Why do some of them thrive and grow while others just wilt?

Two that are thriving are actually social networking communities hosted on Ning.com, but they feel very much like a forum to me.

My Squidoo Marketing community continues to grow very well and the membership is approaching 200 members. I join in the conversations when I have something to say, watch out for spam, and check in two or three times per day, but the majority of the activity comes from the members interacting with each other.

Murphy Connections is growing, too, but a bit more slowly. That’s understandable since it’s geographically targeted to a small town in the mountains of western North Carolina. Yet, even though it draws from a smaller target group, it is growing and the participation is pretty good.

On the other hand, my A Year From Now Forum, which is tied in with my Act On Your Dream! website just isn’t doing anything. Part of the fault is mine, because I really neglected it over much of the last couple of years when I wasn’t able to give it the attention it deserved. Still, it’s getting an average of 50 visitors per day, yet practically none of them are joining and participating. It’s obvious that the posts are getting read, but replies and new threads are practically non-existent.

Is it the subject matter? Am I reaching the wrong audience? Is the forum just not worth joining and participating?

I don’t have much ego involved in this, so please feel free to be honest with your comments. Just remember that honest doesn’t mean the same thing as brutal.

I’m hoping your fresh eyes on the subject will help me learn what I can do differently to improve.

I’m hoping you can offer some advice to help me.

Act on your dream!

JD

It started out innocently enough.

Brian Hawkins left a comment and I went to visit his blog. I was reading his Extreme Ezine Makes The Grade post and it reminded me of Twitter Grader.

After visiting Brian’s profile page on Twitter Grader, I went and had a look at my Twitter Grader profile page.

I had been there sometime in the past, but never really paid a lot of attention to the site. I’m somewhat leery of sites that tell us how much our sites are worth and how we rank for whatever they’re covering.

This morning, however, I stopped and really looked over my profile page.

One thing I noticed is that the link next to the “Full Name” label is a link to my Twitter profile. That certainly makes it easy to follow someone.

I also noticed that it had a link to the Twitter elite in Murphy, NC. Of course, I had to visit that page.

When I visited the page, it turns out that I am the Twitter elite in Murphy. I’m the only one listed on the page. I guess that’s one of the benefits of living in a small town.

It’s also one of the benefits of listing your town and state in your Twitter profile, if you live in the USA. I’m not sure how it works if you live elsewhere.

It also is a good opportunity for others who live in Murphy to establish their presence by starting to use Twitter regularly.

I wondered who would be listed as the Twitter elite in Asheville, NC.

I found a list of 50 people and visited each of their Twitter profiles. I think I followed about 20 of them.

This is a good way to find other proficient Twitter users in your local area and to meet the ones with similar interests.

But the twisting path I followed this morning continued along to places I’d never seen.

One of the Twitter elite from Asheville had just joined a Twitter Group for Asheville, NC and I went to take a look at the group.

When I noticed the #asheville hashtag code for the group, something clicked.

If you’ve been following my blog for the last few days, you’re already aware that I’ve been looking at ways to use Twitter to promote what’s happening here in Murphy, NC. I’ve been experimenting with the #MurphyNC hashtag.

So, I read the FAQs at TwittGroups and decided to create a group for Murphy.

There was only one thing to do before creating the group.

In December 2007, I created a half-dozen communities on Ning.com, but closed all of them in June 2008 for reasons I won’t go into here. Suffice it to say that it really pays to read the terms and conditions of a site before putting a half-year of effort into it.

When I was fully aware of the terms, I resurrected one of the communities for Squidoo Marketing and have been enjoying sharing with others in the community for the last six months.

One of the other communities I’d started was for Murphy, NC. This morning, I checked to see if the subdomain I’d previously used was available. It was, so I reopened the community.

Then, it was time to create the TwittGroups group for Murphy.

All of this took a few hours and it opens the door to much more work in the near future, but part of this was already in my plans for this year.

I’m not going to do anything with the Murphy community on Ning until I line up one or more businesses to sponsor the site. For the last few years, I’ve been promoting the area and some of the businesses for free, but it’s time to stop doing that.

As soon as I’ve lined up at least one sponsor for the site, I’ll start rebuilding it.

This time, however, there will be more tools thrown into the mix, including Twitter.

