Newletter: July 3rd, 2008
I love July.
Not only does it mean warm weather, playing outside and celebrating our independence here in Canada and the U.S… it also marks the halfway point to the year which is a great opportunity to review where we’re at with this year’s goals.
However, instead of talking about revised goals, I’m just gonna suggest that you ‘eat that frog‘.
At NPT this week I also blogged about:
- Google Adsense Referals to Retire in August
- Music downloads, leatherbound journals and parenting…
- Pepperjam Network Introduces Blogger Incentive Program
As promised, I blogged and posted pics from our Canada Day Eve party (the man in red serge showed up!!).
At Roamsters, you’ll also find an account of the inaugural trip in our new kayaks and a an account of my recent experience with sunburn and heat exhaustion.
Duh me.
That’s all for this week. I hope our Canadian friends have recuperated from their Canada Day celebrations and that our friends south of the border have a fabulous 4th of July and manage to avoid heat exhaustion.
Until next time… eat that frog!!
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Grumpy and HoundHunt: Learn and Be Inspired
The GrumpyOldMan (his real forum nickname) has returned to the NPT Forum and I’m thrilled. In his most recent post, he tells us how it’s been a year and how he’s ‘followed all the advice given’ regarding selling his Clickbank products.
Well, I gotta tell ya, as I see it, that ain’t the case. So, to answer his and a few other questions that I received regarding selling Clickbank products this week, I posted 2 articles.
The first is an article that was published in Revenue magazine called “How to Get Super Affiliates to Join Your Program and Promote Your Products“.
The second is specific to Clickbank merchants and titled “15 Ways to Sell More of Your Products on Clickbank“.
Speaking of the NPT Forum, we have 2 new moderators this week, Jim Hutchinson and Griff Grumbein. Both have been uber-active members of the Forum since joining and have a wealth of knowledge to share with newbie and advanced marketers alike. Look for their names along with Brad Haslam and Lowell Reiger if you are looking for answers to your internet and affiliate marketing questions.
This is especially pertinent now as our Support Desk is down. Don’t ask me why… I have no clue. Weirder than weird, but considering we planned to move all general questions to the Forum anyway, perhaps it’s good timing… or karma? 
Lastly, I would like you to look at HoundHunt’s forum post. He says “I purchased the Handbook a little over a week ago, and have been working day & night, especially once I followed advice and started a blog ( which I knew nothing about ) and built it live, since I didn’t know how not too.. accomplished in just a week“.
I checked out his site and was delighted, surprised, amazed even…
That’s it for now. I have to get out and help move a mountain of bark mulch from the driveway to the newly landscaped garden area before our Canada Day Eve party on the 30th. I’ll post pics of both next week.
In the meantime, learn from the GrumpyOldMan and be inspired by HoundHunt and I hope you have a super prosperous week… and a very Happy Canada Day and 4th of July. Woohoooooo!
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Affiliate Marketing with a Bad Credit Rating and more…
As the economy worsens and the price of basic goods continues to skyrocket, an increasing number of people are writing in to ask me whether it is feasible to do business as an affiliate marketer with a poor or bad credit rating.
The short answer is a big fat “YES!” and I’ve detailed some of the how-to’s and caveats in this week’s article “Can I Start an Affiliate Business with a Bad Credit Rating? “.
In conjunction with that article, I’ve also included some information about “credit cards for those with bad or no credit“.
A sampling of posts to the NPT Forum this week:
- Mark asks “should I start a debate forum?“
- NewMom0208 wonders “When is a website ready to start affiliating?” and about link cloaking.
- Ron wants to know if he’ll go to jail if he promotes…
- caseykt2008 struggles with GoDaddy’s Website Tonite program.
- NPT forum moderator extraordinaire, Griff, posted a poll about how you use Adsense.
Stumped about a issue related to online business? Register and post your question in the NPT Forum.
Until next time, have a super prosperous week.
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Weekly Recap: Twisted in Toronto
Well, just one more sleep until I’ll be on my way back Home Sweet Home and I’m thrilled.
