It’s important to look at long-term strategies to get your business on a solid foundation. That is, if you don’t want to find yourself scrambling from one rock to another, as your “empire” sinks into the sand.

Let’s look at some ways to build up personal credibility, especially in the vastness of cyberspace, where a billion websites are calling out for attention.

Here are some essentials that every website should possess:

• Background and Biographical information

At the least, you need an “About” or “About Me”, “About Us” or “About Andrew” / “About (insert your name)”. And having text like “This is an example of a WordPress Page” doesn’t count either.

People want to read and possibly do business with people they know. And “knowing” goes beyond a run-of-the-mill “XYZ Inc is a leading Fortune 500, Inc Hot 100 Tech Startup”.

Pfft. These awards carry some weight, but if you take a second to think about some of the leading tech companies like Dell, Apple, Microsoft, the names Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs come to mind. Personalization if not just a “strategy”, it should be the cornerstone of your success if you want to succeed online.

Going beyond a mention of yourself the person, going a little deeper to include biographical information, adds color and builds stickiness, especially if your audience identifies with you. Whether you were a pump station attendant, McDonald’s French Fry Specialist or an Air Traffic Controller. The “personal cred” factor can be one of the key factors in determing your conversion rate, more so than having the BBB or TrustE logos on your site.

• Photographs/Images

Yes, we’ve seen blogs containing only text (especially if the content has been lifted from somewhere else and pasted verbatim on the site). These can succeed, although adding images and video gives a huge advantage to those who put in the effort to make their blog or website go the multimedia route.

Some good examples include SuperAffiliateMindset’s Amit Mehta:

Scott Jangro’s Jangro.com

Shawn Collin’s AffiliateTip

From a photo montage in his banner. (Left-to-right – Myself, Shawn Collins, Jim Kukral, Sam Harrelson, Zac Johnson)

A picture says a thousand words. If you have videos, I’d expect they’d say 100,000 words.

If you haven’t already gone the multimedia route, it could bring your business to the next level.

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If you have a takeaway from this, it’s not that adding “stuff” to your blog or website is going to bring some magic dust with it. However, given that the internet is constantly expanding, going the personal route or looking inward may seem contradictory. If you try it out however, you may just discover that it pays big dividends.

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…)

–

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…

–

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

–

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.

I am probably behind the curve when it comes to picking up new-fangled technology, unlike Shawn Collins, Scott Jangro and Sam Harrelson.

On a recommendation from Kerri Morrison (AKA @kmore) , I checked out Twitterific.

Oh great…it’s Mac-only. I typically keep my MacBook on a pile of Cat5 ethernet cables under my desk most of the time and I don’t think I’ll be firing it up, so I can burn more time on twittering…

Twhirl looks like a better alternative – it’s Windows and Mac OS X and I see a number of people sending updates using it.

I’ll probably check this out.

Anyone have experience? What do you recommend?

I don’ think I’ll venture into Pownce territory till next week, as there’s quite a bit of site development on a couple of new verticals I’m working on.

I got an insight into how he’s structured one of his web properties, CostumZee, said by top affiliate Jeremy Palmer to be the largest affiliate for costumes online.

But more importantly, the biggest takeaway is understanding how Scott thinks and how he conceptualizes and executes a project. I like his system because I have a similar approach to running my internet business too – it’s everything to do with being around a year, and even 10 years from now.

Check out the Friday Podcast:

Scott Jangro resources:

• Jangro.com
• BumpZee.com community site
• MechMedia

Because of the BlackInkProject, I’d been waking at 5am (later rolled back to 545am) to make it for his live affiliate training (3pm PDT is 6am in Singapore…)

If you’re already an affiliate marketing veteran, what you’ll take away from Jeremy’s lessons is not what he says on the surface, but also “what lies beneath”. Look beyond the surface and you’ll get an insight into how he strategizes his system, develops a process and applies that process with ruthless efficiency when approaching a new niche.

So if you’re on the forums asking “I want to start a shoe blog, I hear they make good money. How do I start?” you’re probably barking down the wrong track.

Instead, take a moment to map out your goals/outcomes, develop a plan of action and be prepared to change course along the way.

As someone who made it to the sophomore year as an EE/CS (electrical engineers, computer science) major before dropping out and making a minor switch to creative writing and psychology, I’d like to think that one thing I’ve carried over from my 2 years of engineering is a systems-based approach to building a business.

Which totally echoes what Scott Jangro mentioned during the recording of our Friday Podcast session.

If you haven’t read between the lines in the affiliate and internet marketing blogs out there, and go beyond the “make quick cash” ebooks you see being flouted and touted and pimped all over the place, you’ll see a trend towards building a business online. And it’s no “big shock” or suprise either.

If you look back historically at the first salesmen selling snake oil and other miracle cures, they were soon supplanted by guys who were the real deal.

Do you think the online world is going to play by different laws?

