ContentRobot

The ContentRobot team headed to Boston on Monday to attend the Affiliate Summit East 08 Conference - Shawn Collins and Missy Ward know how to put on a show.

We had a great time meeting up with some friends, clients, and colleagues - and we even had time to make some new ones despite being there for only one day.

While we were happy to hang out in the blogger lounge just to mingle, play Wii, and affix stickers to our laptops; we actually took the time to share our WordPress expertise with anyone seeking some technical advice.

We even attended two seminars: Content the Kills and How is Social Media Changing Affiliate Marketing - and wanted to share some random insights:

• The affiliate marketing crowd is extremely tech savvy and they often actively seek online tools and techniques to drive interest, community, and sales
• The best way to encourage readership is to be consistent, open, entertaining, giving (takeways and teaching go a long way) to build trust and a following
• Be passionate with your topics and be in it for the long haul
• Web 2.0 is in full force - there are currently 80 million views on YouTube and 110 million blogs
• 56% of users now look to others for product information
• The ROI of blogging / social networking is still elusive, but you need to put value on the conversation and the process not just the clickthrus and conversions

Tools of the Trade

To be a great content creator, you must take advantage of the technology:

• Twitter - the popular micro-blogging/ social networking tool
• ping.fm - post to all your social networks (Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr, Pownce, Facebook, hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.) all at once
• ShareThis - share information (such as a blog post) via email, IM, and social bookmarking site
• MyBlogLog - display your photo/vanity profile on MyBlogLog-enabled sites
• FriendFeed - see the ripple effect of your network
• Technorati & Google Blog Search - find out what are people saying about you
  

Success Stories

Those looking for case studies for successful affiliate marketers were often encouraged to check out the following sites:

• Daily Candy
• FatWallet
• SheFinds
• Zappos

During the Social Media seminar, it was amazing to see the tweets flying back and forth - so much so that the moderator was able to field several questions from the Affiliate Summit twitter stream. We went from people who didn’t know much about Twitter at the Las Vegas show (a mere six months ago) to an impressive adoption rate since.

Our favorite sentiment of the day came from Chris Brogan (who was discussing the best ways to get into the conversations at Twitter), “Don’t just sit on the blanket, bring a bottle of wine to the picnic.” Be sure to give and give and give.

Blog.on affiliate marketers!

Just when you thought we forgot about our affiliate blog … We took the plunge and began signing up for some affiliate programs with publishing accounts this week.

Chitika
We headed over to Chitika because they are so blog-centric with their advertising. We were especially impressed with their Chitika | RPU program that brings related products right within a product-oriented story. We were approved for a Chitika | eMiniMalls account, which provides relevant content and comparative shopping information. We found it simple and easy to apply to Chitika and highly recommend it.
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No sooner did we report our initial impressions of Open Ads, they rebranded themselves as OpenX today. According to their blog:

After news a few weeks ago of our new investment and the beta of the hosted version of our ad server software, we’ve got more news to share. We did it again, we’ve changed the name of Openads to OpenX.

In the past few months we have spent lots of time with folk in our publisher community to understand better what you want from us. Simply, you want us to make it easier for you to make money online. We’ve already started, launching the beta of the hosted version of our software which we’re scaling as fast as possible to meet the overwhelming demand we see (publishers from over 60 countries have signed up for the beta program!).

This is just the first example of how we plan to move with our publishers beyond our core open source ad serving software. That will always be our heart and soul. But as we start to roll out our hosted service and look towards the future, we thought the time was right to evolve our name to reflect the suite of services we hope one day to offer our publisher community.

ContentRobot expects we will recommend OpenX ad serving software to our clients when we can.

We spent our day yesterday kicking the tires of OpenAds. While a bit of an overkill for some bloggers, this is a great piece of software for those who are committed to serving ads, tracking click-thrus, and making some money.

What is OpenAds?

It’s free ad serving software that allows you to choose banners (from animated GIFs to Flash), campaigns and terms that you define. It includes a sophisticated tracking system means that helps you to gather statistics and optimize campaigns. Note: it’s also big, so it will take a while to download and then upload to your server.
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We hightailed it over to Smashing Magazine’s list of 83 Beautiful WordPress Themes You (Probably Haven’t Seen) to find our affiliate blog theme.

We decided on BlogDog’s Green Dog Theme. Here’s a preview and click here to download it.

One thing that you’ll notice is that the theme is in Russian! Thankfully we have enough experience with WordPress themes, so it didn’t take too long to translate everything into English.

We are enjoying working out its kinks and customizing it for our use. We are really looking forward to launching our (first?) affiliate blog.
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We wanted to let you know about an excellent resource that can help you learn the ins and outs of affiliate marketing: WebmasterRadio.FM.

They feature a channel called Affiliate Thing. It’s hosted by Lisa Picarille, the Editor-in Chief of Revenue Magazine and Shawn Collins, the Co-founder of Affiliate Summit.

Each week, these two affiliate professionals announce the latest groundbreaking affiliate stories and conduct interviews with well-known industry leaders. Lisa and Shawn divulge affiliate marketing tips and valuable resources for increasing your revenue in the affiliate marketing world.

As of today, they had 42 podcasts for your listening pleasure. They are a knowledgeable duo - go listen! Read the Entire Post >

To help promote The Secret Power of Blogging book, we sign up for our first affiliate program: Amazon Associates.

How it Works

By linking to Amazon products and services you can add content to your site and receive up to 10% in referral fees for doing so. Participation is free.

Associates drive internet traffic to Amazon.com through specially formatted links that track sales and other activity. Associates earn up to 10% in referral fees on all qualifying revenue made through their links. Amazon sends monthly payments to Associates.

You’ll have access to Associates Central, the place where you will build your links, view your traffic and earnings reports, and read about the latest news and opportunities available to you through the program. Reports are updated daily.
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There are hundreds upon hundreds of WordPress themes available. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending how you look at it) they run the gamut:

• Many themes are very badly done, but some have very nice implementations
• Many feature minor modifications of existing themes with new names on them, but some are unique
• Some are free, but many are not

While it might be cost effective to begin with an existing, free theme, you might run into design limitations or find that badly coded themes may not support your future goals.
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Welcome to the technical portion of our program. While everyone wants to get right to blogging, you have to know where the website is gonna be stored, right?

There are alot of hosting packages with a variety of price points. It can be overwhelming to find the right one for your affiliate blog. We offer some basic direction when considering hosts.

What features should you look for in a hosting plans?

• LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
• The ability to create and maintain databases (WordPress requires one and some ad servers require one as well)
• Decent bandwidth (200GB/month transfer)
• Storage (3000MB disk space)

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What is the ContentRobot affiliate blog gonna focus on?

If you are familiar with our team, you’ll notice a strong affinity for Apple stuff (can you say fanboy/fangirl). Between us we have a stash of desktops, laptops, iPods, iPhones, and even a Mac TV (Not to be confused with the Apple TV, although we have one of those too ).
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