TJantunen.com

Blog isn’t just ideal for generating advertising revenue, it is good for affiliate marketing as well. I know that many bloggers have done well in advertising but not in affiliate marketing.

Successful affiliate marketing through blog can provide you a great source of revenue. So if you are blogging for cash, you certainly want to learn about how to promote affiliate programs on your blog effectively.

Andrew Hansen from NicheBloggingInstitute.com will be holding a completely free, content packed Live webinar presentation on how to quickly build your affiliate income using simple blogs and only free traffic methods on this Thursday. Andrew will talk about one hour in the webinar, giving useful information and tips about making money with affiliate marketing through blog. You may also chat with Andrew and ask anything you like after the presentation.

This is a free webinar that worth joining because you can learn a lot about blogging and affiliate marketing. If you like to join, you may go to https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/991854474 to register for the event.

from Make Money Online

Guest Post by Shane

Whether you sell expensive items on eBay or low cost merchandise, how you market the item is what ultimately determines the success or failure your listings may have.

This does not mean you should start placing ads all over the internet; you want to keep your marketing at the eBay website. The truth of the matter is that whenever you list an item on eBay, that auction actually becomes your automated marketing campaign.

Determining the value of your item should be your top priority and this is done in three different ways. Following this step will help you in deciding what your reserve price is going to be. (This being the lowest amount you’re willing to accept for your item on eBay) You first have to find out what the real market value is for that expensive item you have. You do this by researching similar items that have already ended and seeing what those items sold for. Lastly, you need to figure out what the real value of the item is to you. Once you have all this information it should be easy to determine and establish what the lowest amount that you would be willing to sell the item for is.

Now you will set your reserve price while setting your opening bid as well. The opening bid should be no greater than $50 no matter how high you set your reserve. In essence you are using a great marketing tactic where you will offer an item worth thousands of dollars at a low starting bid of $50 or less. This will guaranteed that you attract and bring in many potential buyers looking to steal a deal. The catch is that since you have your reserve price in place, you won’t have to sell your item unless the final bid matches or surpasses that amount. All the while, you are using a marketing gimmick designed to simply get customers to ’set their foot in the door’.

Providing as many details as possible when describing your item is also very important. Choose your words carefully when describing your listing. If you provide as many details as possible – including information that proves the authenticity of your item – will sure to go a long way in attracting potential customers.

However, be sure to include any scratches or marks the item may have. The pictures you take should convey this fact to the buyer. Let the buyers know how much it will be for shipping and insurance, which must be purchased in case the item gets lost or damaged once you ship it.

Most eBay sellers feel better using an escrow service for higher priced items. You can offer this option to the seller explaining to him or her that one, the buyer must pay for the service and two, this helps protect the both of you from scams or fraud. There is an escrow serviced which eBay has partnered with especially used for high priced ticket items.

Author Bio:
Finding ways to increase income is more essential today than ever before. One definite way to boost your finances is to use Ebay. We’ve got the ultimate inside scoop on how to make money on ebay now on http://www.dropshippingplanet.com.

from Make Money Online

There is a theme song contest for the ShoeMoney System, a program from Jeremy (ShoeMoney) Schoemaker that helps new affiliates learn how to make money online.

Jeremy has posted a video about the ShoeMoney System theme song contest that features some unique vocal styling.

Highlights include some auto-tune work and a Miley Cyrus cover.

In order to enter, just upload your ShoeMoney System theme song and post the URL in the comments on ShoeMoney’s blog post about the contest.

He will accept submissions until March 26th and then he will have a final vote off for the winner, who will receive $1,000.00 cash.

Video: $1000 ShoeMoney System Theme Song Contest

This post originally appeared on the Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn Collins

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from Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn Collins

This is a guest post by Nicholas Z. Cardot. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Far too often I find that people are getting caught up with the technical aspects of blogging like which plugins are the best, which designs are the most appealing, which methods of SEO yield the greatest results while at the same forgetting about the most important aspect of all, connecting with real people.

It’s certainly a good idea to work on creating an appealing looking site that can also effectively draw in traffic from search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Yet if people are instantly clicking away from our material and never return again then we’re failing as bloggers and as authors.

At my site I want people to browse through the articles. I want them to interact with the content by leaving comments and sharing the material. I want users to get involved and feel compelled to read my articles as they get published.

The most powerful element to accomplishing all these goals and to building a prominent online presence is developing genuine connections. People will visit your material and read what you have to say because they’ve bought into who you are as a person. You don’t build that with new plugins and fancy post titles. You do that by connecting with real people.

1. Connections provide you valuable feedback when you need it.
2. Connections provide friends to share your content across social media sites like Twitter.
3. Connections provide explosive ‘word of mouth’ marketing for your site.
4. Connections provide guest posting and back link opportunities that might otherwise not exist.

There are two major arenas that you need to learn to use to build connections and it’s important that you don’t pick one or the other. Use both and multiply your efforts in building relationships online.

The Command Post: Your Blog

Successful bloggers understand that in order to draw people in and get them involved then we have to create a sense of community throughout our site. We have to encourage conversations and feedback.