If you are in Murphy, NC, and you are a Twitter user, come and join the group for Murphy.

If you’re not in Murphy, you may find that Twitter Grader and TwittGroups may be tools you’ll want to try out, especially if you’re promoting a local area.

As with all experiments, part of this may prove to be worthwhile and part may be a waste of time. I won’t know for sure until I’ve worked on it for a few months.

Thanks, Brian, for linking to your TwitterGrader profile page. It made for an interesting morning!

Act on your dream!

JD

As a result, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how I can educate my friends and neighbors in this little mountain town to use free Internet services to promote their activities, interests, events, organizations, and businesses.

I’ve experimented with websites, blogs, forums, communities, and more, and none have gained traction, yet. Perhaps I’m just a bit ahead of time on this, but it may also just be a matter of finding an easy-to-understand analogy that will attract people to creating new conversations online.

Part of the problem, I think, is that we’ve been trained for decades that promotion and advertising are mostly one-way announcements and not two-way conversations.

To promote an event, we buy advertising on the radio or newspapers. If our area and event are big enough, we may even promote it on TV.

These are examples of one-way announcements. We tell, and hope someone listens, hears, and does what we want.

With the widespread use of the Internet, however, this is changing.

Now, we can have conversations, inexpensively or free, and these can lead to that most-wanted form of promotion, word-of-mouth recommendations.

Those of us who practically live online don’t really understand that most people don’t spend all their time thinking about websites, blogs, forums, social networking, and all the other things that we devote our time and energy to on a daily basis.

I was reminded of this a few days ago when I asked someone for his email address and he wasn’t really sure. Now, I don’t know about you, but my email address is so important to me that it has been indelibly imprinted onto my brain.

I’ve spent years making it easy for people to email me. In fact, I get hundreds of emails every day and usually send a dozen or two. How could I not know my email address? It seems almost impossible.

Yet, many people don’t depend upon the Internet for carrying on conversations and talking about what is important to them.

I can spend a half-hour or so writing a blog entry or a new web page about something that is important to me, and I can make it available to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. It’s practically free.

Even when I consider how much I pay annually for domain names, webhosting, email autoresponders, page rotators, banner rotators, and other similar services, it all adds up to less than a couple of thousand dollars per year. How much newspaper or radio advertising can I buy for that?

A blog post or web page has an indefinite life-span. I know that I’m making sales from information I put on the web years ago, not just from what I wrote yesterday or today.

Currently, a search on Google for “John Dilbeck” returns over 8,000 results and “johndilbeck” returns over 35,000 results, so there is a lot of information out there created by me or talking about me. This is just a small sample of all that I’ve put online over the last several years.

A radio ad has a life span of seconds. A newspaper ad has a life span of days. Even most promotional products have life spans of weeks or months.

What is the life span of a tweet on Twitter?

That’s hard to say.

If we’re online and watching our Twitter stream, it seems as if most tweets have a life span of seconds, almost like a radio spot.

But, that’s only part of the story.

Think of a major event or thing and search for it on Google. You’ll find hundreds or thousands of links to what you searched for, but you already expect that, don’t you?

Now search for it on Twitter.

Did you know that all those tweets are still available? Did you know that all the hyperlinks are preserved and are still active? Did you know that the search engines follow those links?

Want to know what I’ve been saying on Twitter, or what people have been saying to, or about, me?

Does that give you a different idea about the life span of a tweet?

Now, what happens if we take this knowledge and use it to try to build a conversation.

That’s one of the things I’m going to be doing in 2009.

This year, I’m going to concentrate on two things:

1. affiliate marketing

2. promoting the people, events, and organizations in Murphy, NC.

I am dramatically narrowing my focus and hope I can build higher revenue from affiliate marketing and gain better traction in promoting what’s going on in Murphy.

I’m not going to become a news organization. I’ll leave that to the newspapers and radio stations in town. After all, I’m interested in marketing, not news.

While testing it, I’ve done it for free for several years. This year, I’ll charge reasonable rates for what I will do, and those rates will be much less than what it would cost for using traditional advertising.

Still, I like doing things for free on the Internet and I’ll help people in my community learn how to do that, too.

I think Twitter can play an important part in doing all this.

