A minor quibble I have about the Affiliate Summit is not being able to hear presentations by the event’s co-founders Missy Ward and Shawn Collins because they’re busy presenting awards or talking to folks during the 3-day event.

In launching and leading their own new podcasts on Geekcast, this should address the appetite to hear and benefit from their expertise.

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BrandMouthing, a new solo podcast by Shawn Collins, gives his take on branding strategies and marketing techniques that affiliates and internet marketers can employ in their own business. Usually featuring a 5-10 minute duration (the longest has been about 22 minutes thus far), the short, punchy format (with a high signal-to-noise ratio) gives immediate tips.

I’ve enjoyed Shawn’s synopsis of the Cast of Geeks/GeekyBunch sessions when his Skype recording software failed to activate (resulting in a loss of about 1+ hour of content) and the BrandMouthing podcasts likewise provide a short burst of actionable information.

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TheSpew, helmed by Missy Ward, is vaguely themed after popular women-themed talkshow “The View”, with an affiliate marketing slant. Featuring prominent affiliate marketing/internet marketing veterans like Lisa Picarille, Connie Berg, Karen White, Lisa Riolo, Kim Rowley and featuring guests like Brian Littleton, Scott Jangro and others, the sessions are chock full of useful content, involving issues like the California affiliate tax, Missy’s fundraising projects, insights into the affiliate industry.

Bundled together with this, you’ll also hear about how several marketers got their start, get some insights into what makes them successful. TheSpew bunch have also thoughfully included snippets into managing a healthy work-life balancing, addressing issues like dating other members of the affiliate fraternity, networking at events and balancing parental duties with running your own internet business.

Although the sessions clock in at more than an hour, the time will probably fly by and I’ll be saving the sessions to listen to again.

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I’ve certainly got a healthy fill of content and will be looking forward to more episodes from Shawn and Missy.

You can check them out at:

• BrandMouthing
• TheSpew

Listen to the previous Friday Podcast where Missy and Shawn talked about their plans for Geekcast.

During our conversation, we talked about:

• The history and growth of the Geekcast podcast network and upcoming plans
• The expansion and growth of content on Geekcast beyond just affiliate marketing
• Incentives and admission criteria for would-be Geekcast podcasters
• Details and the launch of Missy’s new podcast, “The Spew”, soon to debut on Geekcast in late March
• The addition of video content on Geekcast
• Shawn’s tips on getting started as a podcaster
• How to organize and structure a winning podcast
• The growth of FeedFront magazine
• The upcoming inclusion of AffStat data in FeedFront
• Missy’s new involvement with the affiliate program for DIYThemes (publisher of the Thesis WordPress theme)
• Highlights and details of the upcoming Affiliate Summit East (Aug 9-11, New York City)

Check out the Friday Podcast below:

Links:

• Geekcast
• FeedFront
• Join the DIY Themes affiliate program
  
• Affiliate Summit East

If you’re an affiliate signed up to multiple networks, you’d receive a constant barrage of daily emails with subject lines like “network exclusives, promote now!”, “Highest payouts!” and “Hot new offers”.

Likewise, I’ve checked out a couple of affiliate marketing forums where networks have sponsored sections of the forums and populated these sections with “These offers are hot!” then proceed to list down payouts and offer caps.

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I don’t know how you feel, but this is pretty much tantamount to email and social network spamming by overzealous affiliate managers.

A good affiliate manager should know when to promote offers and when to back off. And emailing/hounding me when I say I’m busy is one way to get on my really bad side.

The other thing that’s disturbing is how little time many affiliate managers take to understand their affiliates. Granted, each AM might have 500 affiliates under them with just 5-10% of them actively promoting campaigns.

But my thought is this – If you’re already investing a couple of minutes using an instant messenger or making a phone call to the affiliate: what’s the best way to use this time?

Should you:

1) TELL the affiliate about your best converting offer, and the exclusives and the highest payouts. (I doubt an affiliate running a credit repair website might be able to clear many acaiberry lead gen offers for you…)

OR

2) Should you ASK the affiliate what type of offers they’re interested in, and filter your pool of offers down to the most relevant 10-20 and email that information over?

The concept of customer relationship management (CRM) does not apply only to the advertiser-affiliate network relationship because the advertiser is paying for the leads/customers, I’d say that affiliates are equal part “customers” in the equation too.