So just like the dotcom crash of 2000 wiped out the guys who had $5 million in VC money and were buying BMWs and Hermann Miller Aeron chairs for everyone, including the janitor, the real world economy soon gave them a slap in the face and showed them the door.

With internet marketing, we’ve seen the rise and decline of keyword stuffed single page “affiliate sites”, crazy Google Cash-style direct linking campaigns, and in the last 2 years, squidoo lenses and blogger blogs stuffed with scraped content.

I think there’s a definite trend towards building a branded viable site, along the lines of what Kim Rowley is building, where you have a clearly identified personality like a Gary Vee fronting the site, rather than a hidden site owner, sitting behind an obscure and often cryptic “about us” page.

I was pretty surprised that Scott talked pretty extensively about his costume site which he’d mentioned a number of times in the earlier episodes of his Jangrocast podcast (he’s got good music taste, he recently swapped the intro/outro music from the FatboySlim remix of A Tribe Called Quest’s I left my wallet in El Segundo to something equally cool), and Jeremy just mentioned that Scott is probably the biggest costumes affiliate out on the internet.

But if you’ve learned one lesson from their books, it’s that copying their sites and expecting the same results is just like cloning a MacDonald’s and expecting the same results.

To paraphrase a popular phrase, “It’s the system, stupid!”

Check out the BlackInkProject and watch for Scott Jangro’s appearance on the Friday Podcast this Friday.

I know it works because I just got a new domain there a couple of minutes ago. More on that later.

Just a note about “Super Affiliates”, I was chatting with Kim Rowley last night about marketing techniques and mentioned the power of video blogging and YouTube.

I wake up this morning and she’s posted a VIDEO product review post at her shopping site TechTheStyle.

If that’s not enough, her partner Pat posts a VIDEO followup a couple of hours later here. (I dig the window blinds which gives his video a “Max Headroom-ish” feel and I thought the timecode gave it a techy/industrial feel).

If you’re still suffering from “structured procrastination“, I say “bull-crud”, get off your behind and do something, instead of just wondering why folks like Kim and Pat are so “lucky”…

–

Back to the domain, I got a new one – AndrewWeeLive.com – the nice ones I was hoping for were taken already.

The site will be more personal in nature, a theme that I connect with, especially with the recent Sam Harrelson AffiliateFortuneCookie podcasts and the Scott Jangro “JangroCast” (should “JangroCast” be a new trigger term for “Sorry, Jangro“?)

It will also give me a reason to use my new MacBook as more than as just a paperweight.

Anyone have any tips/suggestions on getting started on the Mac?

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?

–

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. 

I’ve created a temporary page listing my schedule (which will change over time) and the summit highlights.

You can take a look at:

–> Andrew Wee’s Affiliate Summit West schedule

Going by the last summit I attended, I met Scott Jangro and Geordie Carswell just once during the entire 3 days.

I hung out mostly with the WickedFire affiliate marketing forum folks.

You will meet so many people at one point that it will seem like a blur and it’s only after going through the business cards that you’ll recall who you met.

So if you would like to meet and talk to someone during the summit, it’d be a good idea to either:

• Private message them on their Facebook profile
• Contact them using the contact form on their blog
• Attend the session they’ll be speaking at.
• Head to one of the smaller events like Affiliate Classroom Live, Gospel Brunch, the Affiliate Dinner
• Arrange to meet at one of the parties and try to find each other from the hundreds of people there…

Else, it could be a hit-and-miss affair, especially with more than 2,500 people registered for the event.

Forewarned is forearmed…

Here’s a snapshot of some member avatars:

I guess one might ask, “How’s listing yourself in the directory help generate more income?”

While it might be a realistic expectation to want to see a tangible ROI on your time in BumpZee, it might not be so ready in coming.

BumpZee is a community of affiliate marketing peers, rather than consumers, and it serves as a hub for affiliate marketing content, aggregating blog content specifically.

You know the old marketing mantra where it generally takes 7 exposures before you commit to a buying decision?

I believe on the Internet it could be as little as 5 exposures, however, the one caveat is the sheer amount of information we’re constantly bombarded with.

This “info overload” syndrome means that we need to get our names out there, whether through publising a blog, expanding our MyBlogLog community, or by participating in forums and social networking sites (hence leading to my “social traffic generation” paradigm).
Through BumpZee, I’ve become a more regular reader of:

• Carsten Cumbrowski
• Nevada desert camper Sam Harrelson
• Jim Kukral
• Wayne Porter

Being “social” only makes sense because it’ll give you a leg up in:

• Tapping on the expertise of others by learning from their experience
• Branding yourself in your chosen niche
• Facilitating the search for joint venture partners for collaborative product development and marketing efforts

I’ve found these tips to be useful in establishing your “online turf”:

