While there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the practice, I feel that it sets up expectations that the blogger or website owner will have to deliver on once the visitor lands on your page.

If you can keep your readers happy, you’ve laid the foundation for a successful and low cost (possibly free) traffic generation model.

The sad reality is that more than 90% of the sites using such techniques have average (and usually sub-standard) poor content.

At best, this is gimmicky in my opinion and best used for one-off, throwaway adsense-oriented traffic.

But if you’re a serious Internet Marketer in this for the long haul, you’d do much better to build your brand, which means either using your photograph, or an image which represents your online presence.

Iconic Avatars: Michael “GrayWolf” Gray, Jim Kukral, Rasheed Ali, Robyn Tippins, Todd “StuntDubl” Malicoat, Shawn Collins, Chris “Drinkbait” Hooley, Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker.

Credibility and reputation are essential to your long term success, and being consistent in your online branding build rapport with your visitors. Consistent branding will bring you intangible returns in the way of joint ventures which will net you much more than merely driving traffic to an adsense-optimized site.

I don’t know about you, but it would be difficult to take some aspiring marketer who uses a Hooters girl as his icon, seriously, much less consider a joint venture.

Some will obviously be interesting, fun and insightful. The bulk, unfortunately, will have…lots of room for improvement on being interesting, fun and insightful.

The more interesting (and slightly voyeuristic ones like the ‘5 Things About Me’) ones will tend to generate more social traffic, and attract longer term longevity and reader stickiness, especially if you come across as personable and likeable.

Sticky content is one of the foundations of sustainable and credible social traffic generation.

Yes, memes may seem to contain high school popularity contest overtones, but it’s based on a “hip geekiness quotient” (HGQ) more than anything else.

Did anyone else feel like a loner in school? Or perhaps you were the one intellectual quarterback or wrestler in the team? [I can only lay claim to being in the computer club and the electronics/audio-visual club and the occasional explosion and filling an entire chemistry lab with chlorine gas].

Back to the meme, I’ve been hit by Chris “HooMoney” Hooley.

So here goes the Trust Meme:

===

Ok- ‘nother meme, but this one seems bit more interesting. It’s about the trust. Greg Niland kicked off what seems to be a good one this time.

Here’s the tree so far…

Greg Niland
trusts
Rae Hoffman
trusts
Michael Gray
trusts
Todd Malicoat
trusts
Andy Hagans
trusts
Cameron Olthuis
trusts
Jarrod Hunt
trusts
Chris Hooley
trusts
The SEOmoz peeps I still trust them, but they can’t keep the meme going. I also trust Andrew Wee!
trusts
Planet “I got the biggest freaking business card collection at ASW and whooped Joe Whyte’s butt” Andrea

trusts

????

—

PA, represent!

PS: Andrea just launched her new spammy innovative cooking video site at AndreaCanCook.com. If you’d like to make a request for spam sandwiches or baked beans and pickles on toast, drop her a comment.

Maybe if we’re really nice, she’ll make food, so we can spend more on entertainment.

PPS: I’d be really surprised if Joe Whyte doesn’t rally his Lunar Pages Marketing Team ninjas in on this one.

I still haven’t figured out whether Joe refering to me as an ‘advisary‘ is a compliment or an insult.

Should we be worried that in the same post Joe also says “I’m bring my sexy!”

Maybe someone has been studying the “All your base are belong to us” wiki and drinking a little too much juice?

An ‘advisary’? ‘I’m bring my sexy!’?

Can someone help out?

Like a game of ‘Pass the Message’ which you play in a big group, depending on who you check out, the meme is known as:

• 5 Things You Might Not Know About Jarrod Hunt
• 5 Things You Don’t Know About Me (Cameron Olthuis)
• 5 things You Didn’t Know About Todd Malicoat
• 5 Things You Never Knew About Me (Shoemoney)
• 5 Things You Never Knew About Me (David Naylor AKA DaveN)

At first look, it seems like Shoemoney and DaveN are on to the right thing. Then again, it could mean that DaveN is good at following formats after being tagged by the Shoemeister.

So this freeform means you have the right to rename the meme (Master Rename Rights so to speak).

