Tag Archives | Spencer

Robert Scoble On Online Curation

By on March 29, 2012 in Bonus Interview

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMn-cJHzF8A

In this video, the “Scoblizer” Robert Scoble talks about content curation from a curators perspective.  Robert is one of the key tech bloggers/journalists out there and relies heavily on other news sources to develop the content he creates.

Back in the early days, I made a lot of money with Adsense scraping content from RSS feeds and auto-blogging.  That is not what content curation is about at all.  Curation is about adding perpective and view points to existing content from other sources while also giving them credit.

Content curation is a great way to build content for your business and your clients.

I was fortunate enough to check out some new software that Paul Clifford has developed to not only pull in content based on your topics of interest but also format and post the content while giving proper credit to the original owners of the content.

The software is very cool and saves a lot of time.

Like Scoble, one of the tools Spencer and I both use now on our iPads is Flipboard.  Towards the end of the video Robert mentions a site that helps you find quality people to follow on Twitter based on your topics of interest.

That site is http://listorious.com/

I am going to be using Listorious.com to pull in better sources of content for both Lean Startup and Social Media news for our blogs and the article that are getting aggregated on our newspaper at Paper.li

 

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Creating Affiliate Income Streams + Bonus Video from Mike Long

By on March 28, 2012 in Bonus Video

Some SEO Tips From Mike Long

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAbhDl6Bd5E

Mike was one of the people Spencer followed as he was building out niche sites for his affiliate marketing back in the day.

If you haven’t heard of Mike, he is one of the behind the scenes guys in a lot of the launches you have seen through the years, including John Reese’s Traffic Secrets.

Personally, I never got the level Spence did with affiliate marketing, but I have always had it incorporated in my offline consulting business.

With an offline consulting business, there are three areas you can promote to your clients and make a nice side income as an affiliate as you build your business.

1) Hosting Services

2) Autoresponder Services

3) Domains

Whenever I am working with an offline client, as part of my initial interview, I am finding out which of these they already have.

If they don’t have one of these, I am them taking the time during the interview to help them get setup.  This does a couple things, 1) It builds the relationship with the potential customer.  2) I get a commission since they go through my affiliate link.

Where this is the most cool is with the Autoresponder service.  I setup most of my clients with AWeber if they are going to be adding subscribers through their website.  The best thing about this is every month I get a check from AWeber while the customer is on the service.  The other great thing is the more successful they are, the more subscribers they have, and the higher my commission each month.

Just helping some of my customers get started in AWeber has been responsible for hundreds of dollars of recurring commissions through AWeber.

One of my favorite podcasters, Patt Flynn makes a majority of his income through affiliate marketing.  Each month he reports his affiliate income, and every month his highest commissions are from Bluehost hosting.

Last month when he posted his annual report for 2011, I asked him about it, and specifically asked whether he referred people to Bluehost through Commission Junction (CJ.com) or through the internal program at Bluehost which pays less.

I was surprised to find out that he is actually an affiliate directly with Bluehost instead of CJ.  When I asked him why, he said Bluehost pays more on CJ simply because the tracking of the affiliate links is not as accurate so even though the payout is less by going direct, he actually makes more.

For 6 years now, I have been a reseller of domains for GoDaddy through WildWest Domains.  My biggest commissions from them actually came during the Adsense days when my customers were actually building Adsense networks and buying hundreds of domains.  I actually had one client that I received over $4600 in commissions from over a 2 year period simply by offering them domains through our affiliate portal.

Anytime you are building a business online, you want to look at creating multiple income streams and not rely on one source of income.

Affiliate marketing is a great solution, even if you are building an offline consulting business like I was affiliate marketing can still play a part in your overall income strategy.