Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone! I hope that 2008 has been a good for your affiliate marketing business.

I’ve had a great month of December. So far, my earnings are 3x more than what I normally make in a month. Obviously it’s due to the Christmas season, but still impressive considering the current economic climate. Even more impressive is the fact that I really haven’t worked on my affiliate sites for the past couple months!

My Main Earnings Source

The majority of my December earnings have come from a Nintendo Wii BANS site that I setup last Spring. I can’t even remember the last time I worked on that site, but MSN decided to index it and rank it fairly well for some good terms.

The rest of my earnings are coming from a combination of BANS site and WordPress blogs running phpBay.

I’m not lazy and I put in a lot of hard work setting up my sites, but it amazes me that they can essentially run on auto-pilot for a few months or more, and my earnings still go up 3x during the Christmas season.

Sweat Equity

I credit my success to all of the “smart” hard work I invested in getting my sites setup.

I also credit my good training from Wealthy Affiliate, and the great keyword research I was able to perform using Micro Niche Finder and NicheBOT. Remember that there isn’t a software tool or training resource available that’s the silver bullet for making a profit with no work. (Trust me when I say I spent countless hours researching my niches, setting up my sites, and marketing them.) However great tools can make your hard work be more efficient, for the best results possible. I’m very pleased with the results I’ve obtained from the tools I rely on.

Happy Holidays

I’m looking forward to 2009, and wish you and your family the best this holiday season. Here’s to all of our ongoing success!

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Wealthy Affiliate Accredited Courses

Wealthy Affiliate is an internet marketing membership site that contains a wealth of information, training, coaching/mentoring, and peer-to-peer support and assistance. It’s where I got my feet wet in affiliate marketing, and being completely honest, I didn’t make a penny online until I joined.

It’s also the place where I first learned about the Build a Niche Store software (which is still my largest source of income).

Just to be clear, Wealthy Affiliate is a membership site that costs $29 per month. However I’ve been a member there for over one year (you can look me up on the forums, I’m “skolvikings”), and as long as I still have my affiliate marketing business, I plan to continue my membership. So obviously, since I’m spending my own money on a membership, I feel it’s a good deal.

So why am I telling you about Wealthy Affiliate?

Accredited Training Courses

I wanted to mention Wealthy Affiliate to you because they’ve just released two additional training courses:

• Article Marketing Accreditation
• PPC Accreditation

These courses cost $67 each, and are only available to Wealthy Affiliate members. (That price is valid for only the first week after the launch, after which it will be increasing.)

I’m not going to get into the details for each of these courses, because I don’t want you to think I’m hyping them and just trying to make a sale.

As you’d expect, they do come with a ton of great bonuses, etc, but I’ll let you check out those details for yourself by clicking one of the links.

Is This For You?

If you’re already very successful online, then you probably don’t need additional training, and you can save your money. But if you’re still in the beginning stages of your online business, you might want to check out Wealthy Affiliate and their new accreditation courses. (And if you use my links in this post, you’ll be helping me out, so THANKS!)

Again, I’m a satisfied member of Wealthy Affiliate, so if you have any questions about it, please feel free to contact me and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Here are those links again:

Wealthy Affiliate
http://www.wealthyaffiliate.com/course_signup.php?a_aid=n921cagg

Article Marketing Accreditation Course
http://www.wealthyaffiliate.com/course_article_marketing.php?a_aid=n921cagg

PPC Accreditation Course
http://www.wealthyaffiliate.com/course_ppc.php?a_aid=n921cagg

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Organizing Your Affiliate Business With OneNote 2007

Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 is an electronic notebook that can be used for organizing your affiliate business with to-do lists, notes and research, and so much more.

Product Name: Office OneNote 2007
Developer: Microsoft
Platform: Windows Vista / XP
Purpose: Digital notebook that organizes your notes, lists, audio notes, web site printouts, and anything else you wish to store digitally.
Price: $68.99 (as of 2008-09-01)

Introduction

When you run an affiliate marketing business, you have a lot of stuff you need to keep track of, including:

• To-do lists
• Affiliate program details
• Research notes
• Brainstorming ideas
• Keyword lists
• Membership usernames and passwords
• Etc.

It can be a daunting task to keep everything straight, but if you don’t, you end up being disorganized. When you’re disorganized, you don’t work efficiently, and so ultimately you lose money. Office OneNote 2007 is a software program that can help you stay organized in every area of your business.

Who Is This Product For?

In a nutshell… EVERYONE. There isn’t a person living who doesn’t need to stay organized. If you’re an internet or affiliate marketer and own a computer, there’s no doubt that you need to stay organized. So yes… that’s you!

If you already have software or a system for staying organized, and it works well, then you might not have a need for OneNote. However if you don’t have a system in place yet, or if your current system isn’t working that well, then you will want to seriously consider OneNote.

What Can It Do For You?

