1. I am recovering from a very serious illness and I finally feel like working on my sites again. It has been a difficult period (almost three years), but I’m ready to go. (I’m getting tired of talking about being sick. I’m looking forward to it becoming a distant memory.)

(If you’re interested, I wrote about my battle with cancer on my other blog. It’s a good thing I wrote it down, because I have no memory of writing those posts. Fortunately, my memory is improving, this year.)

2. I have closed over 50 websites that I built over the last decade (non-SBI). I started about half of them before SBI was introduced and the other half to test ideas and to see if I could put together a system that was better than SBI (for my own use, only, not to sell to others). I tested many different ways of building websites and blogs, and some of them were successful, but all of them had problems. Problems that I’ve never experienced on either of my SBI sites.

As an example, I spent a whole day last week fighting a security issue on one of my non-SBI sites. It took several hours with that company’s support staff, a supervisor, an administrator, and their security team to find one PHP malware file hiding on the site. I have no idea how it got there. Additionally, I spent several hours reprogramming the webserver on that site, so that it would block a group of people from around the world who were using my server for their purposes (to the tune of over 20 GB of bandwidth per month, and nearly 200,000 page views). I devised an elegant solution to block them, and still let everyone else see the site.

At one time in my life, I would have enjoyed that. I used to enjoy devising fast, elegant solutions to tech problems. Now, it’s just a hassle. A major hassle. This is one of the reasons that I fully support Sitesell for not allowing scripts (other than javascript) on our sites. Every non-SBI site I’ve ever built has been hacked more than once. Neither of my SBI sites have been.

Why did I build so many websites? I am a firm believer in testing to see how well something works. I don’t believe what people say, until I test it for myself. That’s probably a character defect and it has caused me a lot of unnecessary work, but I’ve reached my conclusions based on my own experience, not from someone’s claims.

3. The release of BB2 is coming at just the right time. I’ve spent the last three or four months brainstorming, planning, and thinking. I’m going to rebuild both of my sites and I’m going to take the time to do it the right way.

When I built my first SBI-powered site in April 2004, it was basically to learn how SBI worked so I would be better as a 5P affiliate. At the time, I was building a couple of large (1,500+ page) sites using a database created by Dave Winer (one of the inventors of RSS and an early blogger, as well as a very talented programmer and application developer). His product was called Frontier and later became Radio Userland and Manila, before he moved on to other things a few years ago. Over a period of several years, I modified that system heavily by tweaking the programming and adding my own modules. (Even with all my work and thousands of hours invested, it did not do all that I can do with SBI.)

It did, however, offer an easy way to build templated sites from a database. I could modify the template and rebuild the entire site, any time I wanted to, with ease. It made it easy to manage large sites. It made it easy to manage sub-sections of a site.

I’m looking forward to seeing how well I can do similar things using BB2. Reusable blocks open up a new way of approaching a block-built SBI site.

At their peak, each of my largest sites was getting about a million page views per year and earning enough income for me to be able to stay at home and be my mother’s sole caretaker for the last years of her life.

4. My income from affiliate marketing took a nose-dive in 2009. It has not recovered, yet.

The sites I built were very successful until the North Carolina legislature passed the nexus tax law in 2009 and Amazon.com cancelled my affiliation, and all the other affiliates in the state. Several other large merchants also dropped me at the same time. I had been an Amazon.com affiliate for 13 years and all of my sites were heavily monetized through their affiliate program. *poof* *gone*

For the last 2 years, my income has been decimated, so I’m basically starting over. I’ve managed to hang on and not close my business, but it was touch and go last year. Last spring, I showed my daughter how to close the business, if necessary, and gave her my power of attorney to do so.

This happened just as I was getting so sick that I had a very difficult time thinking straight and trying to make the necessary changes. I was able to update one large site by deleting several hundred pages and removing most of the Amazon affiliate links, and I removed most of the Amazon links on my smaller sites. I never got around to updating the other large site, so it’s been sending thousands of people to Amazon.com to purchase products we recommended, for more than two years — and we’re earning nothing from it. (Even after two years of total neglect, that site still gets more than 50,000 visitors and about 300,000 page views per year.)

