Linkbaiting on social networks like MyBlogLog, MySpace and BumpZEE is common, especially when Internet Marketers use pictures of bikini-clad women as their avatar.
While there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the practice, I feel that it sets up expectations that the blogger or website owner will have to deliver on once the visitor lands on your page.
If you can keep your readers happy, you’ve laid the foundation for a successful and low cost (possibly free) traffic generation model.
The sad reality is that more than 90% of the sites using such techniques have average (and usually sub-standard) poor content.
At best, this is gimmicky in my opinion and best used for one-off, throwaway adsense-oriented traffic.
But if you’re a serious Internet Marketer in this for the long haul, you’d do much better to build your brand, which means either using your photograph, or an image which represents your online presence.
Iconic Avatars: Michael “GrayWolf” Gray, Jim Kukral, Rasheed Ali, Robyn Tippins, Todd “StuntDubl” Malicoat, Shawn Collins, Chris “Drinkbait” Hooley, Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker.
Credibility and reputation are essential to your long term success, and being consistent in your online branding build rapport with your visitors. Consistent branding will bring you (more…)
I just touched down in Singapore earlier today and although the 14 hour time difference is causing major havoc to my body clock, I figured this is the perfect opportunity to reflect on Affiliate Summit West and the takeaways from having flown 20+ hours around the world to attend.
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 (more…)
Every week, yet another journalist or online marketer predicts the Death of Blogging. Ironicially, sometimes these ‘predictions’ are made by bloggers.
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 (more…)
