…There’s just a little more than a day to finish what you were supposed to have completed this year.
It’s natural to measure your achievements by how much you have earned, but I think a more important measure is how much you have learned this year.
Even a salaried employee can go through the year, earning a steady paycheck, with a fat bonus on top of it, and not learn much or be very much improved over the past year…not to mention an internet marketer or entrepreneur who spent all year reading, “finding their direction” and still not be much closer to their goal.
Look into the psychological mirror and take a hard look at the reflection, is the “You” on December 31, 2007, very different from the “You” on January 1, 2007?
What are 3 achievements you have made this year, and what are 3 achievements you plan to achieve next year.
In his book “The Magic of Thinking Big” author David Schwartz says if you want to get something done, give it to a busy person because it will get done. If you give it to someone with lots of free time on their hands, it’s likely they won’t get it done because they aren’t able to prioritize and take action. And action is where it counts, because ideas and thoughts are not active till acted upon.
In January, I’ll be:
- Developing and launching a membership site as part of the Super Affiliate Accelerator project I’m working on with PPC Super Affiliate Amit Mehta.
- Interviewing Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds (one of the best speakers addressing issues in SEO).
- Launching a guerilla style PPC campaign which I’ve adapted from tactics my buddy Ruck has blogged about over at CashTactics.
- Developing a series of content creation tutorials over at Haiko De Poel’s ABestWeb affiliate marketing forum.
- Launching a contest on this blog with attractive prizes. (I have a $250 prize in the bag now and will aiming to get $1,000 worth by the launch).
And a number of assorted administrative and tax issues for a new Internet Marketing company which Amit and I formed about a month ago.
I can’t really say I’ll get the 8+ hours sleep per day that I’ve enjoyed over the last 2 weeks…
But it’s going to be one heck of a wild ride!
See you in 2008!
For the first time in its history, Affiliate Summit will be travelling outside the continental US to the UK (United Kingdom) and I had an opportunity to find out more about the event from Affiliate Summit co-founder Shawn Collins.
Founded in 2003, Affilaite Summit brings together affiliate marketers, affiliate networks, vendors and merchants. The event has been going gangbusters with this year’s Affiliate Summit West and Affiliate Summit East nearing or breaching the 2,000 attendee mark.
I had a chance to talk to Shawn about the upcoming Affiliate Summit UK. Aside from a June 2004 Affiliate Summit held on a cruise ship from New York City to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, this’ll be the first time (more…)
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’d have seen news reports that marketing guru Seth Godin‘s Squidoo social networking site has been Google slapped in recent weeks. My friend, black hat marketer Howie Schwartz, interviewed Seth and in the process elicited a number of nuggets for social marketers from the Internet Marketing community.
In recent weeks, there’s been news coverage from the likes of TechCrunch that some Squidoo pages have seen as much as a 75% drop in traffic, due to lower rankings in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
With a Google PageRank 6 and Alexa 493 traffic ranking, Squidoo is among the Internet’s most popular sites. [You can see my earlier: Squidoo review]
The reason? A number of marketers have been using Squidoo lenses as a parasite host for hosting pages for spam marketing purposes. [The Squidoo team lists their anti-spam measures]
With the drop in Google’s SERP positions, a number of marketers have since moved their pages over to Hub Pages (PR6, Alexa 3,220)
But does adopting a “nomadic” approach of shifting to another authority site solve the puzzle of generating a continual stream of traffic?
It seems more like a “slash and burn” forest clearing measure. You forage in an area, turn it into a wasteland, shift to the next plot – slash the trees, burn it to the ground – and move on.
Sure, there are a lot of “forests” on the Internet, but if we were to take the “Live Earth” idea of a sustainable, long-term and long-tail approach to Internet Marketing, wouldn’t it be better to master the dynamics of social networking and build a brand AND a business from there?
Howie’s interview with Seth provided a number of insights. If you’ve read Seth’s works like Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, the Idea Virus and All Marketers are Liars, the interview will reasonate with you and you’ll see the principles put into action.
 Master Marketer Seth Godin
If you’re not familiar with Permission Marketing, Seth provides a good illustration of the evolution of marketing from disruptive to a permission-based model:
“Marketing has become a consensual process. In other words, you can’t yell at people (on TV, on the radio, on the web) and hope that you can earn enough to yell more. As a result, the most successful marketers are the ones who have a product that people are eager to use and talk about (think iPhone). This is great news for people who have useful information to sell, because human beings are drawn to insight and knowledge and things that help them succeed.
Like Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds had mentioned at Affiliate Summit East, building a site optimized for humans, rather than search engines will bring you the biggest returns.
You may detect a bias towards “content development” and “content sites” in recent posts, but that’s only because “content IS king”.
As Seth skillfully illustrates:
Like the booth at the carnival that has a great barker outside bringing people in, but not much in the tent, at least as far as I can tell.
So SERP rankings can bring you so far, but you’d need (more…)
Affiliate Summit Co-Founder Shawn Collins has been uploading all the presentations from the recent Affiliate Summit East online and one of the standouts is Seer Interactive Wil Reynold’s presentation “SEO Site Critiques” which aims to help you target the right keywords and use SEO best practices.
Wil is founder of Philadelphia-based SEO firm Seer Interactive and he focuses on marketing, SEO and analytics.
There’re a number of what I call SEO Snake’s Oil salesmen out there who will claim to help you rank for 1,000 keywords, but Wil has a caveat empor warning for those who might fall prey to these ruses:
I have been reading of instances in which some dubious SEOs will help you rank for terms like “divorce lawyer outrageous settlement los angeles”. But seriously, what’s the (more…)
