The BookmarkMoney Blog

First off, I’d like to extend congratulations to Ruck, at Cash Tactics. This week he announced that his first daughter was born. It sounds like everything is going well, so I’d like to welcome him to a new world of concern. As the old saying goes: If you have a son you only need to worry about one prick. If you have a daughter, you need to worry about every prick in town. My daughter is only 17 months old, and already the boys her age are giving her the eye. I fear that it will only get worse from here.

Now, on to the goodies.

Affiliate Marketing

For those just getting started in affiliate marketing, Sean at the Warrior Blog has a tutorial that takes you through all of the steps - researching, locating, and then finally cashing the checks. I wish I had known about this when I had first started out. Your First Clickbank Sale.

Build a Niche Store (BANS) is something I’ve been looking into for a while. When my wife goes back to work, I may just break down and purchase it, since I’ve heard noting but good things about it. Affiliate Confession has a 7 part series on setting up and using BANS. A very good place to start if you want an easier entry into affiliate marketing.

Build A Niche Store Tutorials Overview - Parts 1-7
Part 1 - What BANS Does And Does Not Do
Part 2 - Niche Brainstorming And Getting A Domain Name
Part 3 - Installing And Setting Up Your BANS Affiliate Store
Part 4 - Tweaking Your eBay Affiliate Store
Part 5 - Adding Some Content To Your eBay Store
Part 6 - Article Marketing And Getting Links
Part 7 - Using USFreeAds.com For Traffic And Getting More Links

Article Marketing

The Warrior Blog has a tutorial on Article Marketing for promotional purposes. I know that a lot of people recommend doing article marketing, but it seems like a lot of work, that I’d be better off channeling elsewhere.

Mashups

Although it’s over a year old, Paul O’Brien’s list of Mashups created with Yahoo! Pipes is still a pretty good read to help inspire ideas for your own mashup.

I’m not sure of the date on this one, but SEO Book had a nice roundup of specific Pipes.

If you’ve been dying to create a mashup, but can’t program and can’t afford a program, Open Kapow may be for you. Using their simple tools, literally anyone can create a mashup in minutes just by pointing and clicking. Extremely useful if you want to use data from sites that don’t provide an Application Programming Interface (API) or Ready Site Syndication (RSS) feed.

Black Hat

If you have a Wordpress Blog, then Jimmy at Seeds for Wealth has a technique for raping Digg’s traffic. At best this trick is grey hat, at worst it’s black hat, but getting links from Digg is never a bad thing.

Continuing along the path to the Dark Side, Jimmy has tips on getting big trafic from BlogCatalog, and another one for using your avatar as visitor bait.

If you’ve been wondering how certain sellers always rank so high on eBay’s Pulse page, someone placed them under the magnifying glass, and found out that there’s a lot of cheating going on behind the scenes. estreet at Watched Item watched some top sellers on eBay Pulse, and gathered some compelling evidence that there is rampant cheating going on.

Datafeeds

5 Star Affiliate Programs has a pretty extensive list of affiliate datafeeds ready for integration into your website. Affiliate Datafeeds are great, because they help generate a lot of content for search engines to spider, as well as helping to monetize your website.

Extensive Squidoo Lens on Datafeeds

Tools

Marc Ghosh at Weblog Tools Collection posted this week introducing us to Zemanta. Zemanta is a contextual content suggestion engine that works with Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Typepad.com, and self-hosted WordPress installations.Zemanta is a simple FireFox extension that creates a little AJAX box on the side of your write panel in WordPress, and makes real-time suggestions for related news stories, Wikipedia articles, and Flickr photos. I’m very excited to start using this. You can also keep up to date with the latest happenings at Zemanta’s Blog.

WordPress Plugins

Jeffro2pt0 at Weblog Tools Collection rounded up 10 WP plugins that fight comment spam. I personally use WP Spam Free from Hybrid 6, and have no complaints with it. I do disable it every so often to see how much it actually stops, and It’s amazing how much of a difference it makes.

Freebies

Since I like free stuff, here’s my link to Robbing Craigslist. If you want a free copy, just link to it from your blog too.

Emarket Scout tipped me off the the following: Freebies for Writers, Authors, and Screenwriters., Self Growth Freebies, and Free stuff for Windows Power Users.