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Having said that, using Twitter, or a blog to publish an endless stream of breaking news on “offer updates” is just another way of doing what everyone else is doing.

Here are a couple of ways to disrupt the “traditional” way of affiliate management, and stepping the standards up a notch:

Engage with affiliates: This is more than just sending me a Christmas card (even if I live halfway around the world), it’s engaging and understanding your affiliates’ requirements.

Geordie Carswell, back when he was CEO of affiliate network Revenuewire, would be available over AIM to give PPC campaign tips and promotion ideas. Likewise, Mike Krongel, CEO of Intermark Media which owns the Copeac network would be available too.

These days, Ralph Ruckman AKA “Ruck” is active on the Wickedfire forum and actively posts on the Convert2Media blog and gives out promotion ideas on the C2M affiliate forum with clear, actionable ideas to promote the offers on his network. Not to mention that his partner and co-founder Steve Howe practically lives on AIM.

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Building A Goodwill Virus: I hadn’t heard of Market Leverage till meeting some of their team at the Affiliate Summit last year. Since then, they’re proactively got my mailing address from my domain whois information and sent me a schwag bag earlier this year (and included some gifts for my daughter too).

Likewise, they’ve been following on their promotion efforts by organizing a series of contests on the popular blogs and rollout their “Cashinator” money grabbing machine thingie at events they’re taking part in. While these items and cash won’t be significant for successful affiliates, it does demonstrate that affiliates are a priority for the network and building credibility and a reputation among the affiliate community are some of its goals.

Also, having a regular video broadcast does help build the reputation of the affiliate network (or merchant). Market Leverage has it’s Market Leverage TV weekly broadcast, while Buy.com has it’s Buy.tv broadcasts.

If anything these intiatives demonstrates the networks or merchant’s investment in long-term projects which will ultimately bear fruit from its core of affiliates.

Taking some of lessons to mind when attending an event like Affiliate Summit will help any network get more mileage out of their participation in the event.

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Related podcasts:

• Mike Jenkins, founder Market Leverage
• Geordie Carswell, former CEO Revenuewire
• Dina Riccobono, Market Leverage marketing manager

When most think about information products or digital products, they think of the ebooks which used to hog eBay listings – but NIN’s The Slip album (together with the entire inventory of iTunes and other digital music marketplaces) are digital inventory too.

With their latest album, NIN have chosen to “give away” the album via a Creative Commons license (although a bunch of merchandise at their “merch” tab at NIN.com looks pretty tempting too…)

Taking a step away from Radiohead and NIN’s previous effort at selling their music online at a fraction of the printed CD package, or asking for a donation, you’re getting The Slip for free – in essence, content becomes free. (I would not be surprised if Trent’s production costs and time cost upwards of $100,000 or more for this).

Which is what online analysts have been saying about online platforms and applications for years. Eventually, a technology-based platform will become commoditized to the extent of being free and you’d pay only for applications that ride on it.

It’s already being practised with cell phone operators. Most time you either get a free cell phone handset or get it at a vastly discounted price, the operator makes up the difference through your monthly subscriptions via a contract of 1-2 years.

Progressive analysts have even said that eventually cell phone service will be free – you merely pay for the applications and data services you use (like the GPS and maps functions mentioned by Todd Crawford and Sam Harrelson in Geekcast 16.

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But back to NIN for a moment.

They’ve broken new ground in my eyes for a couple of intiatives.

You’ve not only been given the right to play the tracks however you wish, you have NIN’s blessings to:

• remix it
• share it with your friends,
• post it on your blog,
• play it on your podcast,
• give it to strangers,
• etc.

Which will undoubtedly viralize the music.

I can still remember listening to NIN’s Pretty Hate Machine in the early 1990s, especially tracks like Head Like A Hole and Down In It. (A number of the tracks (which are pretty hypnotic) appear on the soundtrack of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers – which features “Iron Man” Robert Downey Jr…)

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How is NIN going to monetize their intellectual property (ie. the music)?

I think NIN fans are pretty hardcore, and the proceeds from merchandise and concert sales, and likely DVDs, interactive media will more than make up for it.

If NIN has bypassed or disintermediated themselves from the music studios, they’ll certainly have more room to access funds and stay in touch with their fans.

