Affiliate Marketing Fanatics 10: Gonna Make a Change
Friday
Jun 26, 2009
Affiliate Marketing Fanatics – A Publisher (Mike Buechele) and an Affiliate Manager (Trisha Lyn Fawver) talk about all things Affiliate Marketing. From blogging to branding, social media to search, video and more!
Unfortunately this week we had a mic failure on Mike’s part, so even though I could hear him when we were recording the podcast on Skype, when listening back he was inaudible. I tried amplifying it and leveling it and everything, but it was a lost cause. So instead, we decided I’d give you a recap on what we talked about since they were all pretty important issues. Basically, we’re taking a page from Shawn Collins’ book on podcast failures 
. So the title refers both to all the changes going on with tax rules and disclosure regarding affiliates AND to the change Mike has to make to get the recording right next week!
The recap episode is a short and sweet 26 minutes on the dot since it includes a Jackson tribute at the end.
In this show, we discussed:
- A recap of Affiliate Convention.
- Amazon dropped North Carolina affiliates and sent a warning letter to Rhode Island affiliates. Darren Rowse wrote about it on Problogger.
- The FTC is tightening it’s rules regarding disclosure, but it’s still ambiguous enough to leave affiliates questioning what this means for them. Daniel M. Clark wrote an article on the FTC disclosure issue, as well as Brian Clark of Copyblogger’s wrote about how to turn disclosure into a selling point.
- Twitter servers took a hit yesterday when the news about Michael Jackson’s sudden death broke. Are they ready to be a major search engine?
- Rumors swirled about other celebrity deaths – this doesn’t make Twitter look like a legitimate resource in the eyes of skeptics.
- Finally, Rest in Peace to Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, who both passed away yesterday. We pay tribute to MJ and pontificated on whether or not we’d see affiliates attempting to capitalize on these events. I see just now that Shawn Collins is thinking about this topic as well on his blog.
Saturday Shopper 10/25 – Blogger Boogie Edition
Saturday
Oct 25, 2008
This week’s shopping bonanza will focus on blogging and resources for eager minds who want to delve deep into the minds of bloggers. After using both Blogger and WordPress to power my blogs, I firmly believe in WordPress, which is why I’ve included the WordPress instructional books and not the Blogger books. Most professionals will advise that any serious blogger get started right away with a self-hosted platform – it might be a bit outside your range at first, but these books outline a lot of the super technical stuff really well. Beyond that, it will save you the hassle later of having to move everything over to another platform when you’re ready to make the jump (trust me, losing readers and traffic by switching URLs and losing some posts in import isn’t a walk in the park.
Cribbed Content for October 10th
Saturday
Oct 11, 2008
Okay, it’s not the 10th. I severely slacked yesterday due to a stomach ache that wouldn’t die. Nevertheless there are some things I really want to share with you, so I’m adopting the “late but worth the wait” mentality to this post. I hope to get back into the swing of things soon – I’m still adjusting to working from home and finally have my docking station set up so perhaps I can be a touch more productive working on a real keyboard and my lovely 30″ monitor.
I digress… the links! This week’s links are mostly about blogging.
- Chris Brogan, a fountain of useful information, posted an interesting one the other day about 25 Ways to Build Your Community. Excellent tips that I admit I’m not using nearly enough, but are super simple to implement.
- This actually came from last Friday, but Darren Rowse wrote another great post for you fellow bloggers out there on How to Choose Categories for Your Blog.
- If you’re an Entrecard user like myself, and subscribe to the U Drop, I Follow movement, there’s a new WordPress plugin for you to make it easier.
- Darren also wrote another great post this week on 8 Tips for Affiliate Marketers on Using Twitter. If you MUST utilize twitter for marketing efforts, this is the way to go about it for sure.
