Just happened to notice this title on people.com, and I think it just wrong on so many levels if you consider the fact that they are probably insinuating the Brokeback Mountain roles that the two actors played. They just did not have to add the single quotes to ‘harder than most’. Not sure if they are trying to be funny.
Most of you know, I am a fan of JohnCow, and he has been good to this blog as well. You will also know that John has been on vacation in Australia since 15th of Jan and he has been using guest posters to keep the blog going. I am sure there are many of you that would love the opportunity to be a guest poster on his site. Imagine the exposure that you would get for your site and ofcourse the free link backs can make it extremely worth your while to spend a few hours just tapping away on the keyboard. So how can you get your post published there? Simple.
Learn to spell C-O-W or anything related to cows. You think I am kidding? See the image below:
The last post that you see is the post by John before he left for his vacation, and there are eight guest posts after that. Out of which, seven have the word COW or something related to cows – udder, moo etc. Now, here is the part I don’t get. The titles are cow related, but the content has nothing to do with it.
Do Cows Dream Of Free Music Downloads? – WHAT??? Even I don’t dream of free music downloads. The theme of this entire post was whether P2P file sharing is morally wrong or not?
So, here I am with my glass of “milk”, and as soon as I “lasso” a post, I will ride my “wagon” down to JohnCow.com, ring my “bell” until my post gets published.
I WAS the dumbest affiliate marketer, and I am not ashamed to say it. I have made these mistakes in the past, and have tried to correct them. If I hadn’t, then I deserve what I get. Why am I bragging about this in the post? Because, I know there are many more people out there that don’t have the resources to waste, and are lacking the basic knowledge of how to promote affiliates. I do not consider myself a super affiliate or an uberaffiliate. Hell, I am still in kindergarten when it comes to affiliate marketing. I am an offline marketer, who uses the old school media of radio and TV to promote the business. However, there is a way for me to fix this, by attending the Affiliate Summit and Mr. John Chow is giving away a free invite to it, and wouldn’t that be just the perfect way for me to learn and pass on my knowledge to you guys.
Why do I deserve the invite? Well, I have been dabbling with internet websites and affiliate marketing for the past 9 or 10 years and am still a newbie when it comes to affiliate marketing.
Faux Pas #1: I thought that the only way to promote an affiliate was to have a website, and slapping the affiliate banners all over the damn site. – What? Didn’t I ever hear about direct linking from Adwords? My landing pages looked like crap, and that in turn gave me a really crappy CTR. I would build a whole site around a keyword or around an affiliate program – ipod, bluetooth etc. and would wait for the $$$$$ to roll in.
Faux Pas #2: I set the program on autopilot. And I don’t mean the site being on autopilot, but rather my Adwords program. I didn’t believe in tweaking the ads or the keywords, because I thought I knew it all. My quality score went to shit. I was still running campaigns that had expired 2 years ago. And to top it all of, I was spending twice as much as what I was getting in, in the hopes that once the organic traffic picks up, I would be ok.
I know there is so much more to learn, and this summit would really put me over the top. For the past month or so, I have immersed myself totally into learning and educating myself about affiliate marketing, and have tweaked, and redone my campaigns, and am already seeing results. What I would like to achieve is from the summit is the ability to make a real success in affiliate marketing, and be able to show other people how to do it, and how not to do it. I want this blog to follow the concept of – “Give the man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he will eat foreverâ€.
So Mr. Chow, how about this. Give me the invite. We have a nice dinner. You teach me about online money making. And I will teach you about offline money making.
Got this tip from Uberaffiliate. Use it while it is still available.
Just sponsored a really cool looking Wordpress Theme. Hope you guys like it.
Amiral Theme
Blogging, once a geek’s way of keeping a journal, now has become more mainstream. It used to be that if you were a blogger, you were trying to make a statement. It was not really considered a means to make a living. I can safely say that majority of blogs that are started today, are started with monetary benefits in mind. Bloggers (including this SOB) will map out the layout exactly where they want the ads to be placed. Each blog page is prime real estate, and will try utilize it to the max. But I will tell you this, I am not doing this solely for money. Sure, I will monetize it, but I do pretty well on my own. I write this blog for its entertainment, and educational value – for mine and yours, and am having the time of my life doing it.
Being Passionate is good. Having Money is awesome. However, what really motivates most bloggers? Sure, passion, love and hard work can get you only so far. What do you do if you can’t attract readers? How long will you keep at it? There has got to be a time that you finally say to yourself, “Screw it! That’s just not worth it”. Are you trying to do this and quit your day job, or are you doing this as a hobby?
