Like there is some kind of magic formula you can apply to your marketing to “improve your reach” or “make your message go further” or better still that there is a “best time to tweet”.

This notion, that armed with a dataset, and a couple of rudimentary text analysis tools you can discover the patterns contained within social status updates, and come out the other side with a sure fire marketing strategy that will make you RICH BEYOND YOUR WILDEST DREAMS!

Let’s take a look at the magical mystical world of the retweet. Self titled social media scientists provide us with some MARKETING GOLD. 

Sorry, but I can’t be the only one that thinks this stuff is utter nonsense.

So what can we learn from such insight. People who ask nicely for retweets (which must happen – oh, I don’t know at least every other minute on Twitter) are retweeted more than others! IMAGINE! ..and..wait for it.. Social media folk who publish their blog post and ask their followers to check it out (which is marketing 101 for 99% of content business on Twitter ) are also retweeted more than the average Joe. Boom.

For the purposes of science and your reader entertainment. I decided to conduct my own little experiment. Over here. That post went batshit insane all over social platforms more or less as soon as I posted it. Honest.

Don’t even get me started on “The right time to post on Twitter”. Well excuse me. I didn’t know I was doing it wrong. How silly of me. I didn’t realise that fans and followers are only awake at particular times of the day. I wonder how the television and advertising world hadn’t discovered this statistical gem years ago! Perhaps they should just run adverts all at the same time, they’ll make millions! When people are actually paying attention. Simples.

via Mashable:

Meanwhile, sending a tweet with a link after 8:00 p.m. should be avoided — as should posting links after 3:00 p.m. on Fridays.

This is exactly the sort of hyperbole that the web thrives on. It’s like saying that you can game the stock market just by watching trends. Or there’s some magic formula to follow. Social media is about people, and people by nature are unpredictable.  Even if there was some truth to it, considering that the web is a global medium, you’ve a global audience to service. Before you get sucked into that what time to post drivel, it might just be worth checking here. Yes. My pedigree chums, the web is always awake, and if what you have to say is powerful enough – it’ll find it’s way to eyeballs regardless.

If you are worrying about when you are talking to your fans and followers, or are noticing that no one reacts to your message – chances are your are doing it wrong, and maybe, just maybe its your message that needs improvement, not the time you post it. A thousand times this. Everything else is horseshit.

I wrote this post whilst high on Kool Aid. is a post from: Webdistortion

Its no longer  just good enough to create engaging content on your own website that drives traffic, you have to rock the Casbah on Facebook, Twitter et al to be considered a true guru™ of the online space. That means updates and statuses that generate retweets and likes and reshares.

Understanding the fundamentals of why a particular status update, photo upload or tweet got people to react is just as important as understanding the fundamentals of linkbait and content virility. As well as that – considering Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm, unless you make waves with your content, your message isn’t going to be seen at all.

 ’Social bait‘ is the NEW linkbait, as this type of content organically increases your network reach.

Obviously, the bigger your network, the more people you have to work with in the future for marketing drives.  Primarily, this is the one thing you should be concentrating on, and should be at the heart of your social strategy. All too often businesses decide to self promote rather than focus on building social equity – and considering most people aren’t interested in being marketed to when they are busy chatting with friends, that’s a sure fire strategy to go down in flames – or at the very least smoulder quietly in the corner.

Yes, every marketing activity should focus on ROI, and be judged on how many sales it delivered, but you have to do it through the backdoor.

Drive engagement, and get people talking about your brand and everything else will follow organically.

One of the underlying problems I see when brands and small business take to their Facebook or Twitter page – is that they don’t know how to get their audience excited  and fired up with the content they share, or worse still they just don’t know what to post – which leads to a stale and stagnating community that is as lifeless as the brand itself. This post contains everything you need to know about finding and creating social bait that will drive visitor engagement through the roof.

Meme’s

Don’t know what a Meme is? You can bet your life that your audience do, and a small segment of them will be involved in the creation and distribution of the same. Meme content is typically a large part of internet sub and counter culture,  and extremely popular within Gen Y users of the web. If your brand attracts a youth audience, that will ‘get it’ – take a quick flick through this SlideShare, and then read this. Meme content is dead easy to create, as a number of websites exist for the sole purpose of making your own LOLcat, or riding off the back of existing hot memes.

