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

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In “How to Promote Your Affiliate Marketing Program Blog” Part 2 I talked about what to work on while you begin your online networking. This post continues with even more suggestions about what to do to promote your blog.

6. Ask Questions
Asking questions is a great way to get people to talk to you and a great way to learn about them. The more you know, the more chance there is you can find a connection between their projects or what they blog about and your affiliate marketing program. Also, it establishes you as a listener who isn’t completely focused on your own agenda, which is a powerful angle to take when you are networking.

7. Be a Go-To Blogger
This is similar to establishing your reputation in general, but it focuses on one thing within your niche. If your affiliate marketing program has an array of products and you write about a wide variety of topics on your blog, that’s good. But it is also good an powerful to become the “go-to” blogger about something specific. That way, once you start networking and asking questions of your own, people will be able to ask you questions, which gives you an opportunity to build your reputation, connect on a new level, and be an ambassador for your affiliate marketing program.

8. Have a Profile Statement
In the online world, short and direct is good. You should have a solid, short, effective profile statement that stays the same across all of your online profiles and shows up in your affiliate marketing program blog. This will identify you and your affiliate marketing program as a dedicated and focused player in a particular niche, which goes a long way toward establishing your reputation when someone new finds your profile or blog.

9. Make Connections that Aren’t Obvious
Yes, establish yourself in your niche and go at it full-force. But along the way look to interact with bloggers who aren’t at the center of your radar. Most of the people who are doing exactly what you are doing are competing with you for business. There are, however, lots of other bloggers and affiliate marketing programs who are doing things with products that are similar or have some points of crossover. Look for bloggers who write about topics that brush up with your niche or who have personal interests that they don’t necessarily blog about but match your product line or the niche of your affiliate marketing program.

10. Stay Consistent
You could do all of the suggestions I’ve just made and start growing the blog for your affiliate marketing program just fine- but if you start slacking off and leaning back just when you start getting momentum it will backfire and all that work will be lost or end up hurting you in the blog world. If you want your affiliate marketing program blog to be successful, start with the strategies I’ve been writing about and with all of them STAY CONSISTENT!

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In “How to Promote Your Affiliate Marketing Program Blog” Part 1 I talked about how to utilize online networking. Utilizing online networking is important and will go a long way toward connecting you with other bloggers. Here are some things you can do and approaches you can take while you are building those connections:

1. Establish Yourself:
First and foremost, your affiliate marketing program blog will have to establish itself, or if it is your personal blog within an affiliate marketing program or network, you will have to establish yourself. This means creating quality content on a consistent basis. As you build a blog full of quality content and begin contacting other bloggers through the techniques I talked about in Part 1 you will begin to establish yourself as a blogger worth connecting with and an affiliate marketing program worth being associated with.

2. Give, Give, Give:
In your affiliate marketing program blog, make sure you are adding value and creating content that readers can use. It’s not just about making a marketing case or a sales pitch with each post, or about creating SEO content so people will find you and click on your banners. With bloggers, if you want to start networking you need to be giving with your information and advice within the niche of your affiliate marketing program.

3. Be Patient:
Establishing yourself will take work, and establishing your affiliate marketing program blog within a niche or as a good site within an affiliate network will take time. You won’t see immediate results, but do everything you can as far as adding value and creating good content so that when you do start to make connections and get attention people will view your affiliate marketing program blog as quality. With patience you will build a solid foundation on which to grow your affiliate marketing program network.

4. Contact Growing Bloggers, not just the Big Guys
Contact other bloggers who are growing their own sites as much or more than people who you would consider the “Big Guys.” Why? Because the Big Guys are established, they give-give-give, and they are approached by people all the time who want to connect with them. Other bloggers who are growing and know what they are doing will be looking for connections and partnerships just like you and will often be more apt to put time and energy into a connection with you and your affiliate marketing program blog.

5. Be Persistent
Bloggers are busy people and they are contacted by people with ideas and people looking for exposure all the time. Sending one email or leaving one comment from your affiliate marketing program is often not enough. Being persistent doesn’t mean sending something everyday or a lot of correspondence all at once- it means contact, comment, comment some more and then contact again, maybe through a different avenue like Twitter or in a forum. The key is to stay at it and keep your message consistent.

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If you have an affiliate marketing program and you want to promote it via an affiliate marketing program blog. Promoting the blog is different from promoting your affiliate products, affiliate network and your whole affiliate marketing program. You are not selling a product or generating leads, you are cultivating an audience, connecting with other people in the blog world and creating an online reputation.

