• Blogging
• Affiliate Marketing
• Social Traffic Generation

I get lots of feedback on general posts, but here’s a chance for you to pose questions and get answers in a future post.

To make things a little easier, here’re some of the foundation between each of the areas I cover, so you can better “get” me and pose a question which might best help you:

Blogging

I see blogging as the next generation of web publishing. It certainly beats the HTML I was bashing out on a text editor in 1997 when I was managing web portals.

The introduction of RSS and Social Networking/Bookmarking widgets means you can easily get a blog from the starting point to more than 10,000 uniques in less than 6 months after starting.

Someone might say, “Sure, I can do that in a single day by getting my post listed on Digg or one of the other big bookmarking sites”, but what I’m refering to is a consistent stream of traffic, as in a consistent 1,500-2,000 page views per day. Not 50,000 page views today, and 200 page views tomorrow.

The underlying philosophy here is that I am (and I hope you are) building a solid business. Although it’s based in the online world, and by definition virtual and intangible. The business I’m building here is as solid as any brick-and-mortar equivalent out there.

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Affiliate Marketing

My approach is different from many affiliates out there.

I adopt a customer-centric point of view, thinking about questions like “Why should I submit my email/zip code/buy this product/service”.

Value creation is a key here. And the law of fair trade applies.(well, somewhat).

If I spend $1 and get “value” worth $2, I’m certainly a happy camper.

If I spend $1 and get “value” worth $0.10, I’m going to be a very unhappy camper.

The specific mechanics of this will be covered in a product I’m currently developing.

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Social Traffic Generation

The fundamentals of traffic generation I subscribe to is based on “human relationships” more than search engine alogrithmns.

Coming from a social/organizational psychology background, it’s quite easy to see how relationships still form the basis of interaction on the Internet.

If I like you, I will visit your blog/website, leave comments, buy your products/service, do joint ventures with you.

But the virtual world being vastly different from the physical one, there is a huge difference in how you accomplish this goal to get people to ‘like’ you.

That’s where my whole social traffic generation system comes about.

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Now that I’ve laid out the foundation of the systems I practise, go ahead and list topics or questions you might have in the comments below.

Comments

People keep asking me why I say that 90% of Internet Marketers drop out of the industry within 6 months.

The truth is I don’t have a fixed answer, but on bad days, it seems like everyone else who started out about the same time as me has moved on to:

• Network marketing
• Taken up a 9-to-5 job somewhere
• Doing the “financial trading cycle” which typically involves day trading or forex or options trading

The sad part is that they inevitably hit a brick wall, then look at what I’ve achieved in the last year and comment “Gee, you’re lucky”.

That kind of stings, considering the amount of effort I’ve spent in Internet Marketing, determining a path, building bridges to other Internet Marketers (sometimes taking a 20 hour flight each way) and taking on more than what others would normally do because I want to move along the road further.

So when I hear about the aspiring Internet Marketer who hasn’t taken action because he bought a new laptop and couldn’t figure out how to use it, and didn’t know how to configure his email, it makes me sad. Very sad.

In 2 minutes I informed him that he ought to call Dell and his ISP’s toll-free number and get his problems fixed by the next day.

Allaying blame on an inanimate laptop is tantamount to scolding the gas in your car because you got into an accident. It doesn’t quite add up.

Is it a catchall and a generalization to say marketers fail because they are lazy?

I think it’s more than just laziness, however, it’s a fundamental disconnect between your current reality and your long term goal.

If you knew you were destined for greatness, and you spent the day futzing around (maybe playing online chess, or IMing your friends), who’s to blame?

And if you have $127.05 in your affiliate marketing commission account, can you truly blame the ’system’ because it’s rigged?

Why not start looking into the mirror, and take a cold hard look.

If you’re truly doing your best and your best isn’t good enough, it might be time to consider other options.

But if you’re putting in 30 minutes a week, and loudly yelling that the system doesn’t work, then you might eventually become part of that 90% dropout statistic.

Should it be time to kick your Internet Marketing efforts up a notch?

Like they say: “Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.”

Here’s why: The whole system of Internet Marketing profits is based on effort and engagement.

Witness-

Web advertising (text links, banner ads, Adsense) has a back-of-napkin payout of about 1-10% against your time and resorces.

Comparatively, CPA (cost per action) marketing where you’re rewarded on leads taking an action (filling in a form, submitting an email address or zip code) pays about 5% to 30% return on your effort.

Affiliate marketing with payouts on completed transactions gives a payout of 10% to 90% (depending on whether it’s a physical product or digital one).

And the big kahuna is product creation with payouts of 20% to 100%, and you control the highway toll booth so to speak.

The higher payouts are proportional to customer engagement, and your efforts to profile and understand them.

With that equation clearly in mind, why would you choose to focus on lower levels of engagement with a limit to your time and resources?