Instructions: (Especially for those I’m tagging)

From what I gather, you are supposed to:

1. Disclose 5 personal things about yourself
2. Tag another 5 victims friends to pass this labor of love to.

Here’s my 5:

1. I am was quite the game addict. I used to clock up 8 hours a day on mudding (especially DikuMUDs) when I was in school. I clocked up another 12-14 hours per day on weekends. A mud is a multi-user dungeon, the predecessor to text-based MMPOGs (and muds are way cooler IMHO). The longest I’ve spent is 36 hours on a game of Civilization. I only stopped because I was starting to black out (and just as I was about to wipe everyone else out too).
2. I am was also quite the Japanese manga/anime fan. To the extent that I blew a couple of thousands of dollars on graphic novels during my youth, and much more on DVDs when I failed to make it to adulthood. How do I rank on the Otaku scale? Let’s just say I wanted to name my daughters: Nausicaa (after Nausicaa: Princess of the Valley of Wind by Hayao Miyazaki) and Bianca (after the Sol Bianca sci-fi series). My wife didn’t go for Nausicaa, although my daughter’s Bianca (the Italian variant of Blanche, which means fair-skinned and beautiful).
3. Although I’ve been paid quite a bit for writing (as a journalist generating content, and later as a consultant generating strategy plans), I write in spurts and prefably when inspired. In my youth (a long long long long time ago), I used to practise writing love poetry (I write killer haikus and sonnets), and then I handed them out to girls I met. Somehow I tended to always have a lot of company.
4. I had plans to operate an ice cream parlour. I’d always enjoyed eating mud pies, ice cream and generally anything with chocolate in it. I spent about 6 months experimenting with recipes and testing out my creations on friends and family. Then one day I realized the idea of working 7 days a week and 12 hours a day didn’t seem that appealing. My favourite ice-cream flavors would probably be chocolate chip cookie dough, phish food, vanilla bean and basically anything with chocolate in it.
5. I spend a lot of time watching TV (although it’s usually during meal times and just before I sleep). I like all sorts of gangster movies (Scarface being a favorite), sci-fi (Babylon 5, the 4400, X-files) and crime dramas (The Shield, Prison Break. All time Favourite: Oz)

That rounds off my 5 Things.

I’m tagging:

1. Rachit Dayal: (dude, get moving on the Blogging Predictions 2007 meme too!)
2. Ryan Chua: (who seems to blog in a leap year, or every time a space mission is launched, whichever is less frequent)
3. Super Affiliate Guy Jon: (who might have more time to take part in this meme since he’s stepping out from Affiliate Marketing, though I’m not sure if I should use anchor text like “Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Blog” anymore. Some advice, Jon?) Oh and Jon’s promised to smack me at ASW too.
4. Kumiko (The Cash Quest Babe): Ok, I have a thing for attractive young women aiming to make money (…from online ventures). She’s got a ‘bubbly’ writing style too.
5. Chris Hooley: Chris is too &*&(_&^ creating weird junk like HooMoney and going on SEO Pub Crawls to participate in my blogging meme. With friends like Hooley, who needs…

Since I was double-tagged, I’ll do the excessive thing and go tag another 5 bloggers (I’m not sure how Laura’s going to reply from her Notebook forum to being blog tagged by PlanetAndrea (who’s likely from another planet).

Here goes:

1. New mum and social media optimizer Michelle MacPhearson: Badder Adder pawns MySpace. Next stop: MyBlogLog!
2. I scanned and it seems my anime homie (and fellow 9ruler), Michael Ono, amazingly hasn’t been tagged yet.
3. Tag guru and fellow 9ruler, Richard Ball
4. 9ruler Social Media specialist Emergence Media (Daniel Riveong) – he has a really cool ‘slider bar’ navigation tool to move through his blog. And social media being his thang, I figured a meme is just what the doctor ordered.
5. Bluehost CEO Matt Heaton (Because I came across his blog when scouting for web hosting and moved my sites over, impressed by his integrity, candor and honesty)

Ok, all, I’m looking forward to something juicy interesting

Here’s my to do list for ASW:

• Attend the great sessions planned
• Meet and greet the affiliate managers present, as not many have a point of presence in Asia.
• Finally put a face to many of the personalities whose blogs I’ve been reading, or emailing, or catching their web radio programs, or whose forums I’ve been participating on.
• Get a Shoemoney t-shirt (one of the new black one maybe?)
• Get some nice WickedFire merchandise at their booth
• Catch some great parties

This is one of the few times I’d be heading halfway around the world (I’ll be battening down the hatches in Asia to work on a couple of major projects once I get back).

