An interesting look into which companies are spending the most money on advertising online.

So everyone knows that knowledge is power, and I myself have been on a reading binge the last month or so, soaking up information like a shamwow… you getting this camera guy? Anyways everyone has their own set of must read books that has helped them in some way or another, and I am no different.

I made a list of books I’ve read that have personally helped me gain both financial freedom and valuable insight on personal wealth and well-being.  I feel that these books more than others I’ve read influenced me the most and left the most lasting impression on my thought process and my business life in general.  So I present to you:

Books for Affiliate Marketers & Entrepreneurs

Four Hour Work Week – Main concept follows an 80/20 rule, where 20% of your work/actions account for 80% of profits (campaigns, keywords, affiliate networks) – you should be finding the most important ones and scaling/optimizing. Stop wasting time on the meaningless pursuits.

Think and Grow Rich – In the original Think and Grow Rich, published in 1937, Napoleon Hill draws on stories of Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and other millionaires of his generation to illustrate his principles. This is carried on into the 21st century where many of the principles still hold true today, and can be very powerful for getting yourself in the right mindset.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad – This book tells a story about a man who was raised by two different households, and two different mindsets. One an educated dad stuck in the proverbial “rat race” and the other a college dropout who simply understood investing and how to work with “smart people”. To sum up this book in one word, outsourcing.

The Long Tail - In the most important business book since The Tipping Point, Chris Anderson shows how the future of commerce and culture isn’t in hits, the high-volume head of a traditional demand curve, but in what used to be regarded as misses–the endlessly long tail of that same curve. Inspirational book on finding those niche niches.

The Snowball – The biography of one of the richest men in the world, and possibly one of the smartest investors that ever lived.  Although not written by Warren Buffet himself, it is still a great read that will put you in the mind of this invesment genuius.

There are obviously way more books out there that I am missing, so if you have any *must read* books that I missed,  leave a comment and I’ll be sure to check em out.

Aaron Wall over at SEOBook has recently released a great tool that I am just diving into called the SEO Toolbar. So far this thing looks great, its got a bunch of nifty features as well as an SEO X-ray tool and a competitive analysis tool which look like they will be really useful. The competition tool can track data from Compete, Google Trends, Quantcast, Alexa & SEMRush as well as show PPC destination urls.

What would happen if you smooshed together many of the best parts of Rank Checker, SEO for Firefox, the best keyword research tools across the web, a feed reader (pre-populated with many SEO feeds), a ton of competitive research tools, the ability to compare up to 5 competing sites against each other, easy data export, and boatloads of other features into 1 handy Firefox extension? Well, you would have the SEO Toolbar.

Some of the main features listed are:

• Google PR
• Yahoo linkdomain/pagelinks
• DMOZ/Yahoo/BOTW Directories
• Archive.org Site Age
• Compete.com Uniques
• SEMRush.com Traffic Value
• Competition Analysis
• SE Rank Checker
• SEO X-Ray
• Keyword Suggestion

And that’s not even half of it.  There are tips and techniques available for the more advanced SEO’s out there, as well as a generalized section for the total newbs.  All in all I think this will be a great plugin, and might even replace my Google toolbar and SEO for Firefox altogether.

For a full list of features head over to the download and overview page.

Sort of a continuation of my previous post, Firefox has decided to take it one step further and attempt to set a world record for most software downloads in 24 hours, and if anyone can do it, Firefox 3 can.

They have setup an affiliate page in pretty much every language you can think of with banners like the one below, so if you haven’t already, click below and pledge your allegiance to Firefox 3, and help set a world record. And if you decide to sign up to their affiliate program over at spreadfirefox.com you can earn points for your efforts which can win you t-shirts, if thats your thing.

At the time of writing this they are at roughly 175,000 users who pledged to download on the release day, and firefox itself had been downloaded 562992952 times, finally people are pushing IE under the carpet.

So go ahead and pledge to download Firefox 3 and set a Guinness World Record. I voted but im pretty sure it will come down to what the superdelegates want.

Update:

Download day is today!

So you want to be the next super affiliate and make uber amounts of cash online… great… grand.. fantastic. There’s no magic formula that is going to get you rich quick, so if thats what your looking you need to go beg your boss to give you your job back. What you need to do is understand exactly what your getting into, and what affiliate marketing really is. I get asked on a daily basis what it is I do, and how I can help other people make money online, so I figured I would help you all out a little bit.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

First of all to get into affiliate marketing you need to break down exactly what it is. The first thing is obviously the affiliate, a company in which you will promote their offers for cold hard cash. Depending on the offer you will either get paid per click, per lead (signup), or per impression. There is undoubtedly greater detail for each but we will keep it simple here. Next there is the marketing aspect in which you will need to market those affiliates’ offers and try to get other people to do one of those aforementioned things. (click/lead/impression)

Which Affiliate Companies are Best?

