Archive of ‘Internet Marketing’ category
I’m in the process of developing websites in a couple of different niches and going through the process of building sites from scratch has been instructional, especially since the process has changed with the availability of new technologies, here’re a couple of steps to help accelerate your site development.
Choice of niche:
Obviously an important choice which will affect your daily/weekly routine for at least the next couple of months. It’s never a good idea to go into a vertical/industry solely by the perceived high payouts or bonuses you’re being offered.
Choosing a niche based on your affinity and interest seems to work for me, and I don’t feel that passing up on a number of “lucrative” niches has hurt me.
Working the Grind
Any vertical will have a period of “grinding” or what gamers refer to a period where you have to go through some repetitive, potentially painful effort. Any site will require more than (more…)
Chris Pearson is a smart designer/developer who’s latched on to the emerging trend in publishing – the move away from elaborate, bandwidth-heavy, ornate websites to the more subtle, clean design that’s seeing its way on more progressive blogs.
Is this an influence of the minimalist style micro-blogging platforms like Twitter? It’s hard to say, but having a simple, yet intuitive design will give blog visitors easier access to your content and reduce the distraction that a cluttered blog template can create.
Chris’ Thesis WordPress template has been around since last year, so it’s not exactly a new kid on the block. In that time, it’s made its way on a number of blogs, especially based on its strengths.
I’d been looking for a clean and SEO-optimized template for use on a number of new content sites I’m in the process of developing and after reading a Thesis review by Rae Hoffman AKA SugarRae, it sealed the deal for me.
Here’s what the default installation looks like:
As you can see, it consists of a text area on the left and a prominent (more…)
If you missed it, check out: Affiliate Summit West 2009 in Pics and Words (Part 1).
Here’s more goodness from the Affiliate Summit:
ShareASale’s Director of Client Services Carolyn Tang AKA Catango is one of the most pleasant and knowledgeable individuals in the industry and it was a pleasure to talk to her at the SaS booth, even though there were lots of people there.
As a tradeshow visitor, I’ve got more than my fair share of t-shirts, notepads, pens, paper weights and stationery to last 2.5 lifetimes. I liked how SaS did a little out of the box thinking to provide a photobooth where affiliates took some crazy pics (I’ll post mine later), and thoughtfully gave out baby T-shirts and bears. For affiliates with families or significant others, they’ll likely be seeing the SaS logo on a teddy bear or baby T for some time to come. (a good thing).
Check out the Friday Podcast interview on Affiliate Program Strategies with Carolyn Tang.
It was cool hanging out with top affiliates Colin “Google” McDougall and Ros Gardner over dinner at the Nobu Japanese restaurant at the Hard Rock for the private launch of Jim Lillig’s Offeratti network.
Considering that Colin doesn’t take raw food, it’s a testament to the great food at Nobu that Colin was enjoying the sashimi with the rest of us during the meal. It was also interesting to hear Colin tell his stories about his towed trailer that he rolls out for holidays. And if you’re looking for inspiration as you’re working towards your ideal affiliate lifestyle, Ros has bought a lot of nice toys/trinkets to enjoy the fruits of her labor.
It was great to meet affiliate network Market Leverage‘s marketing manager Dina Riccobono after talking to her over IM and being interviewed for MLTV late last year.
Market Leverage has a proactive outreach and affiliate recruitment program and it’s refreshing to see a network take the intiative in getting to know affiliates. They hosted a dinner at Switch at the Encore hotel, with Market Leverage CEO Mike Jenkins in attendance. It was a great opportunity to talk to affiliate managers Mike Kelly and Jen Fluker to get insight into how affiliate managers operate.
At the dinner, Mike announced the launch of Market Leverage’s greenlinks program, which provides links to video-based affiliate training from the ML website interface.
Here’s an earlier Friday Podcast with Market Leverage CEO Mike Jenkins
Jen Goode, better known as JGoode, headed the Affiliate Summit mentors program and did a great job (I believe there were more than 100 mentees in the program). I also had a picture taken with the penguin and nearly kidnapped him. Ah well, maybe next time.
In the meantime, check out the Friday Podcast with Jen talking about Print-On-Demand product strategies
With Jon Fisher AKA AOJon , founder of the WickedFire affiliate marketing forum. I started making these “gang signs” because a number of the “affiliate gangstas” started making them.