So far, I look forward to the opportunity to meet and greet with Shoemoney, Jon F, Anik Singal, PlanetAndrea, Chris Hooley, Scott Jangro, Robyn Tippins, Shawn Collins, Missy Ward, the LunarPages blogging team (including Joe Whyte) and it looks like Pepperjam will have a good presence there too.

I might be approaching some of you to do interviews, so you are forwarned, and perhaps forearmed.

If you’re planning to interview any of the folks at ASW, here’s a couple of pointers from my days as a tech journalist.

• Do Your Research

Nothing’s more irritating than being asked, ‘What do you do?’, ‘What is your website/blog address?’, ‘Can you explain what you do?’. My all time favourite had to be the story of another tech journalist who went to IBM and asked, ‘What’s a server? Is it some kind of maid or butler?’

We live in the online world. Google your intended target. Use technorati if you need to. Look through PRWeb, scan article directories. Visit their blog/website. Look through their milestones. Read through the past 6 months or 1 year of archives. Look through major trends in their industry/niche. How does that impact them?

• Be Prepared

If you requested the interview, think through the angle of the story. Don’t expect your interviewee to propose an angle. If you do any copywriting, you don’t have any reason not to be able to come up with an angle for the interview. The interviewee is there to sit in front of you and answer your questions. Look at your research, figure out the angle.

• Be Thorough

If you’re asking the questions, follow a logical sequence and be thorough.

Use the ‘inverted pyramid’ content structure (starting in general terms before coming to specifics questions). Think like your reader. How would you like the information to be presented? Structure your questions in that manner.

Note down key statistics and facts, list your questions down so you can refer to them.

If your interview subject sidetracks, bring them back to focus.

Coming up with quality content requires laser-sharp focus.

If your subject is getting majorly off-point, gently interrupt them and bring them back to your original question.

• Assembling the Jigsaw

Newer interviewers tend to follow a chronological sequence when presenting the interview. I’d suggest reorganizing your information to follow themed segments might be more useful for your reader.

A major shortcoming of verbatim transcripts is that related points might be scattered through the discussions. This tends to present a somewhat schizophrenic picture, unless your subject is very used to being interviewed.

• The Biggest Success Factor

It’s related to adopting a reader-centric approach to interview. If you’re able to present the information clearly to your reader, you’ve succeeded.

PS: If you’ll be at ASW, leave a comment below or drop me a note via the contact form, including your email address. I’d love to meet up.

• You can make huge money, if you’re skillful, especially if you’ve traded in equities, mutual funds and the like.
• Luck plays a huge part too.
• It can be quite fun
• If you think this is a complete waste of time, just remember that it started out at PlanetAndrea.

One last minor note: It’s all fake money. But who knows, just like the “Game gold” phenomenon on the MMPOGs out there, you might start seeing eBay auctions if this thing takes off.

As everyone knows, Internet Marketers (whether you’re focused on SEO, SEM, blogging, arbitrage affiliate marketing, product creation, domain trading, or one of the things some of you have emailed me about and asked not to mention) tend to spend on average 16 hours a day in front of the computer. (Unless you’re Cameron Olthius and only spending 14 hours a day in front of the computer: Personal Resolutions for 2007)

So to break the monotony of Internet Marketers engaging in another game of minesweeper, solitaire, tetris or tagman, there’s a new game in town. Here’s the brief:

• Alexadex is a stock market-like trading game.
• You start off with $10,000 and have to work your way up. (fake money).
• Money is made, and lost, by trading shares in websites.
• The value of the shares changes once a day, during updates, and there is a maximum amount of shares for one site, so you might not be able to buy the site you are looking for every time.

The rest of the rules aren’t too exciting. But despite it’s noble intentions, I think this is a thinly disguised way for SEMs to bet on Alexa rankings (‘investment’ learning ambitions aside).

So like any astute gambler investor, I immediately invested all my funds and I’m now officially illiquid.

Here’s where I put my funds:

Chris-Hooley.com: I put my money on Chris at $35 a share and bought about $4,500 because he’s a swell guy. And also because his shares are fairly inexpensive. And given his past history, I’d say the prices have a good chance of tripling in value.

I invested the balance of funds into myself. Although at $95 a share I’m fairly pricey, I think it’s a good investment because as the blog owner, I’d easily be able to hack the system unlock shareholder value.

Left with about $40, I decided to be a nosey parker and snoop around.

Shawn Collins’ Affiliate Summit.com will see more traffic as January 20 approaches. That’ll be when Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas will kick off. And as the time approaches, expect to see more traffic at the site. And if you haven’t got your ASW ticket yet, head over to the Affiliate Summit website.