1. Encourage participation in the conversation by asking questions in your posts.
2. Point people to connect with you through other forums like Twitter and Facebook.
3. Provide a contact page that makes it easy to get in touch with you.
4. Respond to comments with more than just “Thanks for the comment.” Actually be conversational.
5. If you want to you can even invite people to connect with you via Instant Messenger.

The Outposts: Social Media

If you’re only communicating with people at your blog then you’re missing out on a lot of potential relationships that could really help you.

1. Connect with like minded bloggers on other blogs by leaving genuine, valuable comments.
2. Connect with people on social media sites by responding to people, sharing other articles that are valuable, etc.

Whether you are at your command post or out at one of your outposts, the key is this: be real with people. Respond to people. Answer questions. Ask questions. Be conversational.

Talk to people the same way that you would talk to someone face to face. The medium might be different. The technology might be constantly changing but the principle remains intact.

Connect with people. Connections are a powerful asset.

Nicholas Z. Cardot is the creator and author of Site Sketch 101 where he publishes daily articles for bloggers and webmasters.

from Daily Blog Tips

http://www.esnbrussels.com

In a previous post, I discussed the issue of writers burning out and some tips about what to do about it. One of the most important things that you can do if you’re suffering from burnout is to get away for a while. Sometimes a break is all that is needed to be able to beat the burnout beast and get back on track. If you need to get away for more than a day or two there are some things you can do to make your life easier, save your writing reputation and possibly save your writing business.

Here is the right way to go away:

• Contact your clients – Quite possibly, this is the most crucial step of going away and it will certainly be the most difficult. Examine what projects you have on your plate and where you are in the process of completion. Contact the clients who may be impacted by your absence. If possible, phone contact is best. Just sending an email with a statement announcing you’ll be away for a while will not instill any confidence from your clients and they are apt to be less forgiving about your absence. So the question is, how much do you divulge in terms of why you are going away. The answers is: It depends. You know your clients. Which ones are more laid back and flexible? Which ones will profess an end to the world as we know it? The most important aspect of providing a reason for your impending absence is to not give a whiney, blubbering dissertation about how life has turned unfair and you need to get away from all this #$?<@! stuff. It’s not fair of you to burden your clients with this.
• If you can outsource some of your work, go ahead and do it.
• For your blog, email your closest writing blog friends and explain you will be away for a bit and need some guest posts. For this part of going away, all you need is one a week so even if you’re going away for a month, you only need four guest posters. The simplest way to help get this accomplished is to register each of them with your blog so that they can go in and post on their own. The alternative involves getting the posts as emails and posting them yourself. You are trying to get away for a bit so try and avoid this.
• Set your email up with an “out of office” reply, including your anticipated date of return.
• If you normally respond to comments on your blog, you may want to publish an “I’m going away for a while” post. Again, not a lot of details are important here as to why you’re going away. You’re just letting folks know when you’re leaving and when you’ll be back. It may be helpful to set this as a featured post so any new clients who may be interested in you will know not to expect a response until a certain date.

Finally, relax. It will all be okay. Chances are, when you come back you’ll be able to pick up where’ you’ve left off. There might be consequences and perhaps you will lose a client or two, but your sanity and long term wellness is well worth it.

from Freelance Writing

Strange, but I figured might as well. The links I find follow no rhyme or reason anyway. They are just the byproducts of the work I do and the blogs I read and every now and then a random coincidence, which is why I still like StumbleUpon. And I will not be held down to the tyranny of a specific link day because some weeks I just collect more than others. Plus I have a new list of sites I am posting to my affiliate marketing blog, which will be my first link:

• An Analysis of 71 LinkWheel Sites – I don’t know if you have heard of them, but I think I here too much about them. Web 2.0 brought with it a lot of free content sites. No need to pay for hosting or install software. Instead build your network on freely available, authoritative content sites and point even site to your money blog or website. It is a bit more complex than that but you get the idea. I took a list of 71 of these fully featured free hosts, added PageRank and Alexa Data, found out which have revenue sharing (6), and added notes where I could.
• 15 methods to boost your PHP based website’s performance – I was looking for a way to cache parts of a page for different lengths of time. I ended up using gCache. It might end of playing a part in other software I am developing.
• 10 Writing Rules You Can’t Break…And How to Break Them – Sometimes the rules just don’t apply. How to throw out that Strunk & White at least momentarily.
• Creative Writing Tips for LinkBait Production – How to come up with ideas for linkbait or how to create a story so hot that you don’t have to build any links to it, everyone else will for you.
• ProgrammableWeb: How to Make Your Own Web Mashup – A lot of links to various API’s available on the internet. A great way to bring more content and data in for your visitors.
• Nesox Link Checker Free Edition Download – Software to check Pagerank and Alexa Rank and it’s free. And, yes, it is what I used to get the rank for my LinkWheel site list
• Wiktionary:Frequency lists – Wiktionary – I have been playing around with content classification and contextual matching for a few years now, trying to hit it from different angles. One angle I thought of was taking a sample of the most infrequently occurring keywords from the content. At some point over one word, a definite theme could be locked. So rather than trimming stop words and then indexing, go directly for the meat and build upward until a match is made. Think of it like Wheel of Fortune. You go for the easy letters to fill the board fast, but really if there was a z in that word you were trying to guess and it were visible, you would know the word right away. I find myself half the time searching Google this way. Not typing phrases, but trying to triangulate between three words I know have to be on the page, words that would never occur together except in the context I am looking for. This link is just a list of how often an English word occurs in various contexts from the Gutenburg Project, Movie Scripts, etc.
• Writing for Attention: Ammunition for Personalised Search – A great post on making your site stand out in Google’s new search results.
• DreamPie – I already warned you, I said random links. A few weeks ago I posted a link to Sikuli a visual programming tool. Well, you scripted that software in Python. After realizing Python was like the Volkswagon of programming languages, very forgiving to errors and simple, I found DreamPie, which is a Python shell.
• Most Beautiful Free Wordpress Themes for E-commerce – Nice themes to turn Wordpress into a shopping cart.

