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Q. What was your first website?

A. Oh god, I cant actually remember my first specific site.  I started work in a web design company and was working on about 4 or maybe 5 projects simultaneously and this was about 10 years ago so none of that work remains online, at least none that I worked on directly.

Q. What is the biggest tip you would give to a newbie blogger?

A. I offer lots of different advice to new bloggers at http://www.justinparks.com , over a range of different subjects related to blogging and social media but if I had to sum it up I would say make sure the subject is something you are passionate about, dedicated to and be prepared to spend long hours over a keyboard writing up content and copy!

Q. What do advertisers do that you wish they wouldn’t?

A. Treat people like a number and neglect the personal touch that makes something really special.

Q. What do bloggers do that you wish they wouldn’t?A. I think the most annoying thing a blogger can do is ignore comments on a post and not get involved with the visitors.

 

Q. Where do you see growth in the blogging field? 

A. The corporate side of blogging has seen some serious growth over the last 6 to 12 months as business takes up the mantle of two way communication.  I can see serious growth in this as they develop their blogging presence but they do need to realize that the interaction is key to success on a blog which requires dedicated blog admins and representatives to personify the company.

Q. What new ideas are advertisers coming up with to take advantage of new trends?A. Social Media is the big hype word of the moment with one to one interaction and the realization that inbound marketing is much more productive and rewarding than something like spam or cold calling. I think advertisers are realizing the high value of interaction and targeted users/followers via the medium of social media and are beginning to implement strategies to address it, although this method is still in its infancy today.

 

Q. What do you do to improve the world?

A. Educate. It’s the key to all our problems. Be honest, be straight and tell it like you see it as best you can.

Q. What do you do that is green?

Aside from being Irish? 😛 I never print anything if I can help it so reducing the use and waste of paper is where im most definitely environmentally friendly.

Q. What is one thing about you that not many people know?A. I hate sandals and socks together. (sorry all you crazy tourists!)

 

Q. What’s your favorite book?

A. I have to writers I love to bits and read all their work.  Terry Prachett who wrote the “Disc World” Series and Robert Jordon (god rest his soul) for the “Wheel of Time” Series

Q. What is on your iPod?

A. Stiff Little Fingers are the most played group without a doubt, and lots of alternative types of music and differing genres.

A. What are your contact details (email, company, blog, facebook, myspace, forums, etc)?
Blog:http://www.justinparks.com
Mob: 0034 617 325 727
Email: [email protected]
Email2: [email protected]
�
Follow me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/justinparks
�
Linkedin Profile
http://www.linkedin.com/in/justinparks

and all the rest of my social profiles are on my blog or available on my Social Media The Big Picture page.

Q. How do you prefer to communicate?

A. I prefer voice so Skype, mobile or face to face ideally but am more than comfortable using Email, FaceBook and Twitter or any other medium you can think of.

Q. Who would you recommend, and why?

A. I would recommend http://blog.webdistortion.com . Run by Paul Anthony its definitely an excellent resource for great information on other aspects of the internet, not just Social Media. Paul writes excellent and interesting posts that I find myself book marking and referring back to continuously.

Q. Who would you NOT recommend, and why?A. It all depends :P.

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Email marketing is a powerful tool for affiliate email marketing, lead generation and Ecommerce. You may be considering an affiliate email marketing campaign but aren’t quite sure. If so, here is why I think you should strongly consider creating an Email marketing campaign:

1. Cost: Email Marketing is an inexpensive way to distribute information to a large number of possible customers. The costs and logistics of traditional paper mailings are just not worth it. Email marketing is cost-effective and allows you to expand your customer base without significantly expanding your cost for materials.

2. It’s Green! As a green affiliate marketer myself, I love the fact that Email marketing is paperless and green. Being able to market a green product or Ebook through an environmentally responsible method is both an advantage and a way to live the message.

3. Tracking: Email marketing enables specific, trackable results so you know how well your message reaches your potential customers and who is responding to your message. With paper mailings it is impossible to know who responds to your message, and tracking Internet advertisements can also be difficult. With Email marketing, you know with certainty who responds to your message.

4. First Contact: Email marketing is a fantastic proactive marketing tool. Ecommerce sites do a great job of setting up the basis for a successful Internet marketing business, but in themselves they don’t make first contact with customers. Email marketing makes that first contact.

5. Follow Up: Email marketing is the ideal way to follow up with customers who have visited your Ecommerce site and signed up to receive emails from you. Once people visit a site, they often don’t come back frequently. Email marketing is the ideal tool to remind people who have already responded positively to your site that you have new and exciting products.  going on.

If you are interested in learning more about Email marketing, I would love to talk with you. Please contact me at [email protected] or find me on Twitter: @murraynewlands.