Here are a few ways to start promoting your affilate marketing program blog:

1. Social Media Profiles
In a world of networking where you often meet people online and carry on communication and a relationship there without meeting in person, it is important to have your best foot forward in your social media/ online profiles. Definitely be on Linked In. Be on Facebook. And give your profiles on these sites more than passing attention- rather than just Googling a person or company anymore, people often search for profiles of names associated with new companies. If the people in your affiliate marketing program don’t have profiles, they can’t be found. If they do have profiles, make sure they are filled out and professional.

2. Active Profile Networking
Once you have those profiles filled out and professional, you should get everyone in your affiliate marketing program to start actively networking. Make connections and give/get Recommendations on Linked In. Friend people and start Connecting on Facebook. Actively linking your profiles to other online profiles will exponentially build the network of your affiliate marketing program.

3. Email Introductions
It isn’t just all about the profiles, though. With the evolution of social media, email has become somewhat formal! If there are bloggers you want to get to know, email them and introduce yourself. If there are other affiliates or affiliate networks you want to work with, an email introduction making clear what you are looking for and who you are can be a solid start to growing your affiliate marketing program network on solid relationships.

4. Commenting
If you blog, you know how good it is to get comments. If you have an affiliate marketing program blog, comments mean people are reading what you say and find it engaging enough to add their own thoughts. If you want to begin a relationship with another blogger, in addition to linking profiles and introducing yourself on email, start commenting on their blog. Don’t just comment there and drop links- that will alienate them. Comment and add value to their article. If they see that you are taking the time to read and comment on their stuff they are far more likely to take the time to read your affiliate marketing program blog.

5. Adding Targeted Value
Write blog entries that position your affiliate marketing program in a specific niche. Then, send them or send links to them to specific people who you want to read them. Ideally you have been building online relationships using the tactics I just talked about and you have a network of people who already know your affiliate marketing program to contact.

With all of these, Stay Active! Be Consistent! Once you start relationships, make sure you keep them up. Online communities are powerful and need to be maintained just like personal relationships.

I wish you and your affiliate marketing program Happy Blogging!

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Social media is the future, the future is local, personal and worth every difficult bit.
This morning I, like many in the social media world, read Chris Brogan’s blog. His entry is called “Just As Difficult as it Seems” where he says, in essence, that adding social media to your business communications strategy is complicated, difficult, and time-intensive. Yes. He also says that sending out a mass email newsletter or measuring a new banner ad campaign is easier. Yes. What makes these so much easier than using social media? Mass audience vs. Single audience, generic vs. personal.

I’m also reading a book called HARDBALL by American political writer Chris Matthews. One of the chapters is full of stories about how politics is ALWAYS LOCAL and that every national or state campaign is based on connecting small campaigns that are built on years of one-on-one interactions. Yes. National vs. Local.

The connection? Business and politics are both personal. Humans are social animals. Put the clichés together and you come to a very simple conclusion: social media brings business, all kinds, down to the individual level for people who want it there.

The massive transition going on right now is impossible to ignore. The business pendulum swings once more to the personal with the growing popularity of social media. Brogan hits it on the head with today’s post, and we in the affiliate marketing program world should pay attention.

As Matthews writes in HARDBALL, people stay loyal to someone they know and interact with who keeps up that relationship. Same with business. Same with social media. For that reason alone social media is worth every ounce of difficult that it is.

Again, the future is social media, which is local, personal and worth every difficult bit.

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Have you seen the profile images that look like digital art? Great stuff, and a welcome break from the normal twitter profile photographs and images.

@marikurisato is a digital web artist listing Denver as home who has made creative profile portraits for Twitter power users such as: @fantomaster, @zaibatsu, @buzzedition and @webaddict2, and @alapoet. Her work blends anime, digital painting and photoshop image manipulation to make innovative and strikingly real-life looking portraits. As I discuss in my twitter ebook people follow people so a good image is important.

You can see more of her work here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marikurisato/

So, how do you get your own Twitter portrait from Mari Kurisato?

She says in her Flickr profile: “People who would like to commission art or illustration from me can contact me on Twitter or at [email protected].
The average price for a portrait is $60, based on prior sales.”

If you’re looking for a fun way to make your Twitter profile picture more fun, check her out!

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Twitter continues to grow and establish itself as part of the evolution of ecommerce. There are many different apps for Twitter, and while many of them will enhance your Twitter experience, it’s hard to find the time to research them and figure out which are the best. As for affiliate marketing, what do we need an app to do? Make it easier to network with other affiliates and communicate with potential customers. This is good for one pice of affiliate program advice is that twitter is good affiliate managment and affiliate program managment.

To that end, here are 5 Twitter Applications that have made green affiliate marketing easier for me.

1. TweetDeck—TweetDeck is a great interface that allows you to see your twitter stream, @ replies and DM’s all at the same time. It has a built in URL shortening function and allows you to preview shortURL’s in other tweets. If you don’t use it, try it. It beats the online interface for usability without question.