Earlier, I said that it takes a good analogy or model so that people can easily understand how to join in online conversations. Things that are simple for some of us can be confusing to others.

For example, take the idea of Twitter being a microblog. Those of us who blog every day can understand that, but if you don’t know about blogging, is it a good model to use?

You may not be an old geezer like me, but I remember when several people used the same phone line. This was called a party line. At any given time, someone may have been talking on the phone, but you never knew who was listening.

Later there were private lines and now cell phones, but in the very early days, we had party lines.

Here in Murphy, this is a good analogy to use for Twitter. Why? Because it’s an ingrained part of the local culture. There is a popular program on WKRK radio called PartyLine, and it is hosted by Bill Yonce on weekdays and Tim Radford on Saturdays.

Listeners can join the conversation by calling the program and talking to the hosts. They can chat about what’s happening, offer what they want to sell or ask for what they want to buy, or just pass the time for a few minutes. A few years ago, when Mom was healthier and still able to get around well, she would always have PartyLine playing on the radio as she worked in the kitchen.

So, for the people who are much more comfortable with offline communications, perhaps a party line is a better analogy for Twitter than is a microblog.

You can listen to whomever you chose on Twitter, so it’s not like some giant chat room. You can fine tune the group of people you listen to so that you get specifically what you want. Anyone can choose to listen to you, or not, too.

Substitute the word “follow” for “listen” and you have a good understanding of Twitter.

Then, you have to think about how these groups of followers overlap, intersect, and diverge. For example, John may follow George, but not Jane. Perhaps Jane follows John, but not George. If George tweets about something interesting, John would learn about it – potentially – but Jane probably would not. However, if John then tweets about it, he would be extending the reach of the conversation beyond George’s followers/listeners. In traditional marketing, we call this “word of mouth.”

In reality, George may tweet about it, and John may post the information on a blog, lens, forum, website, or some other presence he maintains on the web. All of this can be done in a remarkably short time, with little effort, and negligible expense.

Who knows how far the information will spread?

So, while Twitter may be thought of as a party line, it potentially has a much wider reach. It brings another meaning to the old saying, “a little birdie told me.”

Unlike a party line, however, you can’t just talk as long as you want. You are limited to short tweets of 140 characters or less. You can tweet all you want, but each one is short and generally focused.

How much does it cost? Nothing.

So how is that going to help me promote Murphy, NC?

Well, there’s the rub.

There are so many tweets every day on Twitter that a few about Murphy would easily get lost in the crowd.

That’s where the #MurphyNC hashtag comes in.

By tagging all tweets that are specifically about something or someone in Murphy with that code, it is easy to search for them. It is also relatively easy to syndicate those search results.

Currently, there are few tweets with that hashtag, but I’ll be working to change that, over time.

This morning, I am testing syndicating these #MurphyNC tweets on my Squidoo lens for Murphy, NC 28906.

It didn’t go as smoothly as I had hoped.

I could not get the lens to show the feed, so I ran it through Feedburner.com and created a new feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MurphyNC-TwitterSearch

Squidoo can read and show that feed, with no problem. I wonder if it is because the Twitter search feed is in Atom format rather than RSS.

Another problem to consider if you want to syndicate hashtag searches on your lenses is the fact that Twitter uses relative anchor addresses in the content, instead of absolute URLs. This means that the #MurphyNC link in the content will not link directly to the Twitter search page. This will give you unintended results, depending upon where you syndicate it.

To get around this problem, I’m syndicating headlines only on my Squidoo lenses. If someone clicks the headline, it will take him/her to the status address for that particular tweet. Since this is shown on the Twitter domain, the hashtag link in the content will point to the right place.

It will be impossible to syndicate a real-time conversation on Squidoo, because the minimum update time for an RSS feed is 30 minutes for a Squidoo RSS module. At this point, that’s not a problem, because I’m the only person doing it and all my #MurphyNC tweets have been tests up until now. However, if it ever gets popular, this would not be a workable solution for syndicating the feed.

Although doable, this may not be the best way to syndicate a conversation on Squidoo.

I’m open for suggestions, because this is something I want to do on multiple lenses, as well as several blogs and websites.

Why am I talking about this on a blog that is about affiliate marketing?