Smart marketers have for some time been using the concept of Internet memes to further define their brands. Anyone remember this advert?

It was created by Joel Veitch, who at the time was commissioned due to his viral internet success with songs set to animated cats. The existing internet savvy audience recognised his distinctive style, and provided a link between the offline advert with the online meme. This tied the advertising very closely with the community of people online who were prepared to share the work for its creativity, and its underbelly of virality. Just recently, we’ve experienced Virgin doing something similar, with the success kid meme. To keep a brand rejuvenated, and youthful – I can only see more of this trend continuing, and if the Virgin ad is anything to go, is received warmly as a homage within the communities the meme originates. It’s well worth involving yourself within communities such as B3ta or Reddit to provide you with ideas on how you can capture social attention using Memes. This post on SEOMoz is a great read as well and contains an appropriate case study on why you shouldn’t ignore Memes as part of your overall micro content strategy.

Images

Visually appealing images are much much easier to get a reaction with than text updates. However, understanding what constitutes a compelling image update ,and finding that content in the first place is much more important. One of my favourite methods of surfacing great image content is to let the collective hivemind find it for me. Yes. Crowdsourcing your content is one of the best ways to turn up the goods. Using the same sort of techniques I’ve previously blogged about to find great content, you can find communities and services which exist solely to find the best images on the web within your chosen website niche.

Lifehacker have a great post on finding popular images on Flickr, and considering you can search by creative commons and popular, offers a great way to turn up some gems. If you are looking for images which are popular amongst social sites such as Digg or Reddit, then Imgur.com is nothing short of awesome. Webpronews have recently written about the power of Imgur for sending traffic for e-commerce, and well – I’m going to big it up here as well. Not for traffic benefit, but for great image content discovery.

To provide a bit of background about Imgur, to those of you unfamiliar. Imgur was setup by the Reddit community, for the Reddit community. Here is the original thread, where owner, Alan Schaaf first promoted the service. It has become a crucial part of the glue that holds Reddit together, with the use of the service being seen as something of a secret handshake amongst users and has grown to become one of the largest image hosting services on the web. Typically, Imgur image posts typically receive the lions share of upvotes and karma. and best of all, considering that the site is now tightly wrapped in the dynamic of social voting – the content quality on the site is top notch.

There is also one feature that few people realise that makes it  interesting to marketers – searching by subreddit. Lets say, for sake of interest you run a site about gardening. A pretty mundane topic wouldn’t you think? Well, this is the web, and social sites such as Reddit provide subreddits to satisfy that green leafed Zoda in you. See here.

You can then take this subreddit, and plumb it into Imgur.com – Bingo, you’ve found a selection of the great images posted to that subreddit, ordered by the most popular as voted by the community.

Pinterest offer standard search, domain search – and a popular images board that can contain some pretty inspiring stuff for resharing again, all niche specific. It is also fast becoming a great source of curated video content. You can use this in all sorts of awesome ways to turn up the perfect image or video, depending on what website you try it  with.

Think about your competition – what images are hot on the hottest websites in your niche? Which ones are ALREADY generating interest with users on the web.. i.e. trending up and receiving likes and repins?

You can take this concept and apply it to almost any community on the web, and as such repost and populate your fanpages with great, appropriate content that is much more likely to generate buzz.

Video

If images are a powerful force at making people, then video is the equivalent of Chewbacca fighting Natzis while riding a Giant Squirrel. It makes sense to keep on tap the video content which is rising in popular over time, and there are a whole host of services on the web that provide a great way of finding this. For starters, say hello to the YouTube Trends Dashboard - which provides insight into YouTube videos currently rising in popularity all over the web.  The downfall of this current service is the inability to subscribe to newly rising videos which can be a pain. However,  my own approach to this problem is simple but effective page monitoring services, which provide you with either email notifications or an RSS feed that you can subscribe to.