Now you are probably wondering what to look for when you go to signup for an affiliate company. One of the most important things to look for is the quality of the customer service and of course the reputation of the company. I would suggest reading around some affiliate related forums to give you some insight. There are literally tons of affiliates out there depending on what you are trying to sell. If it takes longer than a week to approve you for their program or there has been no contact from an AM (affiliate manager) then its more than likely not the best bet. If however when you signup you are greeted by a friendly email and are given numerous methods of contact, then you may be on the right track.

The Marketing Aspect

So great you’ve decided upon one of the numerous affiliate companies out there, now what? Well you need to start pushing those offers and try to get some leads. What is the best way to do this you may ask? SPAM! No just kidding, the truth is the vast majority of affiliate marketers don’t really make that much money. Around 10% make 90% of the money, and thats just the way it is. They’ve built monopolies on certain market segments and it is extremely hard to topple some of those strangleholds. However don’t give up all hope yet!

The secret to affiliate marketing lies within the niche you choose to market. If you look through your affiliate companies campaign listing, you will see there is pretty much an offer for any type of product you can think of. And if its not there, then you can bet there is another affiliate company or program somewhere out there to cater to your specific needs. An example of this is a hip hop forum that I was running and wasn’t getting that many leads for the offers my affiliate company was offering. I switched over to an affiliate program for the clothing supplier DrJays.com and started to make some nice dough off of actual sales. Affiliate marketing is all about tweaking and testing your offers until you hit a home run, and then once you find that golden gem, you need to drive it into the ground until the wheels fall off.

Putting it all together

There are other ways to earn money through affiliate marketing without the need for a website, although you will need a landing page. But Lorne I am slow, what the hell is a landing page?! A landing page is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link, taking them to your offer and hopefully getting them to signup, and getting you a conversion. An example of this would be facebook ads, where you can simply setup an offer through their developer network and pay per click. The premise here being that if you pay for example .20 cents a click, and your offer pays out $1 per lead then you would need 1 signup for every 5 clicks to break even. Obviously no one wants to break even, you want a positive return on your investment (ROI).

So on a very basic level I hope I have given you some insight as to exactly what affiliate marketing is, so that next time when one of you donkeys goes to ask me exactly what it is, I can simply direct you to this article

Well its a new year, and that means that I should probably get off my ass and get down to business as usual. So for 2008 I figured I would give some insight as to the best ways in which to garner traffic to your website for the new year.

Social Networks

With the booming explosion of facebook and myspace, marketers should once again look to utilize these resources in order to drive substantial traffic to their websites. Numerous web developers have seen great success using facebook ads to publicize their sites or push conversions on their affiliate offers, and either way you will see improvements.

Blogs

Blogs are going to continue to be utilized in 2008, with networks like blogrush and mybloglog you can expect to drive traffic to your sites using the traffic and social systems of these sites. The best thing about blogrush is that it is totally free and the traffic you drive can be targetted for your specific niche. The best thing about blogs is the fact that if your writing unique content you can get other webmasters to help build your traffic flow simply by linking to your articles. Content will always be king.

Social Networking & Bookmarks

We will continue to use social networks such as Digg, Sphinn, Delicious, Stumbleupon, reddit and the long list of up and comers to drive traffic and build backlinks to our sites. While getting your stories dugg or stumbled isnt the easiest thing to do, as long as you keep submitting viral stories sooner or later you will start to see traffic flowing. While the majority of the users are going to be ad blind, it will still be one of the best ways to drive traffic and backlinks for your sites.

Google

Still the powerhouse of the internet, valued at $66.5 Billion US Dollars, and not something that looks to change anytime soon. Getting your websites and articles ranked high in the SERPS will ALWAYS drive you targetted traffic and tons of it depending on the relevance and search popularity of your terms. While backlinks and SEO are the most important things to consider when trying to rank for google, once you struggle with rankings for awhile and work on building high quality niche relevant links to your pages, you will start to see significant traffic from the search engine leader.

Article Writing

Well content is still king in 2008… Not much has changed there. The only thing that has changed is who is writing your content. With guest blog writers and some very inexpensive article writing services available on the various webmaster forums around the net, you can keep a steady stream of articles flowing for less than $50 a month if you know where to look. However if you have garnered a reputable name for yourself in the industry you can even find yourself writing articles for others and making a pretty penny.

Overall in 2008 you should look to continue to utilize the booming social media networks and social platforms to drive traffic that is targeted for your niches, these are the top performers right now in terms of my traffic generation and I suspect that these methods shall remain prevalent for the rest of the year.