Also, regardless of why you start your blog. Whether it be for passion or money, there is always part of you that wants to make money. Hell, most of the part of you wants to make money. Granted, that money may not be your only driving force, but again, be lets be real.
Is there a point where you just plateau, and your readers ask, “What have you done for me lately?” and all you have to give them is a picture of your last meal? What happens when you start losing subscribers? What happens when your comment section has more information or more interesting topics than your post? Do you still keep going? Do bloggers get burnt out? Just too many questions and I don’t have answers to all.
Why are you blogging?
I didn’t know about RT Cunningham of Untwisted Vortex, until I saw this post by Darren. RT has been going through some hard times, with his wife due for a surgery, and out of work. His wife is currently in the US, while he is in the Philippines, and he would like to be there for his wife at the time of the surgery. One hitch, he does not have enough money saved to support the flight and the time that he and his wife will not be working.
Anyways, he has added a Donate Via Paypal button on his site, and would be awesome if you could help.
I am enrolled into numerous affiliate networks, and I have to say, PepperJam Network is one of the easiest and the most transparent network I have ever seen.
PepperJam Network uses ajax for approval in with advertisers, chatting to socialize with the advertisers’ reps and and instant approval process for most advertisers. This network is in a league of its own, with superbrands as advertisers. Almost all of the brands shown below, I have not seen on any other network -
And don’t fret if you are a blogger, you can promote PepperJam, ReviewMe, Text-Link-Ads or SeoMoz. Sure, the pickings are a bit slim, but the network is still new, and it will definitely be adding more advertisers.
One of the coolest feature of this network is that it allows you to pick the advertisers that you want to pick and make a Banner widget like this -
It allows you pick different sizes, and sort of give it an Adsense like look, with your advertisers. I think that is going to be an extremely useful feature, especially, with this one, you will not have to worry about getting banned if you have images next to the ads.
One other feature that I was impressed by was the Chat with the Advertiser’s Rep. You can see if the rep is online or offline, and click on the chat icon to chat if online.
I have never been this excited about joining and promoting an ad network.
Entrecard, which started with a great concept, of allowing small fish to hang with the whales, ie. someone with no money to advertise on a big blog like John Chow, (This was originally a John Cow link, but had to be changed since he no longer displays the widget) can use Entrecard credit to do that. The way the system works is like this:
). Similarly, your ad will be showing up on other blogs that you have purchased ads on. You don’t use real money to buy ads, but rather EC credits.
The problem right now is that the entire system is being abused by the “powerusers” and most of them will click the max drops amount allowed per day, which is 300. I myself as you can see above have dropped 212 cards in the last 30 days.
There are a couple ways to fix that system:
Do you guys have any better ideas?
Entrecard was launched by Graham Langdon, the same guy that also gave the infamous MillionDollarWiki
For those of you that aren’t aware of what I am talking about, check out this prank.
Some top bloggers have called it a Black Eye For Bloggers, while others have called it When Bloggers Go Bad, and the rest of blogosphere is holding back no punches. I on the other hand think that sure, the prank was evil, and got out of hand when the trigger happy Gizmodoans didn’t spare the presentations. I know, that public speaking is not easy, trying to promote your business is hard, and when some a-hole messes with that, it is wrong.
However, the prank by itself was a classic. I think that the flat screens monitors shutting down and the techs trying to figure out what went wrong was funny as shit. It really makes me say, “Why the hell didn’t I think of that in all the years that I have been attending the show?”
It is being said that Gizmodo will probably be banned from CES (There is a rumor as of this writing that they already are, but it is not confirmed), and they should be banned from Macworld etc also. Get a sense of humor guys. Ok, this was a prank gone wrong, but no one got hurt, and the culprits admitted it. It has gotta suck to see that Gizmodo, one of the coolest tech blogs get banned from the Big Kahuna of All Tech Shows. And as for bloggers thinking that this is just going to give bloggers a bad name, not going to happen. The printed press, or other media may think what they may about bloggers, but even they know that bloggers on the whole have a lot more power than they care to admit.
| Ads4dough - This Network is run by Jason aka Smaxor. Hit him up on AIM for any questions. | I use these networks because they don't scrub my leads. |
| Convert2Media - An amazing network run by Ruck - this dude has ideas to run your campaigns that you will never in your wildest dreams think of. He too is available on AIM for any help. | Copeac - Ask for Eddie as your Aff Manager and he will hook you up with the best payouts and "Exclusive" offers. |
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