Doing a search on YouTube itself, and then changing the time parameter to daily, e.g. see this search for recent YouTube videos about Google – is yet another great way to keep up with content which has just been released onto the web within your topic of interest, that is often ripe for sharing due to its freshness.

VideoSift is another third party service which provides a pretty decent way to keep track of up and coming videos. It is a dedicated community of video lovers who vote purely on video content, and has numerous categories where content can potential fit. Mag.ma is another video aggregator in a similar vein worth exploring to find great video content – and finally if you have yourself an iPad, check out Squrl.

Within social sharing giants – the Reddit and Digg communities have both sub categories appropriate to Video. Here’s how to find popular trending content on Digg. And theres the subreddits /r/video and /r/videos - which by the way can be searched and filtered for example..Popular gardening videos anyone?

In short, there is no shortage of places where you can find epic content which will have your audience eating out of the palm of your hand, and engaging and resharing your social updates. The secret is to just use a bit of creativity with the readily available tools out there, and move beyond the basic Facebook strategy of posting just text based plain jane content.

Creating mindblowing social bait – micro content updates that work. is a post from: Webdistortion

Love Pinterest but are slightly peeved that you can’t pin anything from with Facebook? Say hello to a new Facebook application that allows you to ignore the timeline, and browse yours and your friends updates in a more visual interface.

With the web becoming an ever more visual platform, Pinviews design purposely rides the coat tails of Pinterest which has made the web more scannable, and visually appealing, and combines it with the social data contained within Facebook.  Once you’ve authorised access to your profile, there are options for viewing your own wall, the wall of your friends – and the ability to pull in both image and video content from each – which makes it much easier to see what to like and share.

Very cool.

Pinviewer – View your Facebook content like a Pinterest board is a post from: Webdistortion

His post reproduced in full below says it all  - Google should really be bringing developers along for the journey, and get out of this secretive mindset that further alienates them from the community. Further more he has asked for support in raising awareness around the issue, which has previous fallen on deaf ears at the GooglePlex.

Why is Google trying to be so evil to the developer community?

Change is good, but you know what is even better? Relationship with your third party developer community who technically spend hundreds of hours building on top of this platform for free. Where the hell is the transition period?

My extensions and apps were downloaded way over two millions times from the last 10 months. Look at my GitHub page, I loved this platform so much that I spent my personal and free time evangelising for it to make the experience better and more enjoyable. Clearly I wasn’t the only one, tons of developers spent their precious time, free time, extending this platform which many of your users loved and adored.

I technically spent hundreds if not thousands of hours building free open source applications, I have converted many users to use Chrome as their main browsers, I even have converted many users to Google+ and made many of them happy. Why didn’t you reach out to the developers and tell them major change is coming? Didn’t we support this platform enough to know things will break? Now hundreds of thousands of machines who are visiting Google+ have a broken experience, many errors will be shown, many popups will be alerted, our thousands of hours of hard work down the drain.

Facebook never did stuff like this, never forced us to change layouts like this. They have given the users a transition period to use the new layout. They always presented us a transition period to try the new layouts in a BETA sandbox weeks before they release it to the public. Allowing us to fix and comment, and iterate

From the entire blog post that Google released, not even a “Thank You” to any of the developers who contributed to the success of the first Google+ version. Look at the new version, it has a lot of what extensions had. But I guess they dislike giving credit where it is due. We are like Ghosts to them! Great news!

I guess I will officially give up supporting Google+ and find another platform to tinker with that will welcome us, Facebook.

Google, you won, you finally got what you wanted, you lost my support.

via Google+

Google+ launches new layout, leaves developers out in the cold. is a post from: Webdistortion

Eyeem

URL: http://www.eyeem.com/

Platforms: Android / iPhone

EyeEm main advantage over Instagram are its use of themed group albums. EyeEm automatically creates group albums based on different interests, and allow you to tag your photos to suit within each album. This allows users to subscribe to particular themes, making their stream much more tailored. Photo fiters can also be tested prior to taking a shot, rather than the post-processing approach of Instagram, which is a particularly nice touch. You can find people to follow by both location – ie. people near you, or by tag – which turns up plenty of likeminded photo bloggers who are into the same stuff as you. Users also get a dedicated URL to share online.

