Author Archives: Andrew Wee

About Andrew Wee

My name is Andrew Wee. I'm 32 years old, live in Singapore and am happily married with a 2 month old daughter. I've gone through a list of various occupations including: * journalist (for a business newspaper) * Internet content developer (for one of Asia's largest media group's Singapore Press Holdings) * trainer in entrepreneurship, business building, life skills * photographer/photojournalist * real estate agent * consultant * entrepreneur (I think that's enough for now...more later!) This is a personal space to express my goals, dreams and aspirations.

One Key Concept To Growing Your Internet Business In 2009

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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:

90-10 rule

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 Continue reading →

How Not To Be A Tool On Twitter

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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 Continue reading →

Friday Podcast: Building Your Affiliate Karma With Missy Ward

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missy wardI’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:

[display_podcast]

Resources:

How To SUCCESSFULY Recruit And Retain Affiliates In Your Affiliate Program

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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

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 Continue reading →

Affiliate Video Marketing Strategies From Affiliate Summit West 2009

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One of the standout sessions from Affiliate Summit West 2008 was the video marketing panel comprising AskTheBuilder’s Tim Carter, Wine Library TV’s Gary Vaynerchuk, Metacafe’s Brian McCarthy and Buy.com’s Melissa Salas moderating.

melissa salas

Buy.com’s director of affiliate marketing Melissa Salas

This year’s session similarly featured Continue reading →

Affiliate Summit West 2009 In Pics and Words (Part 1)

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Shawn Collins and Missy Ward have consistently put on a great Affiliate Summit since I first started going to them in 2006. This year was no different and if you’re an affiliate, consultant or network, the show serves as a great opportunity to network and get a pulse on the trends in the industry.

It was worth the 20 hour plane ride each way, and despite the somewhat hefty tax expense, the benefits far outweighed the time and resources to get there.

This is a first in a series of posts, more to come.

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Pre-Affiliate Summit

Getting to the summit is a good idea, especially with some flights being delayed and having a chance to do some chillaxing before the event. I did some shopping at the premium outlets outlet mall and met up that night with Kim Rowley and Jon Levine.

kim rowley

At most conferences and seminars, I usually learn more from talking to other affiliates about their sites and projects, compared to the formal sessions (unless it’s a brand new area/topic for me).

So we went for drinks and it was interesting to hear about how the program that Jon is managing was put together.

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Day 1: Sun 11 Jan

I was pleasantly suprised outside the conference rooms by Shawn Collins who danced a welcome jig:

shawn collins

I’d post a video, but the group we were Continue reading →