GetResponse just posted a nice calendar representing all major holidays in the USA. Here it is below, and you can see the original post here.

USA Holiday and Events Calendar

The idea of marketers leveraging holidays and other major events to sell things is nothing new, but it’s worth reminding everyone one more time: this is a great way to spin your marketing message for nearly any product.

The simplest strategy is temporal: in other words, use the lead up time to the holiday to create time pressure – ‘time is running out’. Yep, the old scarcity technique.

Another strategy is to provide an easy option. People often have trouble getting organised for a major holiday, e.g. buying all their Christmas presents before the mad rush. That’s where you step in to provide a one stop service to solve their problem, and relieve the stress. This strategy is highly suitable for Valentine’s day, because the onus is on the male to provide an amazing night/gift for their partner. Provide an impressive package for a reasonable price and… ka-ching!

Yet another strategy is to use one-upmanship, a.ka. ‘keeping up with the Joneses.’ People want to appear fresh, exciting, and prosperous to their friends and neighbours.

So, for example: for a popular Summer holiday, you might focus on:

• upgrading your BBQ, or outdoor furniture
• cleaning your yard (high pressure cleaners)
• high quality food products (grass fed beef)
• entertainment equipment (a huge TV, or killer sound system)

Remember: you don’t sell a product, you sell its perceived benefit to the purchaser.

Oh and the above graphic is mostly only relevant to North America. What holidays and major events happen in your neck of the woods? There are huge opportunities if you do some research around the holidays in other markets, like the UK, South America, or Asia. Just make sure you understand the way people celebrate.

Happy holidays!!

Build Your Marketing Campaigns Around Public Holidays is a post from: Marketing Newb

To be honest, I don’t own a lot of commercial WordPress plugins – PhpBayPro and this are it. Most things you want to do on WordPress can be accomplished using free plugins. Sometimes I also create my own simple plugins, since I can make them do exactly what I want. But the two that I bought are both essential plugins. To recreate either of them would take a lot of work, so I love that they are both 100% ready to help me make money, right out of the box.

PhpBayPro is a topic for another post, but read on to see why Ninja Affiliate is so useful…

What does MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate do?

In a nutshell, it is an affiliate link manager, cloaker, which can also create automatic keyword-based links using your affiliate links?

Why do we need this?

Of course, you can insert your own affiliate links straight into the WordPress post editor. There are three problems with this:

• It is tedious – I don’t know about you but building up affiliate links from the various network tools, complete with tracking IDs, Prosper 202 variables, etc is just boring. I want to create my links once, and then be able to use them many times throughout my posts, sidebar, banners with a couple of clicks.
• It is error prone – if you are setting up the full blown affiliate link each time you want to use it somewhere in your blog, your chance of making an error (and thus losing cash) is magnified.
• Changes – say you set up a cloaked link in a post, and then you want to remove cloaking. You’ll have to edit the post, and everywhere else you used that link.
• Organisation – having affiliate links directly inserted into posts all over your blog means that you’re more likely to have dead links, which is just a wasted opportunity. Good luck finding all your dead links!
• Tracking – you can track affiliate link clicks with something like Google Analytics, but this requires additional setup in your account, and is unreliable. I find it essential to track the clicks that each link receives.
• Similar to this, sometimes you have multiple affiliate links within a single post (e.g. end of post, middle of post, etc.) – setting up an individual link for each of these is just BORING if you don’t have some form of tool to help you.

Here’s how Ninja Affiliate helps you:

Click here to see videos showing exactly how Ninja Affiliate will make your life easier

What’s in the update of Ninja Affiliate?

Since the trigger for this post was the update, I thought I’d quickly explain what they changed:

1. Complete visual redesign – I have tested it for a while and it is definitely easier to read.
2. They’ve added more navigation options in the Admin so you can get around the config screens more quickly.

I’m Interested, Where do I get Ninja Affiliate?

This plugin is $97 for use on unlimited blogs. They now have a $37 option for a single blog.

