Happy New Year!  As I mentioned last Friday, I’ve spent this week with family in Oregon, so I have been semi-off the grid.  So this week’s edition of Cribbed Content is as much for me to catch up on things as it is for some of you!

On a personal note, 2008 treated me okay…but I’m hoping that 2009 knocks me off my feet!  I hope your lives are treating you right and leading you in the direction you want to go!

• The movie industry doesn’t get to have all the fun with an awards season: on the heels of ShareASale announcing their awards last week, the finalists for the Pinnacle Awards Finalists at Affiliate Summit West 2009 were announced this week.  Congrats to the finalists, and we’ll see who the winners are at the awards dinner in Las Vegas.
• Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed via Twitter that PageRank was updated.  I heard about it before then and I’m glad to report that this blog has gone from a PR0 to PR2, thus reassuring me that I hadn’t landed on some mysterious Google blacklist.  As exciting as this was, it was also proven how little PR means anymore when I checked my twitter page out of curiosity to find it was a PR9!
• It’s Official: The Performance Marketing Alliance is now an official, non-profit trade association.  Charter membership will be available sometime this month, I imagine starting at Affiliate Summit.
• I wrote another guest post at Marketing Pilgrim, this time on how Digg’s Lack of Ad Targeting is Hurting Revenue.

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My 5 year wedding anniversary is tomorrow.  It’s amazing how time flies, and how much has changed in my life in the last 5 years.  But I’m happy with where things have gone – generally.  So while I’m spending a romantic anniversary weekend in Lake Tahoe, you can chew on these links and I’ll catch you on Tuesday.

• XM and Sirius Satellite radio companies finalized their merger this week.  Details are still to come.  I really am anxious to learn what stations are surviving – I don’t want to just change the station to find that one of my favorites doesn’t exist anymore.
• Google was all set to purchase social bookmarking/sharing site Digg for the princely sum of $200 million, but looks like The Google bailed on the deal.  Are they toying with Digg?  Time will tell.
• Vertical Response posted a great idea for building your mailing list using your business cards.  Great strategy just in time for Affiliate Summit.  Remember, it’s not too late to order new cards with PsPrint.  I ordered my new batch a couple days ago and I can’t wait to see the results!
• A new forum for affiliate marketing was launched last weekend, AffSpot.com.  I joined up and I’ve been having a blast so come on over and say hi!

Have a great weekend and go rent a movie from Netflix!

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Not bad considering that I haven’t been posting a lot of good content lately.  I admit, I’ve been in a slump.  A general lack of motivation and drive has resulted in my taking days upon days off and not blogging that much here.  I’ve been spending ample time on Twitter, a good amount of time on my new fancy BlackBerry Curve, and of course doing what it is that I get paid for at PsPrint.

Actually, my hats have been expanding here.  I’ve been doing more web development on small projects to assist with our overloaded graphic services department, and I’ve been doing more development of images for our e-mail campaigns.  It’s nice to have something new and different to do every once in awhile; it definitely is something I’m very capable and willing to do and breaks up the monotony of staring at CJ weeding through affiliate applications.

I’ve also given myself a sabatical on the social networking.  I haven’t sent anything through StumbleUpon or Digg, and haven’t been stumbling or digging anything lately either.  It was getting to be too big of a distraction during the day, and trying to get everything done was a hassle.

Now it feels like things are calming down a bit now that we’re two weeks or so out from the holiday weekend and I’ll probably be picking up where I left off on the social media stuff, ramping up and collecting tips for my roundtable discussion next month.

Do you have any social media and networking tips to share?

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This week has been nuts – I’ve been on both coasts, in three time zones, and multiple states of mind. Yesterday, I admit, was really hard to get my head back into an “office” frame of mind. Which includes coming back to blogging. So here’s the easy post of the week – a wrap up of stuff you might have missed.

