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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Some days the world just seems to crap on you. You wake up in a bad mood, which fades to black in a hurry. No matter what you do, you just can’t find your way to the light. Somehow as the day goes on, the darkness gets darker, and the blackness gets blacker, until you finally hit rock bottom. Days when it seems there’s a boil on your soul, that fills and fills with psychic pus, until you’re sure it’ll kill you.

That was my yesterday.

Somehow, overnight, the boil burst, and I woke up today in a much better frame of mind. Even though I had just finished a three day weekend, I was kind of looking forward to going back to work. I braced myself for the ungodly weather, and disembarked.

Stopping at the gas station on my way out of town, one minute into pumping gas, my hands went numb to the wrist in the driving sub-zero weather. The credit card slot didn’t work. I went inside to pay, and one of my friends from high school was manning the register. He warned me that the road crews weren’t even attempting to clear the roads, and that travel was suicide. I shrugged and decided to attempt it anyway, since I called in sick Friday, and I don’t want to burn up my free time within 3 weeks of getting it.

Leaving town was hard. The highway was about half drifted shut in the westbound lane. The roads were icy from yesterday, and the wind was whipping the snow into white-out conditions. Still, I soldiered on. I passed a compact car stuck in a drift as I turned the corner to head to the neighboring town where I work. As I passed the stranded vehicle, I noticed two of my co-workers, volunteer firemen, helping in the rescue. I would have offered to help, but I didn’t have anything like the cold weather gear they were wearing.

As luck would have it, I was following a DOT truck, so I felt moderately safe. A quarter mile down the road my optimism faded into a dull, aching dread.

Eyeballing the northbound lane to my left, I noticed that it was solidly covered with at least 16 inches of snow and no tire tracks. The road in front of me, plowed only minutes before, was already filling it, and visibility was limited to about 20 feet in the good spots due to the snow in the air.

Still, I soldiered on, if only due to the fact that the other lane was impassable. The flashing light on top of the blaze orange DOT truck was my beacon of hope, and I was determined to follow it, even though I had no other choice.

As I crept southbound the drifts got higher and the roads got worse. Two and a half miles down the road I came across a stopped semi. It wasn’t in the ditch, just stopped in the middle of the road. That’s when dread turned to outright fear.

I called my supervisor to warn him that I was going to be late. He told me flat out to turn around, and not even bother. All of my coworkers who live in my town had all called in. All of them are burly man’s men who drive 4×4 pickup trucks, compared to my late model sedan.

As I was talking on my cell phone the DOT truck drove around the semi and continued down the road, me tailing him at a distance of about 15 feet. We had proceeded about 1oo feet past the semi when the DOT truck’s reverse lights came on.

I stopped, but he kept on coming. Panicked, I threw my car in reverse, and started backing up. The truck wasn’t stopping, and I was actually forced to speed up. We backed up for about 80 feet before I decided I had had enough.

Backing around the semi, in white out conditions, I kept moving knowing that there was a crossing 200 yards to the north.

Suddenly there were headlights behind me. Another semi! I swerved into the other lane, and we missed each other by inches. Terrified, I kept going until I reached the gravel road, and did a three point turn.

I entered the southbound lane and started heading home doing 45 mph in the wrong lane with the snow whipping around me at gale force.

I called my father to warn him of the road conditions, only to come upon him at the end of his gravel road, waiting because he had seen me. He pulled out after me, and suddenly we were a convoy.

We made it to the blacktop heading into town without incident, and I called my brother to warn him not to bother. Right now he’s getting drunk and watching movies with his friends. Lucky.

I got home, got changed and let my wife know what was going on. Then I went downstairs and fired up the computer.

Consigned to the nothingness that awaited me, I fired up eBay, expecting both of my auctions to have ended with no bidders. Again.

Instead, I was greeted with an alert that I had actually sold one of the things I had listed. It wasn’t for a lot of money, but I hadn’t expected to sell it. The day was looking up.

Next I logged into my ClickBank account expecting to see the same old zeros that usually greet me. Instead, I see the total $17.98. One of the AdWords campaigns I had thrown up on a whim last Wednesday had generated a sale. Awesome!

I know this has been a long post, but it does have a point. The saying that “It’s always darkest before the dawn” has never really meant much to me. However, considering how this weekend went for me, it does ring true.

I’ve passed through the long dark night of the soul, and come out the other side stronger for the ordeal. Now that I have results in my marketing efforts, I’m doubly determined to get better at it and make a living at it.

Three good things have happened to me today:

1) I was specifically told not to come to work.

2) I made a sale on an eBay auction.

3) I made a sale using Adsense.

Events, both good and bad, seem to come in threes. I intend on making this streak last as long as possible. Persistence is the key.

The best advice I have been given personally is from Ruck, in his response to me in the comments to one of his recent posts: Keep on keepin’ on.

And that’s exactly what I plan to do.

Tags: Adsense, Affiliate Marketing, Music, Psychology by Jotun
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