21st Century Affiliate Marketing

I believe that Seth Godin is a marketing genius and has as good an idea as anyone about how marketing and making money are evolving.

I’ve been paying attention to most of what he has been saying for a few years and I’ve learned a lot in the process.

Today, on his blog, he writes:

Make money: not by building an internet company, but by using the net as a tool to create value and get paid. Use the internet as a tool, not as an end. Do it when you are part of a big organization or do it as a soloist. The dramatic leverage of the net more than overcomes the downs of the current economy.

The essence is this: connect.

Then he goes on to explain 10 ways to connect the disconnected.

Obviously, it’s not an exhaustive list, but it’s a good springboard for thinking about how you can add value by helping people make connections.

You can read the entire article on Seth’s blog: How to make money using the Internet

So, how can you help connect people and make money doing it?

Act on your dream!

JD

I have been using Alex King’s Twitter Tools WordPress plug-in to automatically tweet about new posts to this blog to my Twitter account.

When I set it up, I was new to both Twitter Tools and to Twitter. This plug-in offers an option to also post a daily index of Twitter posts to the blog. I chose to implement that option.

A few days ago, while looking critically at this blog, those Twitter posts stood out like a sore thumb. Most of them are entirely unrelated to affiliate marketing and I don’t think they belong here, even though it is now my primary blog.

So, on October 8th, I turned off the option of indexing my daily Twitter posts on this blog. Coincidentally, I got tied up doing some time-intensive things that just didn’t leave me with time to blog, so nothing has been added here since then, about a week ago.

If you subscribe to this blog via email, then you haven’t heard from me for a few days.

Most bloggers think that is a terrible thing to do, but I disagree. If I don’t have anything worthwhile to talk about here, I just don’t say anything. Most bloggers think we should write at least one thing every day to keep the readers in the habit of visiting our blogs. I just don’t accept that.

When I have something to say, or have news related to affiliate marketing that I want to pass along, I’ll write about it. Sometimes, I’ll post several times in one day. Other times, such as last week, I won’t post anything at all.

The daily index of Twitter posts violated that idea.

So, now they’re gone.

(The crowd cheers wildly!)

I’ve been doing some research on several things that I’ll be talking about, soon. I hope you’ll find them of interest for you and your affiliate marketing business.

What do you think? Did I make the correct choice in no longer blogging my Twitter tweets?

Act on your dream!

JD

I have found that participating on social networking sites has helped my business grow and I’ve met some great people in the process. Some have become real friends.

It takes time and effort to network effectively, so don’t think it can be done in a few days or weeks, and don’t try to do it more quickly by using software to speed up the process.

If you sincerely want to network with other like-minded people and you’re willing to take your time and socialize with them - not just spam your ads towards them - then you’ll find a great list of social networking sites on Kelly Stone’s blog:

Want A List Of Social Networking Sites?

I just found Kelly’s blog and I’m finding lots of topics that interest me there.

Yes, I found her through social networking.

I saw her on a Recent Visitors widget on my Squidoo Marketing community and followed the link back to her MyBlogLog profile where I found her blog’s community and then visited her blog.

It sounds like a lot of effort, but it took only a few minutes.

Along the way, I joined her blog’s community and added her as a contact at MyBlogLog.com. Then, I subscribed to her blog via email so I won’t forget to keep in touch.

Have you been using social networking to help build your business and make new friends? It takes time, but it works.

I noticed that she didn’t have a link to www.apsense.com, which has a Google PR of 4, and an Alexa rank of 45,857.

I like Apsense, but haven’t had the time to play in their sandbox lately. It’s one of the things I intend to do more of in the near future.

If you’re not already a member, I’d like to extend an invitation to join Apsense and network with me there.

For an example of what you can do on Apsense, I would like to invite you to visit my profile and business center on the site.

If you would like to network with me on some of the other major social networking sites, please see the links to my profiles on the About page of this blog. I look forward to meeting you. We can probably connect most quickly on Twitter and MyBlogLog, because I’m more active on them than the others.