PicPlz

URL: http://picplz.com/

Platforms: Android / iPhone

PicPlz offer a couple of interesting USP’s. Firstly, all of the built in effects within the application are absolutely free. Whereas some of the competitors within the space force you to buy photo filters as in app purchases, PicPlz provide all of their offers absolutely free of charge. In tandem with this, they also offer the only ‘non destructive’ way to apply filters to your photos – i.e. you can restore the original shot back after applying the filter.  This means that regardless of the filters the company release, you can retrospectively apply new ones going forward should you wish. Smart. As you would expect, PicPlz also provides out of the box hook ins for social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

Lightbox

URL: http://lightbox.com

Platforms: Android

Lightbox offers tight Flickr integration with its app, and a quick easy signup process lets you get snapping without hassles. Interestingly it attempts to gauge popular photos across different platforms, including major image-hosting sites (Flickr, is included), news networks (New York Times, Guardian), social media and the current user’s own Lightbox account, which is a nice touch and one which can turn up some pretty interesting photo offerings. Ships with 10 photo effects filters currently.

Hipstamatic

URL: http://hipstamatic.com/the_app.html

Platforms: iPhone

Perhaps predictably with a name like Hipstamatic this app is currently only available on iPhone. Marketing itself as a must have app for every wannabie hipster, its over the top marketing IMO shot itself somewhat in the foot. Anyway – that detail aside, the application is one of the more commercial alternatives on the market. $1.99 plus additional costs for photo filters and films, it offers similiar functionality to Instagram, with the added bonus of natively sharing directly to that platform.

PixlrOMatic

URL: http://pixlr.com/o-matic/

Platforms: Android / iPhone

Starting life as an online hipster filter app, Pixlr o-matic offers a way to apply a unique selection of presets to your existing and new photos. Instead of constraining the user into the confines of its own photo application, it steps out of the way and lets your native photo capability shine first and foremost, and then offers the facility to select which photos you want to process. You can adjust both the frameset options and the filters for each photo and export allows you to either save to your chosen social platform or copy direct to your photo gallery.

Magic Hour

URL: http://magichour.me/en

Platforms: Android / iPhone

Another commercial alternative looking to get in on the action – MagicHour offers 40 filters and effects for your photos and retails at $1.99 – although unlike Hipstamatic all filters are provided absolutely free. The ability to save your own combination of presets will also appeal to many, as will the allure of being supported on both the Android and iPhone platforms.

StreamZoo

URL: http://www.streamzoo.com/home

Platforms: Android / iPhone

Streamzoo is one of the few mobile apps showcased here that makes extensive use of gamification to garner traction. Users are awarded points for uploading to the service, and for commenting on other photos. Weekly and Monthly leaderboards are maintained to encourage further participation on the network. Along with the standard filters (Lomo, Vibrance etc) you can also apply a tilt shift effect to your photos, and as with PicPlz, effects can be seen before you take the shot. Video is also supported within the app, allbeit without the filter capabilities. Friends to follow can be found from your addressbook, and the existing social networks that you are a part of.

7 lesser known alternatives to Instagram is a post from: Webdistortion

In essence, it prevents you having to develop multiple different versions of a website for different devices. To see how it works, grab the edges of the browser window for this site, and make it smaller. You’ll see straight away that if viewing from a mobile browser, there is no need to scroll left or right as the text simply flows to the browser width.

Although this makes life easier for webdesigners – and indeed saves money for a client, it has further exacerbated a negative trend in the design community. Particularly on mobile devices.

Just making things work.

Mobile design shouldn’t be just about ‘making content just fit’ into a particular viewport width and height. It should be about hand crafting a beautiful mobile experience.

Few if any implementations that I’ve seen using this technique take the care and attention of precise placement of mobile elements, the removal of non essencial ones, nor the persistance of them inside the interface at critical points to make life easier for the user. It’s become about ‘whereever the design elements fit and fall’, well, that’s your mobile design.

Squashing elements to fit in a viewport, is not building a great experience.