Do I feel bitter about this and resent Amazon.com? I did, at first. Now, I recognize that our state legislature made a decision, Amazon.com responded to that decision, and I (and many others) took the hit. That’s business. There are always ups and downs and obstacles in our path to success.

For most of 2009 and 2010, I was so sick that I could not work, at all. I wrote a few blog posts and played on Facebook, but most of the time I slept. Fortunately, the surgeries were successful and chemotherapy did its job. I’m getting stronger every month and I’m back up to about half-speed.

5. After nearly 15 years of building websites and earning a living with my marketing business, I’m turning my attention from all the other ways I know of building websites and blogs and focusing on SBI.

My first SBI site was something I built because it was a subject that is important to me, not because I thought it was something that would make a lot of money. I liked how SBI made it easy to build and manage the site and how it did so much for me behind the scenes. I made some mistakes with that site, and some of those mistakes are evident in my choice of keywords. I did not choose very well. I’ll be testing the bottom-up approach to building that site over the next couple of years.

I was heavily focused on other ways of building money-making sites, at the time. I’ve built social communities, forums, websites, blogs, and even an article directory. I wanted to know, from the inside, how these various sites worked and performed — and I wanted to discover their benefits and problems. I think I spent more time modifying and writing PHP code over the last few years than doing any other activity.

I was a Sitesell 5P affiliate before there was an SBI. So, I had the chance to watch as SBI grew and expanded. It continued to improve and offer more features, year after year. And, the price has not increased, even though the product is many times better than it was all those years ago.

Despite inflation and all the new and improved modules, the price for SBI remains at $299 per year.

I spend more than that for coffee. (…and Reece’s Pieces…)

I’ve also observed, for about 13 or 14 years, the high levels of intelligence, honesty, ethics, integrity, innovation, and good-judgement that are possessed by the people who make up the Sitesell team. I’ve observed how the company has adapted to a changing world, not by following every fad, but by evaluating each new innovation from a business standpoint and then deciding whether or not it would have a long-term beneficial or detrimental effect on all of Sitesell’s subscribers.

I have observed how deeply focused the Sitesell team is on helping us succeed. They don’t just say it. They do it. Much of it for free.

The private, members-only Sitesell Forums are dedicated to helping and being helped, and I have observed more times than I can count or remember how SBIers help each other. Individuals on the Sitesell team offer their help, too, above and beyond their official duties.

This has been true, day in and day out, for years.

When I built my first SBI-powered site, in early 2004, things were very different from what they are, now. (I also have to admit that I thought I was something of an expert in building websites and I didn’t pay as close attention to the advice I got as I should have.)

The brainstormer was impressive and was a FileMaker runtime database that actually ran on our own computers, before being rebuilt to run entirely on Sitesell’s servers. That was a big change. It’s even better now, and the improvements that are planned for next year will be important improvements, also.

I don’t remember there being an Action Guide, although there probably was. I know, if it existed, it was nothing like what’s available now.

Until last year, I lived where there was no high speed Internet and I had a very, very slow dial-up connection. Last year, while I was too sick to work, I moved about four miles away to live with my daughter and her family, and jumped into the 21st century, complete with high-speed broadband. For the first time, I was introduced to video on the Internet and it changed my whole approach to using the ‘net. I discovered the video Action Guide and watched all of them, but remember almost none of it. My illness left me with some real memory problems, but that’s getting better, too.

I’ll be re-reading the Action Guide and re-watching the videos as I work though my site redesigns and expansion, next year. I’ll also use the action steps gleaned from a (recent members-only research) report to help guide me to making my sites as good as I can. It’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of time. It feels almost overwhelming when I look at the big picture, but I’ll take the tortoise path. One keyword, one page, one topic at a time — over a period of months and years. Each individual task is relatively simple.

I am more of a technogeek propellerhead than I am a businessman. I’ve been self-employed as a computer consultant, analyst, programmer, and SysAdmin since the late 1970s. I also taught people how to use and program computers at a couple of colleges along the way.

