Thanks to our sponsor, Winners Circle

We’d like to thank our Performancing sponsor, Winners Circle.

With numerous educational websites offering mentoring programs and promising to help business oriented people make money on the internet today, it can be quite a challenge choosing which one is right for your needs. First time entrepreneurs in the internet business can be overwhelmed with the wealth of information available to them. The vast resources are helpful all right but not all can ensure success in terms of driving traffic and profits.

If you’re really serious in your goal of making it big online, then it’s time you check out the Winners Circle offered by the Winning Web. The Winners Circle is a unique kind of online training program that aims to guide members through every step of the ways to attain success in their online business. Members here can benefit from valuable information including real life experiences of successful internet marketers and bloggers that provide a clearer picture of the online marketing scenario.

Signing up for a membership on this program is highly recommended. There is no risk involved, just your dedication to learn the techniques that work. And the most important thing that you need to know is that you’re being trained not just by any ordinary internet marketer. The man behind the program is Gyutae Park, an expert in internet marketing and SEO. This guy worked previously as an SEO specialist for various large international companies but is now happy working at home earning a living on the internet.

So what specific information can you actually gain here? You may have doubts about it as it could be another one of those common mentoring programs offered online that are pure talk. But give it a try and you will see the results.

When you log into the Winners Circle members area, you get the opportunity to learn from case studies and interviews with experts. Each week, a case study involving a specific website will be featured. The case studies are strictly confidential and cover different aspects of doing business online from analysis, market research to traffic generation and methods of monetizing your site.

The interviews are also very educational as you get to hear from the top internet entrepreneurs themselves. You even get the chance to ask them questions about how they made it to the top. Each month, two interviews will be available to members.

Another edge of this program is the forum open to all members. Here, you get to share ideas and strategies with like-minded people including Gyutae Park himself. With a support group such as this, you will surely get the confidence you need to push your business forward.

As a member, you’ll also get a great bonus from Park. This is his four-step, 18-page guide to finding the perfect niche for your online business. Park’s advice here is very useful especially for those just starting out on the internet.

To join the program, one needs to pay a minimum fee of $27. This rate is good for one month only and by August 1, the regular $47 fee will apply. But the cost should not be an issue if you’re bent on reaching your business goals and staying on the internet for a long time.

Winners Circle is worth a try for online entrepreneurs regardless of the size of their business.

Making money with Amazon even if you miss the direct sale

Until recently, I’d almost given up on being an Amazon affiliate. It wasn’t necessarily hard to get people to click on links but they rarely seemed to buy what I was offering them.

However, times have changed. I can’t think of any of my family, friends or acquaintances that isn’t aware of the Amazon brand and hasn’t bought at least one item from them.

What I’m discovering more with Amazon is that, while the basic rules of affiliate success remain the same — including traffic, deep-linking, compelling and relevant enticement — Amazon is one of the few big names that rewards you even if your visitors’ first clicks don’t make a sale.

Granted, you only get 24 hours from a visitor landing at Amazon from your site in order to earn commission from items placed in their basket, but there’s also a 90 day window of opportunity if users add something to the basket on day one but don’t purchase it immediately.

I used to think that Amazon had less earning potential than pay-per-click advertising such as AdSense or Chitika, because someone not only has to click but also purchase before you earn any money.

Thing is, I’m finding that if I can get people to visit Amazon, I have a good chance of earning commission on everything they decide to buy, even if it’s not something I initially recommended.

Looking a what people order, a number of items are either the exact product I recommended, or something closely related. The other items are seemingly random.

So, with decent traffic and a positive push towards Amazon from a wide variety of your blog posts, you do have the potential to earn, letting Amazon do its usual great job of drawing people further into its site and towards the “Add to Basket” button.

I know some other affiliate programs also offer this kind of deal. It’s worth looking into. If you’re transparent about your links and recommend stuff that you own, or would buy yourself, then regardless of whether your visitors buy those items when they go to a merchant site, they’ll hopefully remember your site as a useful source for genuine product recommendations.

Income from Amazon is still far more unpredictable than from other forms of advertising I run on my blogs, but I now believe it has much greater earning potential too.

Now to drive the traffic in.

What’s your experience with Amazon or other affiliate programs and indirect conversions like this?

Would You Withhold Information If It Meant Saving a Life?

