Who's the guest?

This guest post, about guest posts, comes from yoinkgasp of the WickedFire forums.

Utilizing Guests Posts: A Basic How To

Blogging has become the latest and greatest symbol of affiliate affluence. It’s no secret that blogging has been around for a while, but blogging seems to be withholding the test of time. Unlike other flash-in-the-pan trends, blogging isn’t going anywhere. This has been reinforced by bloggers who attempt to kick blogging to the curb, only to come back to the blogging scene.

Obviously, anyone worth their weight in salt is going to focus their marketing efforts on working, with blogging take a place firmly rooted on their proverbial back burner. The unfortunate downside to running both a business and a blog is that one tends to suffer when the other is successful.

Not so, thanks to the many advantages of guest blogging.

Why Guest Blogging Is So Powerful

Extracting some excellent and unique content from another specialist to post on your blog is almost always a win-win situation for everyone involved. If your blog is even mildly popular, having a guest post or two is a great way to expand your reach and draw in new visitors. You may even find that the content discussed in the guest post brings in a significant enough of a reader base to expand upon further in future posts.

For the guest blogger, it means the ability to reach out to a completely different visitor base and, hopefully, bring some of that action back to their blog. The golden rules of guest blogging are simple (provide good content, good a juicy back link), yet so many bloggers throw the rules out the window. Namely, the “provide good content” portion gets thrown out in exchange for convenience and/or money. This, ultimately, is a bad thing.

Qualities Of A Good Guest Post

If you’re the owner of a relatively hip and happening blog, the idea of a guest post or two may certainly seem appealing. Before you start throwing up any and all lines of text someone throws your way, you should carefully consider if the content should actually be on your blog.

• Does the post meet the quality of your other posts? Little details, such as the use of proper grammatical conventions or the proper spelling of common words, can really disconnect a reader. Never assume that someone will just ignore certain shortcomings due to your reputation. Ensuring that the guest post is technically correct on a copy level will prevent this from ever becoming an issue.

• Is the content of the guest post accurate and relevant? There’s no faster way to ruin your reputation, aside from selling your friends out (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/how-to-spam-facebook-like-a-pro-an-insiders-confession/), than endorsing false or misleading information. Your reputation is paramount in any industry, so it’s in your best interests to protect it.

• Is the post mutually beneficial? If your blog is about pet supplies, and you throw up a guest post about how to level quickly in World of Warcraft, where’s the benefit? The back link loses its weight due to unrelated association, and your readers will likely skip right over the post.

Most importantly:

• Does the guest blogger have credibility? Anyone and their mother can claim to be an internet marketing guru or search engine marketing specialist. Does your guest post come from someone with credibility, so that the information they are presenting has merit to the reader? A guest post from a newbie marketer on this particular blog would likely be overlooked, especially if the lack of experience on behalf of the poster was ever exposed. Ensure that your “expert guest post” is actually written by an expert.

Obviously, opinion posts and/or posts that are a little more casual in nature don’t need to carry the same authority.

Following this de-facto guide to guest blogging will ensure many long-standing and mutually beneficial relationships in the future!

- yoinkgasp (http://www.wickedfire.com/members/yoink-gasp-.html)

There are many different personality types in this world. I've learned that part of business is dealing with those different personality types.

There are four main personality types and each communicate differently. Therefore in order to be most affective, talking to the person you're doing business with in a way that best allows you to communicate with them and their personality type is key.

Before you determine another person's personality, you must know what your dominate personality type is.

To do this, I use a chart such as this one (the best I could find), to determine my own personality.

Personally, I have melancholy as my primary trait and choleric as my secondary.

Knowing what personality traits others have can really help you to understand them better and ultimately be able to communicate better with them.

Now, I'm not saying that you should be doing this for everyone, but for closer business contacts, it can dramatically help you.

Here are some good tips on how you can deal with each personality type.