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Datafeeds, Gurus, Internet Marketing, Link Building, Mashups, Plugins, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Tools, Traffic, Viral Marketing, WordPress by Jotun
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(Cross Posted to Fascination Street )Following up on my previous post, I am starting down the path towards becoming an Internet Marketer. I have opened my AdWords account, and started my first campaign. I’m trying to remain cautiously optimistic. I’ve set a limit of $5/day, and I’m going to probably burn through $20 to $25 just testing the waters.

I don’t expect that I’m going to make a crapload of money. I’m not even expecting to make money at all. I don’t have a defeatist attitude, getting rich isn’t the point of this first campaign. The point is to start getting results. I’m eyeballing what seems to be an absolutely massive market that isn’t even remotely being tapped. The question is, how to tap into it.

Hence my first AdWords campaign. I’ve spent years now reading the latest and greatest e-books promising to teach me all of the “Insider’s Secrets” and such. The problem being is that actions are the most important thing when it comes to determining one’s future. I don’t pretend that I’m a guru, or even on the path to becoming one, but I know what my strengths are, and I intend to utilize them to the fullest.

My father is an engineer, my mother an artist. Opposites really do attract, eh? I’ve always had an innate ability to solve problems, generally thinking laterally. I am proud to say that my efforts to break the various systems that I have worked in have led to rules specifically designed to thwart my efforts. Of course, that just generally just encourages me to find new ways around my problems. I digg pissing people off. Moreso, I love to get inside of their heads and just drive them to the brink of madness. I am a psychological sadist who has the ability to observe in a detatched manner the subject I’m working on. I have the brain of a lawyer, but the heart of a used car salesman.

For all of my life I’ve had to deal with the war raging inside of me: logic versus passion. I’m very analytical in my outlook, but I tend to flip to passionate in a heartbeat. My bullshit tolerance is low as a result, and getting lower the older I get. I have a wife, a kid, and a mortgage, so I have to deal with shit, since I can’t just up and quit when I get pissed off, as I was once wont to do.

I stand out at work. I hate working. Detest it. But, the way I see it, if I’m going to be there I’m going to do as much as possible to fill the time. Once I figure out my job, I usually start coasting at about 125% of productivity. That doesn’t make me popular. The fact that I can do it using half the energy of the guy next to me who is struggling at around 80% productivity doesn’t make me many friends either. Add in that I’m a non union worker in a union shop, and it’s amazing I don’t have more “accidents.” The thing is, I’m tired of having to put forth 125% effort just to keep my mind occupied, all the while lining somebody else’s pockets. I want to fill my own pockets with my effort.

That’s why I’m embarking on this venture, so I don’t have to deal with anybody’s crap anymore.

I’ve recently become a reader of Cash Tactics. The author of the blog is “Ruck,” and two years ago he was in my place - wife, two jobs, and trying to get out. Two years later, he’s hit the big time. That’s my inspiration. The ‘only in America‘ type of success story that Ruck is enjoying. I admire his honesty. He shoots from the hip, straight from the hip. When he recommends things, he doesn’t even use affiliate links, unless he’s cloaking them some way I can’t figure out.

Recently he wrote a post entitled Stop Looking For Handouts And Start Busting Tail. Articles like this really help to keep my motivation high, and this is the second post in the space of about three days that really spoke to me. I don’t believe in coincidences, but I do believe in synchronicity - the points where everything in the universe seems to actually fit.

I notice synchronicities all the time, but by the time I squash the Woody Allen voice inside of me, the window has closed, and I’m left waiting for the next opportunity. There’s a saying in certain political circles that “Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” Political views aside, that sums my life up in a nutshell.

Last Tuesday/Wednesday was one of those times, however instead of debating, I kicked my inner nebbish in the face, and decided to act on an idea that came to me out of the blue. On an impulse I registered BookMarkMoney.com, and actually paid for hosting instead of slaving it to my main hosting account. Then I went to work.

And that’s where I am today. I’m still working, behind the scenes. I’m splitting my time between backend stuff on this site, AdWords, some speculation on eBay, redesigning my brother’s website, snowblowing the damned driveway every two to three days, and my wife and kid. Plus I have an amazing idea in the pipeline, and if I can wrangle it, I’m going to install the software and play around with it this weekend.

It sounds like a lot of work. And it is. But it’s 125%, and that’s nothing new. The fact that I’m doing it for myself, now that’s new.

Tags: Gurus, Psychology, Site News by Jotun
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