21st Century Affiliate Marketing

In the last day or so - I don’t know exactly when - Squidoo released a new Workshop editor for editing lenses.

I didn’t know about it until I was editing a couple of lenses yesterday and there it was. Everything looked totally different, and for a moment I wasn’t sure what to do.

So, I did what I normally do. I started poking around to see what would happen when I clicked on things.

In just a few minutes, I felt pretty comfortable with the new editor and started liking it.

Many things are much faster. It looks like they’re using more AJAX to speed things up.

Although I haven’t tried adding a module or changing the order of the modules on a lens, it looks like the new system will be faster. I’m going to try that later today.

Well, why wait? Hang on a second while I go edit a lens and republish it…

I have a lens about Ken Evoy that hasn’t been updated in a long time. So, let’s update it.

Ken’s role at Sitesell changed in 2008, so I wanted to add a text module for updates.

With the old Workshop, I’d have to click on the Add Modules link, go to a completely different page, add the modules I wanted, drag them to the correct order, and then go back to the editor. That took some time, especially for people on dialup connections.

With the new Workshop, I just went to the right column and clicked the plus sign next to Text module. At the bottom of the list, I clicked Add. That’s it. I wanted to change the position of the module, so I went to the next section in the right column, Reorder Modules, and dragged the title of the new text module to where I wanted it. When I clicked the Apply button, the page reloaded with the new module right where I wanted it. This was much faster than the previous method.

Once I had the new text module where I wanted, it was just a matter of writing the content and visiting a couple of sites to get the proper URLs.

Done.

Publishing the lens worked as expected and it’s now live in its updated form: Ken Evoy.

Everything that I tried worked great, but there is one thing that is a bit irritating.

I’m using a Mac and Firefox 2.

At the top of the new Workshop, there is a gray section across the top that has links to several things related to the lens, including the Publish button.

For some reason, that section deactivates the scroll bar and the scroll up button. Now, I’m an old dinosaur and I prefer the scroll arrows on each end of the scrollbar, and not next to each other. As a result of the changes in the new Workshop, I can’t scroll up by using the up arrow. This really bugged me, at first. Then I found a workaround. All I have to do is click in the scroll down part of the bar until the scroll button (what used to be called the Thumb) is below that gray section. Then, I can drag the thumb back up to find the part of the page I want to see. It’s a bit annoying, but easy enough to work around.

All things considered, I like the new Workshop. I’m sure they’ll get the bugs worked out in the next few days.

So, what do you think?

I’m looking forward to your thoughts and comments.

Act on your dream!

JD

From the introduction of the lens:

Welcome to the 2008 Giant Squid Awards! We’ve hand picked over 100 Giants in 15 Categories for you to vote on along with “Best Lensography” and “Giant Squid of the Year”.

PS - Everyone can vote! So blog, e-mail, create a lens and get creative about getting votes for yourself and your favorite lenses.

Vote Now for the 2008 Giant Squid Awards

Act on your dream!

JD

Do you want to get started in social networking, but don’t have the time or expertise needed to do it yourself? Now, you don’t have to. You can have your lenses built and promoted and then transferred to you, all in a couple of weeks or so.

Tiffany Dow and Lewis Smile - experts on Squidoo - are now at your service.

Who are they?

Here’s part of what Tiffany has to say about herself and her qualifications…

I know how to get into the Top 100 LensRank, how to create content both Googlebots and human traffic devour (since I’ve been the top ghostwriter to many famous marketers over the past 6 years), and how to use group participation to garner traffic! I’ve achieved lens of the day for an instant flood of traffic and I’ve earned tens of thousands of dollars using Squidoo as my traffic funnel to products and services alike.

Seth Godin (owner of Squidoo) even blogged about my Squidoo success on his own blog! Plus, I’ve been bestowed with Giant Squid Status!

