I don’t read many magazines, reading most of my content and feature content online.

Besides reading the print edition of Singapore’s major English daily, The Straits Times, which comes with weekly tech, fashion and lifestyle “magazines”, on the rare occasion, I check out:

• Revenue (I read the online digital edition when I can)
• Skymall catalogue found on most domestic flights
• Tabloids like US, People

Tabloids and rag mags are a good opportunity to conduct niche research, especially for FMCG (fast moving consumer goods). You can find out which are the hot jeans, perfumes/fragrances, electronic items and build a niche themed site within a couple of hours.

Depending on how hot the trend is, you could reap affiliate or CPA commissions for a couple of weeks or even more than a year, if you trendspot correctly.

The other thing is magazine preferences reveal a lot of a person’s personality. Kris and Lee Odden have a fairly strategic/macro type approach (having leading their own respective business organizations), but more so from their choices of the Smithsonian, Forbes, Inc., while younger guys like Shoemoney and Joe Whyte go for more topical/news type publications like Playboy, Wired, Maxim, Stuff.

To propagate this meme, I tag:

• Laura Alter
• Michelle MacPhearson (who was a good sport to take part in the Goals meme)
• Sleepyblogger Robyn Tippins
• Social Traffic Queen Alex Mayo
• PlanetAndrea

Laura attended the inaugural Elite Retreat and has been very successful in her brick-and-mortar computer business and is also owner of the popular NotebookForums site too.

Besides having 3 sweet kids (her 5 year old plays a mean game of warcraft), she’s pretty tech savvy.

Check out her blog:

Laura Alter’s blog

Laura’s got one of the prettiest WordPress templates I’ve seen and Matt Brett (a fellow 9rules member) did a great job on it.

If you need inspiration for your own Internet Marketing efforts, read Laura’s post “PC Torque – $25 million in 4 years“

Thanks to Shawn Collins and Missy Ward who conceptualized Affiliate Summit and have been grown it from strength-to-strength at about 200 participants in the first AS in 2003 till more than 2,000 at the recently concluded ASW.

It was a great opportunity to meet up face-to-face with a number of the online marketers I’d been reading and talking with over the past few months like ShoeMoney, Scott Jangro, Kris Jones, PlanetAndrea, Jon Fisher from WickedFire and Joe Whyte.

Becky “Webmoxy” Ryan was a friendly and intelligent person to talk to (even though I was deep in thought and seemed to have unintentionally ignored her when she called out a few times).

Maura, Robyn, Andrew Wee at the Pepperjam booth

Shoemoney’s assistant Nicole

Webmoxy Becky Ryan

More surprising still was the fact that a number of affiliate managers and affiliates whom I hadn’t met prior to ASW mentioned they enjoyed reading this blog.

Blogging can be a solitary affair and it’s comforting to have face-to-face validation (which gives a human face to the otherwise clinical awstats’ 6000+ monthly uniques).

Although I missed them, perhaps I’ll have a chance to catch up with Super Affiliate Ros Gardner, BlogKits founder Jim Kukral, Sam Harrelson and SleepyBlogger Robyn Tippins at the next event. I heard Neil Patel and Cameron Olthuis had to leave Sunday evening for school, so I probably missed them by a hair.

What I greatly appreciated was the opportunity to meet Mike Krongel and his team over at Copeac. They threw a killer party for the WickedFire folks over at the Caramel Loung in the Bellagio.

It’s a great opportunity to have met up with WickedFire founders Jon and Brandon and WF members like John “I like c**k”, SEO_Mike, chrislingle, lerchmo, jDog, DruSam, Surly, Kaveman, Smaxor, Jon Warass, ExEngima, Rick.

Mike Peters from Software Projects had some interesting stories to tell too.

I’ve been listening to some of the post-ASW buzz and one of the issues I’ve heard is that the workshops didn’t provide good information.

I think the major element of a ‘summit’ is to share ideas. And given the time constraint of a 1.5 hour session, I’d doubt it’s fair to compare AS’ workshop sessions with Elite Retreat or other multiple day workshop focused on a single topic like SEO or list building.

I had the opportunity to speak to merchants making their first foray into affiliate marketing and they seemed to have got basic information to follow up on their efforts.

The biggest benefit of ASW is ‘being there’.

And ShoeMoney has rightly pointed out that the best exchange of ideas takes place after the workshop, in the bars and restaurants after the sessions end. In a more relaxed environment, you have an open exchange of ideas and trading information on what works and what doesn’t.

And herein lies the rub, Internet Marketing has more to do with relationship building and personal contact, than just the technology aspect that people generally get obsessed about.

