvin Ng and Gobala Krishnan have put together 100 products on topics ranging from product launches, blogging, traffic generation, product creation and product marketing.
If you’re a new Internet Marketer, you will find a number of these products can be very useful in helping you better understand some of the fundamentals of Internet Marketing. Granted, you can probably get most of this information from high authority blogs, forums, Wikipedia, Ask.com and Yahoo! Answers, but I think the value you’ll get is from having the information aggregated at one central location.
If you’ve been doing Internet Marketing for at least a year, and are generating a comfortable income from your efforts, you might (more…)
As an affiliate marketer, I have to deal with challenges (or you might view them as opportunities) during the course of your campaigns, but when happens when you find out a merchant has been sticking it to you?
A case in point, I’d be promoting web services for a merchant through their in-house affiliate program. It paid about $60 per customer who signed up for their services.
And I discovered a couple of days ago that they’re running the same offer on one of the biggest affiliate networks and paying out $90 a customer.
Boy, I was fuming.
I can understand a $5-10 gap differential when the same offer is listed across various affiliate networks (the networks might be willing to cut out a chunk of their profits to give more to affiliates).
But when there’s a near 50% commission payout gap I feel it unconscionable.
There is an unspoken affiliate marketers’ code of conduct, but there isn’t a formal regulatory body which presides over affiliate networks and merchants.
In other words, who watches the watchmen?
Some might say that in a capitalist society, you are welcome to vote with your feet.
I tend to view business as a series of long term business relationships with real people.
I can only guess that:
- The various marketing/ad departments within the merchant or the network aren’t talking to each other, such that you have a 50% gap in affiliate payouts.
- The service provider faced some stiff competition and upped their payouts in real-time to remain competitive. But wouldn’t you be talking to your in-house team too?
- Affiliates? Who cares.
For the purpose of this post, I prefer not to name the merchant, nor the network, nor the type of service and focus on the core issue instead: Trust.
So does that mean affiliates are going to (more…)
Super Affiliate Kieron Donoghue has an innovative strategy to get one of his sites ranked within the top results on Google for the highly competitive term “Bingo” and affiliate marketers can take a lesson or two or three from Keiron’s case study.
In “Easy method of gaining quality backlinks and building a database of users” Keiron has bypassed the traditional strategy of asking webmasters for backlinks or a link exchange, in favor of a premium giveaway.
The pens costing 20 pence (or about $0.41) each are a viral and guerilla method to gain a backlink.
He’s also engaged in using press releases to distribute his message/content and some viral marketing on forums has occured.
As the marketing is done partially offline (through the delivery of the pens), you’ll get the link love from a backlink, compared to a 2-way link.
At this point, some readers might be thinking “why didn’t I think of that?”
A key reason is many Internet Marketers are overly focused on:
- Technology: Trying to signup for some automated bookmarking/viral software that’s just been released.
- Following the advice of a guru who’s had a successful campaign (Note: once something has been done successfully once, it’s difficult to repeat it verbatim with the same level of success. Those familiar with Economics will know it as the law of diminishing utility).
Likewise, “value creation” is a buzzword in corporate circles, but to get more out of it requires people to do more than sit in a circle on Friday afternoons, chomping on doughnuts, sipping cappucinos, talking about improving work processes, but never doing anything about it.
I used to conduct entrepreneurship training focused on business building skills in the Singapore schools. It was particularly frustrating to sit in on meetings where it’d take 2 weeks to figure out who’d be a project manager and who’d form the team.
Then they’d be offer to conduct “research” for a couple of weeks and finally decided that there were too many obstacles, so they needed to find some other project (or niche in Internet Marketing speak).
They’d then bang into some other challenges in the midst of their “research” and give that up too.
Which kind of reminds me of what many new Internet Marketers do.
They start out with AdSense publishing, then maybe make a switch to eBay auctions. Then they decide it doesn’t work, and before you know it, they’d made a full circle of adsense publishing, affiliate marketing, product creation, online auctions, PPC arbitrage, CPA marketing, and somehow come to the conclusion that “nothing works”.
Is it due to the “Honeymoon effect“?
Maybe.
And it feels like old ground is being covered, like (more…)
