Thanks Darren for the guest post. To all others, I will not be accepting any more guest posts or paid reviews in the near future; want to work on the bum marketing case study. @ Agent 001, the ad you submitted doesn’t seem to be displaying so please email me the image URL and your link and I’ll put it up.

“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own” – Henry Ford

I want you to think about something. Think about the last moment when you had an argument with a friend.

Good. Now think what caused the argument. Is it that you couldn’t understand his point of view? Or he couldn’t understand yours?

See, many problems could be easily solved if we just understood other people’s point of view.

This applies in internet marketing. How can you solve a customer’s problem if you didn’t understand his point of view? Some marketers say it in other words: “put into your customer’s shoes”. But I say “be in the same time in your and in your customer’s shoes”. Create a win-win situation.

Let me give you an example. Many marketers, in order to sell their product, just make a pitch about a product they sell and expect that somehow “magically” the interested “zombie prospects” will come and buy without hesitation. Sorry, but you gonna hardly get 100 prospects if you do this. People are not dumb (with some exceptions).

Now, let us take an opposite example. Ed Dale and Dan Raine created the Thirty Day Challenge site, a site where you can download very valuable free videos if you’re marketing beginner or even a veteran. With that, they make YOU want to get more of their stuff, even buy their product or get a paid membership!

This is a very famous concept popularized by Eben Pagan (his penname in the dating industry is David De Angelo) called ‘move the free line’. By moving the free line you create a win-win situation. You give away your best tips and advices on the niche where you market and your customers feel valued and gain trust in you. You win, they win.

So, the next time when you’ll be doing something in your business, ask yourself this question. Look from your customer’s point of view. Although it may sounds obvious, if you don’t get this foundation you’ll never be able to progress further. Often the simplest things are the most powerful ones!

Peace,

Darren

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Derek Salyers is the author of the Click Consultants blog where you can Learn Affiliate Marketing. He has been promoting affiliate programs for over 2 years and works full-time from home doing so. Make sure to check out his blog today and discover the world of affiliate marketing.

If you’re not using Video on your affiliate websites yet, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to convert your visitors into cold hard cash!

Did you know that according to NetRatings in January 2008 87.49% of Internet users in the US are on a broadband connection? This number is expected to hit over 90% by mid 2008! The even greater thing is the US isn’t the only country seeing these types of numbers of growth in broadband connections! Canada and the UK are right behind with most of their users now using broadband as well!

The simple fact is most people are lazy! In fact, so lazy that most would prefer to watch video over reading text any day of the week! Why do you think more people watch the news instead of picking up a newspaper? Watching video is easier, it engages us more, and it captures our attention, and most importantly holds it!

With video becoming ever so increasingly easy for the average person to use, edit, and upload now is the time to start testing the waters and adding video to your affiliate landing pages! With popular camcorders like the Flip Ultra or Creative Vado it has become extremely easy to make videos, transfer them to your computer, and quickly edit and upload them!

If you’re anything like me, a cheap-ass, you’re already thinking, isn’t hosting video expensive? Have you been living under a rock? There are tons of free sites out there that will host your videos for you and allow you to easily embed them into your sites! A few that quickly some to mind are Youtube, MetaCafe, and Revver.

Why Should I Use Video?

Videos Build Trust

Video can help build trust with your visitors. It can create an instant connection that text or images simply can’t create!

Think about it for a minute… Would you rather see a screen shot of a program you’re about to purchase or a video showing highlights and key points of the software? The answer is an easy one and requires little thought! The video would allow you to instantly realize what the program can and will do for you or your business.

Video Keeps Visitors Attention

Video is able to keep people’s attention span a lot longer than text can. Unlike text, video allows you to show emotion and also allows you to capture your audience by sight and sound by using music or sounds in your videos.

Don’t Cost Much to Get Started

The cost of adding video content to your sites isn’t much. Most digital cameras allow you to also record video. Also, with the rise of video devices like the Flip or Vado, which range in price from $99 - $149.99, it is pretty cheap to get started. Also as I said above there are tons of free sites to host your videos that won’t cost you a penny. Also most devices come with free editing software and both the Mac and Windows comes with a free program for editing video.