If you are active on any of the major social networking sites and would like to network with the readers of this blog, please leave a comment with links to a couple of your profile pages. While you’re doing that, I would enjoy reading about your experiences in social networking and your major areas of interest.

So, on which of the social networking sites have you pitched your tent?

Act on your dream!

JD

You’ve taken the time to research a topic for your new blog and decided there should be enough interest to make it worth the effort.

Then, you created the blog, chose a theme, modified the theme, selected plugins and widgets, and now you are ready to write great articles on all the topics you researched before starting.

Right?

Hopefully, that was your approach.

I think most bloggers throw up a blog and then look for something to write about. I know I did that on some of my first blogs.

I was a lot more focused and took more time to research what I was going to do before I started this blog.

Either way, now you have a blog, you’ve been writing on it for some time, and you want people to find you and read what you have to say.

Ideally, they’ll also post great comments so you and your readers can learn even more about the topic of the article.

So, where do you promote your blog?

There are lots of ways to promote your blog, and I’m sure you know of many that I’ve never used. I hope you’ll share them with us.

Let’s start with some that work well for me.

Create a lens about your blog on Squidoo

My main place to promote my blog is on Squidoo. For instance, I created a lens especially for this blog at 21st Century Affiliate Marketing.

Syndicate your RSS feed on your other blogs

I syndicate the RSS newsfeed from this blog on several other Squidoo lenses and some of my other blogs, such as you’ll see in the sidebar of my Marketing With Squidoo blog.

Create a community for your blog on MyBlogLog.com

I also registered this blog on MyBlogLog.com and created a community for it at 21st Century Affiliate Marketing.

There are several benefits of creating a community for your blog there. First, it syndicates your RSS feed as headlines on the page. Second, it makes it easy to increase your business networking as people join your community. Third, they offer widgets so you can see who has visited you lately. This makes it easy to visit their sites and/or make contact with them on other social networking services.

You can see this in action towards the bottom of the left column of this blog. Look at the Recent Visitors widget. If you hover your mouse over the visitor’s face, you should see a fly-out that lists the blogs and sites for which they have created communities on MyBloglog.com. It also makes it easy to join their communities and increase your business networking.

About half-way down every page on this blog, in the right column, you’ll see a section called “New with John Dilbeck.” In that section is a widget provided by MyBlogLog that shows my latest activities on this blog and other sites and blogs I author. It also shows what I’ve been doing on several networking services such as Twitter, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and others.

It has taken a long time to set all of this up, but now, whenever I do something on one of my blogs, websites, or forums, that action is recorded in the RSS feed and is automatically syndicated on multiple other sites. I get visitors from a wide variety of sites as a result.

You can see another example of this at work on my profile page at the Squidoo Marketing community I created. In the right column of the page (and every other page of the site), you’ll see the Recent Visitors widget for the MyBlogLog community I created for that social networking site. In the center column, you’ll see the wider widget from MyBlogLog that shows my activities on my sites and the social networking services I use regularly.

Syndicate your blog’s RSS feed as widely as you can

Syndicating the RSS feed from your blog on multiple sites is a good way to get your writing noticed by both new readers and the search engines.

Should you tweet your blog on Twitter?

I use a plugin called Twitter Tools to post an announcement about new blog postings to my twitter profile.

At first I was unsure about this and created a Squidoo lens called Should You Tweet Your Blog? to learn what other people think about the idea of automatically tweeting new blog posts. I’d welcome your opinions and feedback either on that lens or by leaving a comment here.

Link to your blog on forums and in comments on other blogs

I’ve talked about my blog on various forums and in comments on others’ blogs.

Be sure to add value when you post to the forums or comment on someone’s blog. As long as you’re adding to the conversation and helping others, the link to your blog will be welcome, or, at least, tolerated.

If you just jump in and write a post or comment about your blog that doesn’t add any value to the discussion, it will probably be deleted. At the very least, you’ll look like a spammer, and I know you don’t want to do that.

One good place to list your blog is in the thread started by Michael Galante on the ConquerYourNiche forum, Share your active blog here. I’ve found several blogs there that I’ll be reading and I’ve subscribed to a couple of their RSS feeds.