A lot of bloggers tend to be trigger happy with publishing information. There’s always the desire to be the first to post about breaking news, especially if it’s fresh and yet unpublished by the more mainstream news sources. Bloggers and editors of new media publications take pride in this. But how far will we go with the desire to be first? What if it meant possibly endangering the life of a person–a fellow writer or journalist at that?

Back in November of 2008, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist David Rohde was kidnapped in Afghanistan. His employer, the New York Times, has struggled to keep this information under wraps for about nine months until Rohde’s escape from his captors just a few days ago. The reason: word going out would potentially endanger the life of the kidnapped reporter.

However, some Wikipedia editors (which means virtually anyone who knows how to edit content on the site) felt the need to make the information public, and Wikipedia’s administrators likewise fought a “convoluted game of cat-and-mouse” in preventing this information from being included in Rohde’s Wikipedia page. They were met with much criticism and outrage from these editors. And the administrators felt they could not arbitrarily suppress this information without attracting too much attention. So they kept trying, keeping a low-profile, and trying to stick within the limits of Wikipedia’s terms of service.

In hindsight, the Wikipedia editors who wanted to include the information on Rohde’s kidnapping probably meant no ill will. But looking at the big picture, their actions could have, indeed, led to trouble on the kidnapped journalist’s part. Even if this piece of information on Wikipedia will probably not have any direct bearing on the captors’ activities, it could perhaps be a catalyst to bigger things. People do trust Wikipedia, after all (or at least that is my perception), and if adequate sources are cited, then bloggers, Twitterers and social media users of all kinds would post, link and discuss. And as the Times’ executives fear, the publicity could, indeed, “raise Mr. Rohde’s value to his captors as a bargaining chip and reduce his chance of survival.”

As a social media user, what do you think if this dichotomy between security and freedom of information? I know this has been a pressing issue in many oppressive regimes where information is curtailed in the name of national security or such ideals. But when the risk is concrete and identifiable, and when you know that someone could, indeed, die if you leak out sensitive information, doesn’t that make you think twice before hitting the “save” or “publish” button? Which do you value more: freedom of information or life?

At the very least, this makes me realize that I should be more mindful of what I post online, whether it’s on a blog, Twitter, Flickr, and other public places.

Would you withhold information if it meant possibly saving a life?

Review: Using the iPhone OS 3.0 for blogging

A few months ago, just after the upgraded iPhone operating system was announced, I speculated on whether iPhone OS 3.0 would make the iPhone a better blogging platform, basing my article purely on the specifications Apple provided.

Now that iPhone 3.0 has arrived, here are my initial thoughts on whether the iPhone is good for performing a variety of common blogging/social media tasks.

Blogging

A number of applications already exist to integrate with popular blogging platforms such as WordPress and Movable Type, and it’s possible to access most admin panels via the Safari web browser.

The main improvement here is the ability to use the landscape keyboard in more applications, though it should be noted that a number of third-party apps already offered this functionality.

Those blogging via email (where a blog can be updated by sending email to a private address) will likely find landscape mode in Mail improves their typing speed and accuracy.

The ability to cut and paste text from web pages and other applications such as the notepad is useful for those who quote other people, though it can still become tedious to do this task because, if you’re following web etiquette and attributing your sources, you first have to copy the text from Safari, go back to your blog app, email message or other Safari tab, paste that text, then return and copy the URL of the original web page to create the link.

Those creating large link lists will likely find this extremely irritating, unless an app exists that can speed up this process (if it does I haven’t seen it).

So, those relying predominantly on text are better catered for thanks to copy/paste and the landscape keyboard, but unfortunately image processing is still far from ideal.

Because iPhone 3.0 is so new, not all third party blogging applications will support direct pasting of a copied image from a web page.

The only other options for importing images into blog posts is to take a photo directly with the iPhone’s camera or add one from the photo library. It works, particularly if you’re liveblogging or using images of your current surroundings, but makes it difficult if you need to edit images first.

Video bloggers who have bought the iPhone 3G S should soon be able to upload videos to supported services, though we’ll have to wait for developers to update their apps to allow this.

Moderation and Admin

I’ve found the iPhone is most useful for those little administrative jobs that need doing, such as moderating comments, deleting spam, quick fixing typos and other non-network intensive tasks.