Over the last ten years, I mostly built websites for the fun of it. I did it for the achievement of overcoming the technical hurdles and creating sites that worked as I wanted. In most cases, the goal was not to earn more money, it was to revel in the joy of learning and doing.

As I said, I closed most of my websites and blogs and I’m changing my focus. Now, I’m more focused on business. I’ve gotten the joy of testing and tweaking out of my system and now I intend to earn a good living from the income produced by my sites.

6. I am moving from being wide and shallow to being narrow and deep.

For a decade or so, I was wide and shallow — lots of websites with not too much depth to any of them, except for a couple. I spent a lot of time on various forums and commenting on other people’s blogs. Although I enjoyed those activities, and they gave me something to do when I wasn’t able to focus on work, I was not building a business in the process. That was not an investment in my business.

It is important not to confuse busy-ness with business.

I actually believed the nonsense about having 100 sites producing $1 a day being a good way to earn $100 per day. Now, I know that this is ridiculous. That’s a whole lot of work to earn very little money. Now, I know that it’s much, much better to focus on a few sites and build them so that they attract thousands of readers and earn much more money.

7. Success is a process.

Of course, as all SBIers know, it takes a lot of thought and work to build an income-producing, niche-focused, original-content website. The Action Guide is a tremendous help, but important parts of building a successful online business can only be learned by doing what you think is best, and then adapting and improving the things that don’t work as well as expected.

I did not focus on my own business as much as I should have, but I will in 2012.

The planning is mostly done. The mind maps are created, the site blueprints are completed, copious notes have been written, and now I’m waiting on BB2 before I completely revamp my two SBI sites.

Even though I made some mistakes when I chose the niche for the first site, I’m going to work through the Action Guide and do my best to correct some of those mistakes and then proceed forward with a patched foundation.

My second SBI-powered site will be much easier to build and monetize.

8. I’m going to quit focusing on what SBI doesn’t do, and focus more on all that it offers.

This time, I’m going to stop fighting the things I didn’t like about SBI (the main one being no integrated blog module with commenting) and start fully using all the tools that ARE available.

It turns out that blogging is fun for me (busyness), but doesn’t produce any real income (business), so the lack of an integrated blog or forum module in SBI no longer bothers me. I’ve learned, after a decade of blogging, that I don’t make my money on my blogs or forums. I enjoy writing them, and sometimes enjoy the conversations in the comments, but the money is made on my websites, and that’s what I am going to focus upon next year.

I should also mention that it has seemed to me that it was easier to write a blog post using WordPress, Radio Userland, or Blogger than it was to write a comparable page using SBI.

There are a couple of reasons for this.

A. WordPress comes with an almost-WYSIWYG editor for writing the posts. It’s easier to write an ad hoc blog post. That’s more of a perception than a reality, however.

B. I put a lot more thought, research, and planning into writing a page on one of my SBI sites, because I knew more people would see it. That may be partly self-fulfilling prophesy, and it may be partly due to all the things that SBI does behind the scenes to make it easier for people to find a page.

When I first started using WordPress, it pretty much required knowledge of PHP in order to get anything done. Now, it’s much easier, but still takes more technical knowledge.

SBI templates offered fewer options with the basic block builder, but, a few years ago, they introduced the ability to upload pages built using any site design software. However, those of us who preferred using the block builder tool had fewer options. The introduction of block builder 2 (BB2) this month will make a huge difference in how we design and build our sites. It’ll still be easy for beginners, but will offer more options as SBIers learn more.

In reality, however, I believe this is mostly perception. What we gain in ease of use in modifying a blog, we lose in spending additional time researching plug-ins and dealing with other technical details.

Ease or difficulty aside, however, I have proof that my blogs did not earn as much and took much more time than my SBI sites — even though I largely neglected my SBI sites for over two years.