Another good place to link to your blog, especially if it is related to Internet marketing, is in the Members, show off your blogs! thread on Lynn Terry’s Self-Starters Weekly Tips forum.

(By the way, I’m one of the moderators of the SMO: Social Marketing & Social Media section of Lynn’s forum, and I invite you to come and share your knowledge and experiences about social networking with us.)

I have links to this blog in my signature file on a number of other forums where I’m active. Each post I make to those forums will link back to this blog.

Make good comments on other blogs

One way you can promote your blog is to make good comments on this one.

WordPress, by default, uses “nofollow” links so the search engines won’t follow links to the site you list when making your comment.

I’ve installed the DoFollow plugin so you’ll get some linklove when you post a good comment here. I also installed CommentLuv, which will try to find the last post you wrote on your blog and will link to it below your comment.

Additionally, SezWho is active on this blog and it will keep track of the comments you make on blogs with SezWho installed. It’s a pretty cool tool and I think we’ll be seeing more blogs using this nice tool as time goes by.

I hope you’ll make use of the rating feature SezWho provides to express your opinion of what I write and the comments others leave. By rating what we say, it will go into the multi-site comment aggregator that SezWho maintains and we can raise (or lower) our reputation based on the quality of our writing.

Now, I welcome substantive comments that are on-topic and I look forward to talking about affiliate marketing with you in any discussions that develop here.

However, I’ll delete your comment if it doesn’t contain anything worthwhile or is off-topic. So, don’t bother leaving a comment that says something like, “you have a good point,” or “that’s great.” I’ll delete ‘em in a heartbeat.

Don’t spam something I write with an off-topic comment full of advertising. Poof! Gone.

But, if you write something about the topic that adds to our understanding of your viewpoint or which offers links to on-topic resources, then I welcome what you have to say.

Do you comment on blogs?

My friend Mitch posted an interesting article called Why Don’t More People Comment On Blogs? on his blog a few days ago.

Do you have any thoughts on that subject?

In Summary

I mainly use Squidoo lenses, Twitter, a community on MyBlogLog, sig files on other forums, and comments on blogs to promote this blog.

How do you promote your blog?

Act on your dream!

JD

Lynn Terry has a great discussion going on her blog post and comments at Twitter: Are you IN or OUT?

It took me a long time to see the value in Twitter and that only came after I found the right group of people to follow. Along the way, I’ve followed a lot of people and unfollowed quite a few.

Now, I’m following some very interesting people who are interested in blogging, Squidoo, CafePress, affiliate marketing, and other things that interest me and are a major part of my business.

In fact, I learned about Lynn’s post because of a tweet from one of the people I’m following. Cool, huh?

If you’re interested in Twitter and want to join her conversation, jump on in.

Twitter: I used to be OUT, but now I’m definitely IN.

Act on your dream!

JD

Jonathan Morrow wrote an interesting article on Copyblogger called How to Stop Being Invisible and I think you will find it both educational and interesting.

You know the feeling of working hard, writing your best, and pouring everything you know into your blog, only to feel like nobody knows you exist.

Jonathan addresses this issue and one of the things he says is:

We’ve established that valedictorians make lousy bloggers because they’re boring, and class clowns rule the blogosphere because they’ve become adept at getting noticed. But how do class clowns do it? And why are we so apt to pay attention to them in school?

In one word: value.

I admit that I fit the boring valedictorian role, even though I left high school a year early to attend Georgia Tech and transferred enough credits back to high school to graduate. I wasn’t the valedictorian, but I was darn close.

So, I admit it. I’m boring.

I tend to pass along information, but I really don’t know how to attract attention. I’m not the type to walk into a crowd and try to get people looking at me, but isn’t that exactly what we want when we write a blog or create a website.

“Hey! Look at me!”

One of the surprising things in Jonathan’s article is this:

Blogs are a diversion.

That thought never once occurred to me.

I think of reading blogs as working, not as a way to procrastinate and get away from working for a few minutes.

