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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First, the history. If you’ve listened to my evangelism regarding Entrecard, you’ve signed up. No doubt, you’ve looked around and perhaps stumbled upon a site called SiteHoppin – View the web like an iPod. When I first found this site, they enabled visitors to quickly browse websites by categories and offered various Entrecard categories that included only websites that were members of the Entrecard network. There were other “Entrecard browers” out there that did similar things, but the feature that set SiteHoppin on my favorites list was the slideshow feature. You set how many seconds you want to view each page for then hit go – the page automatically refreshed after that time to another random website within that same category.

Clearly, the main goal of a service like this is to drop Entrecards on other blogger’s widgets as efficiently as possible to rack up Entrecredits to advertise on more blogs. But I saw a less selfish goal of this as well – expanding my horizons within the blogosphere. Sure I saw a lot of the same websites day after day to drop my card at, but more often than not I found new blog that I could learn from. Whether or not the blog actually interested me, I could learn through their experiences. I’d look at their site designs, how they used links, what widgets or gadgets they used (heck, that’s how I found Entrecard in the first place), and also paid close attention to their coding flaws to pick up some “don’ts” for my mental blog SOP.

The best part about the slideshow feature was that I could set it for a decent time (15 seconds was my average) and just hit GO and let the blogs refresh over my lunch hour as I sat in front of the computer with one hand near the mouse to click on the drop widget and my lunch in the other. Multitasking is a wonderful thing. I could always hit the stop button if there was something that caught my interest enough to read longer than 15 seconds.

Those days, apparently, have come to an end.

A few weeks ago, I noticed that the slideshow feature was gone. Boo! It wouldn’t be nearly as efficient for me to continually have to click the TagHop button to refresh to another site every time, but it was better than nothing. After visiting their blog for more information, I’ve come to find that on 5/2 they removed it to assist with the beta testing of their new Firefox toolbar. Just the other day, I realized that from the main SiteHoppin’ page, the browser was still available but ALL the Entrecard categories were gone. I went to their blog for more information and all I found was a post on the 29th that the Entrecard categories were gone during some rebranding efforts they’re undertaking, but not mention as to whether or not they’d be back.

So for now, their efficiency is nil. The aforementioned toolbar is still in private beta testing, so until they’re done with the testing I can’t have the toolbar to increase efficiency and we’re not getting our slideslows back. I can’t even find anywhere to sign up to request an invite. According to their video posted on the 25th, they’re changing the focus to online bookmarking. They describe how the new and improved service will differ from del.icio.us by saying you can hop from one bookmark to another, one tag to another to browse your bookmarks. What the SiteHoppin’ team seems to forget is that StumbleUpon already has that capability, as well as the capability to browse random sites. The only thing they don’t have is an Entrecard category.

So ultimately, unless they bring the Entrecard categories back along with the slideshow feature, they’ll just be another StumbleUpon. And SU works fine all by itself for me.

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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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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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I finally signed up for Google Analytics. I know… I know… there’s no excuse in taking so long to sign up for such a great tool when it’s free. But I’d been using another stat counting site and didn’t see any reason to switch.

Okay you drug it out of me with that look… I didn’t know it was free either.

Of course, this has highly elevated Google in my mind. Despite my abandonment of AdSense from this blog, I really do love Google and all the great services they’ve offered me. Gmail is my best friend and confidant. Blogger has replaced the little keyed notebook I kept under my pillow. And Reader is my daily paper… with news, comics, and human interest.

So far the interface is a breeze to navigate. Everything is very big and represented visually, which is great for a person like me. I only have to click around and see exactly what I want – visitors, where they come from, what they’re doing. Since this is a blog, mostly reserved to the home page and not a lot of pages to navigate through, some of the more advanced features (like bounce rate) are lost on my use.

My favorite feature so far has got to be the Traffic Sources. Basically it’s a little bit of reassurance that all this time I’ve been spending on Entrecard, Digg, and StumbleUpon isn’t all for not. I’m not getting staggering numbers of people visiting the blog, but it’s super helpful to know where those people are coming from. I could easily redirect my efforts or try something new, and that helps a lot. I love to make the best use of my time possible (maybe I’m weird that way) so this helps me to weed out activities that are a total waste of time (like Furl & Reddit, I see…).

I’m not usually a super analytical person. I never have been. But Gooogle Analytics presents it in a way that is really easy for me to see the cause & effect relationships of what I’ve been doing to promote this little monkey here. Because honestly it’s not that fun writing when you don’t think anyone is reading .

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