I gave the Cribbed Content feature a rest for awhile because, admittedly, I wasn’t really keeping up with much around me.  I’ve put myself into a little corner of existence and did what I had to do.  I’ve got to say, on a personal note, that being continually employed for the last five years and then having a lull in work for three weeks waiting for some things to fall into place has been a bit difficult to handle.  I’m back on track now, back to keeping tabs on what’s going on around me, back to our weekly Affiliate Marketing Fanatics podcast on GeekCast.fm, and ready to kick some serious booty!  I’ve seen some cool stuff that I’m compelled to share!

• Link Cloaking, What is it? – Scott Jangro addresses the ways you can cloak affiliate links.  Also see where I discussed PHP redirects.
• The only coding I really know well is HTML, and I was passed this great article on 10 Rare HTML Tags You Really Should Know through StumbleUpon.  I’m definitely going to be putting some of these into immediate use!
• Did you see the ShareASale Photo Booth at Affiliate Summit West 2009?  I don’t think I did… but that’s okay, because they’re sharing the photos online and I don’t need more goofy photos of myself on the net.  Go check them out and rate them!  And if you’re disappointed you missed it, don’t worry… they plan on bringing it back for Affiliate Summit East this summer in New York!
• A new conference for affiliates, Affiliate Convention, is taking place next month.  I won’t be able to attend, but PMG will be represented as Heather Paulson will be speaking about super affiliate marketing techniques.
• There’s been a lot of rallying together lately with the tax nexus issues in several states affecting affiliate marketers.  Ed Byerly from one fledgling organization Affilaite Trust posted his thoughts on the surge of affiliate organizations attempting to unify a rather rag-tag group of people who make up this industry.
• For those email marketers out there, don’t worry I haven’t turned my back on you!  Check out this cool free tool to make sure your reverse DNS is set up right!

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I’ve already talked long ago of how awesome I think Entrecard is.  Any free traffic source is great, let alone a free advertising medium as well.  A couple weeks ago, they got even more awesome in my eyes with the launch of their Entrecard Toolbar.

Similar to what SiteHoppin’ was offering, Entrecard has taken it upon themselves to offer a tool to allow EC users to jump from blog to blog within different categories to see what else is out there – and efficiently drop your EC card to receive credits.  I really enjoy being able to use the “Next Ten Sites” button within the toolbar to have 10 tabs open up in Firefox and be able to wander through them as I desire.

Yes, it’s great for effectively dropping ECs, but I’ve always said that I actually LIKE going around to different blogs and checking out their content, site design, what ads they’re running, etc.  So this serves that purpose as well.

This is a screen shot of my toolbar right now – I just went and spent all my saved EC’s on ads so I’m starting from scratch.  It doesn’t take up a lot of room at all, and offers you different choices of category to browse within and different ways to order the results: Most popular, Newest, Cheapest, Most expensive, Most advertised, and Random.  The final benefit – and best – is that while you’re surfing these blogs the toolbar updates to tell you how many ECs an ad on that site costs, if you already have an advert in the queue for that site, and allows you to purchase adverts by clicking on the button that shows the price.  You can also add the blog to your favorites site by clicking on the heart.

The only downside to the toolbar is that it’s a toolbar.  Sounds weird, I know, but what I mean is that I have two other toolbars and I can’t toggle this one on or off like the StumbleUpon toolbar to save screen space.  This isn’t a problem for me, but currently the toolbar only runs on Firefox 3 as an add-on, so anyone still using Internet Explorer to switching over to Google’s new browser Chrome will have to do things the old fashion way!  This is the first release of the toolbar with a second beta release out now, so hopefully in future releases they’ll address the browser compatibility issue.

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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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