There’s a lot of debate whether or not a person who has a blog or does any kind of social media type affiliate marketing online should hide or disguise their affiliate links. I’m interested to hear what you think, but let’s talk more about it first.
For those of you who don’t understand, affiliate marketing is where individuals promote a business (or products of a business) in exchange for a percentage of the sales they generate. The actual affiliate link is the link on the individual’s website that points people toward the other business’s product or service. Normally, the link will have some sort of identification tag on the end that helps the business identify who is bringing in the leads and how much commission they will have earned.
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I’m so excited to announce that on Friday, August 28th, we found out our baby is going to be a BOY! Woohoo!
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It doesn’t matter what industry or niche you’re in – different people prefer different ways of learning. If you can cater to each of these types of people, you will not only expand your customer base to those who wouldn’t normally purchase from you, but you’ll give those who would of purchased from you anyways the tempting option to send a little more cash your way.
There are three basic methods to learn new material: reading, listening, and watching. Keep in mind that particular order. While doing business online, we can cater to those who prefer each of these methods by creating eBooks, audio products, and video, respectively.
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At this very moment, I’m running a little experiment to try and promote iCaption Mobile, our new iPhone App, while it’s waiting to be approved by Apple.
I’ve tried to contact a multitude of iPhone app review sites to do previews, which they say they enjoy doing more than reviews since it gives them a sneak peek of new apps, but I have yet to hear back from one of the 10 or so I’ve contacted. So much for that.
So instead, we’re doing something a little different. We’re holding a contest for the best “Pirate Pickup Line” to help bring people to icaptionmobile.com and spread word about the app. I think because of the nature of the application and what people will do on it (leave captions for photos and topics similar to this one), this is a perfect opportunity to do something like this. After the contest is over, I’ll go into detail with you exactly how it works and if it was successful or not.
Like I said before, the application is currently awaiting approval by Apple, but we’re trying to time it so that it’s approved at around the same time we announce the contest winner. We’ll see how it goes. We’re just trying to think of out of the box ways to promote the application.
I’d love for you to check out the contest page and enter too! There’s no need for an iPhone, and we’re looking for as many submissions as possible because we want to compile them all into a youtube video which will hopefully spread the word about iCaption Mobile even more. I love experiments.
Actually, I just sent out the first tweet about the contest at the beginning of this post, and we’ve already got 3 submissions! Good times.
Click HERE to be taken to the contest page. Entries on The Smart Passive Income Blog will not count towards the contest.
Have any of you held any contests on your website before, and if so – how did they go? If you have a link to your contest page (even though it may be over), I’d love to check it out. Thanks!
UPDATE: So it’s been 3 hours since I published this post, and we already have 12 submissions, and an entire blog post at an entry sweepstakes page about the contest. Check it out HERE. Ahh, the power of twitter. I can’t really say this is viral, but it definitely is spreading slowly.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: you can have the best products or services in the world, but without marketing your business will fail. In contrast, if you’ve got the marketing part down, you can sell ice to Eskimos.
We easily can see just how vital marketing is to our online businesses. Some may argue that it’s even more important than what the business actually has to offer. If it’s that important, then why do so many people go into business without a marketing plan? I can think of three reasons.
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I’m always looking to improve the content and usability of The Smart Passive Income Blog, and I do realize that several of my subscribers are writers for eHow.com or people who may be thinking about doing it soon. This is why I’m proud to announce a new page dedicated just for my eHow.com readers – The eHow Reports Page.
I’m not going to duplicate the content here in this post, so I encourage you to click on over and have a look at the new page. It focuses not only on my earnings, but also what I could have earned if I had continued to write like I had in the first month.
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As you know, each month I report my online income down to the penny. At the same time, I give detailed information about what I’ve been up to and how that might have an impact on my current and future earnings. At the end, I’ll conclude with what I’ve learned and what I have in store for the future. The purpose of these monthly income reports is to show you exactly what I do so you can learn from my successes and failures while doing business online and living a passive income lifestyle.
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When someone decides to start a blog (specifically with the intention of someday earning some revenue), of course they want it to be successful. Who in their right mind would create a blog with the intention of failure? Nobody. Well my question is, if people want to be successful bloggers, then why are they setting themselves up for failure right off the bat? Let me elaborate…
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First of all, I’d like to congratulate Toph for winning the $20 Target Gift card for comment #16 from the last post about How will you know when you’ve reached financial success? The winner was selected at random based on the random number generator at Random.org. If you ever need to generate a random number for something (i.e. a number of different comments), it’s the perfect tool. Toph, I will be sending you an email to get your details very soon.
Thanks to everyone who left a comment. They were really inspiring to read, and they provided me with lots of motivation the last few days because as I at times I would get tired from working on all of these projects at the same time.
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No, I'm not a millionaire, but I am living off of passive income made online. I'm here to show 
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