Monthly Archives: March 2008

MyBlogLog API To Open The Door To Social Network Spamming?

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Just thinking aloud…

I was looking at MyBlogLog product manager Ian Kennedy’s post on the recently launched MyBlogLog API.

[also contains video and links to the tech specs of the API].

One feature of the API is that it is “the only API that I know of that allows you to look-up a person’s identifier across social networks”

Does that mean a spam marketer using the MBL API can scrape all your social network IDs and populate your twitter streams, MyBlogLog message feed, and spam comment on your Flickr photos and blogs?

If the process can be automated, or the captchas can be overcome fairly easily (I’ve heard of a number of programmers who’ve been able to optimize OCR algorithmns on even massively distorted captchas…)

So if the spam barrage hits you on your web 2.0 accounts,

That would be pretty terrible, unless there’s a verification process involved in authenticating the ID of the person initiating the search…

So let’s keep our fingers crossed that enough safeguard are put into place, so that email “mass marketing” doesn’t become “web 2.0 mass marketing”….

For more on permission marketing, check out the Friday Podcast featuring Aweber education marketing manager Justin Premick.

The Mike Arrington – Eric Marcoullier Connection…

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…or maybe not.

Anyway, when TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington shows up on your MBL widget, something’s brewing:

mike arrington mybloglog

I am making an educated guess that it’s got something to do with the MyBlogLog post I put up.

And I see that Mike has just put up an update that MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier’s new project, Gnip (or gnip central to be exact).

No official word on Eric’s personal blog.

The Gnip Central site which will focus on “Web 2.0 Infrastructure” is still in stealth mode.

You can however, check out Gnip’s entry in the CrunchBase.

I’m sure there’ll be more updates on TechCrunch in time to come.

Friday Podcast: Email Marketing Tips With The Aweber Autoresponder

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For most marketers out there, autoresponder services like Aweber are a blackbox…most people will have a vague notion that email autoresponders are accessed via your web browser, you get some HTML code and place an opt-in form on your website or blog, people submit their name and email address, it appears in the autoresponder database, and you send them email, and sales comes flooding in…simple right?

Oh and they help negotiate with ISPs to ensure your email is delivered, and rotate IPs on their email servers, so it doesn’t get tagged as a “bad” IP.

Actually there’s much more than that, and Aweber’s education marketing manager Justin Premick gave an insiders view of the inner workings of Aweber.

More importantly, we discussed:

  • The relationship marketing principles involved in maintaining a successful email marketing list
  • Companies which are already successfully using email in their marketing efforts
  • Resources to help you bring your email campaigns to the next level
  • Tips for affiliate marketers incorporating email into their existing PPC and SEO campaigns
  • And we also unearthed a tip which could help you massively increase your results from promoting CPA affiliate offers…

It all happens here at the Friday Podcast.

Check out the audio interview below:

[display_podcast]

References:

Aweber autoresponder service

Brian Clark CopyBlogger blog

Spam Resource

Google Sender Reputation white paper

MyBlogLog User Interface Gets A Facelift – Is It A Good Thing?

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If you’ve been following the MyBlogLog blog and read the entry on the latest changes, you’d notice that the interface has undergone a number of changes:

Mybloglog

With the change, MyBlogLog has moved from being a blog aggregator to being a Web 2.0 content aggregator of sorts. It’s supposed to be able to pull in updates from twitter, myspace, jaiku, flikr, linkedin, etc (a total of 43 services) and present them in a “New With Me” tab.

Oh yeah…where all the information used to Continue reading →

Increase Your Online Income With Email Marketing

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During the recent Affiliate Summit West, I met Justin Premick who’s Education Marketing Manager at email marketing solutions company Aweber.

I think I’m doing more than 90% of the affiliates out there when it comes to incorporating email marketing as part of my SEO-based marketing campaigns, but some of the tips that Justin shared with me during the few minutes we talked before the Blue Man Group performance at the Affiliate Bash at Tao gave me a couple of ideas to test out in my campaign.

So I was looking forward to chatting with Justin when he agreed to come on as a guest on this week’s Friday Podcast. Some of the ideas and behind-the-scene stuff that goes on at your autoresponder operator will surprise you, and I uncovered some killer tips to use autoresponders to enhance conversions in your affiliate AND CPA marketing campaigns.

It was definitely worth waking up at 3am this morning (3pm EST Tuesday) to chat with Justin and the interview will be posted this Friday.

If you aren’t already using email marketing in conjunction with a PPC or SEO marketing campaign, you could be leaving quite a bit of cash on the table…

Here’re some tips which will help you get started:

  • Content is and should be packaged differently across multiple platforms

Seems obvious, but you need to tailor your content to suit the medium you’re publishing the content on.

On a website you have the benefit of space and the ability to use multimedia generously (audio, video, graphics), while in the context of email marketing, people are used to seeing bite-sized chunks of info.

So unless it’s very compelling, it’s generally not a good idea to send out a 5-page email. Even if it does get read, you can expect to see a dropoff if you consistently send out long emails.

  • Permission-based marketing

This was one of the major points during our discussion – email marketing is very much “relationship marketing” which plays by a different set of rules when compared to pricing/bidding strategies of PPC or the search engine algorithmn trustrank/pagerank strategies of SEO.

“Permission Marketing” by Seth Godin is a great primer. To check out 4 free chapters, visit Seth’s blog.

The reality is that even if Continue reading →

$7,119 worth of prizes in Gyutae Park’s “Craziest Internet Marketing Contest”

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You might like to check it out at: Gyutae Park’s blog.

In my mind a “contest” has elements of skills and competitors have to compete.

The event that Gyutae has organized is more like a sweepstakes, where you sign up for his mailing list, subscribe to his RSS feed, post some linkbait back to his blog (via stumbleupon or blog about it) and gain chances to win some of the prizes.

It doesn’t hurt that there’s about $2,000 worth of cold hard cash to be given away, plus an all-access seminar pass to Affiliate Summit East in Boston later this year.