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.

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