The premise behind OneNote 2007 is extremely simple:

• You create notebooks.
• Each notebook can have sections.
• Each section has pages.
• You can also create groups of sections containing lots of individual sections.

The beauty in the simplicity is you can use OneNote in the way that works best for your needs. It doesn’t “force” you to adopt any particular organizational method.

Key Benefits:

Here are some of the key benefits you get when you use OneNote 2007:

• Never Lose Your Work
  All of your notes are automatically saved in real-time. So you can work according to your own schedule, and you never have to worry about saving your work or losing anything.
• Stay Organized
  You can type anywhere you want on a page, just click and type. You can create as many pages and sections as you need. You can tag and flag selected text. You can organize things the way that works well for you, but if you misplace something inside of OneNote, it’s just a quick search away.
• Never Forget Key Tasks
  You can easily create to-do lists inside of OneNote, and checkmark tasks that are completed. You can even create Outlook tasks from inside of OneNote with a single mouse click.
• Remember Great Ideas
  If you’re like me, you often have a great ideas at times when you’re not ready to work on them. And if you’re like me, you sometimes forget those great ideas. With OneNote, you can easily type your idea onto a brainstorming list or page, and then move on to whatever else you were working on. Then later when you’re planning and researching, it’s easy to refer back to your ideas.
• Easily Manage Keyword Lists
  Forget about Excel or text documents for your keyword lists. When you manage your keyword lists in OneNote, you have your keyword lists, to-do notes, and project ideas all in one place.
• Work From A Single Workspace
  You can use OneNote to do nearly all of your work in one place. For example, if you had an affiliate campaign you were just starting, you could create a new notebook or section for that project. Then you would have pages for your research and brainstorming. Next you’d create a page for your project’s to-do list and keyword lists. Finally you could write your web site content (blog posts, content, etc) directly in OneNote, easily referring to your lists and research… all inside of one application! Then copy and paste your content into your web site or blog, and check off those tasks from your to-do list.

Unique Features:

OneNote 2007 contains unique features that I haven’t seen before in a single software application:

• Audio Notes
  Some people don’t like to type notes, they’d rather speak them. A lot of people own digital voice recorders for this very purpose. However going back through your recordings takes time and can be tedious. As long as you have a microphone on your computer, OneNote lets you record audio notes directly into the software. The audio notes can be stored on any page you want. Best yet, OneNote will scan and index the words in the recording and use them for search results. So if you spoke the phrase “Amazon affiliate program” in your audio note, if you later do a search for that phrase, your note will appear in the search results!
• Screen Clippings
  OneNote has the ability to create a screen clipping from anything visible on your desktop. The clip will then be saved as a graphic in your OneNote notebook. If the graphic contains any text, OneNote will detect that, so when you search through your notes, it will include the text from the graphic in the search results!

Are There Any Problems?

Sure, like all software, OneNote 2007 is not perfect. Here are some things I would improve if I were in charge of developing the software:

• OneNote doesn’t have an easy way to run in minimized mode. While there is a system tray icon running at all times, the actual software always appears as a normal application in your taskbar when it’s running. If you want to minimize the software, you have to close it. The program does launch extremely quickly, but still it’s annoying. I would add a ‘minimize to system tray’ option.
• Everything is contained in a single window. The software does have feature to launch a new window, but it doesn’t have any type of advanced window management. So if you want to view two different pages side-by-side, as an example, then you have to manually position the windows. I would add window management features like ‘view side by side.’

Conclusion

I realize this isn’t some sexy new affiliate software… it’s just some boring productivity software… right? Well here’s the deal: you need to stay organized.

It’s really that simple. If you’re not organizing your efforts, then you’re not working efficiently. If you’re not working efficiently, then you’re leaving profits on the table.

If you want to maximize your efforts and profits by staying organized, then Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 is a software product that will give you the tools you need to organize your work. It won’t make you money in and of itself, but it will help you stay organized so your money making tasks stay on track.

Value: 8/10
Return on Investment: 9/10
Ease of Use: 9/10
Overall: 26/30

Click here to learn more or purchase a copy:
http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-OneNote-2007/

Bonus Savings Tip: OneNote 2007 is included as a part of Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, which also includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. This package costs about $20 more than the stand-alone OneNote software, so it’s a better deal if you want the extra software.

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Warning: Don’t Be Seduced By StoreStacker

A new affiliate tool has just been released, and you’re bound to be bombarded by a ton of marketers telling you how great it is. Do not listen to them!

The product is called StoreStacker. It promises that you can easily and quickly setup affiliate stores using products from many sources. You can even auto publish content by scraping other’s RSS feeds. The whole thing is automatic… just set it up, walk away, and enjoy the commissions.

The trouble is this method NEVER works. Sure you might install 20 stores… or 100 stores… and find short term success, but you’ll never build up a source of long-term stable income.