2. TweetLater— TweetLater is an essential tool for the busy Twitterer. Basically you can automate a lot of the functions on Twitter. Auto-follow, Auto-reply, scheduling tweets—all things that will help make you more effective and save time once you understand and start using Twitter.

3. TwitterSearch—When I have a new product and want to find out who is already holding conversations in that arena, TwitterSearch is invaluable. Not only can I find people who are involved in the area, I can find other affiliates that are also using Twitter. For example, if I want to find out about London website design, I can simply search for “London website design” and will find 5-10 companies related to website design in London. What makes this better than finding them on a search engine? In a game that changes as quickly as ecommerce, I want my London website design firm to be on Twitter by now. And then there are the #hashtags…

4. Twhirl— Their slogan is, “Twhirl takes Twitter from cool to AWESOME!” – I’ll let you decide whether to hoot or cringe. Either way it’s true. Twhirl is a social media desktop manager that integrates most of the functions that you need to be an efficient Twitterer. The big advantages it has over TweetDeck are that it integrates with other social software like Friendfeed

5. TwitterKarma—Amazing. Twitter Karma is essential to managing my Followers because it allows me to aggregate my followers and

There are so many amazing Twitter tools out there- these are just some of my favorites. Let me know what you use that makes your affiliate marketing experience something to Twitter about! Much of this is in my twitter ebook, which you can promote via my ebook affiliate program.

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If you are part of an online affiliate network or, like me, part of an emerging green online affiliate network, you are using Twitter (and if you aren’t using Twitter, you should be!).
Affiliate Marketing on Twitter:

1. Listen

Half if not more of the Twitter experience is listening to the conversations. I mentioned this above as part of personalizing your tweets, but LISTENING is worth so much more than that. Just seeing how other people utilize Twitter can be revolutionary for your own use. Watching a #hashtag conversation can spark ideas or lead you to a new solution that you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. Most importantly, Listening takes you out of your own perspective on Twitter, your business and the world. It gives you a window into what other people think and how they see things. When you start tweeting again, things will make a lot more sense. As for affiliate marketing, the best thing you can do is listen to see what from your affiliate network will link up best!

2. Add Value
The other half of the Twitter experience is to add value. This can come in so many forms: blog entries, ebooks, advice, jokes, encouragement—anything that will make the recipient’s experience of Twitter more enjoyable or effective. Adding value to the experience of your followers will, in turn, add value to you as someone to be followed. Adding value can also come from ReTweeting useful information and articles that other people post- being part of their link-chain and promotional network is a way to add value to both you and them. In the end, Twitter is a place to learn by listening and then to add value by having your say. Affiliate marketing adds value as long as it is relevant and targeted at the user. Having the right affiliate link to send on to someone at the right time is a great way to add value.

3. Personalize
Twitter is a social media application that is about relationships. Especially with the recent 1000% + growth, it is important that you get to know both the people you follow and the people who are following you. When you send an @reply or a DM, it should be aimed at that person, not using that avenue to push a sales pitch. To personalize, listen to the people you are following and listen to the people who follow you. The personalization of affiliate marketing will only make your message and product even more attractive to the recipient.

4. Be Part of the Conversation
It is increasingly becoming a Twitter faux pas to do cold tweets that have nothing to do with either what you do or what the recipient user does. In my twitter ebook (http://www.murraynewlands.com/index.php/twitter-ebook/)I talk about not setting up a DM that is pushing a hard sell or simply directing a new follower to go and download something. In addition to not having a high conversion rate it will probably bother some people and ruin your chances for a future sale.

5. Content Links
This can be an extension of adding value or a more specific way to add value. Basically, instead of putting the affiliate link straight into a tweet, place the affiliate link into the body of a blog entry. This will make the user/reader feel like they are discovering the link rather than having the link pushed. Of course, affiliate marketing is all about getting links out there and converting, but the best way to get a link to become a conversion on a social network isn’t always through volume.

Content links also take care of the add value challenge. Affiliate marketing is all about content creation that starts a conversation around a product or service.

Twitter and affiliate marketing can be a fantastic partnership as long as it is used strategically and effectively.

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Michael Conniff wrote a great article on the Huffington Post yesterday about how American conservatives are downplaying the effects and even denying global warming itself.

According to scientists, the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed 3ºC since the 1950’s.

Britain’s own David Vaughan, an Antarctic Survey glaciologist, said, “We’ve been watching it all summer, waiting for it to go, and bang—now it’s gone.”

He is referring, of course, to the Wilkins Ice Shelf, which is no longer connected to the continent of Antarctica.

