People are absolutely obsessed with Twitter right now. There are a million sites out there on how to make money on Twitter, how to find followers on Twitter, etc…

I am heading across the Hudson River for the LinkShare Symposium tomorrow and just wanted to share some highlights (to me, at least).

The networking starts this evening with an open dinner in The Living Room at the Standard Hotel, which is the official hotel of the LinkShare Symposium. Come and join myself and a bunch of other folks for affiliate marketing shop talk and dinner.

And then there is a pre-party organized by Paresh Vadavia of Ice.com form 8:00pm – 11:00pm at Brass Monkey NYC. RSVP for this Paresh CONNECT event on Facebook.

The next day starts at 8:00am at Chelsea Piers with registration and continental breakfast (see the full agenda).

Be sure to check out your copy of issue 6 of FeedFront magazine when you pick up your registration materials.

The speaker I’m most anxious to see is keynote Jonah Lehrer, author of “How We Decide” and Editor of Wired. He’s going to be talking about neurological and social psychology studies that explain how people make decisions and how to use those insights to become better online marketers – I love that stuff.

The Golden Link Awards are taking place during the luncheon, and this is always a fun event.

The host of the Golden Link Awards will be Joan Rivers, and Affiliate Summit is up as a finalist for the Most Vocal Advocate award. We’ve got formidable competition in Scott Jangro and the PMA.

I’d imagine multiple people will Tweet the award winners as it goes along, so be sure to track #sympo on Twitter. A good tool for this is twazzup – check out the page for the LinkShare Symposium.

Later in the afternoon, there is the DealMaker Tradeshow. This is always a highlight for me, and I’ve got a target list of merchants to chat up.

Stay tuned for my photo coverage of the event at http://www.flickr.com/photos/affiliate/.

Issue 6 of FeedFront Magazine came in the mail to me yesterday.

My son Jack snatched the copy right away to read the interview with super affiliate Connie Berg.

Here are the articles for this issue:

• Things I Wish I Knew 10 Years Ago by Jim Kukral
• Guy Kawasaki Keynote at SESNY 2009 by Shawn Collins
• 3 Social Media Marketing Tips for Affiliates by Brent Csutoras
• Online_Charles_44254 is in Charge of your Brand? by Brian Littleton
• ad:tech San Francisco 2009 Recap by Shawn Collins
• 15 Things to Look for in Affiliate Programs by Dan Leman
• Crying Need for Education by Geno Prussakov
• Search Engine Pessimization: Don’t Make Google Cry by Mark Schumann
• Four Great Tools for Twitter Marketing by Ian Fernando
• Who Owns and Controls Your Content? by Deborah Carney
• How the Web’s Rich Get Richer by Michel Leconte
• Gearing Up For Affiliate Marketing Success by Andrew Wee
• I Wish I Was Rich Like You by Zac Johnson
• Five Minutes with Connie Berg by Shawn Collins
• Trust is a Two Way Street by Ad Hustler
• Affiliate Marketing Stats by Amy Rodriguez & Shawn Collins
• The Ten Golden Rules of Online Marketing by Jay Berkowitz
• Compliance in Advertising by Stacey Sicard
• Affiliate Summit East 2009 Speaker Preview
• How to Build Your Message with Twitter by Murray Newlands
• The Tradeshow Jungle by Chantelle White
• 5 Ways to Keep WordPress Running Smoothly by Karen Jackie & Dana Rockel

The issue mailed at the end of last week, so it should hit mailboxes all over the U.S. in the coming weeks. It will also be available at the LinkShare Symposium in New York City.

If you can’t wait to see your copy (or you’re not currently a subscriber), you can download issue 6 of FeedFront.

Free subscription to U.S. addresses at http://feedfront.com/free-subscription.

Domain Roundtable Extended Auction is Released!

Do to the overwhelming numbers of quality submissions for Domain Roundtable 2009, we have secured ’special earmarks’ to present this extended auction catalog. The auction is open for bidding – NOW. The path to your personal stimulus plan can start today!

The complete data used for analysis is and selection for these domains is available for the extended auction list and available for download. The data is used as a reference, is not guaranteed by selection committee.

We all get link requests, most of them are automated garbage & some are legitimate. Some are also too good to be true.

