On November 4th, Amazon announced the launch of a new feature called Share on Twitter that can be accessed through their Site Stripe.

To use it, login to your Amazon Associates account, visit the page that you want to share, click on “Share on Twitter” within the Site Stripe and that will open up a new window in your Twitter account, pre-populated with the product details.

The tweet is prefaced with “Great Deal on Amazon:”, followed by the title and a shortened URL, coded with your affiliate link. I suggest that you change the prefix to something more personal and specific, i.e. “What I’m reading now”, as shown in the sceenshot below.

Once you’ve altered the message, click on Update and your Tweet goes public, with the potential to earn referal fees.

Gotta like that!

Here’s a traffic generation question / comment from Kenny that was spot on!

Rosalind, it is inconceivable that you have time to utilize all the techniques in your ebook.

So, in an effort to follow your lead, so to speak, if you were to narrow down the five most consistently effective marketing / promotion / advertising processes that you use primarily, what would you say those were?

In advance, thanks.

Kenny Love

GREAT question, Kenny!

You’re absolutely right – I’d go bonkers if I tried to do ALL of the marketing techniques ALL of the time.

So, here are the 5 traffic generation or marketing methods that I use most consistently:

1. Blogging for Search Engine Placement
2. List / Email Marketing
3. Social Media Marketing & Community Activity
4. Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC)
5. Article Distribution & Marketing

Blogging for Search Engine Placement

Essentially, my first priority is to publish fresh content to my blogs on a regular basis (some of which are more regular than others). Although I don’t engage in keyword stuffing, (which makes for horrible reading), the content of each blog post has to be tightly focused on one subject so that keywords and keyword phrases in the article are closely aligned and thus the post is more likely to get picked up and listed by the search engines, resulting in free traffic.

List / Email Marketing

The post is then distributed by email to the relevant subscriber list either through a blog broadcast (using Aweber / Feedburner combined) or through a link in a weekly newsletter.

Social Media Marketing & Community Activity

Engaging the audience personally through either blog commenting, forum posting or social media marketing comes next. I will respond to comments and answer any questions posted by my own blog readers and subscribers, which enhances information contained in the article and adds still more ‘fodder’ for the search engines to notice. My social media marketing efforts are fairly scant – using applications like TwitterFeed to broadcast the post’s title and link to Twitter for some more free traffic. From time to time, I’ll post a comment to a high-profile blog or forum in response to a topic relevant to my original article, along with a link to that article.

Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC)

Depending on the response from blog readers and subscribers, I may incorporate PPC marketing at that point. If the conversion rate is better than average for the audience, I’ll do the math to assess whether it’s worth driving traffic to that particular post or page with PPC, starting with Google Adwords and/or Yahoo! Search Marketing depending on the demographic. If the response is just ‘good’, PPC may still be worth the effort if enough of that traffic joins the list.

Article Distribution & Marketing

Article marketing comes in 5th and last, because I don’t post the same articles to my site as I would distribute to article directories so they require some re-writing, which takes time. Furthermore, the traffic isn’t as targeted as it is with your own list or with PPC marketing… but it’s traffic none-the-less and every click counts for something… eventually.

After that’s all said and done, it’s probably time to write another post — or more likely, take another vacation.

I just ran through the AffiliateBenchmarks affiliate marketing survey, and it’s a very well-constructed survey to determine current affiliate practices.

Affiliates who complete the survey will receive a free copy.

Here’s the press release:

New York, NY (PRWEB) July 8, 2009 — AffiliateBenchmarks, a research division of outsourced affiliate management agency NETexponent, has released an affiliate marketing survey to be completed by affiliates and website publishers by July 31st 2009. The survey results will gather best practices for several aspects of affiliate marketing, including how best to communicate with affiliates, what advertisers can do to optimize affiliate relationships, what tools and information affiliates crave, and what challenges they face. Results will be analyzed and used to identify marketing trends and projected changes. Affiliates who complete the survey will receive a free copy of the results and others will have the option to buy a copy once released.

