Link Love – Where have you seen murraynewlands.com recently?

Thanks to BenSpark.com
Everyday Photos
Winners of the Ultimate IZEAFest Prize Pack Contest
www.imnotafamousblogger.com/
MarketLeverage Yacht Party Recap

MarketLeverage TV
The Wrap up

Clickbooth Blog
Recap Of Affiliate Summit East 2009 

www.tamebay.com
An interview with EPN’s Will Martin-Gill

http://www.howdoyoutwitter.net

Marketing On Twitter

Cash-bandit.com
Your Cheese is About to Be Moved

Build A Niche Store Blog
Interview With Will Martin-Gill From EPN – New Changes Coming

http://blog.trrs.org/

http://blog.trrs.org/buy_blue_roses_on_blue_rose_day.html

www.newwebmag.com
Social Networking Forum Top Ten | Murray Newlands

http://Therealtimjones.com/ Internet Entrepreneur
BenSpark.com Ultimate IZEAFest Prize Pack Winner Announced, Today!

http://atthecreek1.blogspot.com/

IZEA Fest 

http://thedirtytshirt.com/

BenSpark’s ULTIMATE IZEAFest Prize Pack Contest 

http://bigdaddyrichard.blogspot.com/2009/08/winners-of-izeafest-prize-pack.html

http://fakeplasticnoodles.com/

http://raxraxrax.com/

http://thefuturebuzz.com/

http://something-about-harry.com/

http://conniesview.com/

http://boatinginbeautifulbritishcolumbia.com/

From this list I seem to be getting around.

I am going to be seen shortly on Evan site experienceadvertising.com which covers affiliate management and affiliate program management. And Loneaspen.com – Free online multi-player pool games

If I missed you I am sorry, let me know and I will add you.

Affiliate Books and Affiliate Book Review on Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants by Shawn Collins and Frank Fiore

Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants is a classic affiliate marketing guide that continues to be one of the best starting points for someone entering the industry. It is an oldie but a goodie. It is co-authored by Shawn Collins and Frank Fiore, both successful online marketers.

Shawn Collins runs the Affiliate Summit Conference and is perhaps the most famous affiliate in the world. He has been working at the forefront of the affiliate marketing sector for decades. Frank Fiore is an eBusiness expert and accomplished author six eBusiness books.

The two put together a highly useful and affordable guide to creating and developing an affiliate program. In essence Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants is a comprehensive guide to a pay-for-performance style affiliate program model. This book covers how to design your program, how to develop the creatives, how to make decisions around the financials, and how to begin promoting your affiliate program.

Collins and Fiore break down the types of affiliates into four groups:

1. Super affiliates- Excited, hard workers who understand Internet marketing- the 20% of your workforce that create 80% of your results.

2. Up and comers- affiliates with good websites and/or email databases but don’t have high conversion rates.

3. Onesies- affiliates with low-traffic websites, generating a few sales per year.

4. Untouchables- affiliates who don’t understand internet marketing, don’t make sales and aren’t really interested in learning how!

The book goes on to lay out a fantastic road map of how to recruit and nurture a super-affiliate, and includes a fantastic affiliate agreement template that is straightforward and easy to understand. Other highlights include an in-depth look at different ways of tracking an affiliate program and how to choose the best and most applicable third-party service supplier.

The final section of the book goes over what to do next once you have your affiliate program set up- basically how to motivate and support your affiliate team- timeless recommendations and wisdom industry leaders that covers everything from how to create an affiliate marketing master plan to a glossary of affiliate marketing terms.

As far as affiliate books go, this is the cornerstone for someone starting out in affiliate marketing management. You can purchase Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants on Amazon.

I’ve been writing about the BlackBerry as one of several great mobile tools for anyone involved with affiliate marketing, digital marketing or affiliate program management—the BlackBerry is a great tool that is adding some key features to its smartphone line that will expand and amplify the basic functionality of the mobile tenfold. Tweetdeck for blackberry is just what you need!

