Video is hot and face time can drive higher conversions.  If you run a marketing program that is highly personal in nature, you might want to consider including personalized video greetings (you can limit the amount of time visitors see the greeting, etc) with the Bubble Guru service. 

I’ve tried this out on CostPerNews, but the audience there really doesn’t fit the type of crowd that would benefit (or provide higher conversions) from something like this.

However, you might have an affiliate site or blog that could… 

Kevin wanted to introduce me, and you, to Bubble Guru, a service that allows you to record brief videos and add them to a page. These videos then appear in small ?bubbles? on the page, either automatically or when a link is clicked, and allow you to share a brief video message with your visitors.

Bubble Guru Adds Video Greeting to Your Web Site | Marketing Pilgrim

If you utilize blogs in your affiliate programs, or if you’re an affiliate marketer who blogs, there’s a couple of different options you have for creating a post.  You can either go directly to your Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, etc interface or you can find a 3rd party app which allows you to create entries and then sync up to publish.

My favorite way to blog at the moment is Windows Live Writer (as a Linux fan, it takes a lot for me to admit that).  However, the Windows Live Writer really is fantastically simple, quick and easy to use.  Plus, you can throw in screen grabs, videos, maps, pics, etc much quicker than through say the Wordpress entry maker.  And the ability to blog while offline is always a plus.

There are a few other options out there that do similar things, so if you have a suggestion leave it in the comments.  Currently, Live Writer is only available for Windows Vista and XP.

So, if you’re using a Mac or Ubuntu, you’ll have to go elsewhere.

Windows Live Writer Beta

More affiliate marketing FireFox goodness…

I mentioned SearchStatus in my post, ‘Customising Firefox for the Internet Marketer‘ back in January.

Well you may be interested in the new version of SearchStatus that was recently released. Version 1.19 includes some minor bug fixes as well as statistics from Compete.com. You can download the new version here

SearchStatus just got better | Keith’s Affiliate Marketing Blog

Although a majority (somewhere around 75%) of internet users still cling to Internet Explorer, Firefox is by far a superior browser for many chores and tasks, including those concerned with affiliate marketing.

Perhaps the most handy feature in Firefox is the ability to add plugins. There’s even a few which are helpful for affiliate marketers.

A few of these are a little old (by a few months) but are still helpful nonetheless…

1. Fraser’s Commission Junction Plugin

“Basically it sits in the the status bar at the bottom of your Firefox browser window and checks your Commission Junction balance every 30 minutes. It has no official association with CJ and although I don’t expect there to be problems I can’t take any responsibility if it doesn’t play nicely with your other extensions.”

2. IE in Firefox View

“This is a great tool for web developers, since you can easily see how your web page displayed in IE with just one click and then switch back to Firefox.”

3. SEO for Firefox

“Want to know why Google or Yahoo! ranks pages? If so this is the Firefox extension for you. SEO for Firefox pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a more holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market right from the search results.”

4. SearchStatus (thanks to Andy Beard for the tip)

“SearchStatus is a toolbar extension for Firefox and Mozilla that allows you to see how any and every website in the world is performing. Designed for the highly specialised needs of search engine marketers, this toolbar provides extensive search-related information about a site, all conveniently displayed in one discreet and compact toolbar.”

5. Firebug

“Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.”

What about you? Any other Firefox extensions or plugins that we missed which help you in your affiliate marketing endeavors?

Wordpress 2.2 has been released. What does that mean for your affiliate marketing program?  Everything!  There’s already a big debate in affiliate land about whether to start a blog or a traditional html site, and Wordpress 2.2 only helps to bolster the argument for blogs.

Search engines love blogs because they are constantly updated and provide a number of inbound and outbound links to juice up your pagerank.

• WordPress Widgets allow you to easily rearrange and customize areas of your weblog (usually sidebars) with drag-and-drop simplicity. This functionality was originally available as a plugin Widgets are now included by default in the core code, significantly cleaned up, and enabled for the default themes.
• Full Atom support, including updating our Atom feeds to use the 1.0 standard spec and including an implementation of the Atom Publishing API to complement our XML-RPC interface.
• A new Blogger importer that is able to handle the latest version of Google’s Blogger product and seamlessly import posts and comments without any user interaction beyond entering your login.
• Infinite comment stream, meaning that on your Edit Comments page when you delete or spam a comment using the AJAX links under each comment it will bring in another comment in the background so you always have 20 items on the page. (I know it sounds geeky, but try it!)
• We now protect you from activating a plugin or editing a file that will break your blog.
• Core plugin and filter speed optimizations should make everything feel a bit more snappy and lighter on your server.
• We’ve added a hook for WYSIWYG support in a future version of Safari.

Full atom support and widgets in the sidebar (rather than having to go hunt down the plugin, install and set it up) are huge benefits as are the over 200 bug fixes.

So, if you are already using hosted WordPress blogs for your program, update today. If you’re not using blogs yet… now’s your chance!

For all of you affiliates using Firefox as a browser and SEO as an active strategy in your marketing efforts, there are a few good plugins to help you out.

One of those is SEOpen:

Current SEOpen features are all accessed through right-clicking an open area on a web page or by using the new toolbar; they include:

• Yahoo Backlinks
• Pages in Yahoo Index
• Google Backlinks
• Google Cache
• Pages in Google index
• Google Translate to English
• Google Related
• PageRank Check
• MSN Backlinks
• Pages in MSN Index
• Alexa Overview
• Alexa Traffic
• Alexa Related
• Alexa Backlinks
• “Mass Check” multiple sources at once
• Check DMOZ Inclusion
• Keyword Density
• Page Size Checker
• HTML Validator
• Server Header Viewer
• Wayback Machine
• Check robots.txt
• Whois Info

Planned for future versions:

• Yahoo & MSN Cache
• Spider Simulator and/or Text Browser view
• IP-based SEO tools
• Toolbar Option

Nothing like an easy tool to help you out in your browsing around on your own sites or competitor sites!