This question is easier to answer. It’s because readers of this blog are generally more technically sophisticated and are used to online interactions. It’s also because I earn money from affiliate marketing even on my local pages for Murphy, NC.

And, Twitter is already helping me earn from my affiliate marketing efforts on my Squidoo lenses and blog posts.

This has been a long-winded way of asking your opinion of how to describe using Twitter to talk about a town or city. Is it a microblog or a party line, or something else entirely?

What model or analogy would you suggest to make it easier for offline-oriented people to join in online discussions using Twitter? Do you think Twitter is really effective for this?

Act on your dream!

JD

I am narrowing my focus and will be concentrating on just two areas: 1. affiliate marketing and 2. promoting businesses in Murphy, NC.

That means I will stop doing many of the things I’ve been doing. I’ll stop blogging on a lot of different topics and I’ll close down blogs and websites in January that are not related to my two primary areas of interest.

It also means that I’m going to be much more active in my community than I’ve been able to be for the last several years – both online and offline. Yes, that means that I’m actually going to leave my cave and talk to real people in the real world, again.

I really love living near Murphy, NC. I love the people, the small town atmosphere, the scenery, and being away from the big cities.

I don’t like how hard it can be to meet new people and to earn a living here. Sometimes, I think the two go hand in hand. In order to earn a living, perhaps new people in our area need a way to tap into the changing social networks and to make friends with people who know where the jobs are and can hire them.

Today, I was reading an interesting article at SocialMediaToday.com, How Small Towns are Social Networks, and it sparked some ideas I wanted to share with the author.

I agree with her observation that small towns are social networks and the photo of the bulletin board with all the business cards reminds me of several similar boards in Murphy.

I was wondering how one can best combine the offline networks of bulletin boards and newspapers with the online networks of Twitter, Facebook, and local portals and forums.

If the businesses are mostly promoting offline and the potential customers and employees are increasingly going online, how do we combine these networks so that it is easy to connect and to get to know each other?

Maybe I’m a bit uncommon as compared to most of the people here in western North Carolina. Instead of reaching for the yellow pages to find a phone number, I search on Google. Only if I can’t find what I’m looking for online would I consider going offline.

Yet, I believe most of the people in this area approach this type of information gathering first from the offline world, and many of them never go online for local searching.

I don’t have any data to back this up, it’s just a feeling from having talked to people.

With the price of offline advertising going up and online advertising going down, how long will it be before the businesses bring most of their marketing activities online?

How long will it be before the residents of Cherokee County take their local information gathering activities online, primarily?

How can I position myself and my services to help put these two groups together so we can all benefit?

As I said, I had some ideas I wanted to share with the author of the blog I was reading, so I was ready to comment and saw the following: “To Comment on this post, you must first register. Click here”

Sigh…

I really had something I wanted to say, so I registered, something I am doing much less of now than I used to do.

Over an hour later, I’m still waiting for the authentication email so I can post my comment, and you know what? I’ve lost interest. Even if I get the email now, I won’t bother activating my account just to post a comment.

Yes, I was a hot prospect then, but I’ve gone completely cold, now.

I even clicked on the link to the original post, but it, too, requires registration. That link takes me to Reddit, and that’s not what I’m looking for. I want a way to contact her directly.

Wait a second, that’s not accurate. Over an hour ago, I wanted a way to contact her directly and carry on the conversation. Now, not so much.

No more. I’m no longer interested.

I think back to just a few months ago when I changed my primary blog to this one with the main goal of making it easier for my friends and visitors to join in the conversations by commenting. It is working out very well, and I’m making friends with fellow bloggers around the world.

I would have enjoyed exchanging ideas with the author of the article I mentioned, but I can’t even see her profile without registering.

To top it off, there are links to the Twitter profiles of three people in the article who are referenced only indirectly, but there is no link to her Twitter profile that I can see. I did a search on Google, and I think I found her Twitter profile, but the photo is different and I’m not sure it’s her.

So, while she makes some good points about social networking, the way I found her has been time-consuming and frustrating.

It turns out that I followed the URL on her Twitter profile to her website and confirmed that she was the author of the article. To her credit, her own blog has links to her email address, Twitter profile, and Skype accounts. Not only that, but the article makes it easy to comment and she even uses CommentLuv. See it here: How Small Towns are Social Networks

Had I found the article on her actual blog instead of a syndicated version of it on SocialMediaToday.com, I would have been much more likely to have joined in the conversation and I would not have felt so frustrated trying to find a way to communicate with her.