The Twitter world on BlackBerry mobiles just keeps getting better—the most recent addition to the BlackBerry App world is TweetGenius. TweetGenius comes to you from the star team of Boy Genius, that somehow popular but anonymous blogger, and Dossy Shiobara, master-coder and the man behind Twitter Karma.

Here’s what they say about it on the TweetGenius website:

TweetGenius was created out of necessity. Simply put, no BlackBerry Twitter application was capable of quenching our thirst. We decided to make TweetGenius for the BlackBerry community because we’re BlackBerry-lovers who know what other BlackBerry-lovers want in an app.

People who love BlackBerry and Twitter writing a good app for both. What more can you ask for? The home screen is pretty, which is a plus for any BlackBerry App. The key functions on the home screen are: 1. Friends Timeline, 2. Replies, and 3. Direct Messages in addition to a bar at the bottom showing the most recent message from whichever function you are using.

Beyond that, features include a “Track” feature that lets you track individual users on Twitter, which enables you to focus on key Followers. Other functionality features include a magnifying-glass option and the ability to use tweet dialogue boxes, and even a way to integrate your Google Map URL for positioning.

TweetGenius has all of the features you want in a Twitter app for BlackBerry with an easy-to-use, smooth interface design. TweetGenius costs $4.99 on sale and $9.99 regular. It sounds like a powerful and important Twitter app, especially for the BlackBerry. They even offer customer service at: support@thetweetgenius.com or @Tweet_Genius on Twitter.

Check it out.
Tweetdeck for blackberry
Tweet deck for blackberry
Tweet deck blackberry
Tweetdeck blackberry

SplitTweet is a Twitter app that enables you to manage multiple Twitter accounts through one interface. If you have multiple Twitter accounts, this is a valuable tool.

In a recent post I wrote about the advantages of having multiple Twitter accounts if you are part of an affiliate program management team and how that can increase your effectiveness and clarity in communication with an affiliate network. If this is you, I recommend checking out SplitTweet as a great way to manage your Twitter presence across multiple accounts. A tool like this will increase efficiency, save you time, and allow you to both monitor all of your accounts at once with the option of tweeting specific information to specific audiences.

On their homepage (http://splitweet.com/) they describe their service this way:

1. All your accounts, one place.
2. Follow your contacts’ tweets easily.
3. Monitor your brand & reply.

Their website is straightforward and easy to use, as is the installation process for SplitTweet.

It is notable that SplitTweet touts their role as part of your “brand.” Branding is fast becoming an indispensable buzz word for how a person or company crafts their online reputation. In addition to being a valuable tool for affiliate program management teams with multiple accounts, a tool like SplitTweet empowers users to cultivate multiple angles through digital marketing or focus on different areas within a larger affiliate network.
You can learn more or download SplitTweet at: http://splitweet.com/

One of the great things about Twitter is how easy it is to Follow new people and for those people to Follow you back. Within a few minutes you can lay the basic communication groundwork for a new business relationship. For affiliate marketing this is a great situation—good for digital marketing, lead generation, list building, and all kinds of advantages for an affiliate network.

The drawback to how easy it is to Follow or be Followed on Twitter is that it’s just as easy to be UnFollowed, meaning your list will shrink. A lot of that has to do with Twitter etiquette and how you use your Twitter account. As an affiliate marketing person trying out new digital marketing techniques, seeing what works and what doesn’t is both interesting from a social media marketing perspective and vital from a business perspective.

If you are in the affiliate marketing business, you want Followers. If you are in any business or marketing anything, you want Followers. Once you have those Followers, here is how you UnFollowed:”

1. Don’t OverTweet
Yes, you want to get your digital marketing message out there on Twitter. Yes, a key aspect of Affiliate marketing is getting your marketing message out to as many people as you can. The key is to do that– without overdoing it. If you start to be one of those users who puts out 100 tweets a day, you will be UnFollowed fast. If you schedule 10 tweets to go out at once, effectively flooding the streams of your Followers, you can expect to be rinsed down the drain by the Followers who are paying attention—and those are the ones you want to keep!