Lewis talks about his qualifications and says this (and more)…

He’s a Citizen Squid Alumni (one of the 6 original lensmasters chosen by Squidoo HQ to work on secret Squidoo projects). He is also a retired SquidAngel (one of the 12 human elements of the Squidoo algorithm).

He has achieved Lens of the Day THREE TIMES, which is more than anyone else, so he knows exactly what it takes to make a great lens. In total, his lenses have spent over 600+ days in the Top 100 LensRank list, and he has achieved the elusive Lensrank 1.

And he has created over 500 lenses and groups across various Squidoo accounts, so he’s no stranger to the ‘Create a Lens’ button! Lewis is also a Giant Squid. Oh, and he recently won the ‘I Love Squidoo’ competition.

Even if you don’t know anything about Giant Squids, Squid Angels, or Citizen Squids, you can appreciate the talents of anyone who can compete with over a quarter-million people building lenses on Squidoo and still get in the top 100 of all lenses based on a number of criteria that isn’t known outside the people who own and manage Squidoo.com.

Anyone who can achieve what Tiffany and Lewis have, obviously know what they’re doing.

They’ve been developing their skills for building Squidoo lenses for a combined total of over four years and almost 1,000 lenses.

Now, as someone who has built about 70 lenses and who has been working on it a couple of years or so, I can tell you that there is a difference between building a lens - which anyone can do - and building a lens that ranks highly, attracts visitors, promotes your business, and earns money.

I’m a Giant Squid, too, but I haven’t achieved the kind of success that Tiffany and Lewis have. I’m still working on it, however!

Now, you don’t have to develop the skillset, do the research, write original content, build the lens, and promote it. You can outsource these tasks to a couple of specialists who will combine their talents and do it for you.

As they say…

So - you want to get into social networking, but don’t have room in your busy schedule to navigate a new site and set up your system of socialization?

Who has the time, knowledge and skill to set up a Squidoo lens, write 100% unique content, bookmark it at social bookmarking sites, add tags, blog about it, post it to Twitter, and generate some backlinks, to give it the best chance possible at pulling you visitors from Google and other search engines to funnel them to your main site as customers?

As a successful business owner, you already know the value of outsourcing tasks that require special skills, qualifications, and talent. That’s why you have a lawyer, accountant, copywriter, and other specialists on your team.

If you want to develop a better presence on the web, you should consider hiring Tiffany and Lewis to do it for you, in as little as two weeks.

Don’t put this off. Go right now and see what they will do to build your lens for you. It doesn’t cost a single penny to click the link and see what they have to say.

Act on your dream!

JD

PS. On the other hand, if you prefer to learn new skills and do your own promotions, you can build your own Squidoo lens and tell the world. It’s free.

Click the link to get started. Don’t get stressed out about your first lens. Build it on something you love and learn how Squidoo works. If you like it, you can keep it. If not, you can delete it and use what you learned to build a real lens.

Feel free to play with the first one just to learn how it all works.

Aussie Sire asked a question on one of my twitter update posts and suggested that I rewrite my reply as a blog post. I think that’s a great idea.

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

After installing TweetMyBlog a couple of days ago and testing it, I found some things I like and dislike about it.

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’ve been thinking a lot about Twitter.com lately. The better I fine tune the people I’m following, the more useful information and interactions that I get from my friends on Twitter.

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

On July 17, 2008, Gery Carson announced the introduction of the SFI Marketing Group “affiliate to affiliate” (A2A) system.

Now, SFI affiliates can meet other SFI affiliates all over the world, or in their local neighborhood.

Hundreds of affiliates have already registered and I’ve had the pleasure of meeting some people that I hope will become friends over time.

I wrote more about this on my SFI Marketing Group Affiliates lens. (This lens has been deleted.)

(Update August 2009: Affiliate link removed, as I no longer promote SFI Marketing Group.)

One of the drawbacks at the moment is trying to find people I know who have already registered. There is no feature for searching by screen name and there are no plans for being able to search by actual name, so, unless someone you know tells you their profile page link or the screen name they chose to use with A2A, it’s going to be difficult or impossible to find them.

