Murray Newlands entrepreneur, business advisor, motivator and keynote speaker.

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John Chow has a new Twitter application is a twitter mass unfollow tool that allows you to mass unfollow even if you have over 10,000 followers: TwitterFollower http://twitterfollower.com

Johns Chow’s new twitter application www.TwitterFollower.com is a great little twitter application. The landing page features a little video (nice video John) that explains all about the application which essentually is focused on greeting a user group who will all follow each other to build their follower numbers to get more social proof. The hypotheses being people follow people to who have lots of followers (social proof they are worth following). John has also built in the ability to mass unfollow people who do not follow you. John is offering this great service free which many other applications charge for. Twitter limits the number of people you can follow so a small percentage more than the people who follow you. If you follow people who do not follow you back you will not be able to follow more people. Given one way to build twitter followers is to follow people so that they follow you back the ability to unfollow people is key to many people building large numbers of followers. There will be many people who like this, there are also lots of people who are opposed to this kind of user list building. Personally I say well done John Chow.http://huitter.com/ is another Twitter Mass UnFollow Application.

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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.

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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.

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I write a lot about Twitter and how it can be used for affiliate marketing or affiliate program management. As far as websites go, I think Twitter will only continue growing and becoming more important. Twitter is a communication tool—what about the bottom line though? The part of affiliate marketing where adding value and lead generation becomes conversion?
In addition to Ecommerce websites, a popular new venue for Ecommerce are mobiles, especially on the increasingly popular iPhone. The Amazon iPhone app allows you to shop at many stores from you iPhone- repeat, you can shop at stores from your telephone.

The iPhone is pretty amazing and just may change the way affiliate marketing evolves. With the Amazon app, you take a picture of a product, that picture gets sent to Amazon who then emails you with what they think you are looking at.

This is visual, specific product search. What ends up in that Amazon email and how does it get there? How can affiliate marketing get involved with this kind of technology? Imagine being able to suggest products, maybe over Twitter, to customers who submitted pictures of products they are interested in?

Amazon is currently working with close to 10,000 merchants and being part of their affiliate team will be even more important if their dedicated customers start shopping with the Amazon iPhone app. It puts Amazon in charge of the Ecommerce experience through iPhone. It means that Amazon is not a choice in itself but that Amazon is now the umbrella of choices for that particular item. The Amazon iPhone app will even remember your shopping history, make suggestions and allow you to buy them with 1 click.

The Amazon iPhone app is sure to not be the last app of its kind. Amazon has long been an Ecommerce leader and their connection to mobile Ecommerce only makes them stronger. Phones and apps will continue to evolve and create new channels for the mobile Ecommerce world, new opportunities for affiliate marketing, and new channels for lead generation.

It’s time to learn more about the Amazon iPhone app and all that it means.

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I was at Ad:tech San Francisco and I was lucky enough to interview tech blogger Brent Terrazas of www.brentter.com and http://www.addto10.com/ fame. Brent Terrazas was at the Ad:tech SF covering the show and commenting on the sessions as they happened for www.adtechblog.com/.

You can connect with Brent Terrazas

http://www.addto10.com/
Where Brent says “I’m always open for discussion on new projects, technology, freelance, or even full-time positions, you can reach me via either the form on the contact page or by emailing me directly: brent (at) addto10 (dot) com”

http://www.brentter.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/brentter
http://www.twitter.com/brentter

PS I will get better at holding the video camera I promise you.

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The worldwide network of Ad:tech conferences combines marketing, technology and media professionals with tools and techniques. Ad:tech is full of people who know that digital marketing is changing the way business and marketing happen. Their conference is focused on the exchange of ideas, new business ideas and getting the people who are top in their field to offer advice and opinions. In short, they are everything you want a digital marketing conference to be.

Ad:tech is the greatest place to network and learn about what is new and growing in the digital marketing sphere because it is a conference that travels the world. The San Francisco conference offers a strong community for networking with vendors, other online business people and people I know from other ad:tech conferences.

As always, the exhibit hall was full of vendors with the best and the latest in digital marketing.It was like walking into the most creative, alive office I’ve ever been to. There were people there for search marketing, metrics analysis, advertising technology, mobile marketing, affiliate program management, and the most advanced data analytics.