Do you really think it’s as easy as buying a piece of software, installing it to a domain, picking a niche, and setting up scraped RSS content? Listen, I know how strong the desire can be to find a silver bullet that will earn you a lot of money for little effort, but that silver bullet doesn’t exist.

If you want to buy StoreStacker, then that’s fine, as long as you understand that if you want long term success, you will need to treat it like any other authority site. You will need to publish original content that provides value to your niche and your visitors, which takes time and effort.

Please… if you are reading this… do not be seduced by StoreStacker. I won’t tell you not to buy it, but I won’t be recommending it either.

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Masking Affiliate Links with WP-Affiliate

If you use WordPress in any of your marketing efforts (and you should be), you probably need a way to mask your affiliate links. If that’s you, there’s a free plug-in you need to know about called WP-Affiliate.

WP-Affiliate let’s you setup blog-wide masked (cloaked) affiliate links. Basically you enter in the anchor text and the actual URL, and the plug-in will give you a masked URL you can use within posts on your blog.

So as an example, if you had an affiliate link that looked like this:

http://www.affiliateproduct.com/myaffiliateid/?=myaffiliatetrackingid

WP-Affiliate could transform that link to look like this instead:

http://www.mydomain.com/recommends/affiliateproduct

I think you’ll agree that second domain looks much nicer, and would provide a better experience for your blog’s readers. You can actually see how the plug-in works by clicking any of the links on this post!

Installing and configuring WP-Affiliate is really easy… just upload the plug-in to your site, activate it from the admin dashboard, and then setup your links from the options area in the write/edit post page.

The downside to WP-Affiliate is that it won’t automatically link your chosen anchor text. You use it to create the links, but then you have to manually add them to your post. It does have a shortcut to send your link to the editor window, but that is still a manual effort.

However considering how well it does what it does—and especially considering the price—I plan on using WP-Affiliate on this blog, and I encourage you to do the same!

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3 Tools for Your Affiliate War Chest

I’ve recently obtained three tools for my own personal affiliate war chest. I plan to post an in-depth review of each tool after I’ve had more time to work with them, however I wanted to give you a heads-up in case you wanted to check them out now.

JohnCow’s “Build a Business Not a Blog” eBook
This eBook is full of amazing information on how to setup and run a blog as a business. It teaches you everything from which plug-ins to use, to how to build up a visitor base and monetize your efforts. The best thing about this eBook is the price… zero.

Traffic Travis
This is an amazing software tool that I just purchased a few days ago. It does keyword research, SEO analysis, but the best feature is the PPC spy tool! You can enter in your list of longtail keywords, and then schedule Traffic Travis to check the running Google PPC ads for those keywords each day. This helps you determine which longtail keywords are making others money. Truthfully I’m not sure how useful the keyword and SEO tools are going to be compared to other tools I already own, but the PPC tool is the reason I purchased the software.

Blog Mastermind
Blog Mastermind is a coaching program that teaches you everything about setting up a successful blog. This isn’t a typical blogging eBook or anything like that… instead it’s a full coaching program. There’s 27 lessons, 5 advanced lessons, over 30 hours of audio, hours of video, live student/teacher Q&A conference calls, and more! I’m not going to say any more about this now, because I just purchased it a week ago, and quite honestly I’m already overwhelmed with the quantity and quality of the material. I just need to work through each lesson one at a time, and once I’ve gotten through more of the material, I will keep you updated on my progress. I’ll know soon enough if the coaching is worth the investment I made in it.

Well that’s it for now. Stayed tuned for those in-depth reviews, but in the meantime, you now know the tools I’ve been using lately to boost my online profits… so enjoy!

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Find Your Competition’s Real Strength with Micro Niche Finder

At first glance Micro Niche Finder is your classic internet marketing keyword software. However unlike some of the more expensive tools on the market, Micro Niche Finder has it’s own… well… niche. Let me explain. Read more

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How to Succeed with AdWords

A lot of people lose their shirts with AdWords. Well here is a method that can give you a much higher chance of converting into profits (although you can still lose your shirt if you spend more on advertising than you can afford):

Read more

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Getting Inbound Links to your Site

Mark from the Build a Niche Store Empire series recently posted about getting inbound links to your site, otherwise known as backlinks. In the post, Mark lists some excellent, high quality ways to get inbound links (which the search engines love). Here are a few more ideas that I’d like to add to the list:

Read more

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Free Directory Submission with digiXMAS

I was browsing the Digital Point Forums earlier today and discovered a post about digiXMAS. This is a free software tool that allows you to submit your web sites to 150 directories. It uses an auto-submission process, so for each site you pick a category and enter in the CAPTCHA, and that’s it. After a few entries it starts to remember which categories apply to your site, so it will begin to automatically select them for you. So for most of the directories, all you have to do is type in the CAPTCHA if one exists, and click okay.

Pretty easy, and boom, your site is now listed with 150 directories. Those are free one-way backlinks to your site. Very nice!

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