If it’s the latter then I advise you to look a bit closer at what is being offered as recently I came across a interesting Recropical Link Cloaking tactic.

Don’t think this is a new tactic either, this has been going on for a very very long time.

Setting the Scene

You get an email similar to this one:

Hello,

As I was surfing around Google , I discovered your website: http://www.earnersblog.com/ I am trying to add as many informative websites as possible to my site. Which in turn will benefit my users as well as provide you with relevant traffic to your site. I have a website with about 5,000 – 7,000 people on it per day who fit the same demographic as your site.

If you follow this link, http://www.widgets.com/?pg=2eC4L you will see that I put your link on my homepage.

Some website owners do not like when other sites link to them so I thought I might ask for your review.

Please get back to me when you have a chance, to let me know if the link I have placed suits your needs.
Also if you would like a custom Title for it just send me a email and I will get it updated.

Have a good week

Visiting the site in question you’ll notice a few things:

• Decent number of Backlinks
• Minimal Outgoing Links
• Decent Pagerank (3 – 5)

Quite possibly the perfect link exchange? Unfortunately not. Look a bit closer.

The Detail

If you look at the email the URL should have a referral string on it (Something like ?ref= or ?pg=). This either sets a cookie when you click on it or logs your IP (or both) which makes your site “appear in the sidebar”.

Thus very cleverly making you think that the website offering the link exchange does indeed link to you.

There’s a few things you can do here to check:

1. Run the referral link through a HTTP Header Checker to see if it sets a Cookie
2. Look at your Yahoo inbound links, does the site in question appear? (it may be too soon but worth looking)
3. Look at the site through a proxy & remove the ?pg or ?ref from the end of the string (Incase they use IP Tracking & not cookies)
4. Clear your cookies & try the site again without the referral path on the end

Very Sneaky

This unfortunately is a very cunning & sneaky tactic to harvest thousands upon thousands of Recropical links. I would imagine that the strike rate doing this is much much higher than just blasting out link requests to everyone in sight.

Be Careful

If you’re contracting an SEO company & they’re using this tactic I’d be very very careful. I’ve seen a number of players that have been branded as unethical by their whole online community for using such tactics.

[Hat Tip]

—
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online – Earners Blog:

• Cloaking & Ranking Your Affiliate Links
• Make Money with Dedicated Affiliate Sites
• Earnosphere: Week Ending 10/11/07
• 15 Reasons why most people fail at Affiliate Marketing: Mini Series
• Link to Me Textbox: Promoting Deep Links within Wordpress

If you’re on there, add me here

Follow thousands of people

Pretty straight forward, just follow as many people as you can. If you’re interesting enough a certain percentage will follow you back, I’ve noticed a 10% ratio here, a bit higher if you’re a ‘beautiful woman’ *coughs*

Tweet famous people

There’s a lot of famous people on twitter now with A LOT of followers. If you can somehow get them to tweet back at you then you’ve got a lot of potential traffic hitting your twitter profile. Creativity is the key here.

Get something viral happening that’s re-tweetable

If you can create something that’s easily re-tweetable but makes you cash then you’re onto a winner. The sitelink fail was a small example of something. I had less that 20 followers when I tweeted it, imagine if I had thousands?

Use the Twitter API to create an app (i.e. twittercounter)

I saw an interesting stat that mentioned twitter gets roughly 10x more traffic via their API than the actual web service. There’s a huge market out there for interesting apps & a huge market to profit from it. This is probably the most lucrative point out of the 5. For example, no-one is really doing twitter backgrounds well yet?

Use twitter for new product/website launches

With plenty of followers you can really give a new website/idea a very nice initial boost or get the blogosphere talking. A trend I’ve noticed is that twitter users love useful apps, oh & twitter related apps

Links are masked anyways

All affiliate links get masked through tinyurl anyways, not entirely sure if twitter plans to address this. Hell if they were really smart they could replace all affiliate codes with their own. Did I just come up with the first real revenue idea for Twitter?

—
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online – Earners Blog:

• Adsense Arbitrage Made Simple
• The US Dollar is Hurting Affiliates, But Which Ones?
• Happy Birthday Earners Blog!
• Alexadex, No Cheating!
• Review Earners Blog #1

Came across this today & had to share it. Major shopping retailer here in Australia.