The other techie thing that NIN have done is to release it in a variety of audio formats – besides the ubiquitous MP3, you can also download a lossless FLAC version as well as a high quality 24/96 version.

Lastly, they’re distributing a number of these versions through the Bittorrent Peer-to-peer network, typically used to distribute pirated CD albums.

Could this signal a change in the winds for content distribution via the internet?

Stay tuned…

Sam talked about Todd’s new blog, be sure to check out Todd Talks. If you’re nice, you might even hear about his secret project…

This week also saw the launch of Sam’s new RedHatBlueHat political podcast. (and if you’re following the industry, political blogs are quite the money rakers…)

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In other news, I’m getting blog consultants to work on the this blog and there’re a number of neat enhancements coming up. You’ll see the weird MySQL errors popping up when you post comments, but they do end up in the moderation queue. If you posted a comment and didn’t see it published, chances are you dropped a “nice post” or “come and look at my site -> [link to made for adsense or ebook opt-in page]. Your name makes it into the master blacklist of bloggers too…

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I’m posting twitter updates more often too. Twhirl seems to be working like a charm.

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I got a bunch of schwag from CPA network Market Leverage (Thanks Debby and the ML crew!) and have been playing with the Flip Ultra that came in the goodie bag. I’ll post an update next week.

While I was huffing and puffing on Sunday manhandling my heavy desk and moving the computer, monitors and bunches of cables around, I was listening to the huge backlog of MP3s I had downloaded over the past couple of weeks.

I probably listened to about 10 hours of audio over the weekend and was more active than usual in my twitter stream too.

I think it’s important to use your “downtime” well, especially if you’re working on your taxes, cleaning the desk, clearing your inbox (snail mail and email), or sorting out your baseball card collection (or samurai katana collection if that’s up your alley).

Here’s my list of favorite podcasts at the moment:

#1: Geekcast (the podcast, not the network…) -  A collaboration between Shawn Collins, Sam Harrelson, Lisa Picarille and Jim Kukral, I’d classify it as a industry banter session. I can identify with Lisa’s sentiment that it seems unstructured at times, but I think it’s part of the fun, especially as the show hosts go off on each other.

There was some drama recently as Shawn and Sam had a spat with Jim, but all seems well now, and we should have the 4 musketeers back in the seat. The show is recorded every Tues and Sam usually has the podcast up within 24 hours.

Be sure to check out the “Sorry, Jangro” drinking game that accompanies the podcast.

#2: Affiliate Summit Sessions Podcast: If you missed the recent Affiliate Summit West, or even if you attended, you probably wouldn’t have had an opportunity to attend every session as there were 4 simultaneous sessions with many great sessions in the same time slot. I enjoyed listening to the “How To Futureproof Your SEO Efforts” by Wil Reynolds, the video innovation panel chaired by Buy.TV’s Melissa Salas, the social media panel chaired by Sam, the super affiliate panel with Kris Jones, Zac Johnson, Amit Mehta and John Chow, the ABestWeb panel….I haven’t had a chance to listen to all the sessions yet, but there’s quite a hoard of great content there.

You might also like to check out the editorial panel I appeared on.

#3: Affiliate Fortune Cookies: A 5-day a week podcast from Sam, it’s his take on Lost, science fiction, social media, affiliate marketing and whatever else comes to mind. As Sam mentions, it’s intended to be a personal podcast and you can kind of hear his existential angst, especially when it comes to affiliate marketing/internet marketing in recent episodes.

Those are my top 3 podcasts at the moment, given the limited time I spend sitting and listening to podcasts.

You might also like to check out Shawn and Lisa’s Affiliate Thing podcast on Webmaster Radio, Linda Woods’ Affiliate Marketing Insider also on WMR. They’re other podcasts on the Geekcast network.

Another resource I highly recommend are the past episodes of Affiliate Marketing Today, especially the episodes hosted by AbestWeb owner Haiko De Poel and the later season hosted by Jeremy Palmer. These sessions provide a great foundation in affiliate marketing for new marketers.

I keep hearing that GarageBand is a great software suite for podcasting on the Mac, and I might fire up my new MacBook to test it out soon.

Also on the cards is a live podcast via Skype’s SkypeCast service one of these days when I have a little more time on my hands.