“The last couple of years, particularly, we’ve seen a real steep drop off in the older ice, ice that’s older than two years old, that used to cover 30 per cent of the Arctic Ocean, the total ice at the end of winter. And even as late as 2006, it covered about 20 per cent, and now we’re down below 10 per cent.” said Walt Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at CU.

“With the collapse of an ice bridge that holds in place the Wilkins Ice Shelf, we are reminded that global warming has already had enormous affects on our planet and we have no time to lose in tackling this crisis,” said U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The general response of the American Right seems to be that India and China need to do something about climate change, but also that climate change is not a real issue. In general, the overall opinion of the American Right is that climate change is not a real problem, but if it is, it’s something somebody else should do something about.

I applaud the response of the Obama White House and their new environmental advisor James Holdren for making climate change, global warming and the green economy vital parts of their agenda!

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“You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory. Victory at all costs – Victory in spite of all terrors – Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.

I take up my task in buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men. I feel entitled at this juncture, at this time, to claim the aid of all and to say, “Come then, let us go forward together with our united strength.”

Do you know who said this? Sounds like a rallying cry from a strong affiliate network leader in a today’s economy, right? I believe that an affiliate network has to fight to survive, and by fight I mean work hard.

This quote is from Winston Churchill’s 1940 so-called Blood, Sweat and Tears speech. He was talking about the need for Britain to fight and win a war, but he could very well be talking about what it’s like to be part of an affiliate network in a tough economy!

I believe there are three things we can take from Churchill’s speech that help in the day-to-day work of managing an affiliate network:

1. Our aim is victory. Victory over who or what? Over the 9-5 work model!

2. Take up your task in hope. U.S. President used hope in his speeches and became president and Harvey Milk said, “You gotta give ‘em hope” in his speeches. If you are going to put your blood, sweat and tears into something like Churchill is talking about, do it with Hope!

3. Go forward together with united strength. This is the power of an affiliate network—community. I do affiliate marketing for work, but I stay with it because I meet amazing people!

If you are an online affiliate marketer like I am, you work hard. In today’s economy, you probably work harder than ever. As today is Friday and a holiday weekend, I want to say to everyone: keep working hard! It will pay off!

Here’s one of my favorite quotes from Margaret Thatcher:

“I do not know anyone who has got to the top without hard work. That is the recipe. It will not always get you to the top, but should get you pretty near.”

Both Churchill and Thatcher were at the top of their respective political games, and if you want to get to the top of the affiliate marketing game (or pretty near!) it will take, as Ms. Thatcher says, hard work.

Cheers to all of you out there that are part of an affiliate network and working hard! Enjoy your weekend and keep working hard!

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Twitter is an essential business tool. For networking and promotions, you can’t beat it. If you aren’t on Twitter, you should get on Twitter. If you are already there, find me: @murraynewlands.

And no matter what, I highly recommend my new Twitter ebook 😉 (http://www.murraynewlands.com/index.php/twitter-ebook/)

It is my comprehensive introduction to how to use and utilize Twitter. If you want to learn how to build a Twitter profile and campaign that can boost your brand, online profile, partnership opportunities and conversion rate for products and services, my Twitter ebook teaches you everything you need to know. I love to use Twitter and think anyone serious about online affiliate marketing will too.

I have done Twitter competitions, met people who I now count as business colleagues and generated a lot of leads. Every Friday on Twitter there is a custom called #followfriday where users will recommend other users to follow. With that in mind, I thought I would take a look at some of the Twitter users who are online affiliates:

Twitter @ffiliates:

@affiliatesummit: I love Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas- great people and a great conference that is growing in attendance and influcence. Hands down, a must follow if you are an affiliate marketer. This is the Twitter account for the Conference created originally to replace Affiliate Force.

@affiliate_Rev: Short for Affiliate Reviews, they review affiliate marketing, internet marketing and online marketing. This user is connected to www.internet-marketing-sales.com, a blog focusing on the same.

@affiliatemarketing: With a tagline like, “Affiliate Marketing is my passion” you know this guy is serious. Connected to Dorst eMarketing in Germany, he offers consistent updates with good article links (though sometime they are in German!)

@affiliates: Just started tweeting again after being a dormant account for awhile. Links he has posted lately are getting better.

@AffiliateTools: An interesting account of someone who is tweeting his attempt to “build an affiliate network from scratch.” Some good links along the way, but mostly this is interesting to anyone who is an experienced affiliate to recognize some familiar steps!

@AffWIn: London-based affiliate network that offers good programs and links.

@AffiliateMoney: This guy is building an affiliate network and posting some good links in the process. Articles that will help you build your own network.

While each of the accounts deserve a look, as for a follow, I recommend:

#followfriday @affiliatesummit

and leave the rest up to you!