As I said, I bought it over 3 years ago and it has paid for itself many, MANY times over.

$37 is a great price, but if you are an affiliate marketer, you are going to need the unlimited version.

Enough from me – the sales page has videos, screenshots and explains all the ways this plugin will make your life easier.

See the Ninja Affiliate sales page now

Confused? Leave a comment

If you want more info or specific examples on how to get the most from Ninja Affiliate, then just ask me. I’m more than happy to create most posts about this.

Updated: The Best WordPress Affiliate Link Manager Around is a post from: Marketing Newb

Every man and his dog is promoting failsafe methods to generate crazy amounts of cash on the Internet.

Let me tell you – 95% of that is pure marketing – it’s going full circle: selling you a technique by using that same technique on you! Frank Kern does this all the time. It’s almost hypnotic.

But the astute person can use this to their advantage. Simply watch how the ‘big’ marketers promote their affiliate education products and you have all the info you need to do a similar product launch; or promote IM products as an affiliate.

Starting Internet Marketing: Choose Your Weapon is a post from: Marketing Newb

On this blog I will only ever recommend tools that I have used extensively. Out of the many tools I try each week, I probably end up regularly using less than 5% of them. So any review I write is honest and based on my actual experience.

Anyway I just finished using TweetAdder today and I wanted to express my feelings about how awesome it is! Initially, I am skeptical of every tool. They never do exactly what you need, but the mark of a good tool is that you find yourself adapting to use it, and coming back to it week after week.

The bottom line for this tool is: it just saves so much time.

…and if you are ignoring Twitter, because you ‘just don’t get it’, think again.

What does TweetAdder do? It is like a virtual assistant for all your Twitter tasks.

This includes:

• Finding new people to follow
• Unfollowing those who do not follow you
• Scheduling tweets for the coming days/weeks
• Automatically direct messaging new followers
• Automatically replying to mentions
• plus quite a bit more…

When I said I use it daily – it’s actually only a few minutes – because TweetAdder automates so many Twitter tasks it just takes a few minutes to open the app and check how things are going. Depending on what’s happening, I might queue up a couple of thousand new accounts to follow, or schedule some upcoming tweets.

Now, it’s not 100% automated. To get new followers you have to go in every few days and queue up a bunch. You do this by searching by keyword, location, followers-of-a-certain-user and some other ways. Doing this manually means you will get a better, more targeted list of people to follow. Other systems that continually add people based on keywords alone do not do a great job of getting really targeted followers.

Once you queue up 2000 or so, you can leave the following for at least 10 days (200 follows per day) and forget about it. You then come back after the 10 days and you WILL see a big increase in your followers. On average I see at least 10% follow-backs from this, and sometimes more, depending on the niche.

Let’s focus on the downsides for a minute otherwise what kind of honest review is this!?

These things piss me off about the program:

• You can’t apply settings across all your accounts – you have to go to the Dashboard and log in to each account to set the automation settings, follower limits, etc. This is not too bad, because you only set these settings up once, when you add each account. Bit annoying though.
• The built-in proxy support is good, AND it auto-finds fresh free anonymous proxies but sometimes the proxies fail (because they are free) and the program does not handle it so well. It does not intelligently skip the failed proxies. Workaround is to use your own paid proxies and you will have no issues.
• The built in Tweet editor doesn’t integrate with any link shorteners like cli.gs or bit.ly. So you have to go and shorten your own links and paste them in. Slightly annoying.

Next time I update the blog I’ll explain how I use TweetAdder and some real results showing it’s effectiveness. I’ll also post about some other ways of automating Twitter legitimately. For example, I use TweetAdder in combination with WordPress Twitter plugins, TwitterFeed, Ping.FM and other service to create a big Twitter Domination Machine!

In the past I’ve manually managed all my niche Twitter accounts and, just like a website, they stagnate if you are not constantly going in and being the caretaker.