In the midst of shuffling paper around for hours and hours in my office (a real joy), I’ve been listening to episodes of Geekcast.

What I like about Geekcast’s easygoing, conversational banter between Shawn Collins, Lisa Picarille, Jim Kukral and Sam Harrelson is that it’s pretty stream-of-consciousness and more shoot-from-the-hip compared to a more produced program like Lisa and Shawn’s Affiliate Thing or Linda Woods’ Affiliate Marketing Insider.

It’s like talk radio for the internet marketer, and goes beyond the affiliate marketing/affiliate management/blogging/social media borders to cover all things “geeky”.

In the latest episode Web 2.0 is the Devil, (yes, it’s still a dirty word) – it’s interesting to hear about the dirty word beyond it’s traffic and monetization implications to get into the guts of the zeitgeist or spirit of social media.

As Lisa mentions, how do you separate your twitter stream and create a divide between the public and personal messages – how do you create twits that your boss or employees or clients can’t access?

It kinda reminds me of the early days of email, before email folders where everything sat in one massive “inbox”.

Right now, social media is still at it’s rudimentary “1.0” stage, where everything is dumped into one huge social channel.

You can follow Scott Jangro’s post and pull up extra commands to try to manage your twitter stream.

Or follow his advice to un-follow people and just follow the ones you like.

On another note, Facebook has create a provision for “limited profiles” where you can selectively adjust your Facebook profile so your cell phone, email address, mailing address don’t show to people whom you’ve just met.

But back to twitter…

How do you filter your updates (AKA “content”).

Do you create a “Fake Steve Jobs” or “Private Lisa” persona and have friends subscribe to that?

But it would show up on their list of “Following” users – unless the people you are following could be set to “invisible” or “private” which kinda defeats the whole point of social marketing, isn’t it?

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Some advocates talk about curating (AKA moderating or censoring) the web.

But if you’re going to impose formal controls over the web, does that mean the “social web” becomes less “social” and more “formal”?

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These discussions may not seem to have a direct impact on your internet marketing business at the moment, but the intangible mechanics are sure to have a very real impact on your bottomline in the longterm.

Be sure to tune in to the Friday Podcast tomorrow, when I nail Sam Harrelson down on concepts you need to incorporate in your social media efforts. 

Or the opposite scenario “no one” is doing it, so you should be the first.

I have been downloading and listening fairly religiously to the Geekcast podcasts (one of the Geeksters Shawn Collins mentioned that the new episodes come out every Tuesday) and watching Gary Vaynerchuk’s video posts.

So the $1m question is if you like this audio and video content, should you also jump on the metaphorical bandwagon and fire up your Flip camera too?

Here’s where I might differ from some of the others – there’s 2 elements to communication – there’s form (whether you write something on a sheet of paper, take a photo, do a blog post, shoot a video) and there’s function (AKA content) – the meaning behind your message.

In the rock-paper-scissors equation of multimedia…

• graphics trump text-alone (a picture says a thousand words?)
• audio trumps graphics (usually)
• and video trumps static images and audio, right?

In most cases, if you’re judging the value of communication (whether it’s a blog post, a forum post), on the FORM alone, that might be true.

But once you add the function/content equation into it,  I think Content > Form.

I’ve listened to scratchy MP3 files remastered from decaying audio cassette tapes (remember what those are?) to get some information which I’ve then been able to apply in my business or in my personal life.

You might’ve had the experience of walking in a crummy used bookstore and picked up a crumbling ragged old book (rare and out-of-print to boot), and might’ve picked up some useful information.

They say that “knowledge is power” – I don’t think that quite works, rather “applied knowledge is power”

Notice the “container” in which the information came in doesn’t play into the equation.

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Applying this to the audio/video channels and especially to social media – providing value to your consumers is going to be key to your survival in the long-term.

Building on business fundamentals and borrowing from some of the dubious PR spin out there, creating a “unique user experience” can and does provide some novelty value (even if it’s something as unique as the Naked News).

But if you want longevity, you MUST have a reason beyond “nobody/everybody is also doing a podcast or video blog”

Bottomline: the last man (or woman) standing at the end of the day is going to be the one who bears in mind the saying “it’s about the content, stupid.“

If you are a marketer are not going to where your leads/prospects/customers are coming from or going to, you could be putting yourself out of their traffic loop, and ultimately the monetization loop.