Nothing particularly outstanding has been added to help with this, except features that have already been mentioned such as the landscape keyboard and copy/paste functionality.

Microblogging

The iPhone is already well served by Twitter applications, and solutions exist for other services.

I’ve not yet seen any of the Twitter apps updated to allow push notification of new tweets. I expect it will happen, and this alone will make staying in touch very useful.

Podcasting

Apple’s built-in voice recorder is a bit of a letdown. It does the job but is very basic in comparison to some third party apps such as Griffin’s iTalk.

Nevertheless, if you don’t want to use something else, the built-in app will capture live audio and let you upload it to your computer for subsequent processing.

Room for improvement

Here are some additional features that could make the iPhone even better for blogging tasks:

• Multi-clipboard: The ability to store and retrieve more than one text block/image at a time would aid in quoting and source attribution amongst other tasks.
• Hardware keyboard: Now that Apple has allowed third-party hardware development, an add-on QWERTY keyboard would allow much faster entry of text. It could either plug directly into the dock or possibly work via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Could include a built-in stand.
• Access to file system: Adding images from the photo library in dedicated blog apps works, but it would be useful to be able to insert images directly into blog posts when using a blog platform’s web interface via Safari.
• Instant Messaging: Meebo was due to be released as a native app for the iPhone, but it doesn’t appear to have made it into the first 3.0 release. Though it is available for the iPhone, making it native would likely afford it more system privileges.
• Application switching: Even if Apple won’t allow more than one third-party app to run at once, some tasks would be so much easier if you could quickly switch between recent applications (Mail, Safari and WordPress app for example) without having to navigate in and out of the home screen.

Conclusion

The iPhone still isn’t the greatest mobile blogging platform available. It’s great for microblogging, blog admin and quick posts including live photos. Other tasks take a bit more work – good in an emergency but you probably wouldn’t want to rely on it long-term.

That said, it’s a mobile phone and pretty amazing when you consider just what you can achieve on it.

Success in the Business of Blogging is More than Passion

Over the last four years, I have watched as many successful bloggers stopped blogging, and new bloggers took their place. Having success in the business of blogging requires more than passion, and I think that is something far too few people make sure to mention.

If you want to have a successful business where your primary product is your blog, then you might want to think long and hard before you dive in.

Creating a business from blogging is like any other business. You need to think about what you are trying to build, and come up with a plan to get there.

Organize Your Thoughts and Ideas
If you can write down an idea map, or even just a procedural list of your goals and how you want to accomplish them, you’ll be further along than many. Giving yourself clear points of comparison is key. While many people become successful by accident, there are just as many that do so because they know what they want.

I consider myself fairly successful in the niche that I targeted, but the wider web audience don’t know me from Adam. The reason for this is that I wasn’t trying to make myself successful and well-known in all niches, but instead, I focused in, and since the competition was less in the niche I chose, I was able to make great strides and earned enough community clout and success to keep myself employed for the past four years.

Network, network, NETWORK!
If there is one tip regarding business success that I enjoy giving out, it is to network with others. I feel like I go back and forth between being an introvert and an extrovert, but in the end, I have met many people, and connected with my fair share. I can pull out an e-mail list of network connections, and if I’ve done things right, I can get more than a few of them to help me out, give ideas or feedback, and even help promote my work. Network connections can mean the difference between getting your site, business or idea in front of a few hundred and a few hundred thousand.

Timing and Luck
With success, there is always an “X-Factor”. You can do everything right, and keep within budgets, meet metrics, and never see the doubling effect growth curve that some of your competitors might see, and that is because there is something to be said for luck and timing.

Many people recognize the name Jeff Chandler within the WordPress circle of enthusiasts, and I would hazard a guess that more recognize his name than my own. I’ve been using and talking about WordPress since I began, four years ago, while Jeff is relatively new to the software and the community. What he was able to do in such a short amount of time was bring a community and brand around himself in a way that I’ve never been able to do. I’ve had more people recognize me as the co-host of his successful podcast, than for any of the other projects I’ve ever done.

Other Factors
Of course there are many other factors regarding success in the business of blogging, and for each person, the goals or point of success might be different, but what far too many people forget is that blogging can be a business, and like any business there is more to it than just creating a product, or being a service. Marketing, network connections, skill, timing, luck, and a savvy mind can help your business go a long way.