I know that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones – and I’ll be the first to admit that there’s nothing spectacular in design about the theme I’m currently running here, nor its responsive design – but I do know a number of things. Mobile users need taken care of, and provided with a design appropriate to their needs. For blogs, and content heavy sites such as the Boston Globe which is being held in high esteem as a poster child of responsive design, we can get away with it, as the focus is just viewing the content.

For others, including sites such as e-commerce, and task focused applications with an end goal, and conversions to measure- I’m not so sure you are going to see things work quite as elegantly. There’s the dreaded image bloat problem, which without ugly javascript and server side hacks is going to see you requesting 550px wide jpegs for a screen resolution that only supports a maximum width of 320px. There’s also the issue of loading additional HTML for unused elements which you are likely going to hide with a CSS style to trim down the mobile version.

In our pursuit of the cross platform holy grail we’ve had to compromise on code bloat.

For e-commerce sites particularly, load times are everything, and could make the difference between a user completing the site goals or not. With mobile devices typically being on a skinny connection, that problem is even more pronounced.

Sometimes, there’s absolutely a reason for serving a different version for different users. The perfect mobile experience may mean striping away added extras, it may mean serving appropriate images, it may mean persisting particular design elements and ultimately it may mean starting with ‘mobile first’ design – which depending on UX design – may or may not allow you to use the same code and markup as your full fat desktop version.

One size fits all is rarely a perfect fit. is a post from: Webdistortion

With the recent opening up of the hangout API publically to developers, there has been a number of creative uses of hangouts, and indeed applications built off the back of the platform through the API. This post showcases just some of the most innovative uses of that particular feature.

Poker

URL: http://aceshangout.com/

Poker is an inheriently social game. It makes sense then that the realtime ‘around the table’ atmosphere that a multiuser Google+ hangout brings to the party has transpired into a poker application.  Aces hangout combines the multiplayer conveience of the web, with the hangout API to create an awesome experience for players.

Business Collaboration

URL: http://launch-hangouts.cacoo.com/

A previous favourite of mine – Cacoo tackles the common business problem of collaboration using the hangouts API. Users can simulataneously see what is on screen, and share diagrams during a live video chat. For software and networking IT professionals it offers a new and exciting way to work together.

Quizzes

URL:  http://www.bravotv.com/watch-what-happens-live/clubhouse-challenge

Bravo TV offers an interactive hangout where pop culture fans can take trivia quizzes together, and rank against each other on a leaderboard.

Collaborative Drawing

URL: http://scootdoodle.com/hangouts

Marketing itself as a kids app, Scoot Doodle provides a shareable realtime doodle pad, where anyone of any age can draw, play and create together at the same time, face-to-face. The hangouts API provides the collaborative video glue that holds the social experience together, and adds an extra dimension to the application.

Collaborative Presentations

URL:  http://www.slideshare.net/hangouts

Slideshare is arguably one of the best online presentation tools on the web. Their recent integration with the hangouts API provides a meeting place where people can watch slides live with multi-party real time video.  Invite multiple participants to your own slideshare show, and collaborate and present face to face with each other in real time.

Realtime SpeedPainting

URL: http://speedpainthangout.blogspot.co.uk/

Artist and Google plus user Cliff Roth invites plus users to join him online in a hangout whilst he ‘speedpaints’ you, creating an artistic caricature.  According to his blog Cliff   now spends a significant part of his day in Hangouts doing Speedpaints of fellow Plussers.

Interview Roommates

URL: https://plus.google.com/103765013042311928518/posts/3ytc8e2K7zT

Alida Brandenburg interviewed a potential new roommate who lived over 3,000 miles away via a Google hangout, showing that Google+ can be useful to meet people long distance without actually meeting face to face.

Cooking

URL: http://www.thesocialskillet.com/

Fancy yourself as a bit of a Jamie Oliver? Google+ provides Lee Allison a twice weekly platform to get up close and personal with his students. Grab a whisk, and join the webs most creative, collaborative cooking class.

Chat Shows

URL: http://www.hangoutconversations.com/

Hangout Conversations is a weekly LIVE chat show provided via Google+ Hangouts w/ Matt Rappaport. Shows have avariety of guests including musicians, social media strategists and other interesting people invited along for the party. Previous shows are archived on YouTube (and available through links on the website).