While it’s wonderful to visit with friends and family here in Ontario, I can hardly wait to see my cat, my ‘western’ friends and my precious Desktop.
Here at my Mom’s place, I work from my laptop which is perched on an end table in the living room while sitting on a chair which is slightly askew to the table.
Working hunched over and twisted like a pretzel is hard on the old bod, which explains why I’ve barely blogged at all this week.
Fortunately, this week’s guest bloggers, Alexander Alaric and Malcolm Sheppard made excellent contributions.
If you too took a break from the web last week, here are the posts that have been made since my recap from Huntsville on May 28th:
- How to Connect with Influential People on Facebook
- Affiliates Can Make More Money with Amazon Unbox Video™ Referals in June
- Joint Ventures: An Ill-Conceived Proposal
- Five Tips to Make Your Blog More Sociable
- $50 Investment Increases Sales by 500%
‘Til next time, Blog and Prosper!
Cheers,
Ros
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NPT Weekly Recap from Huntsville, Ontario
Greetings from just outside beautiful Huntsville, Ontario.
And no, that’s not me working hard at my laptop down at the town dock - but I did appreciate the girl’s spirit to have biked to such a beautiful spot to do her work.
I’ve been ‘busy’ this past week checking out various Muskoka chairs, and all the while my blog has been busy delivering all the messages I queued up for you prior to my departure.
Just in case you’ve been checking out lounge chairs too, the following posts have been made since the last newsletter went out on the 20th:
- Getting People to Accept Your Facebook Friend Requests
- BeBiz: How Much Does it Cost?
- Wordpress Plugins: Author Exposed
- Ros Tells All in PepperJam Interview
- Spam: SOMEONE YOU CALL YOUR FRIEND, WANTS YOU DEAD
- Where’d You Get that Graphic?
- How to Get Free Pics from Professional Photographers
- Feedburner FeedCount: Be Patient
‘Til next time, Blog and Prosper!
Cheers,
Ros
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Facebook Friends, Profitting from the Recession and a Nifty Plugin
This week, guest NPT blogger Alexander Alaric wrote a comprehensive instructional piece about building leads using Facebook called “How I Got 2198 Facebook Friends With NO Profile“.
To find out how many folks are actually using Facebook as a marketing strategy, I added a Facebook Poll.
I also posted “Have You Tried One Click Installer?” about the plugin that will save you from ever having to upload another plugin with FTP.
And because I know many of you are feeling pinched by the current economy, I posted “8 Recession-Proof Product & Service Ideas for Affiliates” which will help you strategize and succeed during tough times.
Coming up next week, we’ll be talking about how to get into the minds of your visitors to sell MORE of your products and services online.
Until then, have a super prosperous week.
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I make mistakes so you won’t have to… :-)
I think I may have to change the tagline on NPT to the subject line of this newsletter…
“I make the mistakes so you won’t have to.”
In that vein, yesterday I posted an entry to the blog titled “Another Good Reason to Write Your Blog Posts Offline“.
Fortunately, that was my only major time-wasting gaff this week. However, I’m sure you won’t have to wait long to hear about the next one.
After blogging about why I bought Joel Comm’s PLR package, NPT readers were asking how best to use private label rights articles and templates, so I posted an entry that links to a new article that answers that question.
Note too that post includes a special invitation link on which Joel’s template package is offered at the original price which is 50 bucks less than the current price. Be sure to return to that page if you navigate away to read the whole sales letter.
Anyway, I’m off to try and break something else on one of my sites … so you won’t have to.
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Blogging is a “Massive Mistake”… HUH?
My jaw dropped as I saw the subject line of an email sent out by Ken Evoy last week which read:
Why Blogging Is A Massive Mistake!
HUH?
At one point Ken states “Blogging has reached lemming status. Without even thinking, many small businesses equate blogging with having a Web site“.
Sure, call me and the 112.8 million other bloggers out there ‘lemmings’, but at least we know that a blog IS a web site. Moreover, a blog is a web site that is built to find and deliver search engine traffic… immediately.
Ping - ping - PING!