That’s why I like TweetAdder so much it keeps the oxygen going to your Twitter account and you only need to glance at it every few days (per account)

Oh, one last thing I really like – the guys who made this chose to sell it for a flat fee – so NO monthly charges. As marketers we’re always getting products trying to lock us into subscriptions so this is a nice touch. They would be justified charging a monthly fee, in a way, because you get constant ROI from this tool and it builds over time. So, it’s notable that you only have to pay once.

Click here to see testimonials, screenshots and many other great features of TweetAdder (there’s a free, fully functional trial)

TweetAdder – Your Twitter Automation Assistant is a post from: Marketing Newb

What am I on about? Vitamin D!

This substance is not actually a vitamin; it is a hormone. It has been popularly named Vitamin D, probably because the substance you need to ingest is actually not the same as the one that the body uses for its maintenance. Vitamins, by definition, are produced outside the body, whereas this substance can only be produced in the body, when the required chemicals are present.

We get Vitamin D mainly by going in the sun. We can also get small amount from eating foods like Salmon, and Cod Liver oil.

Vitamin D is essential for good health, and is thought to be wonderful for the human immune system. This means Vitamin D is suspected to be a strong anti-cancer agent, as well as a great defence against getting run-down, and the common cold.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7lGBT3oMiw

Vitamin D is also linked to depression, autism, and similar problems.

You may be getting enough.. or you may not. The easiest way to know is to get a blood test – see the link below for details.

So.. who cares?

The point of this post is to bring to your attention one possible reason why you may be feeling run down, getting frequent colds, or just generally feeling shite.

Nutrition and exercise are ESSENTIAL to staying on top of your game in any job. But, in this lonely IM game, it’s even more important. Working as an affiliate marketer requires many long hours cooped up in a dark room, in front of the computer, so it’s important to keep your body healthy – otherwise your mind will suffer.Your mind needs to stay resilient and creative otherwise you risk losing a lot of cash, or just not making enough. Your brain is your top tool as an online marketer, so you have to keep it well fed.

Vitamin D is only one of the things you need to be aware of when looking at achieving peak health, but it is a definitely a fundamental thing to have covered.

I have personally noticed a difference in my basic health since starting to supplement with Vitamin D3, however I also make sure I get frequent exercise.

What Can YOU Do Today?

Going out in the strong sun has health risks, so the easiest way to make sure you’re getting enough Vitamin D is to take Vitamin D3 supplements. If you get the 1000 IU pills, you can take it every day or two. I tend to not take it on the days I go to the beach. You can also get a 5000 IU variety, which you’d take every 3 days or so.

Via the links below, are a few good products for those in the USA.

If you are from Australia, I can recommend the Blackmore’s brand (not an aff link!)

Learn More

Now, I didn’t get on this track by myself – the magnificent Steve Gibson is to be credited for this. I suggest you read his excellent page on Vitamin D, as he provides audio files, links and great info for free.

I’d like to hear from other marketers!

If you have methods that you use to stay healthy while working online, leave a comment! Thanks..

Affiliate Marketers Need Sunshine is a post from: Marketing Newb

We want to change the content of a post based on the referring URL. Why would we want to do this? Well, in an affiliate marketing context, we may want to display a certain offer based on where the reader came from.

e.g.

We have a review blog with 10 informative articles and one post which is a product review, linking to the merchant’s sales page. Unless the blog is laser targeted, you could imagine that the exact interest of the browser will vary depending which article they enter the site from.

So, what you can do to better serve each reader, is vary your offer to match the post they were reading before clicking through to the product review post. That way, each article can link to the same review post, but the content can vary.

BTW, we are not talking about cloaking in the visitor-detection (IP-based) sense, which is the type used for doorway pages, etc. Instead, we are preserving the post’s URL while displaying different content based on the referrer.

The Solution

We don’t actually need a new plugin to do this – John Godley‘s Redirection will provide all the functionality we need to make this happen. I am going to use the above review example, however you can apply this technique to any scenario which requires this type of cloaking.