They had keynote speakers who offered perspective and inspiration from the executive level, panel discussions on everything from best practices to new business opportunities, and workshops that gave me ideas I’ll be utilizing next week. The keynote presenters on Day 1 this year were powerhouses of creative, game-changing marketing ideas. We were able to see Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, and Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu.

In a word: Amazing. I’ll be writing more about my time at ad:tech in future posts, so stay tuned.

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So I was thinking again today about Twitter and how it is becoming more and more influential in the marketing world. The other day I wrote about a twitter survey showing that power users are focused on using Twitter for learning new information and passing on information- basically as social Mavens, in Malcom Gladwell/ Tipping Point language.

While this is one very powerful use of Twitter, there are thousands of other people who use Twitter effectively for other purposes- like marketing.

There are 3 main ways that Twitter can be used for marketing:

1. Lead Generation- People who do affiliate marketing know that generating new leads is one of the most difficult of all affiliate marketing tasks. The process of finding people who are interested in the products your affiliate program offers usually takes the form of email lists and banner ads. These are effective and work in their own right, but Twitter offers an entirely new approach to lead generation. You can’t advertise on Twitter and you can’t send out loads of messages to everyone.
What you can do is search for people who are already identifying themselves with a certain concept or group. Twitter is a place to initiate conversations with those people, build trust, discover their interests and build from there. Where emails and banner ads come straight out with a pitch to a broad audience, Twitter has a much smaller scale but produces a wealth of quality, focused leads with a few topic or group searches.

2. Communicate With Existing or Repeat Customers
Another advantage of Twitter is that once someone has purchased your product, they have a direct line of contact with you through an easy-to-use interface. Twitter allows people to ask questions about their product and talk about it. Because of the 140 character format, communication is fast and focused.
In addition, your customers will most likely be your Followers as well, and that means they will be getting all of your tweets about your new products, your new blog posts and all of the other ways that you add value to their Twitter experience. It is a great way for customers to see that you are a thought-leader and expert in your affiliate program- and that reputation will contribute to building future relationships and sales.

3. User Advertising
In the old world of marketing most of the messages came from the company or in our case the affiliate program. Not anymore. If you are selling a good product, people will tweet about it- that’s what Twitter users do. In a sense, every successful sale you make will get people talking about the great product they found through @you and how much they like it. They will be advertising your product AND your profile just by talking about what they are doing, in a way doing a bit of the work of an affiliate without being an affiliate.

Overall, the social networking and organic advertising potential in Twitter is amazing and ideal for the evolving ecommerce world of affiliate marketing.

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Internet World is one of the biggest and oldest online business events in the world. This year’s Internet World will be in East Court, London on April 28-30, 2009. In recent years they have grown dramatically along with online business and Ecommerce channels. They host over 300 exhibitors and over 13,000 visitors.

Their focus is on online business and strategy, with 5 key areas: Digital Marketing, Ecommerce, Social Media, Content Management, and Hosting & Connectivity. At the conference itself you will find industry leaders and creatives from within the marketing, IT, digital and Ecommerce worlds. They also provide a wealth of free education and the opportunity to meet a wide array of suppliers from all over Europe.

Internet World is focused on offering seminars for all levels of people who are doing business online. The speakers and forums offer insights and strategies for affiliates and online advertising within digital marketing, Ecommerce platforms and payment systems, social media venues like blogging and social networking, content management and everything related to hosting, domains and streaming.

One of the biggest advantages of Internet World is the networking potential. After being around for 17 years, Internet World attracts the top names and industry leaders in online strategy. The networking allows you to meet and compare suppliers and discover new technologies.

Internet World continues to grow and expand beyond being purely an expo. With the addition of education and forums to connect buyers and sellers, Internet World continues to be relevant and important to Europe’s online community.

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Twitter is flexing its communication muscle once again. The CDC (Center for Disease Control) has been monitoring the much publicized outbreak of swine flu in Mexico, and in addition to creating a section on its own webpage, www.cdc.gov, the CDC is using a Twitter account to get information out to the public as quickly as possible.