2. Be Human, In a Professional Way…
Some users tend to treat their Twitter account either like an RSS feed or like a Instant Messenger account. It’s neither—those both exist already!  Using Twitter to put out a new blog post about affiliate marketing or to talk with the people in your affiliate marketing network about an upcoming conference isn’t bad, but using Twitter solely for either one of those purposes is. If all you do is put out blog posts or new products on your Twitter account, you will start losing Followers. If all you do is chatter away about what you’re getting for lunch, you’ll lose even more. Mix those two in with a whole lot of tweets that “add value” and RT some other great users—now that’s being human, in a professional way….

3. Avoid Doubing Up
Specifically, don’t link your Facebook Status updates to your Tweets. Why not? Overdoing it. Again, as an affiliate marketer or affiliate program management team you want your message out to as many people as possible, but you also want to keep that message fresh. If you are dropping the same messages on the two most popular social media channels you will get stale and possibly annoying very quickly- and that means UnFollowed. Keep it fresh and keep it separate when it comes to updates on Facebook or Twitter.

If you read my blog you know that I am a Twitter advocate. It has so many uses for business and personal networking. In addition, it’s a powerful tool for affiliate program management.

Here’s why:

1.    Affiliate Contact
Twitter is a great way to keep in touch with other online marketing and digital marketing affiliates. While emails will always be a strong way to get newsletters and product updates out, Twitter is ideal for answering quick questions, updating affiliates on new information and meeting new affiliates.

2.    Affiliate Learning
Twitter is ideal for learning about new affiliate programs or products. Email lists and affiliate forums still play a major role, but Twitter allows any affiliate program management team to be updated or update about new programs and products to a wide audience. With an affiliate forum you need to be in the forum- Twitter allows everyone to be in the same forum all the time.

3.    Personal/ Business
Having more than one account on Twitter can also be a plus. Using one account specifically for new information, products and promotions and another for personal communication with other affiliates can both expand your reach and keep your affiliate program management focused on the business of lead generation and marketing as well as personal and business connections. Affiliates in your program then have the option to Follow one or both of the accounts and know what to expect from each.

There are many more ways to use Twitter for affiliate program management. Let me know how you use it or ways you would like to use it in the future!

Twitter constantly grows and evolves. New apps respond to Twitter user needs and increase the functionality of Twitter as an interface. Here are some of the recent Twitter apps and how they could benefit affiliate marketing or an affiliate program management team:

Twitority – Using specific keywords, this Twitter app enables you to determine who is deemed most authoritative for those keywords. If you are looking for promotional or lead generation strategies, connecting with the users who have “authority” around keywords associated with your product is valuable.

JustTweetIt – This Twitter app allows you to search for friends with shared interests and stay advised of new Twitter tools. Great for list building or affiliate recruitment.

Twtpoll – This Twitter app lets you create easy poll questions with answer options. A great way to do some research leading up to a product launch.

Twopolar – This Twitter app will tell you what is “trending” on Twitter over a chosen time period- everything from the last 2 hours to an entire month. Ideal for research into how to time a product launch or affiliate campaign.

MyCleenr – This Twitter app allows you to sort Followers based on recent tweets and delete inactive accounts that you are Following. A good tool for general maintenance of your Twitter account.

Tweetube – If you utilize video as part of your affiliate marketing program, this Twitter app is a great way to get YouTube videos out fast and easy.

TwitterSheep -  Simply, this Twitter app creates a word cloud of your tweets. Good for analysis and planning around tweet keywords.

TweetBackup – More of a Twitter service, TweetBackup allows you to back up your Twitter history and restore your account if it crashes. The only catch is you have to be a consistent user to restore it before Twitter deletes your account.

Tweetabix – Ideal for researching and keeping up with Twitter, this app keeps an archive of Twitter user interviews. Again, good for researching recent thought around Twitter.