For those who haven’t started blogging yet - a Wordpress blog is a site-building platform and content management system with an online publishing interface. And because Wordpress is distributed under an open source license called the GNU General Public License, it’s distributed free of charge.
Better yet, easy-to-install (or auto-install) widgets and plugins are regularly developed for Wordpress by legions of progammer/user/contributors who see ways to enhance the software’s already stellar functionality.
By the way, those widgets are also free of charge.
Ken also wrote that blogging is:
…obviously wrong for small businesses with something to sell” and is “also the wrong choice for infopreneurs (ex., those who earn affiliate and AdSense income, without selling anything directly to customers).
Say WHAT? Read more
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Bogus agents, WP2.5, simple upgrades and more…
The latest newsletter has just been sent…
Happy April Fool’s… and nope, no pranks this year, although I see that there were a few ‘take-offs’ around the blogosphere from the one I did in 2006.
The big news for affiliate bloggers this week was the release of Wordpress 2.5, which I talked about in Chomping at the Bit for Wordpress 2.5 and Wordpress 2.5 Officially Released.
I also posted a short piece this morning about Upgrading Wordpress with Fantastico in response to a comment from Evelyn who ended up with ‘weird characters’ on her blog after one such attempt. (Evelyn, it’s not nice to talk about your visitors that way!)
There is also some blog design instruction at How to Correct Bulleted List Errors with CSS and
Have You Updated Your ShareThis Plugin?.
I took issue with something I’ve seen too much of late and posted Agent is Typing… My Eye along with suggestions for a better way of doing business.
Yanik was broadcasting Live Feeds from the Underground® where you can see Marlon Sanders and a whole raft of attendees who attended the seminar. (LUCKY them.. I’m still choked that I had to miss it!) If you missed it too, oyou can pre-order a set of the Underground® 4 recordings (DVD & Audio and workbook) before it goes on sale to the general public — or until 11:59 PM on Friday April 4!
In affiliate program news I posted Chitika Announces a New Way to Monetize Parked Domains and Sell Products to Spanish Markets through Clickbank
Because I’ll still be pretty much housebound for a while, I’ve reduced my consulting fees until May 1st. Wanna chat?
Speaking of housebound, there’s also a little blurb about last Saturday’s Earth hour in Lights Out on Google. We played rummy… what did you do?
Last but not least, I’d like to send a special thanks to Rita Ashin who informed me about a few spelling and grammatical errors on the Super Affiliate Handbook homepage. Just think how much nicer the web would be if everyone took the time to help out another webmaster… not to mention how it’s good karma too! Thanks Rita!
P.S. Stay current by getting the Feed or visit the Blog and share your thoughts, comments and suggestions in the Forum. Always love to hear from you!
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Surgery update, new video, BANS, eBay program and more…
Duh. I only realized today that I didn’t send an NPT newsletter update. Blame it on the morphine… that stuff will really mess up your mind.
First of all, for all those who inquired — I’m feeling much better. Ed sent a short but sweet surgery update and I got out of the hospital last Tuesday. (I just told the doc I was going home and he said “OK”). Shortly afterwards, I got word that the mass was benign. So now it’s just a matter of moving really slow for the next few weeks.
So, while I’ve been housebound, I’ve been blogging and made a video.
The video is a very basic affiliate marketing tutorial called “How Affiliate Marketing Works” in which you’ll see one of my sites, the products that I promote on that site, how I affiliate with merchants and how easy it is to get the affiliate link code to place in your blog.
Posts since the last newsletter include:
- PubCon Las Vegas Dates Announced
- Polling Plugin for Wordpress Blogs
- How to Exclude a Blog Category from Displaying
- Amazon’s Video Widget for Affiliates
- PPC Advertising Doesn’t Work
- Free Bootcamp DVD’s
- Where to Place Affiliate Links for Increased Backend Sales
- eBay Dumps Commission Junction
- Happy Easter Everyone!
- BANS to be Updated by April 1st
I’ll send the next update sooner, so you won’t have quite such a long list of posts to review next time.
See you next time.. and once again, thanks for all your prayers and good wishes!
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