At $135 a share, it seems pricey, though there’s a definite possibility of upside.

PlanetAndrea has a monster of a spike in her traffic. If I could short the stock I would because although there is a possibility of her price increasing, the odds are for a correction downwards. At $85 a share, they’re a little pricey too.

Pronet Advertising: Neil and Cameron’s site seems to have a drop in traffic, but there’s a definite series of peaks and troughs. At $130 a share, there’s lots of upside potential and worth an investment, especially since they look like they’re in a trough at the moment.

PepperJamBlog: Another nice find here. At $27 a share, Kris Jones is your “go to” guy if you’d like to see a 5-fold return on your investment. The peaks comes with some regularity (about twice a month), so you can sit back and wait for them to come along.

Yahoo: For fun, I checked out the top ranked Alexa site which happens to be Yahoo. At $272,500 per share, I won’t be buying any soon. Maybe one day…

—

If you’d like to join in the fun, head to: AlexaDex

What’s a “Reptilian Buy Button”? Chris says:

If you hit them with a primal, instinctive emotion, they may connect with you deeper than just the initial click. They make fall in love with your brand, your image, or your culture and you might have just convince a new person to join your cult and buy every new product you launch.

I agree with Chris, and it’s been a theme I’ve been following for some time.

In the online world, I’ve felt that there’s sometimes too much emphasis on technology, or Web2.0 or Ajax or (insert your favourite up-and-coming website/technology/product/service).

Internet Marketing is a business.

And a business is driven by the need to match demand and supply.

Demand can be natural, as in food, safety, warmth, comfort, sex, belongingness, love.

Or it can be created. No one really needs a MP3 player (billions of people in China and India don’t have them).

Apart from your psychological well being, a plasma TV, a WiMax-enabled PDA, and a 500gb Tivo isn’t a pre-requisite for survival.

Top of the chain for non-functional items are holidays and jewellery.

Holidays provide a change of landscape and ‘expand our horizons’.

I haven’t ever felt a need to expand my horizons by shifting my physical location because:

• I have an active imagination
• I can travel anywhere I’d like through books and films
• I’m just too addicted to the Internet to travel for extended periods of time

Here I am equally a victim too. No one really needs the Internet (unless you’re reliant on the Internet to generate income).

At this point, you’re probably thinking ‘So what? What’s this leading to?’

Here’s the bottomline:

If you haven’t already noticed, there is a law of inverse proportion at work here.

The more non-useful the item is, the more it costs (especially when it comes to luxury items.)

Do you really need a $20,000 Vertu phone?

Or a high performance Italian-designed supercar?

Especially when their counterparts cost 100 times less and provide a comparable level of functional performance?

Here’s another insight: Your personal feelings will inevitably bleed into the message you’re putting across.

The most effective entrepreneurs promoting super luxury holidays as individuals who might go on those holidays themself.

Almost always, a luxury goods distributor started out as a customer themself.

It follows the adage, it takes one to know one.

If you are developing niche websites providing high end products/services, it helps if you are a consumer, and the bigger a consumer you are, the more successful you’re likely to be (the same theory applies to affiliate marketing too).

But, as a fallback, you can co-opt someone who fits your target profile to serve as an advisor, to give you feedback.

Although your site can contain the latest technology, you’d fall far short if you’re lacking in the emotional elements. Because ultimate people buy something because they like it, and ideally they love it. Or they are seduced by their money making greed glands.

My advice, ditch the latest technologies, aim for the emotional heart of your prospect, you’ll soon hear the cash registers ringing.

[Chris: you really went out of SEOland on this one…]

Although there is Internet connectivity in the 99% region, the available bandwidth has been affected. I estimate that in Asia (southwards of Taiwan) are probably at about 60%-80% of the pre-earthquake levels. I suspect the Internet Service Providers might be metering the bandwidth and skewing more resources towards corporates.

Although I have both cable modem and DSL connections, I’m finding that hosted applications like web-based email, my WordPress blog (which is hosted on a US server) and especially photo stock archives like Sxc.hu have excruciatingly slow load times. Lag times of 10-20 seconds for WordPress page loads are common, and widgets like MyBlogLog slow it down even further. It feels like we’ve moved back to the 28.8kbps dial-up modem days.

