Untethered Dreams

Have you been in the affiliate marketing game for a while now and are just flailing around without any real success to speak of? Perhaps some traffic to your site or a sale here and there, but not the kind of envious profits that the gurus advertise on their products? Well, here’s an admission you probably won’t see too much in the marketing world – so have we!

[We should probably clarify though. Our main venture, gadget blog Gizmos for Geeks, has been profitable almost since day one, with income coming in mainly via affiliate sales and advertising. However, we haven't turned a profit from straight up Internet marketing, the kind where you're pushing either your own product (usually of the electronic variety) or someone else's via SEO, word of mouth, e-mail marketing, PPC or other advertising.]

Well this post isn’t about to say that we’re about to throw in the towel. Actually, just the opposite! We still have hope that success can be had in this biz. One of us has come up with an idea that will hopefully push us to get over what we think is that initial barrier. And that brilliant idea is … a friendly competition! And we aim to be as transparent about our methods and results as we can be.
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If you’re a blogger, then you probably do a lot of copying and pasting and sometimes it’s the same stuff over and over. I had been using ClipX pretty successfully for a long time, but recently had major issues with it, probably due to some recent Windows XP update. That meant I had to go searching for a replacement (free and ideally open source).

I narrowed it down to 2: Flashpaste Lite and Ditto, which is an open source project. I decided on Ditto as it was much more powerful than Flashpaste and more customizable, particularly with keyboard shortcuts to quickly paste pre-canned chunks of text.

I noticed some other folks on the Web not caring for Ditto because of its complexity, but hey, the more complex it is, then the better the chance that it’ll do what you want. I’m of the school that believes that power is accompanied by complexity. Take the time up front to learn the tool and you’ll be rewarded by many hours of improved efficiency.

References:

• Travis Illig’s blog post on finding a clipboard mgmt program
• Download.com’s Clipboard Software section

Other Possible Apps that I considered:

• clipmon32
• WinClipper
• Clipomatic

Almost a year ago, we started our trial of GetFriday, a ‘virtual assistant’ or ‘outsourced assistant’ company based in India. Their fees start at around $10/hour and go down from there the larger the monthly plan you get. We eventually decided to part ways with them, mainly due to a few factors: 1. cost-cutting on our part, and 2. our need for more technical skills.

Here’s what we learned, which you can use in many ways when looking for a new VA:
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In all likelihood, you’ve seen where you perform a search on a website and the results look just very much like what you get when you do a search on Google. Well, in case you’re wondering how that works, Google has a product called Google Custom Search that lets you do just that. There are 2 versions, 1 free with ads, and a for-fee version that allows for more customization and much larger websites.

If you’re running a blog, that is based on WordPress for example, then you can use the power of Google search on your site. While Google has decent documentation for how to do this generally, there don’t have specific docs on how to do this on a blog. Canadian blogger Maki who runs Dosh Dosh has put together a pretty thorough tutorial with screenshots that walks you through the process.

About the only thing we would emphasize some more in his tutorial is embedding the search box code in your site. This is the code that creates the search box and button.

You may also be interested in the Google Custom Search WordPress plugin. It redirects all searches to GCS and automatically creates a new search results page in WP. Our advice is to take the time to learn about GCS and create everything yourself. It doesn’t take more than a few hours. The plugin is nice, but doesn’t allow for easy customization.

We recently decided to replace the built-in commenting system that comes with WordPress on Gizmos for Geeks due to its limitations and that we were spending too much time dealing with spam comments. We looked at the 4 most popular/capable comment replacement systems available now: IntenseDebate, Disqus, Backtype and JS-Kit’s ECHO. We briefly considered Facebook Connect, but since at least ID already supports FBC, we didn’t bother with it.

We ended up picking IntenseDebate, which by the way is made by the same company (Automattic) that produces WordPress. We won’t go into all the reasons why we picked ID, because your reasons will end up being different from ours and it’ll be worth the time to research them properly and understand what they can do.

Instead, here are some useful references that we used to help us decide. Good luck.

1. IntenseDebate vs Disqus
2. Intense Debate vs Disqus: Why I Nearly Switched
3. BackType’s Co-opetition with Disqus, IntenseDebate

And if those aren’t enough to help you decide, then you can hit up Google to find additional discussions. How apt.

I love this graph. It is so telling. This is a track of our visitors to one of Halloween costume websites. Look at how it rises steadily to the height of traffic on Halloween day (interestingly enough – probably from people looking for last minute ideas) and then falling precipitously the next 2 days (the end date on the graph is Nov 2).

It’s pretty simple what this says – plan for seasonal events. Traditional vendors do it, and so should you.

I love this graph. It is so telling. This is a track of our visitors to one of Halloween costume websites. Look at how it rises steadily to the height of traffic on Halloween day (interestingly enough – probably from people looking for last minute ideas) and then falling precipitously the next 2 days (the end date on the graph is Nov 2).

It’s pretty simple what this says – plan for seasonal events. Traditional vendors do it, and so should you.

Over a year ago, we wrote about being ‘penny-wise, pound-foolish’, or rather advising not to be! Well, I have another very concrete example of how spending a bit more money up front saved me a whole lot of time and by extension, money.

I’ll nutshell it up front:
I built my computer with the operating system on a RAID 1 array. One of the physical drives in that array crashed hard, so I pulled it out, sent it back to the manufacturer (it was still under warranty), got a new one and replaced it. That’s it. No rebuilding the operating systems, no reinstalling applications, no recovery from backups, pretty much very little heartache.
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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has decided that bloggers need to disclose if they’ve received ‘freebies’ that they blog about or write reviews on. Otherwise they would be liable for fines on the order of $10 to $20,000.

In addition, testimonial advertisements now need to be more explicit in what customers can reasonably expect when they purchase the products. No longer can they only contain glowing reviews with a disclaimer saying that the results aren’t typical for all consumers.

The new regulations go into effect December 1, 2009. It’s a good idea to read through the changes, the first of its kind since 1980. However, if you’re a blogger and want to be on the safe side, then simply disclose whenever you do receive a freebie and write about it. Your readers will appreciate your honesty and your trust factor will rise as well.

References:

• FTC Press Release
• FTC Guides concerning the use of Endorsements and Testimonials (filled with examples) [PDF]

In case you’re not familiar with Google’s Sitelinks, it’s those ‘additional’ links that (up to recently only) show up for the 1st result in Google’s search results if the site in question had distinctive categorized content. Ok, that was a mouthful. Here’s a concrete example. One of the sites that we run, MvixCommunity, which is a forum for discussing Mvix products shows up as the 1st result when you search for ‘mvix forums’, and it has additional sitelinks under the result. Here’s a screenshot:

Google recently decided to share that love a bit, and now sites further down in the listings will also get Sitelinks if they are so deserving. They won’t get the full treatement, but at least they’ll get a line with up to 4 such links.

So far, Google does not describe exactly how those links are auto-generated, but you can block some of those links via Google’s Webmaster Tools.