Now, I’ve opened up at least one door by following her on Twitter.

Perhaps I’ll even find the motivation to share my thoughts with her on her blog – if I can remember what they were.

In the long run, what will I remember about this experience? Will it be her insights on local networking or will it be the frustration of trying to communicate?

So, how does this apply to affiliate marketing?

What are you doing to make it easy to establish conversations with your visitors? How well is it working?

Maybe you are doing a good job of conversing on your blog, but what happens when your content is syndicated elsewhere? Are roadblocks thrown up needlessly? Why? What can you do about them?

If you recommend a product or service as an affiliate, do you make it easy for prospects to contact you to gather further information or to clarify any points you’ve made?

Do you respond to those requests in a timely manner? Do you provide additional information? Do you answer the specific questions that are asked?

In my opinion, the main point of having a blog is to start a conversation.

What are you doing to make it easier for your reader to respond to you?

What are you doing to make it more difficult?

Are you even aware of things that may make it more difficult?

Truly, I don’t want to pick on her, because she’s doing the right things on her own blog. Still, I found her article on another site that is syndicating her content, and finding a way to join in the conversation was difficult and time-consuming.

Is that her fault, or is it the fault of the site that syndicated her article?

I don’t see it as her fault, at all. It seems to me to be the unintended consequences of social networking extending our reach to other sites that may not make it so easy to participate as our own sites do.

In the long run, it will probably be worth an hour of frustration, because I found someone who shares some of the same interests I do. Now that I’ve found her blog, and just now subscribed to it, I’ll look forward to reading what she has to say, and it will be easy, then, to join in the conversation, should I want.

I’m going to take a short break and see if I can work up the enthusiasm I originally had to join her conversation, now that I’ve found it.

Act on your dream!

JD

I recommend Squidoo for a number of reasons. The lenses are easy to build and you can always go back and modify them whenever you want. It’s free to use. They even pay you to use their free service – how’s that for a deal!

Why do they call it a lens?

Squidoo calls it a lens, actually one page on their site, because you can focus the page on a particular topic. Not every lensmaster does this, but the more successful ones tightly focus a lens on just one subject. If you want to cover multiple subjects, you can always create new lenses, and Squidoo offers several ways to help you cross-promote your related lenses.

Are you a Squidoo lensmaster?

I am happy to be a squidoo lensmaster and I currently have about 70 lenses. I had more, but had to delete almost 50 of them when one of the companies I was promoting changed direction. It’s time to start creating new lenses about the topics in which I’m interested.

Here’s my profile page: John Dilbeck, Squidoo Lensmaster.

If you examine this page, you’ll see that in addition to listing all my lenses, I can customize the page to link to other sites, including this blog, my Cafepress store, my Lulu store (which needs lots of work next year), my profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, and more.

If you’re reading this, I invite you to follow me on Twitter and become my friend on Facebook.

I think you can see at a glance that your Squidoo lensmaster page is a good way to link to other sites that are important to you.

If you get serious about Squidoo, you may want to create your own lensography to list your lenses in whatever way you want to present them. Here’s my main lensography (you can have more than one): Who is John Dilbeck?

Now, remember that you don’t have to build a lensography about yourself, although it is recommended to keep track of all your lenses and to present them however you want. You can build multiple lensographies.

Let’s say that you are promoting a particular product or service and you want to have multiple lenses, each of which discusses a major feature or benefit. You can create a lens about the main topic and then link to each of the sub-lenses. Even though each page is totally separate on Squidoo, you can present them organized logically and all together. That gives you a lot of flexibility.

Do you have a blog?

If so, you need to create a lens about it.

Why? Because you can tell people about your blog, syndicate your RSS feed, and get the benefit of Squidoo’s high rankings in the search engines.

For instance, I have a lens for this 21st Century Affiliate Marketing blog.

Do you have a CafePress shop?

How would you like to promote not only your store and the products within it, but also be able to promote other products sold on Cafepress – and earn some money doing it?

CafePress has an affiliate program on Commission Junction, and it pays a nice commission when you sell other people’s products. However, just by building a Squidoo lens, you can promote products without having to join at CJ.

