While surfing through the PepperJam affiliate network‘s list of merchants, I came across an interesting banner:

Because all the letters in the domain name are in lowercase, you’re open to interpret it in a different way.

One way could be “Blind Sex Press”. Leaving one to wonder…what is that?

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Using a series of uppercase characters can help visitors instantly recognize the domain and can help pre-qualify the traffic.

In this case the merchant, Blinds Express, could consider changing their creatives to read BlindsExpress.com, instead of blindsexpress.com.

Affiliates can benefit too, because it will increase the return on their marketing spend.

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Check out my previous post about the launch of the Pepperjam Network (PJN).

Easier said than done though.

From my research, most podcasters and video bloggers who generate “interesting” (ie not boring) content tend to be clever/witty, use cool background music, broadcast/guerilla-style video effects and transitions, to the point of being Seinfeld-ish (ie being about nothing) in nature.

If anything, the message is a mood or feeling (emotional) in nature, versus featuring hard, intellectual, fact-based content.

While being cute, cool and kooky might capture an audiences attention for 15 seconds, prolonging that audience engagement beyond that period, can be a challenge.

More importantly, building a brand or cult of personality can be similar to a celebrity endorsement, like a Britney Spears endoring Pepsi type of campaign. However, how far can this go?

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On the other hand, strongly fact-based content, like marketing white papers, tend to be dry, and keeping the audience’s attention can be a challenge too. Appealing to the head, but not the heart, can be a mistake, because most buying decisions, whether buying a new iPod, or signing up for a Acai or Reservatrol trial is often made on the basis of hope…or dispair.

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With blogging providing a channel for any marketer to publish information, it’s largely a self-regulated medium – barring cease and desist letter, you’re free to publish any content, free of editorial control.

If anything, it’s a democratic medium, because the audience “votes” with their feet, whether to come back for a return visit, or write you off as irrelevant.

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So back to the original question – is it possible to be both informative and engaging/entertaining? While this will come naturally for a rare few bloggers, for others it can still be achieved, however, it’d take more effort to each this goal.

Studying role models and more importantly, analyzing how their content is developed and presented will move you further along the learning curve.

Some of the characteristics of successful bloggers:

• Writing in a 1st person style, creating a “you are there” experience
• Engaging the reader fully on a “heart and mind” level
• Creating a reader community and interacting with them

For more tips on using blogging as a branding and monetization channel, check out Secret Blog Weapon.

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 to the best of your ability.

If it’s a free report, your benchmark isn’t delivering $0.01 of value, since they paid $0 for it. Shoot for the stars. A common phrase I’ve heard and which has guided me these years is “the cream always rises to the top”.

If you’re constantly overdelivering, you’ll have no shortage of sales, customers or business.

I give a number of talks each year (including at the upcoming Affiliate Summit), many of them are unpaid, but I probably put at least 10-20 hours preparation time into each hour that I’ll be speaking.

The fact of the matter is that you’re putting your reputation and your personal brand on the table each time you speak, you sell something or your promote an affiliate product.

Choosing to promote an inferior product because it pays a great commission just means it will come back to haunt you later (possibly for a very long time).

Likewise, taking one disorganized idea, blowing it up into a 5 page PDF and calling it a “bonus” or a “report” does an injustice to your readers or customers. But the person who is going to suffer the most is likely yourself.

If you’re not sure whether a report is good, give it to someone who is brutally honest – your significant other or someone who doesn’t pull any punches. If they say it’s crap, it might be time to fix it, or just send it directly to the trash.

That’s your internet business. Get it?

Picture if you will your internet business as represented by the iceberg.

It could be huge. It could be imposing.

Or it could be just a couple of ice cubes floating about in the water, blown all over the place by the wind.

Here’s the kicker.

Ice is about 90% of the density of water. So what you see is the “tip of the iceberg”. There’s another 90% of ice attached to what you see above the surface of the water.

Or is there?

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Here is the problem facing 90% or more of pure-play Internet marketing efforts today…

They’re focused solely on lead generation, and often there is little longterm viability built into the business.

Some may say that CPA affiliates are pretty short-sighted because they’re selling leads (the majority who fill in email and zip submits and sell them to CPA networks for between $1 – $5 a lead).

But are affiliate marketers much better?

In most cases, affiliate marketers are only paid on the initial sales. Eg: a lead buys $200 worth of merchandise from Amazon or Overstock or Buy.com, and the affiliate earns from 2% to 10% of the sale value (depending on whether you’re getting bumped up payouts/are a top performer, etc).

In many cases, once the payout is made, the relationship with the lead ends.