Someone introduce them to Google Webmaster Tools please?

—
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online – Earners Blog:

• Twitter me Timbers: 5 Ways to Profit from Twitter
• 15 Reasons why most people fail at Affiliate Marketing: Mini Series
• The Affiliate Cash Vault Con
• SEO Blogs Don’t Make Money
• 10 Easy Ways to Increase your Textlinkads Income

Hey guys, I’ve scoped out a new project & I’m looking to partner with a Designer/Developer to take things to the next level. My aim is create a team that is building a constant stream of affiliate sites that provide a useful purpose for people & share the profits.

The kind of person I’m looking to partner with:

1. Experience in building web applications with a focus on user experience
2. At least 2 years experience with Ruby/Python
3. XHTML & CSS is a must
4. JQuery knowledge
5. Data mining & Mysql
6. Experience in designing user interfaces

So if you’re keen to potentially get involved get in touch. Please note, this will not be a full time paid position it’ll involve equity in the business.

How to apply

Rather than taking your word for how good you are I’d like to put forward a quick test, I want you to create a quick skeleton site that performs the following:

1. Has a search box that allows a user to type in a url (i.e. www.earnersblog.com)
2. When a user hits submit I want you to create a page around the URL in the format (http://www.yoursite.com/www.earnersblog.com)
3. On that page I want you to pull a screenshot of my site, the meta description & show the last 5 posts below (not by parsing RSS).
4. If you can style this & make it look pretty then that’ll earn brownie points also
5. Once complete drop me a mail at stuart [at] earnersblog.com or leave a comment in this post.
6. I’ll test the system with another URL to check it works.

If you can do the above in another language other than Ruby/Python give it a shot I’ll not rule out other coding languages.

Cheers guys & good luck!

—
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online – Earners Blog:

• Must have Firefox Extensions for Affiliate Marketers
• Comment Hut, Free Backlinks?

Welcome to the one stop shop for link builders looking to utilise social networks & other forms of dofollow link building techniques. I aim to keep this list as an up do date resource that grows over time, so please don’t hesitate to let me know if:

1. There’s sites/resources I’m missing
2. One of the sites I have listed goes nofollow

Current Total: 95 Sites

Social Submission & Voting Sites

These sites are the bread & butter of social bookmarking. The idea is to submit your site/posts & let the community vote. Not only do you get the initial link from the social site, really sticky content has the ability to go viral & generate a much larger range of links from relevant blogs / forums & websites. Remember, submit your best content.

1. Digg
2. Slashdot
3. Reddit
4. IndianPad
5. Propeller
6. Spotback
7. Tweako
8. LinkedWords
9. Sphinn
10. Killer Startups
11. Care2
12. Shoutwire
13. HumSurfer
14. PlugIM

Social Bookmarking Management Sites

These sites allow you to keep a record of your favourite sites & organise them accordingly. Similar to how Bookmarks work in your browser, except you can now access them from anywhere at any time. Use these to bookmark the pages you want to increase rankings too.

1. Connotea
2. Mixx
3. BlogMarks
4. OYAX
5. Spurl
6. MyLinkVault
7. A1 Webmarks
8. Connectedy
9. SyncOne
10. Yattle

Social Search Sites

1. Searchles
2. SWiK

Social Question & Review Sites

1. Yedda
2. RateitAll

Social Content / Article Hosting Sites

These sites allow you to host articles. Use them to leverage links to your own network of sites, some sites allow unlimited links in the articles, some are limited to 2 or 3.

1. Squidoo
2. Now Public
3. News Vine
4. CoRank
5. Associated Content
6. Work.com
7. Hub Pages
8. Articles Factory
9. Easy Articles
10. Article Dashboard
11. EzineArticles
12. IdeaMarketers
13. Go Articles

Social Image Sites

1. LogoPallet
2. BmAccess

Social Networking Sites

1. Flixya
2. Mybloglog
3. Ning

Blog Hosting Networks

Create blogs around specific topics & use them to link to your network of sites.

