The auction closes this Friday, August 28th, 1159pm. Some of the bid prices are ridiculously low at the moment, so if you put in a bid for charity, you’ll either get the product or service at a steal, or you’ll be doing your part to aim in breast cancer research and relief.

You can check out Missy’s fundraising auction post.

Here’re some of my personal top picks for the auctions:

• Two hours of consulting with Lisa Riolo: Lisa was formerly affiliate network Commission Junction’s senior vice president for business development and has had management roles at brick-and-mortar institutions like Bank of America and Peet’s Coffee. Besides the obvious affiliate marketing issues you might raise with her, she’d be pretty experienced in the operations side of running and growing a business too. The auction is currently in the $100+ region, and even if you were to contribute the retail value of $1,000, there’s no doubt that her advice would bring your business to the next level. (check out my Friday Podcast interview with Lisa R).
• Two hours of consulting with Lisa Picarille: Affiliates might know Lisa as the former publisher/editor-in-chief of Revenue Magazine, the performance marketing standard, as well as co-host of the Affiliate Thing and TheSpew podcasts. You may not know that she’s a wealth of experience with print, radio and online content publishing. Whether you’re a merchant, network or affiliate, you’ll be able to bounce ideas off Lisa which will help you on the media and content elements of your business. Again, the $100+ bid is ridiculously low, and even the $300 retail value is lowballing the potential benefits. I’d realistically value the advice you could get from Lisa at at least $1,000. (check out my Friday Podcast with Lisa P).
• Affiliate Summit West 2010 Platinum conference pass (Las Vegas): Gives you all-access pass to the conference sessions and trade show. If you network effectively at this event with merchants, networks and fellow affiliates, there’s no reason why your affiliate business won’t double or triple (at the minimum) from the networking you’ll be doing. In a number of cases, affiliate incomes have increased exponentially as a result of face-to-face meetups at the event.
• Thesis WordPress template/framework developer’s pack: Thesis is a SEO-friendly WP template that can be customized easily to replace other website publishing tools you’re currently using. I’m developing a new set of affiliate sites using Thesis and with the SEO features, it get much more visibility from organic traffic. Also, designer Chris Pearson has placed a strong emphasis on typography, so readability and usability are greatly enhanced. The lifetime upgrades and great support at the forum is worth its ticketed price many times over. Again, the bids are ridiculously low at this point ($30) on a $164 retail value. (read my Thesis product review for more information)
• Market Leverage A-List Experience: The highlight of this package is dinner at the Eiffel Tower restaurant at the Paris Hotel and Casino with Market Leverage social media manager, Dina Riccobono. If that’s not enough, you’ll also get coverage on MarketLeverage TV and be featured on JohnChow.com. With a little out-of-the-box thinking, this package can significantly boost your branding and bring a number of benefits to your business. (Disclaimer: I’m also bidding on this package). (Check out some of Dina’s tips from the Friday Podcast on videocasting and social media branding)

Although I’ve mentioned just a few of the packages up for auction, do check out the various packages available, you’ll be getting resources to grow your business and doing a lot of good for charity too!

Take a look at the signs of the impending apocalypse, once proud A-Lister bloggerati have taken a hiatus, stopped blogging, or are pummelled over the twitterstream into irrelevance. Is blogging, once the circa 2006 golden boy of mainstream media, now it’s whipping boy?

More importantly, is anyone going to read more than the 140 character limit imposed by micro blogging platforms like Twitter?

Are we destined to become a SMS/text nation?

Gee… I hope not.

But anecdotal evidence shows that bloggers are updating their Blogger and WordPress blogs left often, meanwhile they’ve racked up hundreds, if not thousands of twitter updates within the space of a few month.

From casual observation, the mantra seems to have shifted from “I’m blogging this” to “I’m tweeting this”.

It’s a valid observation too. If you’re busy talk-tweeting for an hour every day, that’s an hour taken away from think and composing your next blog post.

The paradigm shift might be this: From an isolated position of having to plan and write a blog post in isolation and interacting with readers through the blog comments later, it’s shifted to a model of firing a question into the twittersphere and using a combination of @username and direct message responses to have a real time chat – Twitter is kind of like the bastard child of IRC and forum discussions in my opinion.