Creating Your Reviews

OK so, this method requires you to set up each product review as separate page/post. You’ll end up with something like this:

Informative Article posts:

example.com/category1/article1

example.com/category1/article3

example.com/category2/article3

etc..

…which link to default Product Review post:

example.com/category3/product-review

[Note: this will need to contain an actual product review because people can reach this page from the SERPS, or by another path in your site. The pages below provide alternate offers.]

…which draws its content from these pages:

example.com/product-review-content-X

example.com/product-review-content-Y

example.com/product-review-content-Z

etc..

If you want to keep the product content pages orphaned, use pages not posts, and if you use an XML sitemap, somehow exclude them. from your XML sitemap. My favourite XML sitemap generator for WordPress allows this easily by excluding specific post/page IDs. This shouldn’t matter too much though because search engines will index the original content of the review post, because WordPress now contains the canonical meta tag by default.

How to Set Up the Redirection Plugin to Cloak

1. Install the ‘Redirection’ plugin

2. Go to Tools->Redirection

You need to do the following steps (3 – 9) for each review you want to mask:

3. Under ‘Add new Redirection’, do the following:

- Enter source URL – this is your URL of your generic review post
- Match = URL and Referrer
- Action = Pass-through (this masks the ultimate post URL)
- Regex = unchecked
- Target URL = First substitute review post

4. Click Add

5. Now you have to edit the Redirection to finalise the setup

6. In the list of Redirects, click on the one you just added

7. In the Referrer field, add whatever you need to match the referrer.

e.g. if you want to redirect from a specific post, you’d just enter:

/cat-name/post-name

But if you want to redirect from all posts in a certain category, then you’d do:

/cat-name.*

and check the Regex checkbox.

There can be other variations too – leave a comment if you need help.

8. I think it is best to change the HTTP code to 302 or 307, since you do not want the various reviews to get indexed on the source URL. In other words, if you used 301, the search engine may replace the default offer with one of the variations.

9. Hit Save.

10. To test that it’s working, just go to the referring page. Then click through to the Review post.

If it’s working, you should see the generic post content replaced by the target post’s content if you come at it from the referrer you just set up.

Here’s an example of the Redirection settings:

Wordpress Redirection plugin example

Final Thoughts

A dedicated plugin would be better, in that you could set up a simple list of URLs for each product review, hiding all the complexity, however Redirection does a good job to save us writing a plugin.

The following plugins seem to do vaguely similar things, and could probably be modified to suit:
http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2009/01/11/plugin-review-referrer-detector/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nsx-referers/

Cloaking a WordPress Post Based on the Referrer is a post from: Marketing Newb

This is a good example of the way companies and people are able to track their exposure in a world of New and Internet Marketing. I would even go so far to say if you are engaged in New Marketing, e.g. social networks, blogging, viral videos, etc, then you must be using tools such as the Firehose Filter to report and gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Here, you can take a look at the generic version of this social media firehose filter. This has really opened my eyes to the power of Yahoo Pipes.

Filtering the Social Media Firehose with Yahoo Pipes is a post from: Marketing Newb

I strongly identify with what he’s written here, and it interests me that it came from him. The reason being: if you read all of his blog posts you will see he’s a smart guy and definitely appears to be a doer. By many accounts, he has done very well from SEO and the Internet and has built up quite an empire of revenue generating web properties. This is why it is notable – someone who is successful has revealed that they too struggle with diversions, procrastination, and frustration of ambition. As one who also grapples with these, this post really hit home and reminded me that it is all about planning, breaking your projects down into small steps and doing at least one of these steps each day.

I urge you to read this passionate post and think about how it applies to your own situation.

If you have trouble getting organised, then I think this is a good time to mention GTD. If you’re not familiar with this – you can read the official definition. I highly recommend getting the audiobook and listening to it on your commute or whatever. It took me several weeks to get through it and this allowed me to gradually work the method into my daily life. I definitely believe GTD applies well to being someone who works online, as there are always many small tasks to do.

Starting off on the right foot is a post from: Marketing Newb