The second time he or she makes a purchase, you don’t get any cut of the sale value (ie. zero residual income), the exceptions being a handful of affiliate programs in the Rx, gaming, adult, network marketing, and a couple of the more progressive merchants.

You’ll just be getting credited for the front-end sale (which could still be a very decent couple of hundred bucks per lead), but will be getting nothing from the backend sales and future sales.

Yes, you might still be making good bank based on generating leads, but an affiliate pretty much has to watch the market, decide when a niche is hitting it’s plateau and start developing another niche.

Industry insiders have been mentioning that cellphone ringtone downloads have slowed significantly since recent legal developments and a plateau-ing of the industry and an increasing number have been moving towards developing products centered around mobile content – horoscopes, love compatability calculators and the like.

If you want to stay ahead of the curve, you’ll need to continue to keep evolving and decide if a market is about to tank, and continue to operate the business or exit it – either by selling the business or in some cases, giving away an entire network of sites.

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Back to the iceberg analogy – most people will get fascinated and possibly obsessed with what’s happening “above the surface”,  I think what’s even more important is “what lies beneath”. – not just the backend operations behind your business (in terms of following up with leads, cross-selling, upselling and even selling those leads to other competitors, especially if they don’t buy your product), but you need to have an idea of what the business represents (typically referred to as your “brand”, and how you’re building a viable business with longterm assets within it.

• Branding:
  

Branding is important, but often there’s too much emphasis placed on a brand. Remember the ads shown during the Superbowl that creates awareness (especially the 1984 Mac ad), but does it translate into bottomline results? If everyone out there knows that you have pineapple-flavored cola, but they don’t go buy it, is it a flop?

There’s a reason why Internet Marketing is often referred to as “performance marketing” (briefly discussed by Lisa Picarille in Sam Harrelson’s recent live Affiliate Fortune Cookies podcast) .

Performance marketing: If you don’t perform (convert leads into sales), you don’t get paid.

Some of the best known blogs and forums in the “cloud” are well-known, have a large base of users, generate a fair bit of buzz and hog more than their share of airtime. So they have a great brand, great mindshare and they’re doing well, right?

I heard the same thing during the dotcom period of 1999-2001, in many cases many of these startups went belly-up 6 months later (also accelerated by the CEOs preference for buying Hermann Miller Aeron chairs, overpriced LCD monitors (in the early 2000s), and a penchant for the occasional Ferrari).

• Tangible Intellectual Property or Human Capital Assets:

If your internet business were to be stripped of it’s online brand today, what would you have left?

A content site? A database of 100,000 leads? Solid intellectual property (either an information product, a unique software, platform)? A solid marketing or programming team?

If you’re left with nothing aside from just a brand, it could be time to start hard thinking and start building some of these elements into your business.

If nothing else, you certainly won’t want to end up like the Titanic, dead in the water.

But without a longterm game plan, you could very well find yourself in that position.

My daughter Bianca was pretty excited about it:

Opening the box revealed…

Purple wrapping paper?

And…

A haul which included:

• MyBlogLog decals
• A Yahoo! pen and pencil
• A Yahoo! bumper sticker
• Purple Gummi bears (in rapid extinction as I write)
• Purple gumballs (also in scarce supply as I write)
• A Yahoo! pin

It’s great to feel appreciated.

I was a little confused though, because judging by Yahoo! web pages:

I’d have thought the corporate colors might be red and white, but it’s actually purple.

Take a look inside the purple house of Yahoo!

So I learned that one of Yahoo’s corporate colors is purple today, though it was a little confusing initially.

To build a strong brand identity in the marketplace, do note that colors are as much as part of your identity as the look of your blog template and sales and landing pages.

PS: My thanks to MyBlogLog Community Manager Robyn “Sleepyblogger” Tippins for the schwag.

So what’s happened since the launch?

In Jan, when WebProNews announced the Amapedia launch, early feedback was along the lines of:

The site looks pretty raw currently and has little info in it – it is after all brand new.

And now nearly half a year later, I find 15 product reviews on the site, none of which are particularly inspiring. Worst still, some product discussions haven’t had an update in 55 days.

Ghost town?

For sure.

Critics will question, Is it even a worthwhile exercise for the mammoth online retailer?

Let’s look at the demand for Wikipedias, or user-contributed content sites:

So there is high demand for online information reference sites.

And the chances are, once you’ve discovered wikipedia, you’re likely to bookmark or keep it in mind, and head over there to bone up on unfamiliar topics.

I’ve gone over there a number of times in the course of my blogging and site development efforts to fact check or build up my background knowledge.