Before the panel discussion on Affiliate Strategies for Traffic Generation and Sales Conversion on the first day of the summit with Miles Baker, Geordie Carswell, Nickycakes.
The session went well with positive (more…)
I’m triple-barreling this post, which will also serve as a reminder of the sessions I’m planning to attend.
First the survival element:
- Bring business cards, especially if you’d like to drop your name in the running to win a Wii, Xbox, gift card or other incentive the networks are offering. (also known as “offline lead generation”). If you’re selective, I’d think 30-50 business cards are enough. If you’re aggressively giving them out, leaving them on tables, etc, you’d probably need about 10 boxes (1,000 cards).
- Be warm: The weather is pretty cool at this time of the year, bring a jacket if you’re going out in the evenings
- Prep yourself: Prepare a 30 second pitch of what you do and your type of traffic generation, you’ll likely be repeating yourself walking the show floor, attending sessions, at parties, etc. Save the life story if someone is really interested, else a 15-30 second “elevator pitch/synopsis” will suffice.
- Comfortable shoes are a must: Walking shoes: wear them. Your feet will thank you at the end of the day.
- Hydrate yourself: “Las Vegas Throat” is a condition that strikes some, especially with the dry desert air and occasional shouting you’ll have to do. Drink lots of water (or honey and lemon if you can get ahold of it). Else you risk losing your voice at the end of day 1 or 2.
- Max out your carrying capacity: If you’re planning to collect schwag from every exhibitor, you might want to bring a backpack as you’re walking the halls, else you could be weighed down. I think Market Leverage might be rolling out their Cashinator machine, where you grab dollar bills in a vortex of flying money. Good for a few bucks, better for more laughs.
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If you’d like to check out the comprehensive list of sessions, check out the Affiliate Summit agenda.
For parties, Jangro’s “Party A Day” Guide.
For some recommends sessions Angel’s Top 5 ASW09 session picks.
Here’s my session and party guide:
Day 1 (Sun Jan 11 2009):
Meet Market (noon till 6pm, location: Pavilion 8-11): A 1-day meet-and-greet session. You’ll think you can breeze through this area in about an hour, but the reality is that it’ll probably be about 3 hours and you’d have barely made it through half the tables. It’s a good opportunity to (more…)
If you’re a frequent visitor to my site, you’ll know that aside from affiliate marketing, my other gig is that of product creator – developing information products – books, reports, videos, courses – which are delivered digital. The majority of the online world calls these “e-book” or “ebooks”.
Information can be found all over the internet and begs the question “Why would anyone pay for something that can be found free on the internet?”
The simple reason is that if you’re merely repackaging a blog post, a wikipedia entry, a google news story or a mp3 download, you’re not adding value and you might as well give it away for free.
On the other hand, if you’re adding value to the process, by organizing information, providing advanced applications to a basic technique or providing a comprehensive case study AND your customer gets value out of the process, you are more than justified in charging for your products.
There’s been a recently trend among bloggers and internet marketers to jump on the “I want to build a list” bandwagon. A common incentive to get people to join a list is to say “I’ve written a report on (topic), get access to this report by joining my mailing list now!”
I’ve experimented in the last week joining a number of lists. In some cases, the promised report hasn’t shown up.
In many cases, the report has been nothing short of disappointing. Just because you can hammer out, copy 5 pages of text, convert it into a PDF and offer it online, does not make it a “report” or a “book”. That’s like saying you can buy a smashed-up race car and say you’re a Ferrari owner. It is technically correct, but just so wrong.
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Here’s my take on the issue:
If you’re going to do anything (free or paid), do it (more…)
Talk to any marketer and chances are that they’ll have a stash of domain names for projects that may likely never materialize. Talk to the enthusiastic ones and they might have a couple of hundred domains registered at their domain name registrar.
I’ve just renewed another 7 of my current ones for another year at Namecheap, using the coupon code GOLDDEAL (good for renewals if you have more than 50 domains) which saves you a little under $1 in registration costs.
And I’ve picked up a new one using the Namecheap December 2008 coupon code THREEKINGS, saving about $1 too.
(If you’re looking for great value webhosting, check out Bluehost, which was my first shared webhosting account and I still keep it around, even though I have a dedicated server now).
The next step is to start planning and scheduling time for doing something with the domains. A couple of the partners I’m working with are going into a consolidation phase and weeding down the number of projects each person is working on – no more than 2 major projects – which will go a long way to maintain focus. It’s a great idea in my opinion.