So, my take-away lesson from Jonathan’s article is that I need to be a bit more entertaining and a little less serious in my writing.

What do you think?

Are you looking for entertainment or education when reading a blog that talks about affiliate marketing?

I welcome your opinions and ideas.

Act on your dream!

JD

If you are a Squidoo lensmaster and you want to continue to improve the quality of your lenses, I recommend reading Victoria Neely’s Squidoo Diary.

She has been posting a series of tips that I believe you’ll find useful. At the very least, maybe they will give you some ideas on new things you can do to improve your lenses, attract more visitors, and earn more income.

I just discovered this blog a few hours ago, and I’ve already found several suggestions that I’ll be using to improve some of my lenses.

Act on your dream!

JD

Earlier this morning, I learned about SquidTop.com.

According to the SquidTop lens, Squidtop - Blogs for Squidoo Lensmasters, “Squidtop is a blog platform built on the Wordpress system that allows squidoo lensmasters to create their own blogs to promote themselves, their projects, and their lenses.”

Well, that sounds just like me. I love promoting myself, my projects, and my lenses, so I immediately signed up for a new blog there: Marketing with Squidoo.

Since it is so new, there isn’t much there yet, but there will be as time allows and inspiration motivates.

Marketing with Squidoo will be concerned with marketing with Squidoo lenses, specifically. There may be a little overlap now and then with this blog.

I’ll be promoting my Squidoo lenses and our Squidoo Marketing Community on the new blog.

Act on your dream!

JD

This morning, I reapplied to BlogCatalog to include this blog in its directory. This time whoever reviewed the application approved it.

Here’s the message I received:

Your blog (21st Century Affiliate Marketing) has been reviewed and your updates have been approved.

If you would like to make any changes to your blog listing, you can do so at anytime by logging into your Blog Catalog Account at ( URL removed ).

If you have any
questions/comments/suggestions/ideas
please feel free to contact us.

Thanks,
BlogCatalog

I’m not going to lie to you. I liked this letter much better than the previous one and I am happy that this blog is now listed in their directory.

Still, I have no idea why I had to go through this process. No specific reasons for either decision were given.

It leaves me wondering what and why, but it’s time to move along.

When you get the results you want, it’s time to be grateful, thank them, shut up, and move along.

Thank you, BlogCatalog, for accepting my blog and listing it in your directory.

Here’s the BlogCatalog page for 21st Century Affiliate Marketing.

Act on your dream!

JD

Yesterday morning, I spent some time sprucing up this blog and added it to my blogs on BlogCatalog.

While there, I joined SezWho, added BlogCatalog widgets and links, and - as far as I can see - did everything required to be accepted into their catalog.

I wonder why they declined to add 21st Century Affiliate Marketing to their blog directory.

I received the following email:

Dear John Dilbeck,

Thank you for submitting your blog 21st Century Affiliate Marketing
(http://21stCenturyAffiliateMarketing.com)
to BlogCatalog.

Unfortunately upon reviewing your blog we are unable to grant it access to the directory.

The most common reasons for not getting into Blog Catalog are:

• We could not verify ownership of your blog.
• A link back, widget or meta-tag is required to verify site ownership. visit:
  http://www.blogcatalog.com/buttons.php
  for more information.
• The URL you submitted is not a blog.
• The URL you submitted is solely for commercial purposes, or is suspected to be spam.
• Your blog is brand new and/or doesn’t have enough content to make it truly valuable.
• If this is the case, please resubmit after you have made more postings.
• Your blog contains pornographic material.
• At the time of review your blog was unavailable or there was a typo in your submission URL.
• Please make sure the URL submitted is correct and accessible

If you believe this to be a mistake, you can login to Blog Catalog and change anything which may have caused it to get declined. After updating your blog, it will be put back into the submission queue.

If you have any
questions/comments/suggestions/ideas
please feel free to contact us.

Thanks,
BlogCatalog

I’m sure they could verify ownership of the blog. My name and photos are all over it.

I have links and widgets installed that link to BlogCatalog.