I’ve also quit focusing on wanting comments and conversations on my website pages. That’s been a sticking point for me for a long time. When I started focusing on the lack of this feature, I really believed that all the commenting and discussions I was having on multiple blogs (my own and others) was helping my business. Earlier this year, I stopped most of that, and neither my income nor the number of visitors to my sites dropped.

It turns out that commenting is not that important, after all. It is a fun social activity that I enjoy, but it does not produce more income. Maybe I should qualify that by saying that it didn’t produce more income for me. Your mileage may vary.

Now that I have Facebook commenting on my SBI sites, it has become a non-issue.

Once again, I was confusing busyness with business. They are not the same.

Also, by focusing on the lack of a feature I wanted, it dimished the usefulness of all the features that SBI provides. I learned that lesson a long time ago. I’m surprised that I had to re-learn it.

So, this old dog is going to learn some new tricks.

I’m going to forget about using PHP and PERL to accomplish things and I’ll adapt to the tools that SBI offers. The new reusable blocks feature of BB2, that makes server side includes available to people who use the block builder editor, will make it possible for me to do some things I’ve long wanted to do.

My first SBI site may never be a real moneymaker. It’s always paid its way and made a profit, however. My second SBI site is the one around which I’m rebuilding my marketing business.

9. It has taken me a long time, but I have finally proven to myself that SBI is the right choice for me. Not just another choice in my bag of tricks and tools — the best choice.

I feel comfortable in stating that I’ve tried most of the alternatives and they are all lacking — especially in performance.

If you hear that SBI is only for beginners who don’t know how to do the technical stuff, part of that is true. It is perfect for beginners, but it is also perfect for us old propellerheads who have been slinging computer code for decades and building websites for almost as long as there have been websites.

(I was building websites before the introduction of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. Before javascript. Before Google. Before websites could show graphics. When I still had to compile source code to build tools. When websites were listed in printed books. When I had to write CGI code in Perl or C to do any kind of animation or process forms. When I had to write my own program for building autoresponders. Before most people had even heard of the World Wide Web. I may not be great at it, but I’ve been doing it for quite some time.)

I admit that I am not a great business-person. I don’t have the knack for making big profits. I’m trying to learn how to do it. I think it’s probably a skill like any other, and even those of us who don’t have a natural talent can learn how to do better.

Ken Evoy has been a great mentor and I have learned a great deal from him. I haven’t implemented all that I learned as well as I could have and I’m going to remedy at least some of that.

He has also been a great inspiration. I admire his dedication, work ethic, intelligence, and ability to cut through the fog and keep things real. I look forward to learning more from him and putting that knowledge to work.

Unfortunately, it seems that I have learned how to write incredibly long posts from him, too. (grin)

10. SBI is a bargain.

Some of us have proven to ourselves that SBI offers a better way of building the kinds of sites we want to develop. Many of you have done much better with this than I have, but I intend to do better next year.

I won’t waste thousands of (more) hours on trying to prove to myself that SBI is the real deal. I’ve already done that. Yes, I learned a lot. Yes, I tested and proved to myself what works and what doesn’t. Yes, I learned all about the high cost of “free” websites.

And the price? $300 per year, per site?

That’s a bargain.

I know.

You have to look at the big picture. Sitesell is much more than a webhosting company.

SBI is not magic. It is not a magical Internet money machine on steroids.

SBI is an online business success toolkit, complete with detailed instructions that you can adapt to the niche of your choice. It comes complete with a set of tools that are unmatched in one service — anywhere. (Remember that there were no challengers in the recent $50,000 Sitesell challenge!) SBI offers a forum with a friendly, helpful atmosphere where fellow subscribers enjoy helping each other succeed.

Only for beginners? Not true.

Too expensive. Not true.

I still spend several hundred dollars every month for webhosting, email mailing services, domain names, and other expenses related to my online marketing business. Only $60 of that is for my two SBI sites. By comparison, they are a bargain. (In fact, I’m saving enough every year (by not renewing a lot of non-producing domain names) to pay the inexpensive cost of both SBI sites.

Later in 2012, I am seriously considering building two more websites powered by SBI. Both are profitable sites, currently, but I know I can create more revenue by taking the content off of those sites and building new sites using the tools that SBI provides. All I need is more time and energy.