Movie Reviews

URL: https://plus.google.com/u/0/106236937736776055381/posts

If movies are your thing, (particularly bad ones) then Movie Riff is the hangout for you. These guys tear apart bad movies in a funny way regularly and the banter can provide hours of entertainment.

Teaching

URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHMCyg-zKjY

Xavier College Prep World History teacher Ms. Nunez has to miss class during the critical review week before final exams. To get around the problem – she turns to an interactive teaching platform – Google+ using hangouts. A great example of Google+ used within education.

Online Concerts

URL: https://plus.google.com/u/0/100974258168375166691/

Daria Musk has used Google+ hangouts as her own personal stage. Hosting concerts where anyone can join to watch her perform has generate amazing buzz on plus, and now over 1 million people have her in Google+ circles.  Arguably one of the first musicians taking advantage of the platform, her about page (linked above) tells the story of how she has grown from humble beginnings to her current internet stardom.

View the Ocean

URL: https://plus.google.com/108517873237526057594/posts/7QvnmJZ5piM

The Great Barrier Reef will soon be mapped out in a Streetview type experience online, allowing users to explore the ocean floor. This joint venture between Google, the University of Queensland and the Catlin group is known as the Catlin Seaview Survey, and this underwater hangout was used to demo the technology – from the ocean floor.

Slam Dunk Performance

URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BROI5pTbqfU

This is definitely one of the most creative uses of a Hangout I’ve seen, and a must for basketball fans. DeQuan Jones took requests for dunks from fans via Hangout, then went and performed the dunks.

Versus

URL: https://plus.google.com/107841648304854245302/posts

Not only do Hangouts have the ability to connect people on opposite sides of the planet, they can also connect people on opposing sides of the social and political spectrum. With the ability to comment in real time to the issues being raised – hangouts provides a way to see how arguments, topics and decisions on important issues resonate with an audience.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the creativity showcased above is only scratching the surface, and with the API now available to all, we’ll see further examples of how people are innovating using the platform.

15 creative Google+ hangouts that illustrate its true potential. is a post from: Webdistortion

“Perhaps the simplest way to explain affiliate marketing is that it is a way of making money online whereby you as a publisher are rewarded for helping a business by promoting their product, service or site.” – Problogger – what is affiliate marketing. 

Affiliate marketing is one of those things that anybody with a little internet knowledge can pick up quickly and make decent money at. It helps if you know a little SEO and have the technical chops to pull together a decent site – but its definitely not a prerequisite.

I’ve been reading a plethora of great blog posts on the subject recently, but as with anything – I’ve found the best way to learn is to get your feet wet first hand.

I’ve been busy experimenting myself recently and have picked up a few beginner tips I thought worth mentioning here.

Choose your platform

WordPress is my chosen architecture, as it is for many web projects.  It is widely recognised as an extremely flexible platform with a lot of code already prewritten in the form of plugins – and it made absolute sense to start building affiliate sites using it.

Also worth mentioning that you don’t have to strictly own or build a website to make an affiliate income. There are plenty of high ranking authority sites that allow you to create content and affiliate links, and make it easy to piggyback your products off their existing success.

Facebook notes have become something of affiliate marketers wet dream in this regard in recent months.  Although something of a grey area, it might not be pretty, but it works. That said, it isn’t really a long term strategy for income, and you are better off creating your own site long term.

Get ship shape.

The default WordPress install doesn’t really do your products justice, there are many things that a great product sales page has, and you only have to look at some great e-commerce stores to understand what they are.

I’ve written in depth about what steps need to be implemented to go the extra mile, and avoid a Google Panda smack down.

It’s important to cross all of the T’s and dot the I’s with your website – including all of the items on this on-page SEO checklist. 

Structure your data

Off the back of that logic, I’ve created a WordPress plugin and theme for my own affiliate sites which uses custom post types extensively to create fields such as:

Product Specification 
Technical Data
YouTube Video of product
Manufacturer
Cost
Customer Reviews (with Rich snippet Markup for better CTR)
and the all important affiliate  link.