The URL I submitted is definitely a blog.

The URL I submitted is used for commercial purposes, but not solely. It definitely is not spam.

The blog is relatively new, but I think it already has content to make it valuable.

I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t contain pornographic material. I may not be able to define pornography, but I can recognize it when I see it.

Perhaps the blog was unavailable. I don’t know. It’s available now.

The submission URL is correct. I’ve tested it.

So, I have no idea why BlogCatalog declined to add 21st Century Affiliate Marketing to its directory.

Maybe someone will take a moment and explain the decision.

This brings up a wider consideration, and that’s poor customer service.

I would think that a specific reason easily could be given for declining a blog submission. That way, we wouldn’t be left guessing and wasting time addressing something that could have been specifically addressed.

I had no problem getting it accepted into BlogCatalog’s competitors’ directories, including MyBlogLog.com.

Now, it’s not going to distress me if they don’t accept this blog in their directory. I still like BlogCatalog and I’ll continue using some of their widgets on my site - although I may drop the one that shows a big fat zero ranking in the bottom left corner of every page.

I’m going to resubmit the blog to BlogCatalog this morning and then I’ll move on, whether it is accepted or not.

I’m really disappointed in how they handled this and the lack of any specificity in their reply to my submission. I know they could have done better. I think this reflects poorly on them, but I’m just one blogger out of many thousands of members of their service.

Perhaps I just don’t deserve better treatment?

Act on your dream!

JD

Recently, Jon Olson had a great idea and added personalized profile pages for ILoveHits.com members.

For example, here is my profile page: I Love Hits Blog for John Dilbeck.

Now, in addition to linking to several social networking sites, you can syndicate the RSS feed from one of your sites or blogs, link to a blog and/or website, and post entries to your very own blog.

Additionally, a members directory is starting to grow as more people edit their profile and add information to their pages. There is a link to the members directory on the bottom of each of our profile pages.

If you have edited your profile and created your ILH blog page, there is also a link to it on the bottom of the pages you promote on the I Love Hits traffic exchange.

Earlier this morning, when I logged in to the members page, the Locker Room, I noticed three entries from members’ blog postings. I don’t know if these are the three most recent posts or if they are a random selection. There may be other criteria at play, too.

Regardless of how they are selected, the blog postings are now starting to appear in other places and not just on your profile page. Three entries on the Locker Room page are in a prime location.

This just keeps getting better and better.

I also noticed that there is a new “Get to know me” badge with javascript that can be added anywhere you can post javascript. I just added it to the right column of this blog. If you click that badge, it will take you right to my personalized profile page.

This is a very nice addition, too.

Are you a member of ILoveHits.com?

Have you created your personalized profile page and posted to your blog there?

Act on your dream!

JD

Several months ago, I created a blog called Random Neurons Firing at WordPress.com in order to test the latest version of their blogging software without having to keep updating the software all the time.

As you may know, I earn my living from affiliate marketing and that’s my main interest these days, so I started writing about the subject at Random Neurons Firing.

A few days ago, I logged into the dashboard to write a new post and there was a message that WordPress was concerned about the contents of my blog. So, I used the contact form to learn what concerned them.

When one of their people contacted me, he told me that I was violating their terms of service by blogging about affiliate marketing.

I wasn’t aware that commercial postings weren’t allowed on blogs hosted by WordPress.com, but that’s the case.

So, I exported all the postings and deleted all that were commercial in nature.

In the future, I’ll be posting about non-commercial topics on that blog.

I had registered 21stCenturyAffiliateMarketing.com some time back, but had never done anything with it, so yesterday, I set up a new blog called 21st Century Affiliate Marketing on this domain and imported the postings from Random Neurons Firing into it.

In the future, I’ll be posting news and views about affiliate marketing on this blog.

Of course, this means more work and I’m not sure if it will really be worth it.

The only way to find out is to try it and see.

The main reason I’ll continue writing to this blog in addition to John Dilbeck And Friends is to see if more people will comment because you won’t have to register here, and you do have to register there.

Any thoughts?

Act on your dream!

JD