• PsPrint gets some ink in USA Today – woot! This is just plain a great article about print marketing, aside from what obviously lead me to this article. Kudos to author Rhonda Abrams!
• We also got a nod on InsideCRM.com, even though I wish we were higher up than #50. Give us some credit, man!
• Delivery.com came to my rescue in Boston. Seriously, it’s awesome!
• FeedFront, a new magazine being put out by Shawn Collins & Missy Ward, is coming to us soon! There looks to be some great articles. On the AffiliateThing podcast this week Shawn mentioned that it will most likely be a quarterly thing, and free! So go sign up – what do you have to lose?
• Affiliate-Karma.com has been launched by the internet geek girl herself Stephanie Agresta – not for nothing, but from what I can tell it’s just another outsourced program management firm.
• Remember that even the smallest of holidays, like the upcoming Memorial Day weekend, allow for great marketing opportunities!
• BuyTV, an online show hosted by Melissa Salas, is going national. G4 picked it up to run on their cable network. Just goes to show that great web content can take you places!

That’s about it for this week. I did have to declare feed bankruptcy and Digg shout bankruptcy to help weed through the stuff I missed at the beginning of the week, so if there’s anything I should have seen and didn’t, share it with me in the comments.

Have a terrific Memorial Day weekend!

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Okay, I was sick on Friday so this is coming at you late. I know I should be drawn and quartered, but where else will you get this info? (That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.)

• Digg is launching a new comment system soon. Maybe I’ll use it more often now that it will be more user friendly.
• Amazon is stickin’ it to the man – they’re suing NY state over the tax laws they’re proposing that affect affiliates.
• I’m awesome, and I can prove it DOUBLE now! Check out http://marketing.alltop.com and http://trishalyn.isreallyawesome.com for proof, now!
• Super Affiliate by day Zac Johnson has a great post for budding affiliates on how to pick the right niche market for you. It’s a great resource complete with some awesome tools to get into the niche you’re looking for.
• Mark Wielgus threw out a video on blog traffic tips. Definitely some good information.

So there… your weekly dose!

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Whoever said that hanging around social media platforms never helped anyone is flat out lying. I’d like to think of myself as ahead of the curve in most situations. I try to be an early adopter whenever I can now. So I’ve been eager to jump onto the bandwagon with new social platforms like Social Thing and Britekite, most recently. I’m making a point to be a presence in the social media space for two reasons:

1. Fun.
2. Traffic.

I am geekier than I care to admit most times, and I’ve always been into instant digital communication like email and instant messenger. Which is why I acclimated to Twitter so easily. Making the jump from LiveJournal to MySpace, then later to Facebook was a piece of cake. So I have a lot of fun hanging around talking to people, exchanging ideas, or just exchanging rather meaningless comments. I’m just an online oriented person. Not that I can’t carry on a phone call or face-to-face conversation, I just enjoy the technical aspects of writing. Blame it on the geek in me.

But as I mentioned, the other more beneficial reason for hanging about on these networks has been traffic to my blog here. I’ve always known that my efforts and time spent on Digg and Stumble Upon would eventually pay off. At the same time, I was never worried about whether they would or not since it was the fun that kept me there. Today I decided to check my Analytics account, something I don’t do nearly as often as I should. I found a wonderful sight.

That’s right… my top 5 traffic sources include three social networks. This makes me totally happy that my addiction to these things is paying off. So listen to all of us social media nerds and register your brand names and participate. It’s just one of the many ways that you can make fun your job

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Today’s tool isn’t so much one tool as it is a set of tools. A few months back while I was scouring the blogosphere for blog directories to post a link on, I found a website called Blogflux. Not only is there a directory on this site, but they also offer a pinger, polls, PR checker, blog themes, and more. All of their free services are listed right on the home page.

PR Checker

With as much credence as the online world gives PageRank, it’s important to be able to easily check your page rank. This PR checker is easy to use and works for more than just blogs. I can use it to see that, sadly, I have a PR 0 or to see that PsPrint has a PR 5. It’s quick and accurate, which is all it needs to be.

Polls

The polls feature works great and super easy. They are somewhat limited in how many answers a respondent can choose from, but for a free service that’s not bad. You can use the Blogflux interface to keep track of various polls and the results. Here’s a quick example:

<a href=”http://polls.blogflux.com/poll-22599.html”>Take the poll</a><br /><br /><a href=”http://polls.blogflux.com/”>Free Poll by Blog Flux</a>Pinger

Any business professional, regardless of industry, would be lying if they said they wouldn’t jump at a chance to save time & increase their efficiency in their daily routine. A blog ping service does just that. Instead of visiting dozens of websites one by one to let them know you’ve written a new blog post, the Blogflux ping service can notify 17 different services from one page and show you the status of the ping, which is a nifty feature. Last October the pinger was listed on Mashable among 19 other blog ping services. It may not be able to ping the highest number of services, but with the added convenience of all the other services that Blogflux offers, the efficiency is definitely increased.