With Choleric people:

• Build respect to avoid conflict
• Focus on facts and ideas rather than the people
• Have evidence to support your argument
• Be quick, focused, and to the point
• Ask what, not how
• Talk about how problems will hinder accomplishments
• Show them how they can succeed

With Sanguine people:

• Be social and friendly with them, building the relationship
• Listen to them talk about their ideas
• Help them find ways to translate the talk into useful action
• Don't spend much time on the details
• Motivate them to follow through to complete tasks
• Recognize their accomplishments

With Phlegmatic people:

• Be genuinely interested in them as a person
• Create a humane working environment for them
• Give them time to adjust to change
• Clearly define goals for them and provide ongoing support
• Recognize and appreciate their achievements
• Avoid hurry and pressure
• Present new ideas carefully

With Melancholy people:

• Warn them in time and generally avoid surprises
• Be prepared. Don't ad-lib with them if you can
• Be logical, accurate, and use clear data
• Show how things fit into the bigger picture
• Be specific in disagreement and focus on the facts
• Be patient, persistent, and diplomatic

(This list was taken from a leadership class I am taking that I believe is based on William Moulton Marston's work from the 1920's.)

Is it just me or has there been a HUGE lack of blog contests out recently?

I remember at one point, there seemed to be 100 contests going on at one time, (mostly marketleverage... lol). Recently this seems to have come to a standstill.

So I wanted to run an easy twitter / facebook fan / blog contest and give away some nice prizes!

Prizes:

First Prize:
First prize is going to win a DUAL 22" Monitor set. Each monitor is 1920x1080 (1080P HD) widescreen for maximum efficiency!

Second Prize:

• 125x125 ad spot on JonathanVolk.com
• $50 Amazon Gift Card

Third Prize:

• $50 Amazon Gift Card

Contest

The way to win is really simple... the more points you get, the better your chances are at winning. This levels the playing field so anyone can win!

• Twitter: Simply Tweet (or RT) any number of my blog posts over the span of the contest period with @JonathanVolk in the twitter message. Doing so will give you 2 points per message tweeted. 5 points will be given for tweeting about this contest post.
• Follow my twitter and/or my twitter affiliate marketing list. - 1 Point for each.
• Facebook: Become a fan of my fanpage - 1 Point.
• Subscribe to this blog's RSS via Email - 1 point.
• Make a blog post about me or this contest - 5 points.

Points will be totaled and a random number will be generated using random.org. This will happen three times - first, second, third.

Rules

- No fake / spam twitter or facebook accounts will be counted.
- You have 30 days from today to earn as many points as possible.
- Winners will be emailed, @ messaged or facebooked and must respond within 2 days with their details. If no reply, a new winner will be chosen.
- If the winner of the monitors is not from the US, a cash equivalent MIGHT be presented to the winner so they can buy the monitors.
- Enjoy!

Let the games begin!!

What is SponsoredTweets?

SponsoredTweets is a website where tweeters from ALL levels (big and small accounts) can sign up and allow people to pay them to tweet sponsored messages.

Who Can Signup?

Tweeters
The cool thing about Sponsored tweets is that they accept both large and very small tweeters. Your value is essentially based upon your number of followers and the amount of people you're following. And although you can set your own price to whatever you think your tweets are worth, there is an automated system which tells you what your approximate value is.

Tip: I recommend that you put your price slightly below this automated number to give yourself a little extra edge over the competition. Even if your tweets are only worth a buck or two, it takes you all of 30 seconds to write the tweet. Extra money for very little work.

Advertisers:
The case study below will be on my experience advertising on Sponsored Tweets.

Advertisers are those who want to pay others to tweet out messages. The price ranges from around a dollar up to thousands of dollars and even those "Call for price" tweets.

My Experiences

I decided to spend around $600 bucks on tweets to see what would be the best for marketing my campaigns if I decided to continue my marketing strategy on twitter.

I selected a few higher profile tweeters and a few lower profile tweeters. I wanted to try all spectrum of the tweetverse.

Here are my experiences with sponsoredtweets.

This is some really good (free) data for you.

It appears that the best deals are at the bottom (meaning those with less twitter followers should go sign up as tweeters right now)

The more expensive spots were great in some ways, but had the more expensive cpc.

To me this shows a lot. I'd rather buy 100 tweets from low volume tweeters than 2-3 large tweets.

Now, Go sign up for sponsored tweets and start making money.

Ok, so chances are that if you asked me if I was going to Pubcon about a week ago, I would have said no. I never really even planned on going to an event until next year simply because I am freshly married.