I understand the often heard sentiment from new marketers to start out with “something easy”.

It’s good to wade in baby pool at the beginning of the journey, but choosing to stay in there for long periods of time, even when people have graduated to blue oceans is beyond me.

And just in case, you’re wondering about the guy who operates 1,000 blogs running adsense on them. I think the branding associated with being a super affiliate or owning your own product, far outstrips the guy with 10,000 made-for-Adsense blogs.

That’s my personal view.

The key is to have a game plan when starting out, and following the plan.

Your comfort zone and your mindset will set the pace for your eventual success in this field.

Comments

In theory, this represents your “subscriber core” and indicates how ’sticky’ your content is.

You might think this blog fares abysmally, according to Text Link Ads “Blog Juice” calculator.

A 5.4 out of a supposed 10 ranking?

Let’s look at the components of the score:

• Bloglines: the number of Bloglines subscribers (accounts for 40% of score)
• Alexa: ranking determines 15%
• Technorati: 30%
• Links: Inbound links 15% (determined fromTechnorati).

From the example above, the low number of bloglines subscribers (32) has hit my rankings hard.

De-emphasizing bloglines subscribers and feedburner subscribers (also a set of RSS subscribers) would be detrimental to your rankings.

Why would anyone want to do this?

In that case, why would a blogger deliberately aim for low RSS subscriber numbers?

Simple. Three reasons.

1. Control
2. Relationship building
3. Branding

Instead of building feedburner/bloglines RSS readership, I’ve built a traditional list.

• Control

Unlike indirect communication with my readers via a RSS feed, I can communicate directly with them via the opt-in list services provided by aweber or getresponse.

This gives me the opportunity to determine how often I communicate with my list and how I do so. I’m not merely restricted to just blog posts.

• Relationship Building

Having a list and control over the emails gives me flexibility in building the relationship gradually.

I can queue a variety of welcome posts, and staggered communication which can ease a new subscriber into the flow of things.

• Branding

I can customize branded posts, personalized to the list members, and have highly targeted and relevant offers sent to the members.

I believe an opt-in list brands you more effectively, compared to a RSS publishing service.

So it’s true that you give up the blog popularity ‘point score’ based on the number of perceived subscribers, but the intangible benefits you’ll gain are unparalled.

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Resources:

List Building Autoresponders-

• Aweber
• GetResponse
• Text Link Ads (Good for building link popularity, $100 free credit)

• It’s highly targeted
• It’s immediate
• It’s low cost and often free

The downside is because of it’s interactive nature (which contributes to it’s virality), spam marketers will always try to flood you, and drown out your message with their spam.

This includes, but is not limited to:

• Posting irrelevant images (usually a scantily-clad female) in their avatars [see: How Your Social Network Avatar Can Make Or Break Your Internet Marketing Efforts]
• Comment spam: “I like your site, come visit me at (website address)”
• Being generally obnoxious (use rules of social etiquette to figure this one out)

On social community sites like MyBlogLog, Eric and his team have instituted several measure like: limiting personal messages to 20 a day (with an innovative reciprocal message feature in place) , and eliminating animated GIF avatars in favor of single (static) image ones.

But that still doesn’t quite solve the problem of ‘widget spam’ where people with link baiting avatars feature on your sidebar widget that appears on the right of this blog.

Fortunately, MyBlogLog community manager Robyn Tippins informed me that MyBlogLog includes features to block both visitors to your site, and mask your presence on a sidebar widget with the ‘cloak of invisibility’ feature (the name I’ve given to it).

Initially I had asked Robyn about killing the community visitors altogether. (which might seem extreme, until you consider that it creates a better user experience for your visitors)

Robyn responded:

If it’s on the [sidebar] widget you can hover over then and click the red x.

At this point there’s no way to kill visitors to your community page (but you can kill community members, I think).

I’m annoyed too by those avs. We are killing animated gifs this week, but the sexy graphics are a pet peeve of mine too (and I’m hard to offend).

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Here’s how you’d delete visitors (say if I wanted to remove my buddy Ryan Chua permanently from my sidebar widget:

And similarly if I wanted to ‘mask’ my presence on another blog:

Let me clear the air, I am personally not offended by these images, but if they affect the blog readers user experience, I will step in and moderate the blog.

I’ve gone one step further and made the recommendation that MyBlogLog could include a classification system that is moderated from a central node at MyBlogLog. Avatars could be flagged with a “G” or “R” rating like movies are. Or maybe it’d be easier to setup a NSFW (not suitable for work) rating (I’ve been told nude images have been used for some avatars).

True, it would reduce some traffic in the short term, but when you look at how this increases the longevity of the social networks (some of which have degenerated more into ’spam networks’), it also makes the network a more legitimate and credible medium in the long term.

Comments