But, you’ll make more money if you sell your own products from your lenses.

I have a CafePress shop at Shirts-Mugs-Hats.com and sell products just about every day.

I created a lens, John Dilbeck’s Shirts, Mugs, and Hats, where I link to the store and some of my best-selling items. There’s also a section where you can add a link to your Cafepress store, and I show random products from searches farther down the lens. I earn money on every sale, and you can do the same thing. It just takes a little time and creativity.

I even created a lens mainly designed to help you promote your CafePress shop. Several dozen shop owners have taken advantage of this, but few have gone back after adding their shops and voted them up higher in the list. Always remember to reload the page after adding something to a Plexo list so you can vote for it.

Come and Promote Your CafePress Store.

By the way, did you know that you can open a CafePress shop for free? Once you’re serious about it, you may want to upgrade to a pro shop. I did, and it’s basically free for me since my first couple of sales every month pays the fee and the rest of my sales are all profit. Not a bad deal.

Learn how to get started at CafePress and Make Your Own T-Shirts.

Promote Your Favorite Products and Services at Squidoo

As you may already be aware, one of the services I enjoy promoting the most is Site Build It! I’m both a satisfied customer and a very happy affiliate.

I have several lenses where I promote Site Build It!.

One of my most popular lenses is Site Build It, a revolution in website design, hosting, and promotion and I invite you to visit the lens, if you’re interested.

I think one reason this lens is popular is because I help other fellow SBIers promote their sites and lenses there. If you are an SBIer and have a website powered by Site Build It!, you are welcome to submit your site to the appropriate module on that lens. If you have lenses about SBI, there is a place you can add it, too.

You’ll note that I even welcome affiliate lenses from competing 5 Pillar affiliates.

As I have time, and as more services are announced at SBI, I’ll be adding more lenses discussing the benefits of those services.

Hint: I can’t tell you any more right now, but Sitesell will be announcing an exciting new educational service in about three weeks. Stay tuned for more information. I was on a conference call about it, just this afternoon, and I think there will be people who will want to take advantage of this new service. That’s all I can say, right now.

Squidoo offers much more

There are many modules that can be added to lenses to help you promote what you’re doing and help people find what you’ve written.

They offer a Twitter module where you can show your latest tweets.

Lijit.com has a special module so people can search your content via their search engine. When you add it to a lens, you can specify which lenses to include in the search results.

By going directly to Lijit.com, you can get code to add their search to your blogs and sites, too. You can see it in action in the right column of this blog.

Want to sell products from Amazon? There are modules designed to make it easy to do just that.

It would take a lot of blog posts to cover all that Squidoo offers to help you accomplish what you want, so I’m going to stop here.

How do you become a lensmaster

It’s easy to start building lenses on Squidoo. Build your own Squidoo lens and tell the world. It’s free, and you may even earn some money from it. Do it now, while you are thinking about it.

Remember, you can start simply and then expand your lens(es) whenever you want. I edited three of my lenses and republished them while I was writing this. It’s pretty easy once you learn how to do it.

Learn more from other Squidoo marketers

I would like to invite you to join us on the Squidoo Marketers community.

Come and learn from people who are using Squidoo in their marketing mix. Share what you know. Tell us about your lenses. Promote your CafePress shops.

It’s a friendly little community, and I’m looking forward to you joining us and participating there.

What’s your opinion?

So, what’s your opinion of using Squidoo as part of your marketing mix? I’m very interested in hearing your thoughts, opinions, and comments about your experiences with, or lack thereof, using Squidoo.

Act on your dream!

JD

What is SezWho?

From their FAQs page:

SezWho is a universal profile service that engages your community and enables content discovery. SezWho is all about making the Social Web truly social.

SezWho enables content rating, universal user profiles, and reputation-based content discovery to be added to any social media site. The SezWho service works with blogs, forums, wikis, video/picture sharing sites, discussion boards and anywhere else where people contribute content and engage in conversations.
SezWho is focused on delivering benefits to all participants in social media interactions:

* Readers can easily distinguish credible content and commentary, and they can follow contributors as they participate on social media sites across the web

* Contributors gain web-wide recognition for their insights and expertise, with a universal profile that accumulates a record of all their contributions, across all communities

* Site-Owners and Publishers can spotlight and leverage informative, high-quality content to engage their communities and drive traffic

Since this blog is powered by WordPress 2.6 and uses a widget-enabled theme, installing SezWho was easy and quick.