I decided to go on a last minute whim for three reasons. First, I have a company that I have been working with out of Vegas that I was hoping to get a chance to meet face to face. Second, meet a friend of mine that I have been doing some projects with. Third, To hang out with Shoemoney and a bunch of other guys at the Poker event.

So next week, I will be flying out to Vegas and I hope to catch a bunch of you there! In case you don't know what I look like, scroll down to the bottom of this page, click the about page, or visit my twitter. Man, my face is all over the place.

Anyway, looking forward to it. Please do feel free to come up to me and chat!

As you can see in my goals, I have always had a heart to give back to the community with the money that is generated through affiliate marketing.

As I write today about some of the charities I give to, my hopes is you will as well begin to contribute as well.

Here are some of the charities I give to.

• Harvest Church (You can view the video of our remodel project which is really cool). Harvest Church is my home church and as a Christian it's important that I tithe 10% and give offerings. I enjoy giving to my church because they use the money for effecting peoples lives which is the most important thing.
• GodLovesKids. This is a charity that I support regularly (every month). I sponsor children both young up to college age from both India and Africa. The reason why I love this charity is because of the results they have achieved. First, they are all about the whole, "teaching a kid how to fish, rather than giving them a fish." The money donated goes towards education costs of these under privileged children.

Those are the two main charities that I regularly contribute to as well as some others on an irregular basis.

I encourage you as you continue to grow in your internet marketing earnings to always give a portion back to seeing people touched for the better.

This post was inspired in part by Purpose inc.. He seems to be all about Charity which is one aspect I really appreciate about him.

Last year and this year, DK, ran a charity poker event comprised of many of the top people in the industry. It's sponsored in part by my favorite affiliate network, AzoogleAds as well as a bunch of other top rate companies.

Some of the attendees included Shoemoney and his partner.

Be sure to check out my other posts on facebook advertising:

• My Secret Weapon: Facebook Ads Manager Tool
• Scaling Facebook Campaigns to $100,000+/Month
• Making Successful Facebook Campaigns.

I have been getting the question, "How do I direct link when using facebook ads? Is it ok to direct link?"

What is Direct Linking?

First, for those that don't know, direct linking means you link your ads on facebook directly to your affiliate link and thus directly to the advertisers page. You do not link to a landing page you made in other words.

Best Way To Direct Link

First, Facebook has no problem with you direct linking to affiliate offers. It's not against TOS or anything. You should however know that direct linking is not always the best way. You should try both making your own landing page and direct linking to get best conversions.

The best way to direct link in facebook is pretty simple. You want to use a php redirect so that you always control the location of the ad. The problem with using a php redirect is many people do not know how to track subid's using them.

You will want to track you sub id's so you know what ads are profitable and which are not. Simple enough.

Setup Your PHP Redirect

• First you need a domain - it can be any domain, name means nothing in this case. It can even be laksdjflkasjdfkas.com! You pick.
• Next you need hosting. You can get it anywhere. Redirects are low load on the server, meaning just about any package you get will be able to handle it. Still, if you want a really good host, check out liquid web.
• After you've got all that setup, you will need to make your PHP redirect file. Here is an example of it.
  You can copy this into notepad, save as index.php, and replace the url with your affiliate link. Make sure that the affiliate link ends with SUB= or the variable that equals sub id from your affiliate network. Leave ['sub'] the same no matter what the affiliate link is.
• Now in your facebook ads you will link to your http://www.domain.com/index.php?sub=1234. Change the sub= to whatever you want to track each different ad.
• To see what converted, pull a SubId report from your affiliate network, and Bam, instant breakdown of what is working and what is not. Simple enough, right?

Now you should be all set to direct link with facebook.

In the past I posted a HasOffers review that you can check out, but this post is about their new dedicated solutions.

I Love Has Offers

I am a huge Fan of Has Offers. I really love the design of the interface, the features, etc. I am surprised it has not been more widely accepted.

One of the main reasons that many people did not move over to Has Offers right away was due to the servers being hosted at their data center. Just like with Direct Track and LinkTrust, the servers stay at the tracking server company and you modify the software theme to match your website. The main concern I had heard from others is that Has Offers was run by Tatto Media, which also runs an affiliate network. Some people felt like they could use the data to their own advantage, etc.