Themes
One of the easiest tools in any blogger’s arsenal is their site design, commonly referred to as a theme. A unique theme is your most immediate way to stand out from the repetitive noise of the blogosphere and stock templates. The Blogflux Themes area lets you browse and search for some less common themes to download and use for your blog. While it’s not a unique theme that visitors will only see on your blog, it will stand out amongst the extremely repetitive stock templates.

Commentful
Now this is one of their neatest features. Commentful keeps track on comments, blog follow ups, and all sorts of handy tracking without having to go to your blog and Digg and a million other sites to keep track. It’s a handy extension for Firefox with a bookmarklet that you just click to add. You subscribe to the RSS feed to keep updated.

Of course, these are just the more exciting features of Blogflux, but there are a few more. Go over and see what you’ve been missing!

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Instead of whining about how my Trackur free trial is over, I’ve collected a few stories for you from around the web. Or you know.. just from my feeds

• Apparently Seth Godin invented the Everything bagel. If you want to talk bagels with me, let’s discuss egg bagels. mmmm tasty.
• The affiliate marketing industry is all a flutter with a cat fight between n00b network Pepperjam & veteran Commission Junction. I think that if the accusations against CJ trying to strong arm affiliates & merchants are true… that’s pretty poor form. But I’m not really taking sides; I’ll wait it out and see how this unfolds.
• Sam Harrelson of ReveNews hearts Twitter!
• Andy Beal (I think I might just quote him weekly!) speculates that Digg is circling the drain and looking to sell. Personally I’m pretty disenchanted with Digg and I wouldn’t mind it biting the big one.

I’m personally very glad to have NOTHING planned this weekend so I can rest, relax, and get some housework done. Enjoy your weekend as much as I will mine!

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If you’re anything like me, you want to get the word out on your business and on important press releases, articles, and blog posts. A great new tool that leverages the social media marketing scene is SocialMarker.com

SocialMarker is so easy to use it’s almost not fair. Drag the bookmark to your browser tool bar and you’re half way there. Whenever you come across something that you feel should be shared, click the bookmark and a new window or tab will open with the article title and link already added to the form fields. Just enter in your own text, add some keywords, and select which services you want to submit it to. Bam!

The service works like an extension within your browser. Here’s my example of bookmarking a new reputation management tool Trackur.com. First I opened the Trackur website, then clicked the bookmark in my browser’s tool bar. As you can see here, the website saved the last bookmarking sites that I’d checked on my last visit, as well as automatically filled in the URL and title.

After entering in some text and tags, I clicked submit and was on my way. SocialMarker stays visible in your browser and you can navigate between the different bookmarking sites using the Next, Back, Login, and Submit buttons at the top of the interface. On some sites the info may not be automatically filled in if you have to login first, but you can use the fields at the bottom to select the info you filled out at the beginning and drag it into the appropriate fields on the site.

Digg Submission shown through SocialMarker interface

I love this tool because, well, it’s free and who doesn’t love that! More importantly, of course, it cuts down the time I used to spend going to several different sites to bookmark something useful. I can increase my efficiency and get the word out faster than ever. Since I use it mostly to get my blog posts noticed, I can spend more time on great content and less time on getting that content out there.

There’s honestly nothing to risk in trying it out since you don’t have to create a login to use the service. Don’t wait and go to www.SocialMarker.com to start!

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As promised last week, here’s my look around the web for interesting business, marketing, web 2.0, etc. stuff.

• Digg changed their algorithm. No one cared except Digg diehards.
• After two+ weeks, PrintSalesPro finally publishes a reprint of my All For One, One For All Printers post.
• LaTease Rikard, one of my StumbleUpon friends, took some advice after my post about our launch of the affiliate program (officially) and joined up and wrote about it.
• ProBlogger just today published Dropping The F-Bomb: Blogging with Naughty Words. I don’t see a whole lot of repeated topics on my jaunts through the blogosphere, but this is the second article on using the F-bomb since September. The first was Scott Jangro back in September. I wonder if this is really a wide spread phenomenon?

It’s been a slow week, so there you have it. Not much going on, really.

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