If you are a merchant or affiliate and primarily using the text channel – articles, blogs, social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and even text ads on Google AdWords, MSN Adcenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing, are you leaving yourself out of the traffic loop if your best prospects are walking around consuming their media on iPods?

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Here’s a brief rundown of my media consumption:

Text: – newspaper, magazines, books, PDFs, text blogs, email -  I am usually sitting in front of my desk, in front of my computer when consuming text-based information. A large part of it has to do with being tethered to my computer.

Even though I have a laptop (actually 2 now…) and there’re a number of Wi-Fi zones around, and even though I have an Apple Touch, I haven’t inculcated the habit of accessing the Internet while I’m away.

I guess I could Twitter while I’m in a bookstore or just walking around the mall, but it’s just not been a priority.

Maybe if I was a lifecaster (a la Truman Show) like Justin “iJustine” Ezarik, ubiquitious internet access would be a boom (Sam Harrelson AKA “Minister of Social Media” and I had a great discussion about the “cloud” for this week’s upcoming Friday Podcast).

But I’m not, so you might not see as many twits or the 4-5 blog posts you’d notice from the “ProBloggers” out there.

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Audio: Given that I’m primarily a visual person, the audio channel is something relatively new to me because I find I don’t process information as easily when it’s audio-based, rather than visual-based and printed in a book or can be viewed on-screen.

I have started listening to audio though, like the Shawn Collins-Jim Kukral-Sam Harrelson-Lisa Picarille Geekcasts (thanks for the mentions of “WhoIsAndrewWee” on the show, guys!).

But audio is not a “dedicated” medium for me – I’m usually clearing email, sort out files, cleaning my desk, checking my snail mail, sorting out paperwork while the audio is playing in the background.

I guess I have developed my awareness to the extent of being able to note down URLs, copy them onto a piece of paper and checking them out later.

The one great thing about audio is that it’s very much tied to a portable device – whether it’s an iPod, an iPhone, a smartphone or PDA with MP3 playback capability.

If you aren’t maximizing your downtime, by loading up on your knowledge -  you could very well be idling yourself into irrelevance.

Whether you’re driving, working out, or just walking to the store, I think that downtime could be easily translated into some productive “uptime”

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Video: Probably the next best thing to physically being at an event or spending time with someone is being able to catch them on video.

The affiliate blogosphere has been abuzz with why more marketers aren’t already using more video in their marketing efforts.

In my opinion, it takes time to put out a frequently updated product like Jim Kukral’s The Daily Flip. – At least an hour goes into the conceptualization, shooting, editing and posting of your video (even if it’s a 5-10 minute segment).

Figuring the “video stuff” out poses a technology-based barrier to entry from having master software that isn’t the most user friendly, to being able to work out the mechanics of streaming.

The other barrier in my mind is that the search engines are still at the rudimentary level of indexing such videos. So if you were there at the early days of meta tag and keyword tag stuffing to get ranked in the search engines, you could try out similar shenanigans with tag stuffing with videos too. (I don’t think you’d do much good for your reputation though…).

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What will it take for the Internet to go boldly beyond text to embrace audio and eventually video?

If we progress beyond DSL and cable modem-based broadband technologies to Fiber-to-the-Home where 1000 mbps speeds are a very real possibility.

Is 2008 going to be the year that video kills the tv star?

It’ll be interesting to see, but one thing’s for certain, if you aren’t already going to where your leads and prospect are, you could very well be left in the dust.

• Co-founding the Affiliate Summit with Missy Ward (the next Affiliate Summit East is from Aug 10-12 in Boston)
• Multiple updates on his Affiliate Tip blog
• His sarcastic and wry style on Affiliate Thing (together with co-host Revenue Magazine editor Lisa Picarille)
• His relative new foray into group podcasting at Geekcast.fm together with partners-in-crime Sam Harrelson and Jim Kukral. (Jim did a video interview with me in the midst of the recent Affiliate Summit West)

If you like Shawn’s Road Trip/American Pie-ish style of humor, you’d want to check out this Easter bunny video broadcast:

Also, check out this Facebook thread where we’re aiming to hit 500 comments. Every little comment helps!