We were very proud of last years effort and the industry’s response but knew we had room for improvement This year survey is not only bigger and better but it also has the support of major affiliate networks like Commission Junction, Google Affiliate Network, LinkShare, PepperJam, Shareasale, and Media Trust. Thanks to the support of these major networks we have been able to optimize our study and significantly increase the number of respondents.
AffiliateBenchmarks produced their first study in 2008 and the research report was met with an extremely positive response from the online marketing community. The positive response from last years research report and continued need for industry benchmarks prompted AffiliateBenchmarks to produce the 2009 survey. This year the AffiliateBenchmarks survey has been significantly expanded and improved based on the knowledge and feedback from the industry leaders. The 2009 survey includes a wide range of questions about topics such as affiliates’ experiences with different types of ad performance, site visitor demographics, technology and communication preferences, motivations for joining an affiliate program, experiences with emerging technology, and more.

“We were very proud of last years effort and the industry’s response but knew we had room for improvement,” said Peter Figueredo, CEO & Co-Founder of NETexponent. “This year survey is not only bigger and better but it also has the support of major affiliate networks like Commission Junction, Google Affiliate Network, LinkShare, PepperJam, Shareasale, and Media Trust. Thanks to the support of these major networks we have been able to optimize our study and significantly increase the number of respondents.”

If you are an affiliate/publisher and are interested in benchmarking your success by completing this survey, we will send you a copy of the results. Your time and input is greatly appreciated. Be sure to complete the survey before July 31, 2009. Affiliate Benchmarks respects the privacy of affiliates and only aggregate information will be shared.

AffiliateBenchmarks is the affiliate research division of NETexponent. AffiliateBenchmarks designs and executes affiliate marketing research with the purpose of increasing industry education and providing useful data and statistics to the affiliate community. We focus on the benefit of the affiliate marketing industry as a whole, and strive to provide reliable information that is interesting and useful to a wide range of people involved with affiliate marketing. Follow us on Twitter @AffBenchmarks.

NETexponent is an online performance based marketing agency located in New York that specializes in outsourced affiliate and search marketing management, growth, and optimization. Founded in January of 2001, the metrics-driven firm leverages nearly a decade of management experience in structuring win-win, performance based deals with its clients. The agency focuses on efficiently acquiring the most valuable customers for each advertiser they work with, while always delivering the highest level of client service. NETexponent is committed to being the industry’s leading performance online marketing agency, continually evolving to address changing market conditions and client needs. Follow us on Twitter @NETexponent.

Take the survey.

I love services that simplify my online business.

One of those services is TwitterFeed’s automatic posting of blog entries to my Twitter account — meaning that I rarely have to login to Twitter, unless of course I feel like telling everyone what I’m having for lunch that day — not.

Well, in a similar fashion, YouTube has just made sharing your videos easier too.

You can now connect your YouTube account with your Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader accounts — meaning that your followers, friends and shared-item readers will see when you upload a new video to YouTube.

Sweet!

To connect your YouTube account with Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader, simply click on Upload Video and you’ll see the link for AutoShare Options. Choose one or choose all 3 — linking is pretty much instantaneous and painless.

The screenshot below shows my YouTube account and the AutoShare options I chose.

Now I just have to make and upload another video to YouTube… wait for it!

Comments, questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment below!

Cheers,

In a video post this morning, my good friend Colin “Google” McDougall reveals Google’s plans to eradicate the value of inbound links from social media sites.

Like Colin, I’ve never been an avid user of MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter exactly because it was inevitable that Google would eventually have to turn that traffic off due to abuse by backlink hungry Internet marketers. Most of the ‘content’ is pure time-wasting rubbish anyway. Seriously, who cares if I’m running off to Starbucks to get tall non-fat moccha? Good grief.

Colin also emphasizes that you can still garner benefit from social media sites when used for the purpose of real networking and sharing content of value.

Hmmm… gaining backlinks and therefore site traffic through the sharing of valuable content. What a novel concept!

This is the 6th (bonus) post in 5-part series social media marketing using Facebook by guest blogger, Alexander Alaric. You may read his other posts here.

I decided to add this post in response to questions about “where’s the money on Facebook?”. Since you have a decent understanding of Facebook now having read my other posts in this series, I’ll tell you about the 3 basic ways I use Facebook to make money.

Although you could use their PPC system which has profitable possibilities. I know people who are making good money using this but since I’ve not personally tested it I’m not qualified to advise you about it so these are ways to use it without spending money in the process.

• Groups
• Events
• Live FB on-site Chat

Groups

You know about groups already. The benefits (and drawbacks) of setting and having your own group have been discussed. However, when you have a group of 200-300 or more you can get good leverage by sending an email to the entire group. Build the community side of it.

Here’s a picture to show you that there are all kinds of groups on Facebook… there’s even one about rodents.