• Use your first and last name. There’s only one major “Gates”, “Dell”, “Branson”, “Trump” at any one time. Unless you’re confident of constantly dominating your chosen niche, it’s easier to identify yourself by your first and last name.
• Use your photo as your avatar. For branding purposes, I know using a bikini-clad model might help recruitments for your social network, but it will ultimately hurt you if you don’t build face-to-name recognition early on. My preference is for the slower-and-organic route.
• Participation in the community. The major problem with the Dotcom crash of 2000 was that most companies spent hundreds of thousands (and millions in some cases) on their websites and left them there in the virtual wilderness to rot. I believe one of the major developments in recent years has been the evolution of SEO and traffic generation strategies. Likewise for online branding purposes, we’d need to do the equivalent of “SEO and traffic generation” for our personal brands too. This may involve visiting blogs and leaving relevant and content-rich comments, participating in forums and doing likewise, and taking note, participating in and commenting on industry trends. The “blog in the wilderness” concept doesn’t fly anymore.

Are there other strategies you’re using?

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!

Here’s the pointers I found useful from the thread and from my experience at other trade shows:

• Before Affiliate Summit West

1. Prepare lots of business cards: 500? 1,000? I guess you’d want to give out lots of cards and leverage on the opportunity to network with affiliate managers and fellow affiliates. Want to go off the beaten track? Check out Cost Per News Sam Harrelson’s Business Card Tag Thing.
2. Pack Warm Clothing: Especially for those who us coming from Asia, I hear it gets pretty cold in the desert. That being said, I’ve walked around Texas in t-shirt and shorts in the middle of winter.
3. Preserve Your Voice: Cough drops, lozenges, whatever it takes to ensure your voice last through the event. Although you’d be talking to a lot of people during the day, I’ve seen footage of people at after hours events which leaves no doubt as to the cause of their hoarse voice (A clue: It doesn’t have to do with talking to hundreds of people during the day.)
4. Sleep: From what most seem to be saying, most won’t be sleeping much during ASW. Maybe not even at all. Deals are cut very early (about 4 or 5am seems to be the sweet spot).
5. Bring Cash: Anecdotal evidence seems to suggest food around ASW will be prohibitive expensive. Although I’ve been to Vegas previously and had $5.99 prime rib at the Golden Nugget and $0.50 margaritas farther along the Strip. But then, if you’re a prime affiliate, I guess you’d be getting wined and dined not infrequently.
6. Loose Change: On a related point, carry lots of small notes. Most service staff expect some sort of tip.
7. Empty Luggage: You’d probably be collecting a lot of t-shirts, pens and all sorts of doodads, so I guess there’s a certain logic in coming with at least one empty bag to carry home your booty (Sounds like Halloween for adults, doesn’t it?)
8. Comfortable Shoes: Blisters are not fun.

• At the Summit

1. Getting from the Airport to the Hotels: Cabs cost $20 from the Airport to the Hotels. The shuttles cost around $5.
2. Say Hi to Everyone: You’ve come all the way to the summit, say hi to everyone who looks friendly. That quiet guy standing in the corner might be a super affiliate. The affiliate manager at the smaller table might represent an up-and-coming affiliate network. In Vegas speak, spread your bets.
3. Buddy Up: Meet up with people whom you’ve corresponded online, split up and cover different sessions if you can. Compare notes later. More importantly, introduce people you’ve met to each other, so you have a common pool of contacts. An exception might be the Shoemoney/Jon F–WickedFire session, I think everyone and his brother will be making a beeline for that.
4. Bring Water: I hear water is as scarce in the casinos as it is in the desert (except for the firewater variety). Bring a small bottle, so you can talk even more.
5. Measure Time: Time looks like the commodity in shortest supply. It might look like 3 days is a long time, but I’d prioritize the people and booths you’d like to visit first, so it’s mission accomplished. Else you might not be able to spend as much time talking to the people who would’ve given you the most leverage.
6. Gum and Breath Mints: The people you’re talking to will be more receptive if they’re conscious as you’re talking to them. Ditto for deoderant.
7. Pen and Paper: You might have a PDA photo or a photographic memory, but nothing beats writing stuff down. You might like to note down important facts on the back of someone’s business card for later reference.
8. Las Vegas Discount Coupons: Here’s a especially useful tip if you’re coming in a group, there’s a discount coupon over at LasVegasAdvisor.com which contains discount coupons. See: here

Shawn Collins has mentioned that presentations for the various speakers will be made available to attendees. This is subject to the speaker’s consent. [Check out Shawn’s sharp looking cards here: Got Your Business Cards for Affiliate Summit?]

Sam Harrelson and partner in crime, Wayne Porter, will be camping out in the Nevada desert (It’s flagged as the Lake Mead Recreation Area, but it still looks like desert on the map). I wonder if they have any wilderness survival tips.

Rumors are that PlanetAndrea will be stalking the showfloor to build the biggest business card collection at ASW. If you see her, hand her a business card.

One last thing I’m wondering (although I’m fairly certain) is that there is Internet access from the ASW exhibit or conference area, so I’ll file blogging reports on-site. Maybe Shawn can shed some light on this.

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.

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