1. WordPress
2. Ebay Blogs
3. Thoughts
4. Aeonity
5. Blogger
6. Weebly
7. Tumblr
8. BlogWogo
9. Blogster
10. Blogetery
11. Blogsome
12. LiveJournal
13. Yahoo 360
14. Xanga
15. Blog.co.uk
16. Wet Paint

Forums

1. Connotea

Wiki

1. PBWiki
2. Mywikibiz

CSS Galleries

Do you have a beautifully designed CSS site? Then there’s hundreds of dofollow links out there for the taking. Submit it to the sites below.

1. A Site a Day
2. Most Inspired
3. CeeSeS
4. Creative Pakistan
5. CSS Design Yorkshire
6. CSS 2.0
7. CSS Based
8. CSS Beauty
9. CSS Slip
10. CSS Collection
11. Tasty Placement CSS Gallery
12. Web Digity
13. Alvit CSS Showcase
14. Best Web Galley
15. Brdcast
16. CSS Demo
17. CSS Website
18. CSS Based
19. CSS Clip
20. CSS Cool
21. CSS Exchange
22. CSS Galaxy
23. CSS Gallery
24. CSS Heaven
25. CSS Import
26. CSS Impress
27. CSS Liquid
28. CSS Mania
29. CSS Pinoy
30. CSS Smooth Operator
31. CSS Tux

Social Bookmark Submission Software & Websites

If you’re looking to automate any of your submissions there are a few options:

• Bookmarking Demon
• Social Poster
• Social Marker
• OnlyWire

—
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online – Earners Blog:

• Delicioso the free Social Bookmark Submitter
• Link Building Guide Part 2 – Social Profile Bumping
• 2009 Link Building Guide
• Link Building Guide Part 4 – Oggix.com
• Keeping yourself Organised Part 1: Notes

You’ve probably seen me harp on about the power of Aweber before, I use it to build lists for every campaign I run & also on almost every affiliate product based website I have.

I’m going to share with you a small secret that will help you triple your profits on landing pages in three different ways. This technique works best with product reviews, but I’m sure you’ll find a way to make it work with your niche.

Capturing Data

This technique works by capturing the customers data before you send them on to the purchase/presell page of the product that you’re reviewing. By far the easiest way to do this is to offer them a bonus download (worth $50 – $100) that is related to the product in question.

Here’s a brief example I found that uses this technique with Ebooks:

Redirecting the User

As soon as the user types in their name & email address you can use an input type in the form code to redirect them to the landing page of the product you’re reviewing. This redirect is normally used to send someone to a thankyou page:

[coolcode]
[/coolcode]

This will then give the user the option to buy the original product & an email offering the downloadable product will be in their inbox (they’ll also be subscribed to your list).

If you get the free download right it can have a massive influence on the chance of a conversion for the main product.

Choosing a Bonus Product

I’ll always try to choose something that relates as closely as possible to the main product. If you’re doing a review of Aweber & want to capture addresses then you might give away a free 30,000 opt-in mailing list (which of course would be useless to them without an email marketing product such as aweber). That’s just an example but you get the idea.

Profiting

So you now have the ability to profit 3 times from this scenario:

Main Product: If your review is good & your bonus product fits you’ll hopefully convert here easily.
Bonus Product: If you have time on your hands it’s possible to use the bonus product to generate profit. Write an ebook or guide on using Aweber (or whichever product you’re promoting) & give it away free (packed full of your affiliate links of course). Don’t forget to also add any complimentary products to the bonus too (like Web Hosting or Wordpress Templates etc). This also acts as a safety buffer, if the person decides not to buy the main product now, they may read the bonus product & buy from there.
Mailing List: You also now have an active member of your mailing list that you can provide newsletters, tips & tricks or more product reviews to. This is invaluable, without it, that person would be gone forever & you’d probably have little chance of ever selling to them again.

Test Drive Aweber

Aweber is allowing affiliates to test drive the system for free for 30 days. With the guarantee that:

If, for any reason, you have not captured more website visitors to follow up and increase profits then receive a 100% hassle-free refund.

It starts out at $19 & increases depending on how many subscribers you have. I have 1 account with around 600 subscribers that generates me anywhere between $300 – $1000+ every time I mail the list. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out which niches are most responsive to email offers.

—
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online – Earners Blog:

• Walkthough Affiliate Marketing
• Google Images frame removal Trick
• Using Mybloglog & Technorati to Increase Blog Readership
• If You’re not Capturing Email Addresses….
• Creating a Viral Opt In list