To make this work, you could develop a 3-6 part email series and a schedule of when you are going to send it out. Start by encouraging conversation on the group’s wall and posting interesting threads on the group bulletin board. This gets people active in your group and further bonded to it.

It’s no longer “just another FB group I’m a part of”. It becomes something they remember and the sense of community is stronger.

Then start asking them questions. Ask them about their concerns and how you can help. The more you engage your members the better.

Finally, you can send out an email inviting them to join you on your webinar/teleseminar or even your ustream.tv channel. The benefit of the ustream is they can see you making the presentation, your body language and gestures. It is almost like being live and face-to-face which is the most powerful communication.

This bonds them to you even further.

You’ll want to use a webinar if you’re doing a highly technical subject where you are going to walk them through how to do it on your computer so they can watch step-by-step what you are doing.

You could compile some of the biggest questions they asked and just do a Q&A call. That’s the easiest way to get your content for the call and it’s most VALUABLE TO YOUR MEMBERS.

This gives you a good running start.

Events

Events can be handled in similar fashion. In fact, I recommend that you combine Events with the Groups strategy. After you’ve finished the mailing series to your group, you invite them to the Events page that you have setup with the details of your call.

The really cool thing about events is that you can invite all your friends. It’s the ONE AND ONLY safe way to invite all your friends without being caught in the facebook spam filters.

Once you have sent out the invites to the friends who’d be interested (or all of them) you have the ability through your events page to follow-up with them. It separates into “attending”, “maybe”, and “not attending”. You can send different messages to each category of friends.

You can see from this image how someone raises their hand to confirm that they’re attending your event. Be sure to send a reminder and bonus info to the “attendees” to further pique their interest and increase your attendance rate.

Include additional reasons explaining why the “maybes” should attend. Make it so desirable that they want to cancel whatever else they had planned because the content of the call will be of such MASSIVE benefit they’d have to be complete fools to miss it.

When you can make it more important than their wedding anniversary you know you have a winner. Okay I’m young so have never been married, and this level may be unattainable but making it really desirable for them is the goal.

To the “not attending” you can send a “hate for you to miss out on this valuable advice, but here’s some bonus info now and maybe I’ll make the recorded version available to you” message. This gets some of them to want your info.

Live Facebook on-site Chat

The chat bar “floats” down below. It’s a standard php bar you’ve seen.

Although I haven’t experimented with this much yet I see the widest potential of this for 1-on-1 client acquisition. For someone like me that does copywriting at $100/hr I can get on here and talk with Facebook friends whom I know are looking for a copywriter. I can see what they are needing done, what they’re looking for, and how I can create a valuable sales piece that will pull high response and ultimately make them more money.

You could be a plumber and contact local people you know are having plumbing issues (no double entendre here). You’d be surprised what people post to twitter and their Facebook status updates.

Also, if you’re an article writer, web designer, seo underground guru, graphic designer, publicist, business coach, or a host of other remote-ready consultant/service based provider the possibilities for this type of 1-on-1 communication on-site are endless.

One piece of advice…make any potential client jump through a few hoops before getting involved in a long-winded conversation with them. This will save you time and eliminate the proverbial “tire-kickers” and “looky lous”.

Nothing fancy just send a couple emails back and forth. Have them send some info to you about what they need from you, and some kind of qualifier that lets you know they’re in a financial position to pay your reasonable fee.

This saves you headache, frustration and ultimately makes you more money because you’re more efficient.

What are you still doing here? Get out there, expand your business and make more money right now!

Special thanks to Ros for her caring commitment and making this series possible. Get more social media facebook tactics here.

I barely tweet at all, but after realizing just how many more visitors were coming to my site from Twitter, I became a real twit one day last week.

Posted 30 tweets in one day.

That was good for some fun, but I’ll stick with my lazy approach to attracting visitors with Twitter. Works like a charm.

Just in case you want to Twitter more, check out this list of Twitter software apps & services.

BTW, I’m checking out the fossil beds in southern Washington state at the moment and have my computer with me, so stay on the look out for tweets from me!

Too, be sure to check the post about the oldest person on Facebook.. who is probably now avidly reading Alexander’s latest post ‘Nailing the Facebook News Feed’.

Until next time… get social and prosper!

Cheers,
Ros

You’re probably already posting tweets to Twitter directly on the Twitter web site.

However, did you know that there are an increasing number of different applications which are designed to let you post to Twitter directly from your desktop or from specific devices, including your iPhone, Mac and Blackberry?