After downloading the plug-in from a link on BlogCatalog, it was just a matter of uploading it to my server, activating the plugin, adding the key for the API, and setting some preferences. Since I went with the default settings, it took no time at all once the plugin was uploaded.

I experimented with adding the two widgets and finally settled (for now) on showing both the Red Carpet (people who have left comments) and the Badge (information about me) in the left column.

Now, when you visit the 21st Century Affiliate Marketing blog, you are able to rate each post I write. I invite and encourage you to do so. I appreciate the feedback.

Also, whenever anyone leaves a comment, other readers can rank the quality of the comment.

(You are not allowed to rate your own posts or comments, of course.)

I’m hoping this will encourage more high quality comments as I blog more frequently. It has taken some time to get this blog configured as I wanted, so now I get to write more. I hope you’ll feel free to rate any posts and comments, and to leave comments of your own.

Together, we can learn more about affiliate marketing in the 21st century and when you leave a comment, you’ll get a link back to your site and a link to the comments and posts you’ve made elsewhere, based on information SezWho has gathered across the web.

For example, if you look at the comments to a post, each commentor will have their name listed with a link to their site (if they entered it when making the comment). Following that is a link that says “Who am I?” If you hover your mouse pointer over that text, or click it, you’ll learn more about that person’s postings and comments across multiple blogs.

I think that’s going to be useful – at least, to me – because I like to learn from people who are well-informed.

I don’t know for sure, since SezWho has been installed for only a few hours on this blog, but I think I’ll find it interesting and helpful.

If you want to add SezWho to your blog, just log in to BlogCatalog.com and click the Manage Blogs link. If you have multiple blogs listed, click on the Manage link to the right of the Blog’s name.

That opens a new page where you’ll see a link to SezWho just to the right of the Edit Your Blog heading.

Follow the directions in that section to register for SezWho and to get the plugin. I can’t guarantee it will be as easy for you to install as it was for me, because I held my mouth just right, bit the tip of my tongue, and all the stars were aligned just right when I went through the process. (grin)

Will SezWho make a difference with how you interact when you visit this blog? I don’t know. I hope it encourages more interaction.

What do you think? I hope you’ll comment on this and see how it works for you, too.

Act on your dream!

JD

That isn’t the part of the article that caught my attention, however.

Towards the bottom of the article is a section called How to build a tribe and it describes succinctly some of what I’ve been trying to do over the last few months.

I’m going to take the liberty to quote from this section, and I heartily recommend that you go and read Squidoo two point oh!

Here’s what Seth said about building a tribe:

How to Build a Tribe

If you want a tribe, you need to earn one. You earn one by being the best in the world at what you do, by sharing generously, by being clear and clean and transparent and easy to work with. The masterpiece lenses on Squidoo have organically generated a following. You can too.

The only way we can make that happen, all of it, is to be open, to give you tools and to trust you. The current generation of the best Squidoo pages–the ones that rank high, get traffic and generate income–are the sort of thing that you want to visit, follow, and be part of.

It’s not particularly difficult to imagine the benefits that you’ll get when you have a tribe of people who like each other and trust you. When you have a blog and a Squidoo lens and a Facebook group and a network of people waiting to hear from you. That’s your tribe. You–and your ideas–are the glue, the magnetic attraction, the purpose. Now it’s time to sync them all up.

So that’s where we are, and that’s where we’re going.

If you run a small business or a charity or work on a major brand or are a stay at home mom, your entire world changes once you have a tribe to lead. A group of people who want to interact with each other and with you to discover new ideas and to contribute what they know.

I’m doing my best to follow this model and look forward to seeing how it all comes together over time.

Thanks for the mental image of building a tribe, Seth.

Act on your dream!

JD

Its purpose is to syndicate a couple of RSS feeds from our new Squidoo Marketing social networking site. The new lens republishes the Latest Activities feed toward the top and the Forum feed toward the bottom.

Additionally, you are invited to vote in our poll and participate in the duel.

