Often marketers are viewed as spammers because all they do is promote a certain topic or link. They also use copy that does not tie with the subject being discussed or do not even provide anything back to the community they are trying to influence. I have spoken with a few affiliate marketers who felt that the product they were promoting was their contribution back to the community. I personally think that is retarded. Hello you are selling something. Plain and simple.

So following the “Be Human!” rule can be challenging and a very manual process. Especially if the subject matter does not interest you. I totally get why marketing experts insist that you pick niches that you enjoy because you will be spending a lot of time on the subject. The manual process is really involved since you are trying to push yourself to be relative to the discussion occurring. And I spend a few extra minutes on each post to make sure I do not sound like a eastern bloc spam bot.

My most successful web growth experience has been posting my site’s URL in the signature of each forum post I completed. I search the forums for threads that have a high read count and especially post in stickies since those threads are always at the top and get the most newest forum members. By using this strategy I get eyes reading my link and I get link juice from the forum. On these two levels I benefit from the link I placed in the forum post. I also include a catch phrase before my link in my forum signature. An example would be “I bought my mac from: www.maclaptopshop.com.”

I have confirmed that this tactic works on two levels. The first by researching my google analytics and secondly by the amount of commissions I made. In May and June I made a total of almost $180. Not bad for spending about 3 hours a month. Now I need to scale the tactic and the effort to another level. There other cats making $450 to $550 per month on lame niche products.

Feel free to leave your comments, questions, and feedback about online marketing.

Then there are underground superheroes such as UberAffiliate (Sup3rNova). Who instead tell you a little of what they are working on or discuss what other affiliate marketers are doing. UberAffiliate never tells you how he handled his marketing and the details of his campaigns. He is basically very secretive on his “super affiliate marketing powers”. And besides him there are many more underground superheroes that do not even blog or think about blogging.

These are the guys I want to know about and meet in person. But I can see how the underground superheroes do not want to ruin a good thing. I had a chance to experience being a superhero. It happened last week Friday while at my day job. One of the guys I work with told me he was reading about an alien task force being created in Colorado. The purpose of the task force was to greet aliens visiting Earth. I joked with him that it was most likely a link bait story with the intent of making the keyword “E.T. Taskforce” popular. I told him I bet some marketer got some affiliate pages ranked on the first page of Google with the keywords of “E.T. Taskforce”. The discussion carried on and I shared with him the Fox News link bait story where a 13 year old boy supposedly stole his dad’s credit cards and purchased services from a bunch of strippers

I could tell he was interested in affiliate marketing and has done some reading. I figured I would let him know what I have up and what I am working on. It was fun to share and let him know how some of the online marketing stuff works. I guess I felt like a superhero. We spoke for about 45 minutes and he seemed interested. With his new found knowledge I hope he does do something within affiliate marketing. If he is successful enough to quit his day job then I will have been a real superhero in his eyes.

Also working on migrating this site over to another server and updating the theme. I have noticed that everyone has the Cutline theme and you know me I like to be different.
Don’t worry I am not dead yet still hustling. And as Jay-Z said “I am not a business man but a Business, man.”

Luckily the tickets were free and dinner at Lulu’s was free. Thanks Mike!

Now only wish I could get some Jack Johnson KokuaFest tickets at the printed ticket cost.

PS-Do you know the definition of the word Incubus? In Webster’s it states “the act of man spirits visiting and sleeping with drunken women”.

Pic of the ticket

Currently, I have OSCommerce installed and set-up for my HawaiiFloristOnline.com. I have not integrated it with Authorize.net yet so I am unable to take orders. I am just fearful that OSCommerce is so easily hacked. Anyone have any experiences with OSCommerce being hacked?

Also anyone got any experiences with the shopping cart solutions I listed above? My top three are currently (notes in parenthesis):

-*List below is in no particular order*-

Substruct (RoR based and will require some dev to make perfect. Not sure of SEO capabilities.)

MagnetoEcommerce (First production release slated for 3/31/08. Early adoption can be painful.)

Drupal+UberCart (Still not a full production release of UberCart)

Please advise.

Went a little early and hooked up with the other attendees. Three of the attendees were from Resort Quest and one of them was a email acquaintance of mine. His name is Dave Z and he is one of the only SEO/affiliate marketing people I know in the State of Hawaii. Another attendee has her own web development business called Ocean Sprite I believe.

The lunch was great and the food was awesome. I had a Pepperjack Burger and it was tasty. I was on the clock of my day job so I could not have a beer. It was very tempting to have a Chocolate Stout. At lunch we discussed various happenings in Hawaii as far as SEO and a few Q&A with Jill on what is going on in the market. She was very open and provided insight on what it is like to be a professional SEO consultant. She also showed off her baby, a mini cooper complete with white stripes.

After speaking with her I really wish to attend her class and I wish I could afford to attend the Aloha Summit. Learning about affiliate marketing, social marketing, as well as SEO marketing can be very expensive. Everyone wants to sell you something so you need to thread lightly and parse out what is BS and what is real.

The lunch lasted about an hour and a half and ended with a group photo outside of Yard House.  You can see it here in her forum also.

I highly recommend anyone interesting in affiliate marketing/SEO and located in Hawaii send me an email so we can hook up. I would like to bounce ideas as well as collaborate on things.

During this time I suspended my campaign and continued to do research keywords for my ebay affiliate site.  Following the advice of the marketing gurus out there in www land I tried mis-spellings of my keyword phrases as well as negatives of other similar products. I got my list and then wrote a few different ads. Basically, setting up my A/B split testing. It is very exciting to see what kind of click thrus you get based on the text in an ad. I am surprised how receptive people are to question based titles in an text ad. Also it seems that Yahoo! traffic is better than Google traffic when reviewing my bounce rate of my site. The big exception is that the amount of Yahoo! traffic is 50% less when compared to Google. So making $$$’s might take longer with Yahoo! traffic.

Since the credit mix up, I have since turned my campaign back on and have set a daily budget of $5.00. I need to get at least 25% on my investment(advertising expense) to make it feasible. So I need to make $6.25 gross for the day.

I will be doing another post in a few days with some traffic numbers. Now back to the hustling.

Enjoy the free $100 and don’t forget who hooked you up!