I have a dream and I’ll act on achieving it in 2012 and beyond.

Act on your dream!

JD

I don’t remember how many weeks I spent on that project. It took awhile.

Now, the three blogs I intend to keep active are hosted on my domains and are powered by WordPress. You may be doing the same thing.

Over the intervening months, I’ve looked at a lot of plug-ins for my blogs and have tested a few. Now, I’ve settled into using about a dozen.

I’m still not thinking clearly enough to tackle real projects, but today I decided to update the plug-ins I’m using. All of them have been well-behaved in the past and I had few, or no, problems with them. That’s why they’ve survived the cut.

It’s been bugging me lately whenever I log into my dashboard and see plug-ins that need updating. Today, when I sat down to write a new blog post (on a topic that I have completely forgotten about now), I saw that nine plug-ins needed updating.

In a fit of uncharacteristic trust that computers and software can be modified without any side-effects, I updated all of them at the same time. After 30 years of programming and using computers, you would think I’d know better.

I was actually going to write about the topic of this blog — affiliate marketing — and that was shot down.

After the system did its thing and updated the nine plug-ins, my blog immediately started loading pages incredibly slowly. The pages have been taking two or three seconds to load, but all of a sudden, it was taking half-a-minute, if they even loaded completely.

So, I turned off all my active plug-ins. (At least, I was thinking clearly enough to stop, pull out a pen and paper, and write a list of all the plug-ins that were activated. I have about as many that are not activated, but which I want to test when I’m up to it.)

The pages loaded very quickly, on the order of a second or two.

So, over the next hour, I activated each plug-in separately and observed the load time of the home page and a long blog post. With each plug-in that I activated, the load time slowed.

I tried prioritizing them. I deactivated the lowest priority and activated those at the top of the list. Still too slow.

Eventually, I found a mix that more-or-less works. In the process, I lost some functionality I wanted, but have a blog that is functional and not too slow. It’s slower than I want, but it’s workable.

I know better.

Really, I do.

Did I back everything up before updating.

No.

Silly me.

Did I set aside a few hours, in case I ran into problems?

No.

Did I do the updates on an impulse, knowing I had to leave home and run some errands?

Yes.

Did I get the blog post written that I originally set out to write?

No.

Is it the fault of WordPress? Partially.

Is it the fault of the plug-in programmers? Partially.

Is it my fault? Partially, but I accept full responsibility for making and implementing the decision.

It is a never-ending cycle of upgrading WordPress and the plug-ins I choose to use. It is getting tiresome. I don’t find it interesting these days.

It’s getting in the way of getting real work done.

After a couple of hours of working through this, I’m actually a couple of steps behind where I was before I started. In other words, I took a couple of steps backwards today.

That will not get me closer to achieving my goals.

I didn’t write the post I set out to write. That won’t get me any closer to earning more money.

It has been a wasted opportunity.

Sigh.

Why do so many blogs have posts from “Admin” rather than a real person?

How can we tell if “Admin” is a person or a robot?

I was reading a blog this morning, and I’m pretty sure that it was written by a real person, but I could find no information on who that person might be. No name, no “About Us” page, no nothing.

So, instead of subscribing to the RSS feed (as I was about to do), I moved along and probably won’t go back.

If you’re putting so much effort into blogging or building a website, why don’t you put some effort into sharing who you are and what you’re all about?

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

He said:

Hi John, I had a look at your Squidoo page and I must say it is very impressive. I have heard of Squidoo and lenses and such but never really looked into them. It seems like another blogging platform but I assume there is a difference?

Hi Sire, thanks for the kind words about my Squidoo page for this blog:

21st Century Affiliate Marketing

Squidoo is not a blogging platform, but it works well with blogs. I try to build a Squidoo lens for each of my blogs for one specific reason: I can syndicate the RSS feed on the lens and Google likes Squidoo lenses. That means that some people may find my blog indirectly via the lens I create on Squidoo.