To make this easier for me, I’ve added a new module on the SFI Marketing Group Affiliates lens so you can add a link to your SFI A2A profile page - if you want to.

While you’re at the lens, I hope you’ll answer the polls, participate in the duel, and leave your comments or feedback.

Act on your dream!

JD

I just created a new 21st Century Affiliate Marketing lens on Squidoo to work with this blog.

By cross-promoting between this blog and that lens, more people will eventually find their way to read what I have to say about affiliate marketing in the 21st century. I’m syndicating the RSS feed from this blog on that lens.

I’ve been running my affiliate marketing business for several years and I’ve watched the nature of the business change. Now, there is much more competition, more things to divert your attention and drain your bank account, and, also, more quality affiliate marketing opportunities for you.

There are also a lot of “me, too” products that don’t add anything worthwhile to what’s already available. One of the struggles is to provide quality information and insight that’s not available everywhere on the net.

The area I choose to target, which is very highly competitive, includes tools and resources to help affiliate marketers promote their products and services online. It’s a hard niche in which to compete, but my interests lie mainly in building a home business and helping others to do the same.

I’m sure you can make more money, more easily, by concentrating your affiliate marketing efforts in other less-competitive niches. In fact, I know that’s true, but I’ve not been able to find a niche that interests me nearly as much as this one.

So, I’ll write about things I learn about affiliate marketing and pass them along to help you.

I’ll also be pointing to other high-quality affiliate marketers and they’ll help you, too.

You won’t find me promoting the latest “flash-in the pan” product just so I can reach into your pocket and take money out of your wallet. That’s just not my style. I know I’ll earn less by not being a ruthless promoter of all things, but I think I’ll live better with myself by only promoting products and services that I know are worth buying.

I’ve tested hundreds and only promote a few.

So, I welcome your comments here on this blog and on my new 21st Century Affiliate Marketing lens. Go to the lens and vote in the polls and have your say in the duel. I hope you’ll take the time to rank the lens and leave your comments. You’ll need to be a logged-in Squidoo member to participate on the lens.

It’s a brand new lens and I’ll be updating it considerably over the next few weeks.

Also, I’ve been testing several dozen blogs and I’ll be closing most of them. This blog will become one of my top two blogs and may eventually become my primary blog.

Currently, my primary blog is John Dilbeck and Friends and is powered by Manilla from Userland Software, which was the best platform I could find when I started it. However, over time, WordPress has overtaken it and offers more features and easier customization, so I’ll be evaluating if I should move my primary emphasis to this blog.

I updated this blog to WordPress 2.6 earlier today and like what I see.

I also added a new plug-in called Tweet My Blog which should post an update to Twitter whenever I post a new article to the blog. This post will be the first test of the plug-in and I’m not ready to promote or recommend it at this time, but it looks promising.

That’s one of the things I can’t easily do with my older blog.

(You are invited to follow me on Twitter.)

So, this may be a time of transition and consolidation for me as I close other blogs and websites and concentrate more on what works the best to build my marketing business.

Maybe some of what I learn will help you build your business, too.

Although I’m a social liberal, I’m a fiscal conservative and I hate wasting my money. You probably hate wasting your money, too.

The object of affiliate marketing is to earn money, and the goal is to earn more than you spend - preferably considerably more.

The art is to evaluate and recommend appropriate products and services to the right group of people.

Now that my multi-year testing and experimentation phase is coming to an end, I look forward to working just as hard, but focusing my efforts more on high-quality products that produce reliable revenue rather than testing everything that comes down the pipeline.

I welcome your comments and questions, and if I don’t know the answer, I’ll do what I can to help you find it.

Act on your dream!

JD

I recently created a new lens for our Squidoo Marketing Community at Squidoo.com.

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

Are you a lensmaster on Squidoo?

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