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The EPA has submitted a finding to the White House that the U.S. Clean Air Act should be used to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. As I was talking about last week, this shows a clear break from the perspectives and policies of the Bush Administration. James Holdren, advisor to President Barack Obama, along with the EPA are pushing for green regulations. The Clean Air Act,

The first U.S. Clean Air Act was passed in 1970, enlarging the U.S. government’s role in the regulation of air quality. Amended in 1990, the Clean Air Act gives the U.S. government authority to protect and improve the air and ozone layer quality in the United States. This recommendation will have significant effects on the future of environmental regulation and the emerging green economy.

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Hiring an affiliate management company is an effective way to start out or manage growth for your affiliate program. Starting out as an affiliate marketer can be tough with so much to learn and hiring an affiliate management program can significantly raise your chances for success as well as give you support and assistance while you begin to learn all you need to know.

5 Reasons Why You Should Hire an Affiliate Management Company

1. Experience
Hiring an affiliate management company means getting people who know what they are doing, have done it for years, and spend all their time doing it. They know how to utilize the connections and promotional tactics to make your program successful. When you are learning and haven’t built your own network yet, developing your program may require time and resources you don’t have yet. An affiliate management company is the answer.

2. Program Support
With an affiliate management company you have access to a team of people who are experienced and well-connected in the affiliate world. With extensive resources and know-how, this will get you faster results through relationships with a wide network of other affiliates. Also, you will have access to people for both strategic and technical questions. The people and resources available through an affiliate management company will help you get leads, keep customers and motivate other affiliates in your network.

3. Promotion
An affiliate management company will have the network to launch and promote new products. They know where and how to find affiliates that match with your launch, and may be the connection you need to a super-affiliate. They also understand how to utilized incentives and creatively get your product and launch out to the people you want to see it.

4. Building and Activating a Network
When you start a new affiliate network, getting good affiliates into your program and motivating them to perform can be a daunting task. That is what a good affiliate management program does. They have the background knowledge and network to find targeted affiliate partners for your products and show you how to do the same.

And what about the hundreds of inactive affiliates you have if your program is growing? An affiliate management company knows how to get them to start adding banners and text links and start moving as a producing affiliate.

5. Your Bottom Line
Affiliate management companies will be paid with either a fixed monthly fee or through a percentage of sales, or a combination of both. When starting out or growing significantly, it is usually more cost effective to hire an affiliate management company to utilize their infrastructure rather than lose sales and spend the time, money and energy to build that infrastructure yourself.

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Nambu is a new Twitter app that anyone with a Mac computer should check out. It’s built for Mac OSX and is still in Beta, but the basic idea is that it will streamline all social messaging into one simple interface. If you are an affiliate marketer like me, this is great news.

You can find out more about the Nambu Network, Inc. at: www.nambu.com

The team behind Nambu is Eric Woodward (@ejwc), formerly of Mail.com and DirectWorks, and Gersham Meharg (@gersham), formerly of Helix and InternetDirect and eTunnels.
http://www.nambu.com/

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Your Twitter profile picture should make you human, present you as someone I want to know and make you interesting.

Most people have a photograph for their Twitter profile picture. As a close second, companies post their logos. Then there are people who have a picture that isn’t them but is something close to a portrait- a painting, a face, a photo of something.

And then there is the advertising power-play: sex and money. How many more profiles will show fanned out $100 bills? Or women making out for shock value? Twitter isn’t an advertising platform, it’s a relationship-based social network.

Of course, you can use Twitter any way you want to- I’m not saying anything is “wrong.” But I believe your profile picture for an individual account, whether on Twitter or any network, should do three things:

1.    Make you human. Twitter is a social application made for social interaction—I want to interact with people, not services.

2.    Present you well. By well, I mean that you should be someone I’m proud to have on my profile Follower list, or that

3.    Make you interesting. I.e. Who is that? I want to find out more about that person.

My profile picture is pretty simple- it’s me in a suit with my signature spike of white hair. But I think it does all of those things. Most importantly, it keeps me social on a social media platform—not an advertisement and not a service.

Let me know what you think: @murraynewlands.

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Ecommerce is business on the Internet. The buying, selling and basic partnerships all function similar to their offline counterparts. The traditional customer interface is the storefront or shop. When a customer walks into a store, there are two main elements: the store and the salesperson. The store sets the environment, giving the customer a sense of trust and comfort, the salesperson makes the sale and gets the person to purchase the product or service.

In Ecommerce, the website is both storefront AND salesperson.

The main difference in website design vs. store design is that you are designing the website to be your salesperson or sales team. A good website design will create a high conversion rate, turning your visitors into customers. In the end, that’s the goal of business—to convert potential sales into profit.