So yes, Twitter is here to stay (at least till the inter-continental wifi-enabled telepathic communication becomes ubiquitous).

Where does that leave blogging?

I believe blogs and twitters can and will continue to co-exist. There’s only so much that can be said in 140 characters. The modus operandi involves including a URL together with the short, pithy update. And blogs more than adequate fill that space.

If anything, twitter has replaced email marketing as a traffic channelling mechanism, and blog traffic has been picking up.

Not to mention having made a couple hundred more blog friends through the enabling technology of Twitter.

Believe or not, 140 character tweets will likely sit side-by-side with 400 word blog posts for some time to come.

In the meantime, new bloggers are still purchasing copies of Chris Pearson’s Thesis WordPress template and streaming into my Secret Blog Weapon program.

So all’s well on the blogging front.

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 “multimedia box” in the top right, with 2 text columns below.

This 3 column design gives you flexibility in deciding how you’d like to layout your blog elements.

One key is the multimedia box allows you to display graphics, ads, an opt-in box, a product shot, text box, or anything that fits within its dimensions easily.

I think the trend toward simplicity and ease-of-use in web design and blogging will continue to be a theme, as sites move away from a Swiss Army Knife “all-in-one” information overload approach with 50 hyperlinks on a page to something that’s easily accessible, especially as users more familiar with the simple user interfaces found on MySpace and Facebook discover there’s a whole world beyond the walled gardens of the social networks.

Experienced bloggers will be familiar with the process of logging into the WordPress theme editor and hacking the PHP code to insert handwritten snatches of code to signal how the search engines should display the title tag and content from the blog post.

If you choose to, that code hacking aspect of blogging can be a thing of the past, leaving you to focus on the core business of writing and publishing content (hopefully you’re having fun in the process). With a series of user interfaces:

You’re left to tick option boxes and type in the free text area how you like the title tags to appear. This used to be a process involving rewrite the PHP command and hoping you didn’t destroy your blog in the process.

Although you can use further SEO add-ons like the SEO Title Tag and All-In-One SEO Pack plugins, you can probably make do with Thesis’ built-in SEO functionality.

Likewise, with Thesis’ server requirements of PHP 5 installed on your webhost account and with a platform of WordPress version 2.7 to operate at an optimal level, you will already have access to WordPress’ newer features.

Similarly where editing the element like the Multimedia box (the free display area in the top right corner) used to involve extensive hacking, testing (and maybe a little weeping), it’s now easily managed with a series of check boxes and pull down menus:

And likewise, insert analytics packages like Google Analytics or 3rd party packages is a matter of pasting the tracking code in the stats boxes:

While Thesis’ enhancements are not exactly earth shattering because an experienced code could probably add or modify WordPress’ raw PHP code, the advantage of Thesis is that you don’t have to play with the code (unless you like to), it’s just a mouseclick away.

Also, having to spend less time messing around with PHP, means you will have more time to promote your offers and optimize your marketing campaigns.

Pros: Easy to use, especially for beginners. Intuitive option panel layout, built-in SEO functions so your blog gets indexed more effectively. Multimedia box gives you adequate room to publish resource links, images, videos, etc easily.

Cons: If you use your blogging software in an advanced manner, eg: membership site, forum, you will need to insert your custom code into the template, or hire a coder. Likewise, if you’ve heavily customized your blog, you will need to some effort to transition over to Thesis (These issues will likely only affect more experienced/advanced bloggers anyway).

Currently, Thesis is available in 2 versions:

• Personal option (usable on 1 blog): $87
• Developer option (unlimited sites, plus you can remove attribution in the footer) $164

There is also an option to upgrade from the personal to the developer version if you decide to later.

–

Since I’m planning to roll out Thesis on at least 5 new blogs, it just made sense to get the developer version.

Your purchase also comes with lifetime upgrades (Chris’ lifetime, not yours…)

With the flexibility to use Thesis as a blog or a landing page template, what’s not to like?

-> Check out Thesis now!