Seven To Ten

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.

There is a fine line between email marketing and spam. You have to be careful when you are using this strategy to promote your products or services, else you get on the wrong side of the law. The main thing is to tie up with a reputable email marketing agency.

I have browsed through this website, iContact, and it looks impressive with a cliente boasting Fortune 500 companies (like Bank of America, Ford, Nissan, Super 8 Motel) and 183,865 users.

iContact has a user-friendly interface, over 300 professionally designed email templates, and also include, at no additional cost, surveying, autoresponder, and blogging tools to allow businesses to interact with prospects, customers, and subscribers.

Sending out email newsletters is effective since they provide a near perfect inbox deliverability. You can also add a sign-up form to your web site, segment your list, and manage your subscribers. The application allows you to track email performances (opens and clickthroughs) in real time with their charts.

Basic monthly prices start at $9.95, increasing proportionally with your list size. For corporations, they offer an Enterprise product that starts at $660/month.

As a blogger, I think this service is useful in pushing my product to a wide audience. Since emarketing is such a sensitive issue, I prefer to leave it to the pros, put it on autopilot and get great deliverability.

The monthly fee may put some people off especially when there is no revenue in the early days but you can try it out for a few months, once the traffic starts coming in, you can decide to continue with the service or not. By the way, there is a 15 day free trial of iContact. Check out the site today!

What is a blog carnival? Think of an event where a lot of people gather for the fun and entertainment. A blog carnival is not too far away from that.

As a blogger, you need links and in a blog carnival, you will find an array links pointing to blog posts about a niche topic. Usually, there are many editions of a blog carnival, and every week, different blogs will host it. It is easy to participate, as an example, go to the Blog Carnival website, browse around for relevant topics and submit your entries.

This is a simple yet effective method to promote your blog when you are starting out. The carnivals will give you exposure in the form of high quality relevant traffic and back links. Additionally it will also give you the possibility to interact with fellow bloggers.

I have wondered why some posts get digged more than others. It seems that there are groups of digg users who help some articles to score and get onto the front page.

I first knew about their presence from forums and you can join these groups and send articles to them for some digging. Bloggers can benefit from the exposure in terms of adsense earnings, traffic, subscribers, alexa ranking, back links, etc.

Certainly, this is manipulation of articles (and even cheating) to gain popularity, but I found that the standard of diggs have not decreased substantially as a result. There is a bury button if you do not like the article for either its junk or excessively-promotional content. Overall, I still enjoy the home page reads. What is your experience of digg?

I just love this letter from Playgirl to former New York governor, Eliot Spitzer. A good does of humor on the back of a scandal…

Playgirl is offering Spitzer a $1 million deal to strip naked and pose for their magazine. This is not something to be sniffed at. That guy’s political career is over; and he is out of job, may be in debt soon.

For Playgirl, it is a win-win situation. Even if Spitzer says no, the amount of free publicity is already tremendous, considering it is just a simple but creative press release.

And if Spitzer says yes, wooh, the shit hit the fan. This will be the best selling issue of Playgirl, lots of advertisers and future subscribers - worth much, much more than the $1 million dollar paycheck. I know, because my wife told me she will love to see Spitzer in the buff too…

Yesterday, I mentioned about the slump in retail. Consumer spending is low, besides all the poor economic news, there is the sky-high prices of commodities, what else is there left to spend on retail at the end of each month? Daily staples take a priority to material needs now.

At this time, if you are in retail, breaking out of tradition and offering a unique experience to customers is the way to go. Conducting more research to find out the popular products and what your competitors are doing are also important. As part of your research, I believe joining online communities is an excellent idea.

Just as an example, over at Style Hive, you can find a community of fashion lovers. Style Hive is not regarded as the worlds’ largest social shopping community for nothing - you can join their interesting forum discussions, get to follow cool people and plug into the latest global shopping trends. You know which items are the hottest finds by the number of hives (saves).

In this page, you can snoop in on the latest handbag craze. It indicates all the hot handbags found, “hived”, and tagged “handbag” by all the shopping fanatics within the Stylehive community. A list of the most popular handbags over the last month is also available.

For active contributers, start building your own community today by bookmarking and adding your favorite items to your wishlist. Alternatively, send, blog or comment on the items to let other members know what you think.

If you are knowledgeable about fashion, or more specifically handbags, your contributions will be appreciated and I am sure you will have a strong group of following in no time… last I check, some of the popular members have more than 5000 followers. When it comes to social networks, always remember that the more effort you put in, the more you will receive at the end of the day.

I was getting bored with surfing the web yesterday and suddenly have the inspiration to look up websites where I can download some computer games to while away some free time. I own a Macintosh so naturally I have to download mac games.

The website I came upon was Mac Games and the home page shows a list of apple games and their respective prices. A wide range of categories is available, from Action, Adventure, Cards/Casinos/Boards, Kids & Learning, Puzzle/Logic, Simulation, Sports, etc.

Some of the downloads are free while others are shareware games, which are essentially free demos for you to get a taste of the action. If you enjoy playing the teasers, then go for the full game versions (or non-demos) which you can purchase for a small fee.

I am surprised the site is so simple or rather “barren,” unlike other game sites which are cluttered with fanciful banners and interesting graphics. I have downloaded two mac games: Planet Tycoon and Build a lot. I think the money spent is worth it since my kid is addicted to them already.

A new form of marketing has been tailored for the mass of unsold home inventories and foreclosures. A Foreclosure Bus Tour….

It is a six-hour trip to showcase homes to buyers in Orlando and educate them on the vagaries of snatching foreclosures in a state where residential real estate has stagnated over the past two years.

The foreclosure bus tours are good value for visitors. A cost of $45 per person or $65 per couple covered the tour, house information, teaching sessions, a continental breakfast and lunch at Applebee’s. A mortgage broker, attorney, home inspector and agent are on hand to advise; for newbies, you get a feel of the team you need to set up for your first foray into real estate.

Real estate agents have also organized foreclosure bus tours in California, where the idea seems to have originated, and cities such as Phoenix, Detroit, Kansas City and Jacksonville.

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.