Website design is important for any Internet project, but website design is especially important for ecommerce websites because they need to be attractive, convey a sense of trust and usability and present the right information in the right way to turn the shopper into a buyer.

So what are the basics of Ecommerce Website Design?

Usability- This is a broad term for website design that encompasses site navigation and the overall shopping process. A menu bar and site map that make getting around the website easy is essential. If a visitor has issues trying to navigate the site they are far less likely to make a purchase. During the actual purchase, offering multiple payment options and prominently displaying security assurance will ensure that a purchase begun will be a purchase completed.

Communication- When someone buys a product from a website they don’t have the same assurance of completing the transaction with a person at a cash register. Just clicking on a button and moving on with no acknowledgement is not enough. Communication after the purchase, through email notification and/or auto responses that confirm the transaction are essential. It is also becoming increasingly important that sites be accessible through social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook.

Security- Website design must include encryption and other security features. If a consumer does not believe and understand that your webiste design is safe thre is no way they will purchase anything, plain and simple.

SEO- Search Engine Operation. If people can’t find you they can’t buy anything from you. Imagine not having a sign out in front of a store or not being included in the phone directory. Not having solid, aggressive SEO is like opening up a shop and not putting up a sign or telling anyone you are there. Keyword articles and original content along with link exchanges are the basics.

Browser Friendly- Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox—and so many others. There are a lot of different browsers that your customers may use. You need to make sure that your site displays well in all of them. And, perhaps more importantly, your website design needs to enable ease of purchase in any browser format. Website design that makes your ecommerce browser friendly is essential to creating a positive buyer experience and return customers.

These are just the basics of web design—there is a wealth of information out there. I recommend reading as much as you can about ecommerce website design before contacting a firm to design your site so you have the background that will help you know what to ask for and how to ask for it.

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This new version does some new things: it fixes the memory leaks, enables shortURL previews and, very cool, shows TwitPic previews.

The memory leak fix is fantastic because now TweetDeck will not use so much memory and you don’t have to restart it anymore to get memory back for other programs.

The shortURL preview basically shows you the full URL to tell you what the website is before you click on it. I like this, but it will also take away the fun mystery and challenge of writing engaging Twitter headlines. On one level it was kind of fun watching everyone in the world become a copywriter for a few seconds when they wrote their shortURL taglines!

Even more exciting are the thumbnail previews for TwitPics. This will show you a small thumbnail of the TwitPic before you click on it- this I like because you can see and share small images as part of your tweets!

The biggest thing that I like is how it integrates with Facebook—you can view Facebook status updates for your friends on TweetDeck. Whoa. You can also choose to have your Twitter updates be posted on your Facebook status.

Another interesting option is that you can automatically include hashtags in reply messages- a good add for every time I have replied to something an affiliate network partner sent me and forgotten the #hashtag, then had to do the same tweet twice just to get it in there.

According to their own blog, TweetDeck drives 8.9% of all tweets on Twitter and is growing at a rate of 32%. It’s a great interface for using Twitter and I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t tried it yet and discussed it in my twitter ebook. Much more accessible when you start following anywhere over a hundred or so people.

The new update was automatic for TweetDeck users or can be downloaded at http://tweetdeck.com.

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I came across a definition for ecommerce the other day that made me think:

“E-Commerce or Electronic Commerce is the way of buying and selling varied good[s] and services over electronics systems such as the World Wide Web (Internet) and other computer networks.”

Seeing ecommerce written out as “Electronic Commerce” made me stop and think about what ecommerce really is. That’s pretty much it: commerce on the Internet.

Ecommerce website design is important for creating and forming relationships between a business and both potential and return customers.

In addition, solid ecommerce website design will attract crucial business partners—we all want to work with someone who knows what they are doing, right?

Ecommerce can be extremely cost effective, cut out the middle man, keep your business open around the clock and standardize the information about your products.

With affiliate marketing, often the ecommerce interface is the main storefront and defines the experience of our customers with our products. Businesses understand that the Internet enables them to develop more relationships, create more leads and sell more products.

Ecommerce can also be a major advantage for the bookkeeping and management side of a business—consolidating payment and ordering information, simplifying the purchasing process, automating much of the customer service and, perhaps most effectively, aggregating sales, marketing and conversion numbers.

All of these things are great and help to make managing a business easier and more “do-able” for a small business owner. Ecommerce makes large-scale affiliate marketing campaigns on the Internet possible.

It is always good to see a fresh definition of something you do everyday to make you think about and examine something ingrained in your everyday.

Affiliate marketing and ecommerce–  the future.