So where has the story gone wrong for poor Amapedia?

The site design certainly looks polished and is consistent with Amazon’s branding and consistent sitewide design.

I do find the user interface a little clunky though.

The Wikipedia I’m used to is fairly text-heavy and has little in the way of design gimmicks.

It’s utlitarian in the way of “enter key phrase in search box, hit enter”. I don’t use burn any neurons trying to find categories or figure out how to search for stuff in Amapedia’s case.

But I think the biggest obstacle is a lack of buzz for Amapedia’s efforts.

History has shown that websites with really horrible interfaces, and poor design can survive, provided there is something compelling.

I have been on more than a few forums and social community sites where the design and interface has been nothing short of dreadful, but I’ve stuck around because the people were interesting.

Text Link Ads not too long ago, enlisted the likes of Neil Patel and Cameron Olthuis to spice up the Link Building Blog and have generated a community of readers and buzz.

Can Amazon do the same too?

They’ve already dumped the idea of plogs (a kind of product blog) in February. So what next?

Maybe Amapedia could hire the likes of celebrity gossip maven Perez Hilton or the folks at gadget blog Gizmodo to contribute interesting content to shake things up. Give Amapedia some personality.

But I think the biggest lure Amazon could go with is with their most valuable asset: Amazon credit vouchers.

If you remember back far enough, Amazon used to give away $10 credit vouchers like water when they first launched.

It certainly worked very well and I’ve racked up a couple of thousand dollars worth of purchases from Amazon over the last couple of years.

A lot of it had to do with the initial exposure and liking for Amazon’s interface and more so their customer service (I typically received an answer within 24 hours, and sometimes as short as 6 hours).

Awarding quality Amapedia content contributors is a less expensive route than taking on hired guns for content creation. More so, incentivizing Amapedia contributors builds site stickiness and organic growth will occur.

If something is going to happen, it needs to take place soon, because the web is already evolving at a rapid place, and the marketplace is unforgiving of slow pokes.

Does it work?

I think my results speak for themselves.

Let’s go on to my favourite affiliate marketer.

Super Affiliate Ewen Chia and Andrew Wee

Something he said during Saturday’s workshop (that’s the Ewen Chia and Jo Han Mok Advanced Strategies workshop) gave me my money’s worth.

Would you like to know what it is?

But if you have a chance to invest in a copy of the workshop videos, you’ll get more than your investment, because I was probing the two gurus for their insider secrets throughout, and they were very open in their answers.

But more on that particular Ewen tip later.

Picking a mentor is important if you want to succeed in a short timeframe and I’d generally use the following criteria to pick a strong one:

• Do they practise what they preach? Or is he just a ‘theory’ guy?
• Are they in for the long haul? Or just a flash in the plan?
• Are they using their own system? Or merely copying someone else?

It’s important especially for your mentor to be using their own system (which could be adapted from someone else’s.

If they’re doing wholesale copying of someone else, take heed. It’ll retard their ability to continually evolve the system.

It’s like buying a stock car and being unable to make modifications to it. You could be ‘jammed’ especially if you’re in an unfamiliar situation and you aren’t able to adapt the system.

But back to Ewen’s insider tip.

I don’t believe anyone would dispute that we should be continually building our own brand on the Internet.

I’m sure most would agree it wouldn’t make sense to build up someone else’s brand name on the Internet.

Taking one step further.

If you’re doing Internet Marketing, why would you engage in activities which continually build up the branding for an affiliate marketing product you’re promoting?

Are you guilty of advertising some hot new product and using the product name as a keyword?
Think about this for a moment.

Why would you build a brand for a product like XYZ blogging tool or AAA affiliate marketing software?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to build yourself up as an authority figure?

Look at Ewen Chia the brand for a moment.

If you’re on his list, and he mentions he found GGG analytics or DDD autoresponder to be a useful tool, would you be likely to check it out? Maybe even invest in it?

After all, if the Super Affiliate Ewen Chia says it must be good, it must be good, musn’t it?

And if you found it to be useful, it’d merely reinforce his postion as an authority figure, wouldn’t it?

So the upshot of all this?

Build yourself up as a high authority figure.

Put your name, or your business name on forum posts, blog comments, article submissions.

Ditch the “Internet4Wealth”, “FastMoneyNow”, “MoneyMakingForum” usernames/nicknames/monikers. They may help you with linkbaiting or traffic stealing efforts today, but they won’t help you in the long term.

Instead: Build up the “Me” brand.

Create an aura of competence and authority. Embark on your Internet Marketing efforts with confidence.

And as you’re contemplating all this, remember two words:

Andrew Wee.