Online marketing is more than composing the best Web copy, or optimizing your landing page or PPC campaign.

If you don’t have grassroot supports from your peers, whether it’s getting feedback on something you’re implementing, or even working together on a project, you can still succeed, it will just take a much longer time.

You can, of course, read about ASW and other events from this blog, though in the long run you’d be missing out on some great networking opportunities.

Affiliate Summit East will be coming up later this year.

Will you be there?

I’ve been talking to the WickedFire folks and we’re psyched about meeting up.

I’ve planned out my itinery and will likely be spending more time networking and attending sessions, compared to drinking and clubbing.

There are a number of networking parties including one hosted by oneNetworkDirect and Wynn Las Vegas at Wynns’ TRYST nightclub which features a private lagoon. If there’s one phobia I have, it’s dancing in public.

We’ll see how this pans out.

Besides visiting the exhibit halls, I’m planning to attend the following sessions:

Day 1 (Jan 21, Sunday)

• Exhibit hall from the time I arrive (likely about 5pm)
• Ice Breakers Networking session (7pm to 9pm, venue: Platinium)

And the WF folks have arranged a football event with the XY7.com Affiliate Management folks.

Day 2 (Jan 22, Monday)

• WF Breakfast (9am, Bally’s)
• Marketing Your Affiliate Site – Outside the Box (Scott Hazard, Cooperative Affiliates Inc, 1130am – 1230pm, Classroom #B Silver)
• Optimizing with Your Merchant Partner (Jake Bailey, Overstock.com, 2pm – 3pm, Classroom #B Silver)
• Ask the Experts: Super Affiliates (Jon F (WickedFire), Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney), Andrew Johnson (Web Publishing Blog) (330 pm – 430 pm, Classroom #B Silver)

Day 3 (23 Jan, Tuesday)

• Rotating Roundtables: A series of 10-minute “speed dating” style table rotations with table speakers on topics like email marketing, affiliate strategies, search engine reputation monitoring and lead generation (945 am – 11 am, Platinum)
• Bloggers – The New Super Affiliates – Jim Kukral, BlogKits (1130 am – 1230pm, Classroom #B Silver)
• Optimizing Landing Pages – Choots Humphries (LinkConnector Corporation), Mark Widawer (Landing Page Cash Machines) (2 pm – 3 pm, Classroom #C Bronze 1 and 2)
• The Confluence of Search and Affiliate Marketing – Kris Jones (Pepperjam) (330 pm – 430pm Classroom #B Silver)

I’m looking forward to Shoemoney, Jon’s WF, Jim Kukral and Kris Jones’ presentation.

With 1,700 participants, it might be a challenge, but I’ll be keeping a eye out for PlanetAndrea, Ros Gardner, Scott Jangro, Robyn “SleepyBlogger” Tippins, Sam Harrelson, Becky “WebMoxy” Ryan, Joe Whyte and the LunarPages ninjas.

I’d like to meet you if you’re headed to ASW, stop me and say hi if you see me!

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

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

Ok, so you may or may not be socially inept, but the fact is that TickMe can help you expand your network, project a different persona in your profile, or simply generate more traffic for your blog, website, portal.

I’m expecting that Terry from Kineda will be coming over very shortly to set up something. And we could use more pictures of Scarlett Johannson and Japanese Race Queens, can’t we?

TickMe’s interesting because there’s a system in place to protect your ego.

According to David:

It’s a bit like Myspace/Faceparty but with more privacy and a dating slant. It’s all very simple. Log in and “tick” someone you like the look of. They won’t know you’ve ticked them unless they tick you back and you get a mutual tick! Cut out all the nonsense and be sure that the people you’re communicating with are on the same wavelength.

That may be true, but if you you look at the profiles:

I’m not sure how I feel about my birthdate going out to everyone, especially if you’re particular about privacy.

Inherent in the TickMe’s assumptions is that if you’re a male, you’re ‘looking to meet women’. I guess it could offer more customization to factor in gays and bisexuals in time?

Minor grouses aside, the traffic is awesome, especially the site having made Digg.

Key to establishing your social presence on TickMe is to colonize the virtual space. Like domain names, once your group name is gone, your group name is gone!
Here’s a snapshot of my group affiliations at 1am:

Andrew Wee Group Affiliations: 1251am

and 8 hours later

Andrew Wee Group Affiliations 823am

TickMe’s user growth at the launch is fairly viral. Tap on that traffic to use it effectively.

The group chat functions works quite well too.

You might be surprised at some of the Internet Marketing luminaries you see on the site too.

Check it out at:

–> TickMe