Seven To Ten

You have heard of Twitter but don’t know what it is. Don’t worry, you are not alone.

You can think of Twitter as a social network but it is less rigid than Digg or StumbleUpon. The system allows you to create you own micro communities, and your actions inside those communities will not affect people outside of them. Every member behaves in a haphazard manner and there is no control over what happens to anyone at any point of time.

The basic concept is a winner: each user has the right to decide who he will follow, who will be able to follow him, and what micro communities he will join. You can’t go wrong with democracy right?

Suppose now, you start a marketing campaign on Twitter, users not following you will not notice your existence, while those who are following can simply remove the follow to stop receiving your nuisance messages. But if your promotional messages are done right, your fans will still follow you.

Some people have taken to using Twitter as a micro blogging tool. Others use it as an instant messaging utility. Others yet use the tool to promote their websites, and some people are even trying to sell their Twitter accounts on eBay!

Be creative and you can think of even more ways to use Twitter. There are immense financial rewards if you do become the next Twitter king.

Advertisers have to lower their expectations when it comes to alexa ranking. John Chow reported on his site a change in ranking system by alexa.

Like everybody else, his blog is affected but he has little complaints. Because his blog has been established to such a popularity level that PR and alexa ranking doesn’t hurt his earnings any more.

Previously, Alexa only consider users who downloaded and installed alexa toolbar. This did not sufficiently capture the traffic data as certain segments, like make money or affiliate marketing tend to show higher alexa ranking than technology websites where the users are more savvy and believe the alexa toolbar to be nothing more than a piece of spyware.

No doubt, the change is a positive move as the ranking is now a more accurate reflection of internet traffic for blogs and websites. But as bloggers, we have to do more promotion and marketing to drive traffic which can help us to push or even maintain the existing alexa ranking.

At this point of time, I think advertisers who strictly look at alexa ranking to determine a blog’s popularity have to appreciate the change, else a lot of websites may suffer as a result.

I do not like clutter and the first impression I get from a site must be its cleanliness and user-friendliness. Loud, colorful banners and oft-centered pages really get on my nerves.

My sidebar is still pretty empty and it will be staying like that for a while. It may make the blog look empty and uninteresting but I always believe less is more. Unless your blog is really popular, you can get away with a lot of things, like John Chow.

The advertisements there have taken up all his available prime space but I doubt he is maxxed out yet. He will certainly be coming up with ever more creative ways to increase advertising revenue from his blog. Take a leaf from him if you want to know how to monetize your site. Earning over $30,000 per month is simply amazing.

Yes, the ads make for slow loading but his content is fresh and useful, so I don’t mind visiting his blog every few days. For smaller blogs, the amount of ads

We cannot do without friends if we want to succeed on the net, whether as a blogger or an affiliate marketer. Investing your time in any social community will pay off in the long run. Social networks are the rave right now, not without good reason.

I believe they can replace forums in the long run as members prefer to hang out there to discuss their favorite topics. There are so many activities going on at the same time, making new friends, renewing old friendship, uploading photos albums, joining or creating groups, blog posting, live chatting and listening to latest mp3 hits.

I already know of Stumble, Digg, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, etc. The new kid on the block is 3GB Community. I found about them through the buzz built by other bloggers.

In order to penetrate an already saturated market, new upstarts have to differentiate themselves. 3GB has several unique features, one of which is a radio station. It allows members to listen to albums of their favorite stars.

Another interesting aspect is their focus on the Arabic community around the world. Since the primary language is English, members from Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, etc will love the 3GB as they understand English well.

I love the live chat feature and also the way you can separate friends into family, co-worker, etc. This is especially useful when you have hundreds or thousands of friends - you will appreciate the effort to organize them into various friend categories.

If you have time to spare, then join 3gb community 3gb.biz today and be among the early pioneers.

Though times are tough now, Americans believe the economy will bounce back by next year. A poll showed 60% of respondents think economic conditions in the United States will be “good” next year.

Most people realize that the economy has cycles of ups and downs. Fortunately, the last two recessions were some of the shortest on record, so in 2009 we should be pulling up out of this. Most Americans feel the economists are right.

83% said they are “confident” of maintaining their standards of living next year, and 85% are “confident” they will keep their jobs over the next six months. Consumers also showed faith that they would be able to pay off their future debts, with 90% of respondents demonstrating confidence they would be able to meet their monthly mortgage payments for the duration of the mortgage.

Other debts like college loans, car payments, and credit cards are in no danger of being defaulted too. The average amount of credit card debt of those polled was $4,000. The Fed’s rate cuts will start to take their toll later this year, and hopefully, the economy should bounce back by the end of 2008.

I heard that eBay has stopped taking new submissions for their affiliate program at commission junction and is starting their own affiliate program from 1^st April 2008. You can register for the new program at http://affiliates.ebay.com from 1^st April onwards.

eBbay’s official launch is over here.

There are more reasons out there why affiliate marketers fail. We will explore it later, here are two more…

Promoting Only One Product

Some affiliates promote only one product and the readers/customers are not given enough options to choose from. There is also the risk of generating fewer sales, it is always better to give them a few alternatives than to give them only one.

Promoting Too Many Products

The converse is equally true. Promoting too many products can harm your affiliate business. Customers become confused and end up not making a choice at all. They depend on your recommendations and if you say everything is good, they may not trust your judgment.

Understanding some of the common mistakes affiliates make can dispel the gloom about this affiliate business. There are certain dos and donts, just like in any industry, if you want to make your effort count.

Lack of Knowledge

Lack of knowledge concerning principles in their business refers to the affiliate’s knowledge of search engines in particular.

Affiliate marketing involves advertising, and advertising through the internet could not have been better without the existence of search engines. What every affiliate has to do is to make these search engines his best friend through studying search engine optimization closely.

This way, he is able to know what to do in connection with building a better website to ultimately use for his business.

Banner Stuffing

It is a waste of time and space if affiliates just stuff their sites with banners but do not provide enough information about the product at hand. The best way to battle this mistake is to provide good content to accompany such banners.

It is important for customers to know and understand the features of a product, and good content will be able to help them realize this goal.

There are many reasons why people buy products. But usually, it is to satisfy at least one of two things: wants and needs. This is important if you are in the affiliate marketing business.

Basic human needs usually involves a staple or necessity for survival or safety. Wants are luxuries that we desire. We don’t necessarily need them but we want them. We have an urge to have them.

As an affiliate marketer must be willing to learn more. Certainly, there are still a lot of things to learn and so an affiliate marketer must continue to educate himself so he can improve his marketing strategies.

Many fail because they don’t grow in the business and they are merely concerned about earning big quickly. If you want long-term and highly satisfactory results, take time to learn the ins and outs of the business.

Continue to improve your knowledge especially with the basics in affiliate marketing ranging from advertising to programming, web page development, and search engine optimization techniques.

Likewise, study the needs and wants of your site users and how different merchandisers compete with each other.

Remember to keep on trying; don’t get disappointed if your first attempts did not pay off. Thousands are attracted by the possibility of generating skyrocketing incomes through affiliate marketing and so they sign up in any affiliate program without carefully understanding every aspect of the business.

When they don’t get instant results, they quit and sign up for another program and repeat the process of just copying links and referring them to others. When you sign up for an affiliate program, don’t expect to get rich in an instant. Work on your advertising strategies and be patient. You’ll never know how much you can get if you don’t persevere.