Affiliate marketers are increasingly turning to blogs to drive traffic, create monetized content and grow their respective niche… or the other way around.

So, it’s important to understand business blogging for blogging’s sake.

Guess what, I contacted Todd and decided to replicate the idea on a different segment. More specifically, I decided to use similar ranking factors to produce the “Top 25 Blogs About Blogging” list.

Daily Blog Tips - Top 25 Blogs About Blogging

(found via Mike Sansone’s Converstations blog)

Jim Kukral has an interesting thesis (that I like for obvious reasons) that bloggers who are content creators and non-practicing marketers are the next super affiliates…

The difference is, bloggers have it much, much easier than the webmasters did. Trillions of pages of user generated content from bloggers will flood the Internet making it unavoidable that you will at some point in a search find blog content. When those bloggers figure out how to effectively monetize that content, they will reap the rewards.

Go read his whole post on the subject here:

Jim Kukral - Bloggers as the Next Super Affiliates

I ran across Janet’s blog via someone else’s blogroll a couple of months back, and she’s been a huge inspiration to me.  Vlad from MyAffiliateJourney posted a great interview with her on the topic of realizing what affiliate marketing was and how to find good information about it.  Here’s a part of the interview I had a great deal in common with:

It was about two years ago at Adtech online marketing conference. I stopped by the Commission Junction booth and asked them what affiliate marketing was. To be honest the explanation I got confused me. I wasn’t sure how it worked. Being a curious person I tried to figure it out. It probably took a year before I started making money as an affiliate.

When I first heard of affiliate marketing, I had no clue what it was all about (and I’m still on the learning curve), but that’s the fun part!

Go read the rest of the interview:

Vlad Interviews Janet Meiners - My Affiliate Journey 

Came across this factoid early this morning and it reminded me of something useful to remember as I start my fourth month in affiliate marketing:

According to the International Brotherhood of Arborists, a typical 20-year-old White Oak tree will produce 19,472 acorns per year.

I’m sure it takes young oak trees a while to produce any acorns at all.  I can’t rush this affiliate marketing thing, even if some people push the “make fast money this month” ebooks my way.

As hard as it is to start out, I’m committed to planting my roots and being in this for the long haul.

Be an affiliate oak tree, Ashley… be an affiliate oak tree.

Hi everyone.  This is my first blog entry ever and I decided to start with a bang. Sam pointed me to an issue that has been raised a few times over the years but most recently in a podcast that Sam was on.  Namely: Who should be the rightful receiver of an affiliate commission in a situation involving more than one channel or affiliate…the first affiliate to drive the sale or the last affiliate to do so? Jeff Doak was on that podcast and raised the issue and said some interesting things about how this should be handled involving a hybrid payout.

On a thread at ABestWeb started last night, the member Trust brought up the issue and pointed to a poll started in April which measured what affiliates on ABW thought of the issue.  Geno Prussakov raised the question on the original thread…

QUESTION: Who do you think the commission should be paid to - the first or the last affiliate that sends the customer?

It looks as if the affiliates overwhelmingly think the last affiliate is the rightful receiver of the commission.  This is an issue near and dear to my heart since some of the affiliate sites I’ve started are related to this issue. I’ve always thought it was common sense that the last affiliate that drove the action receive the payout, but maybe I’m missing something?

Sam says I should ask you lots of questions.  So, what do you think? Is the system of paying the last affiliate the commission for a registered action working, broken or in need of repair?

I am looking forward to great discussions and making more posts!

The Affiliate Summit and award winning affiliate Scott Hazard have joined forces to create AffiliateHug.com. All money will be donated to the March of Dimes, which is a fantastic cause that we should all get behind…

For an online donation of $20.00, individuals will receive a certificate entitling them to one (1) ScooterSqueeze™ from Scott and a “Freshly Squeezed” commemorative t-shirt. Certificates can be redeemed at the Affiliate Meet Market on Sunday, July 8, 2007 during Affiliate Summit.

Hug It Out, Affiliate! at Affiliate Tip Blog by Shawn Collins

Ashley Jones will be coming on board here as the regular “Weekend Editor” and also contributing a few articles during the week.