Self Managed Solution! Awesome

With their new dedicated solutions, HasOffers is one of the first affiliate tracking software solutions that has the options to have self managed, self hosted servers. This is especially great due to the fact that you can keep the server in your own server colocation center vs. them having to manage the server.

A single HasOffers Dedicated Solutions’ server is capable of running over a billion impressions per month, which is quite impressive. More than enough for MOST businesses.

Price

I tried to get the price for the self managed hosting solution but because it varies due to certain factors, they would not tell me. They did say however that it is less than competitors.

What does this mean? I know the other guys run around $1000 bucks a month, so perhaps the price is under that? Either way, well worth it!

Just last week I purchased CPA Tsunami and every day I have been waiting in anticipation for it to arrive.

If you're unfamiliar with what CPA Tsunami is, you'll want to read my previous post on it as it's one of the products that I feel will help me to achieve the $20 million per year in sales that I have been aiming for since 2008. (Not hitting the 8 figures yet, but hopefully soon... )

Anyways, this Wednesday at 6PM PST, Mike Hill will be having a Webinar (Q&A Style) and giving away a FREE copy of his CPA Tsunami course ($2000 value). This webinar will include a bunch of great content as well (I've sat in one already and took a TON of notes).

As well as the great content that Mike Hill has already provided, he is going to have some people on the webinar such as:

• Matt Bacak
• Russel Brunson
• Tim Schmidt
• Yanik Silver

The last webinar they had over 2500 people show but this one is going to be limited to 1000 people which is why I trying to tell everyone I know about it now. You wont want to miss it.

Sign up for the webinar now and save your seat.

You are owed $150,000,000! Just wire me $15,000 to pay for processing and I will get you the money.

You know... those emails we all get!

I got one the other day that was really impressive. Now these guys are using SOCIAL MEDIA to further validate their point. Don't worry, it's that "ugly step child", myspace, that they're using.

I just thought it was funny because in a sense, it's a bit like having a FLOG. Flogs validate products by using false stories. This guy validates himself using a fake social media profile.

Check this out:

Dear Jonathan!
Hope you are doing well in Christ Jesus. Thanks a lot for your wonderful amazing response towards my humble request. I really embraced it.
First and fore most, ''My mission is a continuation of Jesus' Mission on earth.'' Thus; As Father has sent me, I also do send you into the world.'' Thus said the Lord Jesus!
{Read John 17:18]
My prayer is that; I complete my mission, the work that the Lord Jesus gave me.{ Read Acts 20:24} I was created for a mission by God for God.
God has given each of us some special abilities;He asks us to be sure to use them to help each other, passing on to others God's many kinds of blessings. 1 peter4:10.
James 1:27, thus says; ''Pure religion and undefiled before God the Father is this; To visit the Fatherless and widows in their affliction .''
This is exactly what i am doing in the Kingdom of God the Father. I am therefore, calling upon the attention of all God's men and women who gets to hear of this trumpet divine call to come and partner with me in this Great Commission as it clearly states in Mat 28:19-20. Surely, may the Almighty God bless you as you positively respond to this Divine call.

Hi, Jonathan, '' Whoever, wants to be great must become a servant.''
Mark10:43. And servants think of Ministry as an opportunity not an obligation.
'' To be a servant, you must think like a servant. Thus; Philp 2:5 says; Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus!
However, ''Greatness is not found in possessions ,power, position or prestige. It is discovered in goodness, humility, service and character.True Greatness, is achieved not by reducing men to one's service but by giving oneself in selfless service to them. ''
With those remarks therefore, I humbly welcome your supportive hand in this Great Commission. We are currently taking care of over Fifty Vulnerable Orphaned Children and involved in a variety of activities and programs as well.
Hello, Jonathan! I believe It is just God who has linked you to us after realizing, there is a need on the ground! Surely, there is a need. May you please come and be a blessing to these Orphans? Be our contact person in that side Oh, Dear. I joined myspace and my URL is; www.myspace.com/george.katuntu. May you please take a moment of time and get there, hope you will embrace it! Thanks.
Hope to hear from you soon! Nice time.

In His Most Everlasting Love and Service,

Pastor George Katuntu.

Executive Director,

FAMCED INTERNATIONAL MINISTRIES

TEL;

EMAIL;