Search Engines are Getting Smarter

Search engines are becoming increasingly good at indexing and displaying relevant videos with normal search results. In fact, I’ve been seeing Google results where I’ve typed in a search query and the first result is either an image or video related to that keyword!

This is only going to increase as search engines get better at indexing and tagging videos. Why? Because as we said above, people love videos so it would be commonsense for the search engines to include video results on their search results pages.

Conclusion

Video allows you to easily build trust, increase conversions, engage visitors, increase traffic, and more. In fact there are so many advantages to using video that I’m not even able to list them all in one blog post! Using a well thought out, planned video alongside text and pictures on your landing sites can take a campaign and increase conversions like you would believe.

There are millions of affiliate sites out there, yet very few are currently using video to engage their visitors. Video is still pretty much in it’s infancy and will only continue to grow. Eventually more and more people will use video on their sites. In fact, this may be sooner than you think!

Now is the time to start testing video on your landing sites and to see for yourself what adding a short 30 second video to your site can do for your sales and conversion rates!

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Exams are over, I’m at home but a lil… out of shape, shall we say Less than half the places are left for May 13th, so get in if you haven’t.

This post is by guest blogger Agent 001. He is a student, currently at IIT Kharagpur. He is from India. He wants to share some of his knowledge on Privacy on the Internet. He blogs at Greatest Reviews. Let’s hear what he has to say.

Invariably if your private data are on internet in any form, be it your email account, some membership or purchase of item, you already have broken your privacy. Unbelievable but the above statement is true in its sense, even if you argue that they are safe with certain websites or companies etc.

If you have read the privacy policy of websites, e-mail service providers etc, then you are already acknowledged that they wouldn’t share the private data. But the only reason I say your privacy is broken is that your private data is accessible by many person even without your knowledge. They are the service provider (major part). I haven’t mentioned the minor part; they are crackers, spammers and phishers.

Most companies (Google, Yahoo, MSN etc) keep your data safe and encrypted thus you might not (remember it’s only might not) have to worry much. That’s about online data’s which you cannot do anything about except choose only safe services. But what about your offline data, they could harness by crackers, phishers etc. So you need to be alert. Keep your data’s as safe as possible. How to do that should be your main concern.

Here are some possible and advisable steps to be taken.

1) While browsing phishing filters must be enabled and you should report any case of phishing if you feel that you have come across so.

2) Enable spam filters in your e-mail services. Most e-mail service providers, provide this feature but it might not be enabled by default.

3) While shopping for something on internet pay either offline methods or by indirect methods (like PayPal services). You must also ensure that your data is safe with the indirect way.

4) After browsing and downloading delete all private data (cookies, URLs browsed, forms filled etc).

5) Last but not the least you must use a good, lengthy and hard to guess password, I mean a unique one. Read here how to make strong unique passwords.

There’s one more, it is called encryption. It only adds more security to your files. There are many encryption softwares available on the internet.

I hope the above tips might be helpful to you.

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Note - this is Jason, thanks to Ben for the decent guest post. I will be ending my exams on Sunday, and will be working on a project - a social network of sorts for young internet marketers, an idea that I had before but didn’t have the funding or the knowledge to bring about. The funding is there now, but the knowledge is not (sadly ) so if you have any experience in running a social network and are not a pain to work with, add me through instant messenger

Hello Tuk readers! I have volunteered to relieve our UniKid of posting responsibilities for a day. He will be able to focus on knocking out those exams. Good Luck Jason!

Normally I am the primary content writer over at Big Ben Patton’s Place. I like to think that I can live up to the very large shoes which Jason has left empty for me today, so if you like what you read please stop by and say hello. I will also take this time to plug Big Ben Patton’s Contest Extravaganza. My sponsor’s have offered up over $2000.00 worth of wonderful prizes. Stop by today and check it out. You have nothing to lose and some pretty nice prizes to win!

So often I find myself reading someone else’s blog and I feel like they just are not getting the point across in a manner suitable for the content. Many bloggers have utilized many different methods in the past years to put their stamp on the blogosphere. Today I am going to elaborate on a few mistakes many bloggers are still making in hopes of helping you drive that coveted content bus to the bank.