Being hostage to fast big data pipes is one bugbear we’ll have to deal with, especially as web applications are, well, more web-based. We’ll increasingly be held to the mercy of fiber optic (or should that be optic fiber? I’ve heard it used both ways) cables.

YouTube and other video streaming sites have pretty much come to a screaming halt for me.

I was checking out Kris Jone’s PepperJamBlog post “The Next Lonely Girl – ShmulTube is on Fire” about Shmuly Tennenhaus and was looking forward to viewing Shmuly work out at the Walmart Center. All I get is a black screen.

Andrea and Chris Hooley were also talking about some funny videos on YouTube, no luck there either.

Having a vulnerability such as being subject to a major POP (point of presence) through Taiwan will put a major dent in the Asia’s plans to lead the technological charge. Singapore’s recently rolled out free wireless broadband Internet access in the city center. This will be fairly hollow if we can’t surf out of the country at fast speeds.
Content will be one of the major determinant of success, as well as choke points in this drive, especially since the majority of content resides mainly in the US.

Although the government have activated contingency plans to route data through alternative routes, it clearly isn’t providing the same quality of service. “404 Page Not Found” errors are becoming a daily occurence.

If my business was primarily audio or video-based, or I used VoIP applications like Skype for the majority of my business communications, the estimated two week period to repair the underseas cables would make a major dent in my revenue and profits. Certainly not a good start to 2007.

I’ve heard some advice such as using an Australian public proxy to get faster browsing, but I think it’s more a stopgap measure more than anything.

If Asia plans to stay on track after we recover from this round of natural diaster (and my heart goes out to the people of Taiwan), telcos will need to continue to invest in more infrastructure.

As the Web continues to become more bandwidth intensive, we’ll experience the equivalent of ‘bandwidth blackouts’ and that certainly isn’t anything to look forward to.

Far from dying, there’s a resurgence in blogging, judging by the flow of private equity and growth of blog networks.

Just look at the nearly 1,200 submissions for the Round 5 submissions for the 9rules Blog Network or check the stats at the Blog Network List. Darren Rowse’s b5media blog network got a nice chunk of capital funding too.

2007 will see a further evolution of blogging as we know it.

Perhaps ‘blogging’ (a truncation of weblog) may evolve as a term to fully encompass what it represents.

Here’re 4 trends I see this year.

• Offline to Online Content Migration

Even without Amazon and Google’s efforts to digitize content for the Internet, a multitude of content publishers are bringing more content online every day.

Besides info portals, such as About.com and Wikipedia, individuals bloggers are blogging about their pet topics.

Aside from quoting online news sources, bloggers often cite print media, cable television, movies and other old line media (I guess this year someone will start call it media 1.0?). During this process, it’s inevitable that more content will migrate from a paper-based medium to an electronic one.

It only means that the online will will only continue to get more info-rich.

At the same time, it also means that third world countries where dial-up Internet connections (remember those?) at speeds of 28.8 kbps (that’s kilobits, not megabits) will only get further stratified by the digital divide.
Beyond food, water and shelter, the info-rich online environment will provide an opportunity to accelerate progress in the developing world.

• Blog Income Monetization Opportunities Increase

Bloggers increasingly have a number of options to generate income from their blogs.

Options like Google Adsense publishing, paid content posting (from the likes of PayPerPost), banners and text links, affiliate marketing and CPA networks, provide options for bloggers to go beyond just posting on a ‘passion’ (ie unpaid) basis to considering blogging as an alternative to a 9-to-5 job.

For newer bloggers however, it will take some time before they get their rhythmn going.

And I’d still advice newer bloggers to build up good content and develop a following before cramming as much adsense and banners on your blogs.

These monetization strategies generally require planning to create quality content, effectively publicize your blog, generate sufficient viewership and readership numbers, to successfully create a decent income from your blogging efforts.

Most bloggers will be able to generable a couple of hundred dollars to a thousand dollars worth of blogging-related income once they learn the ropes. But to step up to the next level of a professional blogger, it’ll require effective blogging strategies. (For which I’m currently developing products to address those needs).

• Blogging Goes The Rich Media Route

Perhaps it’s due to it’s traditional association with maintaining an online diary, but blogging still remains very text-based. You might sometimes get the occassional graphic or photo accompanying the posts.

To date, the number of blogs with audio or video still remains quite low. In fact, a number of blog directories have dropped the vlog (or video blog) category altogether this year, due to underwhelming demand.

Attaching a video from YouTube can sometimes be a bugbear (even if it’s as simple as pasting HTML code into your blog).