She’s keeping the North Carolina flavor of Affiliate Fortune Cookies as she currently resides just outside of Charlotte, NC.  After a successful career in law and business consulting, she decided to take on the role of an affiliate marketer a few months ago and has had a good deal of success in her short time working in the industry.

Ashley also has a very interesting (and practical) viewpoint on the world of affiliate marketing, so she should be a great counter to my more web2.0 based theoretical mindset.  We’ll see how that dynamic works out!

We are also trying to work out a way for her to get to Miami for the Affiliate Summit in July, so hopefully you all will have the chance to meet her.  Who needs a family vacation in the Catskills during that week??

Additionally, her email address is ashley@affiliatefortunecookies.com.

Welcome aboard, Ashley!

Thanks to Jonathan (Trust) for the link and idea for the post.

Despite what some armchair pundits might prophesy, 9 out of the top 10 companies listed here have affiliate programs. Yet another reason to take this industry seriously and for all of us in this industry to act professionally:

Top 500 Guide from Internet Retailer

Here’s one for the “what if?” crowd…

What if we were to be able to put an affiliate link into the mix here with participating merchants in order to more easily (and efficiently) track offline to online/txt conversions?
Could be an intriguing model as summer begins here in the Northern Hemisphere and more people are escaping their cubicles and laptops to go see movies, travel and enjoy the weather.

We turn to self-serve checkout lines at the supermarket and shop online in order to save time, so why not shop by text message? By registering your information with ShopText, you can purchase items by simply texting a keyword from a ShopText ad and confirming with a unique PIN attached to your ShopText account. However, while we’re all for efficiency, making it this easy to shop - well, it could be lethal for my bank account.

simplehuman | blog: Shop By Text Message

Marketing and blogging whiz Andrew Wee takes us on a tour of Technorati’s new features and algorithm, and how that can help your niche affiliate blog and make you money…

If you’ve been blogging for any length of time, you’d have heard of Technorati, the blog community site. They’ve recently revamped their stats and ranking system to factor in social factors. The net result? This blog has seen a jump in rankings, testament to the fact that social traffic strategies work.

Technorati Kicks Their Analytics Up A Notch at Andrew Wee | Blogging | Affiliate Marketing | Social Traffic Generation | Internet Marketing

If you use FeedBurner to manage your feeds and analytics on a blog or site (which you should), you can easily use a tool inside the FeedBurner interface called “Spring Widgets.” They are simple, fast and easy to create.

Okay I’m not a great widget fan so far, but this one just grabbed me by the throat and screamed “USE ME! USE ME NOW!” And I know it’s easy to use because I created the item below totally by accident initially by clicking a link in my Feedburner feed. It supports text, audio and I expect video too (gotta test that!). Really neat tool from Spring Widgets !

Affiliate Marketing Blog by AMWSO: Wicked Widget for RSS - Affiliate Marketing Blog

AffAimList, AffSkypeList and AffTwitList are all resources for you to find and get in contact with people you already know or people you want to know. As with anything of this nature, treat it with respect and don’t abuse the system or you’ll do some harsh brand damage to yourself!

In January of 2006, we announced that we had created The Affiliate AIM List (www.affaimlist.com), a small website that lists members of the affiliate community, the companies they work for, and a little clickable icon showing if they are online or not through AOL’s Instant Messenger service. The site has grown in popularity and we are happy to report that we have reached a big milestone! The Affiliate AIM List now has over 500 members!

The Affiliate AIM List Reaches 500 Members - IMWave

Wiki’s are an interesting platform because they allow for a conversation to happen on the actual face of the page. For instance, Wikipedia is the most well known wiki, but it’s not the whole picture of what these platforms can do.

Last October, Google acquired JotSpot, a wiki creation and management tool similar to what Wordpress.com is for hosted blogs. So, this space might be picking up traction.

Here’s a nice way to learn more and see some interesting stats…

If you are/were involved in using a wiki in a business environment and can spare 10 minutes, you may be interested in taking this survey run by Penny Edwards, an MBA student in the UK. You’ll be able to see the current stats upon concluding the survey.

Zoli’s Blog :: Survey on Managing Wikis in Business