Untethered Dreams

If you’re new to affiliate marketing you may be overwhelmed by all of the material there is to learn, all of the courses that exist, all of the so-called gurus who want to teach you the their surefire ways to make money online. Let us recommend just one established workshop that takes place at least once a year in Atlanta, called, NAMS (Niche Affiliate Marketing System).

We’ve personally taken this course and found that it is literally filled with wall-to-wall information from experts who have been in the business for years. You may not find their names up in lights, but then again they don’t tend to claim that you will become a millionaire overnight. And that’s a good thing, because as we’ve said time and time again, online businesses are still businesses that require hard work.

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Have you ever wondered whether or not people actually make money on the Internet? And if so, how? Well many struggle, but many really do. But it is hard work, just like anything else really, offline or online.
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Not barely two days have passed, and here I am entering and promoting another guest blogging contest! This time, this one is being thrown by a collection of blogs: ComLuv.com, IBlogZone.com, MyBlogGuest.com, and FamousBloggers.net.

This one is all about traffic generation, and you can read my awesome post called Zen and the Art of Web Traffic. It’s not so much about the mechanics, but rather starts at a higher level, which is where we should all start when approaching a task or project or goal.

I would really appreciate it if you check it out and leave a comment and/or retweet.

And now for the generous sponsors:
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As part of our ever-ongoing efforts to reach out to the rest of the blogging community as well as promote our very own blog here, we’ve been ramping up our guest blogging efforts.

Other blogs in an effort to improve their own incoming guest posts run contests to encourage that. One such community is Blog Engage, and their current Guest Blogging contest runs through the end of March 2011.

Although there are cash prizes for winning, my main purpose for entering is to put my writing skills up against other bloggers in the big bad Internet and see how I compare. [Read the rest of this entry...]

When I was at Elite Retreat last month, I got a chance to speak with Allen Baler, who is simply an all-around good guy, and who gave me a lot of great ideas and advice. The piece of advice that I’d like to pass along comes in the form of a report that shows you where on your website’s page to put your ads to maximize the revenue.

Researched and written by Internet marketing consultant Michael Campbell and dubbed the “Ultimate Heatmap“, this amazing report shows with screenshots where on your page to place your ads for maximum clicks and hence maximum income. Michael spent his money and time to perform this research, gather the data and write up the results and has generously provided this amazing report for free on his blog.

After reading through, we made just one little change with one of our ads on Gizmos for Geeks, and found an immediate increase in the CTR on that block that went from 0.5% to over 1.0%. That’s essentially double and nothing to sneeze at.

Please also check out Allen’s business, Reboot Fulfillment, which will take your info product and turn it into a printed book, DVD and/or CD. Data has shown repeatedly that you can easily turn your ebook or other digital download into a physical upsell that is almost purely profit, so it’s worth checking out.

Knowledge is power and David Perdew has put together a fabulous package for Niche Affiliate Marketers in his NAMS conferences.

The Niche Affiliate Marketing System workshop has gathered 14 of the best and brightest niche
marketers in the business and they will spend time with you actually building your empire in a close-knit workshop setting.

Typically, there are two separate live NAMS conferences every year but David has mixed that up to a virtual event starting in just days (Friday – January 14) and a live NAMS conference in Atlanta during August. This year he’s combined the payments for both into $397 where typically each conference would cost $397. Additionally, we have a coupon code of “UnderTheWire” that discounts the conference by $100 for a total cost of $297 for 2 conferences – a virtual and live conference.

Click here and enter the coupon for the special $297 price and know you are getting a deal for the price.

Not sure of the value, check out this video from Kevin Riley, one of the NAMS teachers.

I’ll be there so look for me and look for a review after each day on Untethered Dreams.

I noticed while browsing the Affiliate Summit conference‘s website that although they have a neat tool to pick the sessions you want to attend and of course the really long page of sessions on the Agenda page, they don’t have a calendar-at-a-glance on a single page that shows what’s when in a matrix type of format.

So I put one together. It’s color-coded based on pass type (Gold, Platinum, Diamond) and whether it’s a session geared for folks at a beginner, intermediate or advanced level.

You can download the calendar (in PDF format) here.

PS> Sign up for our mailing list (top-right corner of this page) to stay on top of all these goodies that we create!

We recently moved over from OpenX to OIO Publisher as our ad platform but before we did, I did some research into what the affordable options were (aka free!). It quickly came down to two (2) platforms: OIO Publisher and Google’s DFP (DoubleClick for Publishers) Small Business.

I wrote a guest post over at Famous Bloggers on why we decided to toss out OpenX, what we chose and why. It’s broken down into easy-to-digest lists of pros and cons. Enjoy!

Update: Congrats to our winner @Getalonghome. Stay tuned here and on Gizmos for Geeks for more giveaways and contests.

Well we’re baffled as to how we had no takers on this past contest. Sent out a whole bunch of tweets to prospective winners, but not a single reply. Weird. Do folks like to enter contests with no hope of winning?! We’d like to think that there are some optimists out there, so here we go again!

This time, the entry period will run until Hallow’s Eve, Oct 31st 2010 @ 6PM Pacific Time. At that point, TWTaway.com will randomly pick a winner. Please remember, you have to be a US resident to win.

Enter to win here.

See all of the other details in the original post.

Social networking being all the rage today, both for consumers and marketers, you probably have considered or are already using it in your business. But if you’ve just begun in this relatively new area, there’s a lot that you need to consider that you may not have thought of or have ever needed to think of in the past. For that reason, you should consider reading some good books on the subject.

I recently reviewed one such book, with an eye-catching yet appropriate name: “Friends with Benefits:A Social Media Marketing Handbook” by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo. This is a pretty thorough book that covers subjects like whether you should start a blog, how to reach out to the rest of the social world, bet practices, and importantly how to measure success.

You can read the full review at Blogcritics.