Plus, you’ve probably encountered the ‘bandwidth traffic jam’ which hits many of these video hosting sites at peak hours.
In the coming year, we might see more Internet bandwidth expanding as Internet Service Providers buy bigger chunks of bandwidth, and increase bandwidth to the video service providers.

We might even see new video caching services available which will help ease the video bandwidth bottleneck.

As for the immediate future, podcasting looks like it has the next lowest barrier of entry, especially as bloggers become more adept at audio applications like Audacity.

Looking for inspiration? Check out Webmaster Radio

• RSS Goes Mainstream

Email went mainstream approximately in the mid 1990s, when email addresses started appearing on business cards, despite the fact that email has been around since the 1960s.

The predecessors to RSS (really simple syndication) were developed in the mid-1990s. And although push-type services like BackWeb and Pointcast were a little ahead of the curve, bloggers are among the early adopters of RSS services.

To date most casual Internet surfers have no idea what RSS is, much less how to subscribe to a RSS feed. (You could’ve included me in that category about half a year ago).

Added to that is the fact that RSS readers tended to be web-based or required third party applications to access. Which makes RSS a mess for most net surfers to get into.

Will 2007 be the year that RSS readers become more user friendly? (I still have problems successfully subscribing to Atom and RSS feeds sometimes)

Here’s a thought, if all email clients supported RSS feeds and even better, RSS appeared as almost indistinguishable from email, wouldn’t we see widespread adoption of RSS?

—

The Blogging Predictions 2007 meme

Those were my blogging predictions for 2007 and I intended to launch an Internet meme off this post.

(check out the classic Leeroy Jenkins World of Warcraft Internet meme. Avoid if you’re offended by gamer vulgarity)

Here’s the meme topic: What’re your Blogging Predictions in 2007? (Include your top prediction or a selection of your expected trends)

How to play:

1. Blog about the meme topic
2. Include a trackback to this post at: –> Blog Predictions 2007 Meme Trackback
3. Pass it on to another 5 bloggers.

Come back here and check out the trackbacks for the link madness. What better way to start out 2007, eh?
To kick things off, I’ll send this to a selection of 20 blogs:

1. 9rules Network Official Blog
2. Darren Rowse AKA Problogger
3. Yaro Starak – Entrepreneur’s Journey
4. Apogee Weblog
5. Rachit Dayal
6. Jeremy Schoemaker AKA Shoemoney
7. Andrea Schoemaker AKA PlanetAndrea
8. Neil Patel
9. RumblePup
10. Robyn Tippins AKA Sleepyblogger
11. Chris Hooley – ThinkBait
12. Michael Gray – Graywolf
13. Andy Beard
14. Scott Jangro
15. Kevin Nair
16. Shawn Collins
17. Steven Wong
18. Gobala Krishnan
19. Rashenbo
20. Dazzling Girl

And lest I forget, the TickMe bloggers crew:

which includes fellow 9ruler Cameron Olthuis

hmm…this is almost too much work for the new year…

PS: If you’d like to play, do your own meme post and trackback to: Internet meme trackback

PPS: Meme project updates can be found at: Blogging Meme Reloaded

It looks like Scott Jango might be on to starting something viral with his post: Have You Got An Affiliate Marketing Blog?

As you’re expect, the big guns of Affiliate Marketing: Ros Gardner, Shoemoney, Linda Buquet, Shawn Collins, Kris Jones, are already on the list, though I’d expect it’s just a matter of time before the likes of Ewen Chia, PlanetAndrea and Jon F appear too.

I’m lucky I didn’t do a trackback to these guys. It would’ve been pretty cheap…
Who knows, I might’ve fired a backlink at Chris Hooley, GrayWolf, Neil Patel, or even one of those crazy guys like TofuMonkey.

Who knows what might’ve happened next?

Oops.

Oh gosh.

Oh well.

I’d have shot the link into the Affiliate Marketing TickMe group (with 67 members. Yes, you need to be a member to see the group. And yes, I spawned the group). But Dave Naylor hasn’t implemented a forum/bulletin board function yet, so I can’t easily announce it to the group members.

Yes, go ahead and petition give feedback to DaveN in the comments area at: TickMe – New Social Networking Site

PS: If you feel that I’ve succeeded in creating the LinkBait Post of the Year, please let me know in the comments below.

If you don’t feel so, it only means I’ve failed.

PPS: Here’s Scott Jangro’s Affiliate Blog Directory