January 2009 archive
This week on the Friday Podcast, I invited PotPieGirl to talking about generating traffic using free methods.
I’d seen her twitter exchanges with Miles Baker and found that she’s pretty proficient in building sites on Squidoo (the social networking site founded by marketer and author Seth Godin) and generate affiliate marketing income from her efforts.
During the course of our discussion, I found out:
- How she got started in affiliate marketing
- Her strategy for traffic generation and how she got involved in social media marketing
- How she balances her time with a spouse and kids to take care of too
- How 2007’s “Squidoo Slap” (where Google placed less prominence on Squidoo lenses) has affected her business
- Tips for resources to build your internet marketing skills
- How to market effectively using Squidoo lenses
Check out the podcast below:
Links below:
Remember when a college kid came up with the idea of selling pixels on a webpage, pricing each pixel at $1 and having 1 million in “inventory”?
And how he raised $1 million and the Million Dollar Home Page generated buzz all over the internet and was mentioned in the newspapers and TV?
It was a novel, funny and creative way to “make money online”.
Then another guys comes up with another page, selling pixels at $1 a pop, hoping to replicate the same results. I don’t know the outcome, but I have a feeling he or she failed.
Then some clever codes came up with software that let you sell pixels on a page. It sold initially for hundreds of dollars and you can probably get free versions now. The poor saps who bought it for $297, probably ended up making $50.
What’s the moral of the story? You need to be first, be the first to bring a product to the market, even if it might be somewhat flawed.
The other side of the coin is that people have short attention spans and have 15 second “soundbyte” attention. Rehash something and it’s bound to be an epic fail.
Likewise, on the Twitter micro-blogging platform/social network, a trend has emerged where Twitter users hold contests where they stipulate that (more…)
If you’ve attended any sort of time management, goal setting or time management class in high school or college, you’d feel that you might have been beaten over the head with the Vilfredo Pareto bat.
Originating as a study that showed 20% of Italy’s population held 80% of its wealth, the concept of Pareto Efficiency (also known as the Pareto principle or 80-20 rule) introduced the idea of efficiency into everything you do. It’s not just enough to work hard, you need to work smart too.
Being (or wanting) to be a lazy affiliate marketer, it’s necessary to get a handle on this concept, especially if you want to hit your 2009 goals (it’s almost the end of January, you did set them, didn’t you?)
So this is your brain and the stuff you can work on every day:
I’d go one step further to suggest that working in “internet time”, the 90-10 rule applies.
A merely 10% of your efforts are going to be responsible for 90% of the results you get, because of the vastness of the internet, the efficiency of technology like (more…)
Twitter ranks as one of the best platforms for:
- Seeing what friends and business contacts are up to.
- Communicating either publicity or privately (via direct messages)
- Tunneling through to someone on their iPhone or other device, set to receive tweets
- Concise and to-the-point communication because everyone is limited to 140 characters
As a “micro blogging” platform, Twitter has gained sufficient critical mass that enough people are on it (like MySpace was in 2006 and Facebook was in 2008) to make it a viable and useful platform. (Sadly, other platforms like LinkedIn and Plurk have not achieved sufficient critical mass to be considered ubiquitous at this point).
Despite the benefits of Twitter, inevitably some marketers are going to be flexing their e-peen by sending frequent tweets about how they’re hit 5,000 followers, 20,000 followers or are in the top 50 on the top Twitter groupies list.
In my opinion, talking about the size of your community in a bragging fashion is disrespectful to the people who are following you. In a very real sense, you ARE reducing them to a mere number – one of 50,000 nameless faces who have chosen to take their time to read your potentially useful content.
Instead, why not spend time getting to know your community/followers.
Instead of going on an ego trip, can you say you know most of your followers?
On another note, twitter is not your platform to send a string of product launch announcements or to send your affiliate links out to some hapless n00b who happened to follow you.
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Now that we’ve defined the “ego” type posts, what falls into the non-ego/useful content basket? For me they fall into (more…)
I’d hesitated about approaching Affiliate Summit co-founder Missy Ward for this series till I felt the time was right.
As an experienced affiliate professional, Missy has built up a reputation in the industry, serving in senior management positions like:
- Director of Public Relations for Media Breakaway LLC (formerly CPA Empire, now known as affiliate.com)
- Vice President of Partnership Marketing for eBound Strategies
- President of Aluria Software
- Vice-President of Marketing for Global Travel International
Some of these positions were concurrent with taking a leading role in launching and growing the Affiliate Summit conference/trade show as well as a number of fundraising intiaitives.
If you’ve had a chance to talk to Missy during one of the trade shows, you’d find that she’s personable and knowledgable. During the course of our discussion, I got to know Missy better, including:
- How she got involved in affiliate marketing
- The formation of the Affiliate Summit and it’s goals and growth over the years
- How she got involved with fundraising activities, concurrently growing her affiliate business
- A preview of upcoming Affiliate Summit conferences and related events
- The guerilla marketing strategies used to promote the summit (merchants and affiliate networks can take a leaf out of Missy and Shawn’s playbook)
- Missy’s video blogging and promotion strategies
- A number of inspirational moments from the recent Affiliate Summit
- Key updates involving projects like Geekcast.fm, a new podcast in the making, Missy’s return to affiliate management and the revamped AffStat affiliate industry survey
Check out the hour long podcast, chock-full of content below:
Resources:
One of the affiliate marketing professionals I constantly look forward to talking to is Heather Paulson, founder of internet marketing/affiliate management agency Paulson Management Group. She’s simultaneously one of the most pleasant and knowledgeable people in the industry.
Heather Paulson
Affiliates are constantly bombarded with the “highest payouts, best offers” line that too many affiliate managers fall into using whether out of habit, laziness or a combination of both.
So it’s a breath of fresh air to get useful information to (more…)