You can follow their Twitter updates here: @CDCemergency.
In addition, some of their tweets have the #swineflu hashtag. As of this article they had over 17,000 Followers. Their most recent tweet was used as a call for a meeting:

CDC Swine Flu Update – Conference Call for Clinicians – 2-3PM ET NOW!http://bit.ly/y9g7Z

The government is becoming social media savvy. Beyond Congress members tweeting their every thought during American election speeches and sessions, this government public health agency is discovering the strategic effectiveness of Twitter as a communication forum.

I have written in the past about Twitter being used for fire and police updates, and seeing it as a medium for public health messages is yet another indication that Twitter is gaining relevance and legitimacy beyond its original uses. From social connection to blog promotion to affiliate marketing to lead generation and now to public health updates, Twitter is proving to be a powerful communication force that will continue to define the future of the Internet.

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LeadsCon New York, LeadsCon East

LeadsCon describes their mission as, “Advancing online customer acquisition and improving the accountability, success, and adoption of internet advertising.”

It is that and so much more. The conference itself is an expo for people who want to increase their effectiveness in online lead generation.

LeadsCon focuses on everything about online lead generation. They began with a LeadsCon Las Vegas expo that brought together industry leaders like Michael Yang, Founder and CEO of Become.com, and Dilip DaSilva, Founder and CEO of Exponential. The fact that the 2009 Las Vegas LeadsCon more than doubled the number of attendees from 600 the previous year to 1400 this year shows how important this expo is for the lead generation industry.

The success and growing reputation of LeadsCon has led them to plan a second expo called LeadsCon East, which is planned for August 17-18, 2009 in New York City. This represents their long-term vision of increasing the standing of Internet advertising within the larger scope of the advertising world, and places the conference in the center of the advertising world- NYC.

The conference will again feature leaders from within online customer acquisition and offer attendees a place to increase their knowledge around performance-based marketing, lead generation. In addition the expo is taking on the necessary and difficult task of connecting people who already operate within online marketing and those who have a desire to work online marketing into their overall marketing strategy.

Some of their previous sponsors have included LeadPoint, Education Dynamics, Reply.com, Targus Info, Quigo, Collegebound, doublePositive, eBureau, Leads 360, Media Venture Partners, Direct Track and MediaWhiz. This year’s LeadsCon East is sure to attract even more sponsors and expand both the learning and networking opportunities.

Who’s going?

ABC Leads
ActiveProspect, Inc.
Affiliate Venture Group
AffiliateContracts.com
Affiliateer.com
Alayga Technologies
All Star Directories
All Web Leads
Announce Media
AzoogleAds
Become, Inc.
Berkery Noyes
Best Nursing Degree, LLC
Billshrink
BTC Interactive.com
Calfinder
Charter One Bank
Clickspeed
CMP Advisors
CollegeBound Network
Coverclicks Media
Customer X Inc. �
Direct Response Group
DMi Partners
DoublePositive Marketing Group
eBureau
eVentures Management Services
Great Hill Partners
Health Plan One
HealthCare.com
Horton Advisory Services, LLC.
iMarketing LTD.
Indigo Interactive
Integral Capital Partners
Keyword Advisors
Lead Research Group
LeadCreations.com, LLC
LeadGenuity
LeadMailbox.com
LeadPoint
LeadQual
Leapfrog Online
LearnHub
LendingTree, LLC
LinkShare
Liquid Wireless
MarketingAnd
Member’s Edge
Mint.com
Monster MediaWorks
MostChoice.com
NA LiveCareer
NetQuote
Neutron Interactive
Neverblue
NextWeb Media
North Bridge Growth Equity
NOVO 1
Octopus
Payday Online
Petsky Prunier LLC
Playphone
Precise Leads, Inc.
Prospectiv
Prudential
Quote Network LLC
QuoteScout.com
RayCollective
Relocation.com
Reply.com
Respond.com
Rex Direct Net, Inc. �
Sausalito Software
Sayforexample, Inc.
smallponds inc
SnagAJob.com
Sunrise Service Associates
SureHits/QuinStreet
TARGUSinfo
Underground Elephant
Vortex Media LP
warburg pincus
WCM Investments, Inc
WebsiteHits.com
Wellington Companies, LLC
Wireless Idea Corp
WiserAdviser.com
World Education Services Inc.
ZipSearch

LeadsCon New York, LeadsCon East

Are you going to LeadsCon East New York ?