Squidoo is more of a simple webpage builder and they call each page a lens because the object is to focus on a single topic per page.

You may understand Squidoo a bit more if you read my lens at:

Marketing With Squidoo

That lens syndicates the feed from this blog, my social networking community for Squidoo lensmasters who enjoy marketing, and my blog specifically about marketing with Squidoo.

It also links to other lenses that have information about marketing using Squidoo.

You can build as many (or as few) lenses as you want and it’s always free. In fact, if you build lenses that attract visitors and get clicks, you can earn money from your lenses. Some very few people earn over $1,000 per month; a few dozen lensmasters earn around $100 per month; and most of us earn less than that. Your earnings come from sharing with Squidoo the commissions from Adsense and Glam ads on your lens.

I get a welcome deposit from Squidoo into my PayPal account every month.

Since you already have several blogs, perhaps you could start by building a lens about the main topic of one of your blogs.

You can get started here:

Join Squidoo and start building your own lenses.

But, I earn much more than the payment I get directly from Squidoo, because I promote affiliate links on my lenses and don’t have to share the proceeds from those commissions with Squidoo.

I also promote my CafePress shop on a few of my lenses and link back to some of my websites on other lenses.

So, I use Squidoo both as a traffic generator and as another profit center. It’s also great at cross-promoting lenses, blogs, forums, websites, social networking sites, and other web presences that share common themes and topics.

If you have a blog and you’d like Google to pay more attention, you may want to build a lens about the blog’s main topic and syndicate your RSS feed on the lens. You can also recommend books and other products from Amazon.com.

You can even recommend products from CafePress without having to join their affiliate program, but you’ll be sharing the commissions with Squidoo. It’s worth it because the CafePress module makes it so easy to promote the products you like on CafePress. There are thousands of shopkeepers selling their designs on CafePress and you can select from millions of product/design combinations.

Once a lens is built, it doesn’t take a lot of work to keep it current, and your blog’s feed is automatically updated on the lens on a schedule you can choose, i.e. every hour, every six hours, etc.

Another thing you can do to build interactivity into your lens is to add a guestbook, set up polls, start a duel (conversation/argument), and there are other modules that are of interest, too.

There are a lot of things you can do with Squidoo easily that are more difficult on a blog. I think the two of them work very well together.

Again, you can learn more, if you’re still interested at:

Marketing With Squidoo

I hope that helps you get the idea of what you can do with Squidoo.

One other lens you may want to visit is my lensography, where I write about my lenses, link to some of my blogs, show my Twitter tweets, and more:

Who is John Dilbeck?

If you have any other questions, I’d be happy to do my best to answer them or refer you to another site with the answers.

I almost forgot. There is a social networking aspect to Squidoo where you can meet other highly-motivated lensmasters and help cross-promote each others’ sites, lenses, and blogs.

For example every time you add a quality comment to another lensmaster’s lens, you’ll get a link back to your lensmaster page.

Then there is the ability for a visitor to your site to join your fan club. Whenever you post a SquidCast about your lens, people in your fan club and anyone who has marked that lens as their favorite will see the SquidCast on their favorites page at Squidoo.

You can even get a chicklet to show how many fans you have and it links to your lensmaster page:

A lens is like a blog in one respect. Each time you publish your lens (after the initial build or whenever it is updated), you can send what is called a SquidCast, but which is really a posting that is added to the lens’ RSS feed. Then you can ping that update to spread the word among the large RSS aggregators.

Of course, the SquidCast is also shown on the favorites page of your fans and the people who favorited that lens. It is also promoted on the Squidcast Twitter feed.

So, there are a lot of reasons to include Squidoo as an integral part of your marketing mix, even if you are a blogger or webmaster, already.

And, don’t forget, you don’t have to join Squidoo because you want to make money. You can build your lenses on the topics of your choice, so tell your stories, publish your poems, or show photos of your kids and pets.

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.

Act on your dream!

JD

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

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

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

While I still feel comfortable recommending it as a useful tool that works exactly as advertised, I’m not sure it’s the tool I want to use for notifying my Twitter followers about new posts on this blog.