You’ll need to be a Squidoo lensmaster to participate, and you can become one for free. I recommend Squidoo and have numerous lenses there with more on the drawing board.

Are you an expert on something? Build your own Squidoo lens and tell the world. It’s free, and you may even earn some money from it.

Please feel free to link to the new lens at:

http://www.squidoo.com/squidoo-marketing-community

I look forward to seeing your feedback on the lens and please – if you want – rank the lens (5 stars is best) and offer your comments in the duel or the comments section at the bottom of the lens.

You’ll note that the people who are participating the most on our new social network are the ones who are getting mentioned the most on our new lens.

How easy is that?

All you have to do is participate on our social networking site. I’ll be republishing those feeds on other sites I own. That means that there will be more links to your profile page as you participate more and as I have the time to syndicate the news feeds on more sites.

Can you think of something I should add to the new lens to make it more useful? All suggestions are welcome.

Act on your dream!

JD

If you are, I’m inviting you to join a new social networking site for Squidoo marketing, where our goal is to help each other do a better job of creating lenses that are used for marketing.

Want to increase the revenue you earn from your lenses? Come and talk about them. Attract new visitors. Learn new techniques and share your own.

Want to become a Squidoo lensmaster?

Everyone is an expert on something. Squidoo provides an easy way to build one-page websites called lenses that you can use to focus attention on a particular subject that you know and love.

It’s free, and Squidoo even shares any revenue they earn from your lens with you. There are many of us who get a monthly deposit from Squidoo into our PayPal accounts. I just got a deposit into mine a couple of days ago. You can, too.

Are you an expert on something?

Build your own Squidoo lens and tell the world. It’s free, of course.

Then, come join us at the Squidoo marketing community.

We’ll help each other become better lensmasters.

Act on your dream!

JD

Create a professional looking online listing for your business with our easy to use tools. Free! – MerchantCircle.com

Truly, even if you are not a highly skilled web designer or webmaster, you can use the tools provided by MerchantCircle to promote your business and the products and services you offer. It won’t take days, weeks, or months, either! You can get started in a few hours and can continue promoting your business as long as you want through posting to your blog, creating coupons, and publishing newsletters.

This is the kind of business promotion that every owner or manager of a small business should jump onto. It’s free, effective, and easy to use. What’s the downside?

Act on your dream!

JD

Of the dozen or more I joined, each has it’s good and bad points, but most of them don’t work the way I do and I’ve had a hard time finding one with the members I want to meet and interact with.

Over the Labor Day weekend, I took some time to really look into APsense and liked what I saw.

So, I’ve decided that the majority of my business-related social networking will be done on APsense and I invite you to join me there – it’s free.

One of the things I like about APsense is that you get a profile page (as every other site offers) and a business center where you can promote business opportunities, advertise your products and services, collect testimonials, list resources you recommend, promote your business, and do other valuable promotional things.

When I got there, I searched the groups and found that several niches in which I’m active were not represented, so I created five new groups:

• Site Build It!
• Zlio Shops
• CafePress Shops
• Businesses in Western North Carolina
• Act On Your Dream!

I’ve joined several other existing groups and started meeting interesting people.

If you want to try out APsense, come check it out for yourself.

Act on your dream!

JD

When I looked at it last year, the people and their interests that I found there were not at all what I was interested in.

However, recently, there is a lot more business networking going on and I’ve started to invest some time there.

Come visit my MySpace John Dilbeck profile page.

If you have a MySpace account, come visit my page and – if you are interested – invite me to be your friend. If you don’t have already have an account, you can join for free.

From my page, you can link to some of the best online marketers I’ve been able to find and can expand your network as you want.

Some of the reasons I decided to invest some effort there is the built-in audience that numbers in the millions, good blogging tools, bulletins to keep in touch with friends and associates, the forums, and groups that you can start and moderate.

I’ve started new groups at:

Site Build It Webmasters

Success With Power Blog

Success With Affiliate Marketing

At the moment, I’m feeling rather lonely in these new groups and I hope you will join me there. I’m open to suggestions on how to make the groups better for all participants.

If you are going to use affiliate links, post it to your blog or profile page and link to it from the group forum. Please, do not post affiliate links in the forums.

I hope to see you there. Come be my MySpace friend!