The Thesaurus and Dictionary. Yea who would of thought I know, but you can find them respectively through Google on the world wide web. Use them. Please learn the use of a synonym. And if you don’t have Firefox and just can not spell, hit the dictionary up. These two wonderful resources will help to spice up your content while making it easier to read. To many posts in the blogosphere are just chock full of random spelling variations of the same word, or worse yet using the same adjective to describe nearly everything they have ever written. These two alone will add immense depth.

Its already been hashed to death, but for the sake of academia I will say it one more time. Research your topic and have a clue before posting. You can see so many posts that appear to be written from a sketchy point of knowledge. All it takes is the reader to realize that your wasting their time just for stats points or money. This would be considered a cardinal sin in blogging and once you set this ship to sail your pretty much doomed to a decline in popularity with your readers. Passion is great but make sure you are armed with the sword of knowledge. Passion alone will not keep people coming back.

Whatever you do please avoid making a blog just to share your journey to riches with the world. It has been done, and more than likely it will be just as disenfranchising as all the others before you. Instead you could be blogging about what is hot in the blogosphere and capitalizing on it with a personal twist. Anything is going to be a bigger hit than another hobbit on his journey.

I find that if I do not already have a draft post ready from a previous brainstorm session that Google news usually can provide me with some sort of idea as to something people will appreciate reading about. The biggest tip for any blogger new or old that I could give is to just not publish everything you write. I try to save at least 25% of what I think would be my greatest posts. Thats right keep some in the bank. You may need to skip a day or just not have a suitable topic come to mind at a later date.

Another option is to use a trackback to another blog to offer up more insight on the same topic. Something I have not really seen done lately is this same method but then basically tearing apart the post from another point of view. Read that as your controversy post. They are very good to gather new readers and keep old ones riveted. Keep in mind that if you bite off more than you can chew that you may lose the bet and your readers. Make sure to proceed cautiously.

I am going to cut this post a little shorter than I usually do to leave open a part two. I am interested in hearing your opinions on some of these ideas; as well as, hearing new ideas from you.

If your interested in learning more about effective blogging stop by and check out Big Ben Patton’s Place

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Image courtesy of Family Guy

Think that headline is too strong? Maybe we haven’t been looking at the same blogs. While looks are not the most important aspect of a blog, there’s no denying that they’re important. It doesn’t matter how amazing your content is if people flee in terror before they can read it.

Unfortunately, just like some American Idol contestants have no idea they can’t sing, some bloggers have no idea they’re repulsing potential readers (or they don’t care). Some blogs I’ve subscribed to were just so ugly I was forced to read them only in my RSS reader, never clicking through. That meant I wasn’t reading comments, which meant a lower level of engagement with the blog. It also meant I wasn’t leaving comments and helping the blog grow, and I wasn’t clicking ads.

Unless you’re in certain niches like web design or celebrity gossip, you don’t necessarily need a super-flashy theme. I decided to go with one that was simple and understated, just Kubric with a face-lift (and later on, a custom banner). In fact, focusing too much on aesthetics can potentially make your blog less functional. But it’s not hard to strike a balance between your objectives.

What makes a blog pleasing to the eye? It’s not so much a matter of doing certain things right as it is avoiding major mistakes. Just look at your blog and temporarily lose your attachment to it. Look at it objectively, from the eyes of a new visitor, and think of whether it might disgust them.

Don’t use color combinations that strain the eyes, like white text on a black background. Don’t mix colors that clash, like pink and orange. Don’t slap on so many colors that your blog looks gaudier than Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.

Don’t use tiny fonts that make people wonder if they need glasses. Don’t use serif fonts that are illegible at typical screen resolutions. Don’t write monolithic paragraphs that readers get lost in.

There are rules that professional designers live by for making everything into a work of art. But for most people, it’s not necessary to be the Michelangelo of blogging. It’s really quite simple. Just put yourself in your readers’ shoes, and think of whether you’re doing anything that would be painful for them to see. With a little bit of effort, any blog can be redesigned in a way that lets readers keep their lunch down.

Hunter Nuttall writes about personal development at his blog Hunter Nuttall . com – Stop sucking and live a life of abundance. No, he doesn’t offer blog design services, he’s just a concerned citizen.

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