from Stephan Miller

The Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, has released a special report indicating that expansive nexus standards burden interstate commerce and harm economic growth.

This report follows an article by the Providence Business News about how the advertising tax, also known as the Amazon Tax or Affiliate Tax, has not generated revenue for the state of Rhode Island.

Here is the executive summary of the report, “Amazon Tax” Laws Signal Business Unfriendliness And Will Worsen Short-Term Budget Problems:

Citing significant budget shortfalls and the inability to collect sales taxes on many Internet-based transactions, a number of states are considering the adoption of “Amazon taxes.” Such laws, nicknamed after their most visible target, require retailers that have contracts with “affiliates”—independent persons within the state who post a link to an out-of-state business on their website and get a share of revenues from the out-of-state business—to collect the state’s sales tax.

Contrary to the claims of supporters, Amazon taxes do not provide easy revenue. In fact, the nation’s first few Amazon taxes have not produced any revenue at all, and there is some evidence of lost revenue. For instance, Rhode Island has seen no additional sales tax revenue from its Amazon tax, and because Amazon reacted by discontinuing its affiliate program, Rhode Islanders are earning less income and paying less income tax.

Amazon taxes also do not “level the playing field” between brick-and-mortar and online businesses; the laws actually mandate disparate burdens on online businesses. Litigation over the constitutionality of Amazon taxes is ongoing, with scholars on the left and right disputing their wisdom and legality.

Enacting an Amazon tax law also sends a signal of hostility to businesses engaged in interstate commerce, runs the serious risk of retaliation from other states and from affected businesses, and undermines efforts to improve the uniformity of state sales taxes.

Get the special report at http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/25949.html.

This post originally appeared on the Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn Collins

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from Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn Collins

Download audio file (affiliatething-030810.mp3)

This week on the Affiliate Thing podcast, Shawn Collins and Lisa Picarille talked about Amazon terminating affiliates in Colorado, monetizing the Oscars, and affiliates upset with a contest from panties.com.

Also, data feeds in WordPress, the ShoeMoney System, and Affiliate Marketing 101 from Jonathan Volk.

Show Links

• Dirty Affiliate Contest from panties.com
• Sports Marketing, Datafeeds and Traffic Geyser
• The ShoeMoney System Reopens
• Amazon Removes Colorado Affiliates and Why
• Amazon drops Colorado Affiliates
• Colorado – bad turn by Amazon
• Letter from Amazon Terminating Colorado Affiliates
• Affiliate Advocacy Conference Call Affiliate Legislation March Update
• Affiliate Marketing 101

Subscribe to the Affiliate Thing RSS feed or listen on iTunes. You can also send a blank e-mail to affiliatething@aweber.com to get each podcast delivered by e-mail.

This post originally appeared on the Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn Collins

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Disclosure policy for the Affiliate Marketing Blog.

from Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn Collins

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from NetBusinessBlog

Let’s clear one thing right away: yes I am an affiliate for the coaching program I mentioning below, which means I’ll earn a commission if you end up purchasing it. But your trust is much more important to me than any commission I might earn, so rest assured I am only talking about this coaching program because a) I have actually used it b) I have achieved good results after applying what I learned there and c) I believe you and other people could do the same.

Now back to the central question: have you ever considered launching a membership site? If you have, I would recommend you to take a look at Membership Site Mastermind. Created by Yaro Starak, this is a 6-week program that you’ll give you all the information you need to launch a profitable membership site.

I was one of the first people to have access to Yaro’s course, and it helped me to launch the OnlineProfits.com training program. If you want to learn more about that story, check out this podcast interview I did with Yaro a while ago.

Membership Site Mastermind is structured around 6 modules. They are:

1. Topic Selection and Preeminence
2. Traffic Generation
3. Human Resources and Technology
4. Content and Pricing
5. The Launch Process
6. Post Launch Activities

Each module comes with 2 hours worth of video content, including transcripts and checklists to make sure you’ll act on the important steps. The program was closed for the past six months, and today it is opening again for new members, so check it out.

from Daily Blog Tips