So, based on a recommendation by thefluffanutta, I’m now testing Twitter Tools to see if it does a better job of what I want.

So far, I’ve tested three widgets to show my Tweets in the blog’s sidebar. I’ve used the code provided by Twitter, the widget from TweetMyBlog, and the Twitter Tools widget. Of these three, I think the Twitter Tools widget is much better.

This post will be the first one that is automatically tweeted by Twitter Tools, so I won’t know what I think of it until I’ve used it more.

I’ve expanded my Squidoo lens, Should You Tweet Your Blog, a great deal today. Now, rather than just focusing upon TweetMyBlog, I’m thinking more about the process of automatically having your blog post to Twitter whenever you post to your blog.

Is this a good idea or not?

So, I’ve added several new polls and another duel where you are free to express your opinion. I’ve also added a Plexo link list so you can link to your blog, in addition to the link list that was already on the lens for linking to your Twitter profile.

If you have a few minutes, I hope you’ll visit Should You Tweet Your Blog and post your opinions and comments.

I’m still not sure which tool I’ll use to tweet my new blog posts, if I use any at all.

I may revert to tweeting manually. I don’t know, yet.

What do you think?

Act on your dream!

JD

I followed quite a few people, and now I’m pruning the ones that don’t really match my interests.

I’ve been trying to tweet more often, but I don’t really want to say anything unless I think it may be useful for the people who follow me.

When Squidoo added a feature that lets us tweet when we update a lens, I started using that as judiciously as I could. I certainly don’t tweet every time I update a lens. I do try to tweet the release of a new lens, however.

Then, I learned about Tweet My Blog, a new plug-in and widget recently released by John Merrick and Soren Jordansen.

I downloaded and installed it on this blog and everything was smooth and easy to do.

So, I’m testing it here, but haven’t decided if it should earn a permanent home, yet.

In order to get more feedback and opinions, I created a new Should you tweet your blog? lens on Squidoo.

If you are interested in tweeting about new blog posts, I hope you’ll take a few minutes and visit the lens. I would appreciate any feedback you’d care to make.

Act on your dream!

JD

I just learned about Merchant Circle a few days ago and I’ve jumped all over using their system. You can see the profile I’ve created for Dilbeck Marketing on Merchant Circle. I’ve taken the time to use most of the tools and love their system.

(Your business is listed at Merchant Circle, right? If not, you can create a professional looking online listing for your business with our easy to use tools. Free! – MerchantCircle.com.)

There are probably other things you can do at Merchant Circle that I haven’t discovered in the less-than-a-week that I’ve been a member of the site.

What you may, or may not, already know is that every time you blog, create a coupon, upload a photo, or post a newsletter, these things are added to a newsfeed for you, automatically.

At the top-right of your listing, you’ll see “Subscribe to blog and coupon feed” followed by an orange chicklet that says “RSS/XML.” This is a standard news feed that can be syndicated on many services and can be read by anyone using a news feed aggregator or a news reader. Even without sending emails you are broadcasting to the world – potentially.

I’ll write a post later to explain more about making use of this. For now, suffice it to say that you can blog in one place and have it automatically republished in multiple places. This makes it very powerful for getting your news out.

If you don’t know anything about RSS, let me suggest that you read What is RSS?.

One place you may want to syndicate your feed is at Squidoo.com.

To do this, you’ll need to be a member.

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.

Of course, you’re an expert on your business, so join Squidoo and create a lens about it. It’s worth the effort to learn how to build free lenses on Squidoo, and it’s a perfect place to syndicate your Merchant Circle news feed.

For example, I’ve created a Squidoo lens about Merchant Circle and I’ve syndicated (re-published) my news feed and Merchant Circle’s news feed on that lens.

Also, as part of that lens, I’ve created a list where you can add a link to the Merchant Center listing for your business. I will be syndicating that list on some of my other websites, so you’ll get free advertising just by adding your link to the list. If you don’t understand, just comment on this topic and I’ll see what I can do to help you.

Act on your dream!

JD