Who Follows Whom – Another Twitter research tool that can be powerful for list-building and lead generation, this Twitter app allows you to find out the Followers up any 5 Twitter users as well as who they those 5 users Follow.

Amsterdam Affiliate Conference (AAC) is entering its 3rd year with the coming conference that starts tomorrow, April 30 and goes through May 3. Almost tripling in attendee size from year one to year two (600 to 1700), Amsterdam Affiliate Conference attributes its success to their “simple philosophy:” Put Affiliates First!

Organised by iGaming Business, the Amsterdam Affiliate Conference (previously called CAP Euro: Amsterdam) is focused on creating a full experience for affiliate attendees. In addition to conference speakers, panels and an expo hall, the the conference includes a free poker tournament and an open bar at the expo room. Featured speakers include: Dave Irvine of The Black Jack Institute, David Naylor of Bronco Internet and Bob Rains of Affiliate Media Inc.

The conference is open to all iGaming affiliates and promises to bring Gaming operators, industry experts and affiliates together for what is sure to be an amazing conference. The ACC will conclude during the week of the Queen’s Day celebration, one of the biggest celebrations in Amsterdam, and begins on the heels of the a4uexpo Europe, concluding on April 29.

If you are part of an affiliate network or part of an affiliate program management team that has some crossover into the affiliate gaming world, this could be a great event for networking.

If you are interested in last-minute information or opportunities, contact: lizzie@igamingbusiness.com or alex@igamingbusiness.com.

As they say: Zie je daar!

A good affiliate program management team will be more like a partnership or mentorship. While some program management teams can end up feeling like you are paying money to have a boss(!), the magic of good affiliate program management is that you get to build strategic relationships between yourself as an affiliate, your affiliate network and the affiliate program management team as well. That can mean a lot of people working for your lead generation and conversion goals—always a positive thing.

Ecommerce is a growing field fed by the creative and evolving world of digital marketing. Some affiliates are great at the affiliate marketing part but can’t do website design, or, as is often the case, an affiliate can line up good products that they love, design and build a website that they like and then have an incredibly difficult time trying to drive traffic to that website. If you are an affiliate who is great at one or the other and just need a little help to put it all together, that’s the beauty of affiliate program management.

Whether your personal strength is Ecommerce, digital marketing, Email marketing or Twitter marketing, utilizing affiliate program management is a way to grow your strategic advantage over the other affiliates out there.

If you are already an affiliate marketer, you know the benefits: pay for performance, low customer acquisition cost, constantly new revenue potential and powerful affiliate program networking opportunities.

Expanding your affiliate network is doing well. Expanding your product lines is doing even better. Expanding your strategy to include an affiliate program management team is the best way for you to maximize the performance of your affiliate marketing program.

Outsourced affiliate program management is a powerful and eventually necessary resource option for anyone who is serious about becoming a successful affiliate marketer. Outsourcing your affiliate program management means having more time and energy to focus on building the pieces of your program that you love the most.

Here are some of the main advantages to using an Outsourced Affiliate Program Manager for you affiliate marketing program:

1.    Increase Revenue
With an outsourced program manager for your affiliate program you get someone with the experience and connections to grow your affiliate program faster than you could on your own. That means more lead generation, more conversions and more networking—in the end, that means increased revenue for you.

2.    Quality Advice
With so many different affiliate programs, affiliate networks and affiliate products to choose from, how do you know where to start? And beyond that, how do you know how and when to grow? Outsourcing affiliate program management enables you to talk with people who know the field of affiliate marketing and know what it is like to grow. This in invaluable for the days when things get busy and you need to know what to do RIGHT NOW!

3.    Keep Your Advantage
If you have been at the affiliate marketing game for awhile, you may be starting to feel successful and growing faster than you know how to deal with! If that’s the case, congratulations—you need to outsource some of your affiliate program management. To hold and grow that advantage you are creating, you can’t do all of the site maintenance, customer support and Ecommerce monitoring and still expect to have the time to grow and manage your program… a solid OPM will allow you to keep your advantage while you grow.