Or, that you can schedule tweets to be delivered in the future?

Here is a list of those software applications and services that will make your Twitter experience simpler and more enjoyable.

• TweetDeck
• TweetLater
• twhirl
• Twittelator
• TwitterBerry
• twitterfeed
• Twitterrific
• Twitter via Mobile Web

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application currently in public beta.

Learn more about TweetDeck

TweetLater

Schedule 12 status update tweets (maximum) for any rolling 60 minute window. Service can not be used for replies or direct messages.

Learn more about TweetLater

twhirl

twhirl is a social software desktop client, that runs on both Windows (2000/XP/Vista) and Mac OSX. In addition to Twitter, twhirl will connect you to multiple identi.ca, Friendfeed and seesmic accounts. You can also use twhirl to cross-post your twitter updates to Pownce and Jaiku.

Learn more about twhirl

Twittelator

Twittelator is an ad-free application by the Big Stone Phone Company for your iPhone. Twittelator can be downloaded from Big Stone’s “App Store” on your iPhone. In an emergency, you can simply click the Emergency icon to create a Tweet with a map of your current location.

Go to Twittelator

TwitterBerry

TwitterBerry is mobile client for posting updates to Twitter. It works over the data network, so you don’t need to use SMS. Supported devices include:

• BlackBerry Curve
• BlackBerry 8800 Series
• BlackBerry Pearl (8100, 8110, 8120, 8130)
• BlackBerry 8700 Series
• BlackBerry 7130 Series
• BlackBerry 7100 Series
• BlackBerry 7200 Series
• BlackBerry 7520

Go to TwitterBerry

Twitterrific

Twitterrific is Mac application that lets you “tweet” (publish posts to) or read posts from the Twitter community website. Twitterrific can be used free of charge with no limitations, but registering the program removes the ads.

Go to Twitterrific

twitterfeed

Automatically feed your blog posts (or any other RSS or Atom feed) to Twitter with Twitterfeed.

Go to twitterfeed

Twitter via Mobile Web

You can access Twitter from most phone’s web browsers. Just point your browser to http://m.twitter.com for a tiny Twitter interface.

Go to Twitter via Mobile Web

Stay tuned for updates about new Twitter services.

And please… don’t be an idiot and tweet while you’re driving.

Although I don’t post to my blogs every day and barely tweet at all, (OK, I went nuts one day and updated almost 30 times, but that was a BIG exception) I’m getting much more traffic from Twitter by using a special service.

Best of all, it’s free, only takes 2 minutes to set up and after that there’s no extra effort required on your part.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret about how you can get more traffic to your blogs from Twitter – even if, like me, you barely tweet at all.

Best of all, once you’ve spent a couple minutes to set things up, there’s no more effort required on your part.

What’s the secret?

Twitterfeed!

What is Twitterfeed and how does it work?

Twitterfeed takes RSS and Atom feeds and republishes them on your Twitter timeline. You choose how often you want the sytem to check your blog feeds and republish a your post(s) from once every 30 minutes to once every 24 hours. Up to 5 posts at a time can be sent to Twitter. Note also that your posts need to contain a publish date so Twitterfeed will know which posts are new.

You are given the option of posting just the title of the post or the title and truncated description to Twitter. You can also prefix each of your tweets from Twitterfeed with something like ‘My latest post: ‘ or ‘New on YourSiteName: ‘.

I however would suggest that you avoid using the prefix, especially if you have a tendency to write long blog post titles which will get truncated if the prefix is too long.

You will also want to make sure that you check the ‘Include item link’ box, otherwise Twitterfeed will send the tweet without a link back to your post. You have choices as to which service Twitterfeed will use to shorten the link including;

• TinyUrl
• TweetBurner
• SnipURL
• bit.ly
• is.gd
• URLshot

Tweets don’t have to come just from your blog feed.

For example, I set up a Twitter feed that tweets whenever I post a new article to the article directory here on NetProfitsToday, as the ArticleLive content management system that I use supplies feed URLs for each category and sub-category.

Open a Twitterfeed Account

To get started, go to Twitterfeed.com. You will have to supply your Twitter username and password so the system can post your blog updates to your twitter account.

Twitterfeed supports OpenID, a service that eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites. You probably already have an OpenID if you use services such as Flickr, Yahoo! or WordPress.com.

So… check out Twitterfeed and enjoy the extra traffic!