Separating out this information gives Google a clue that there is structured content on the page that will provide value for visitors in comparison with the competition.  From hunting high and low around the web, I couldn’t find an affiliate theme or plugin which went the extra mile using this sort of data, so I wrote one myself.  (I may release both the theme and plugin at some stage if there’s sufficient interest).

Find an Affiliate Program

So where do you go to actually become part of a particular affiliate program? There are a number of different sites which merchants provide data feeds to, and manage the affiliate program on their behalf. Affiliate Window,  Affiliate Future, Commision Junction, Linkshare, Tradedoubler - and loads more provide the information you need to market thousands of products from thousands of retailers around the web.

Can’t find what you are looking for to market? A bit of Googling for any product + “affiliate program” or “referral program” should provide you with adequate information on how you can sell the things you love on other people’s behalf.

Believe in your product

I’ve always been of the opinion that you need to be passionate about what you do online to really make a difference to people. You’ll write with passion, and sell much more if you believe in the product yourself.

All the better if you can manage to get your hands on the product to find out really what it is all about, and actually know what it is all about.

Which leads me onto:

Write unique descriptions

Copy paste ain’t going to carry you through. Google don’t take kindly to it for a start as you aren’t bringing anything to a visitors experience, and if you are just copy pasting descriptions from Amazon or other third parties, you don’t stand much chance at ranking for your chosen keywords against these giants.

Add value

Whatever product you decide to market, you should think about a particular angle for your site, and how it separates itself from the (likely) already crowded marketplace. For example:

Can you bring something unique to the party that others can’t?
Is there an angle you can use to bring something extra to your visitors?
Can you shoot unique video reviews of the product?
Can you suggest strange scenarios where the product can be used?
Can you build supporting resources that gives you an edge?

Understand price point

The higher the cost of a product, the higher the commission you receive. It also makes the sale harder, as people are less likely to impulse buy.

When choosing which products you think you should promote online, it makes sense to try and find the sweet spot in the RRP.

Look at cost items which offers a high enough percentage of the profits to make it worth your while; and are accessible enough to be mass market.  If you aren’t going mass market – you’ll need a higher end product to market. (Fewer sales, higher affiliate commissions).

Identify Future Trends

Smart affiliates are always trying to identify growth markets and products. Try to always think about what is going to be the next big thing. Mass media is a good place to start identifying product trends.  Right now something like the Hunger Games (following on from the success of the Twilight Saga) is going to be pretty hot, and have low competition on a number of products.

What can you market off the back of that trend?

Thinking about future events and building sites around that topic is not going to hurt either. London 2012 is going to be shit hot this summer as the Olympics kick off, and there are already people working hard on creating value for when that trend hits the shelves. When the World Cup was in full swing, I know a number of sites set themselves up to sell Vuvuzelas, and made an absolute killing.

Market Trending Products

Not sure what is going to be hot, or is getting hot? Why not use existing resources out there to identify them. This old post of mine helps mine the web for e-commerce trends, but the same technique could just as easily be used across a number of pre-existing e-commerce stores and platforms to determine what you should or could market online.

Other Must Reads:

Elsewhere on the web.

The best niche to be in. The best niche is one that no one else is in.

The Ugly Truth  - Why your sites don’t have to be beautiful to win at online marketing.

11 lessons learned earning $119,725.14 from Amazon

You master nothing by committing 25% - great post on focus.

Why you should dumb down your marketing.  - Been saying this for a while.

10 steps to more successful affiliate marketing. is a post from: Webdistortion

Although very much a work in progress, ‘Project Glass‘ technology will be designed to let wearers see calendar, maps, search and most features of the Google+ social network while carrying out day-to-day activities. The company are also looking feedback on the project to help shape its direction and Google will, be testing them largely in public, so don’t be surprised to see Googlers trying them out if you are near Mountain View.

Running on the Android mobile platform, and containing a variety of motion sensors and GPS and full mobile connectivity the glasses could be on sale for as little as $250 by the end of the year. Although Google admit that they have no idea whether they will have mass market appeal, it’s an interesting research project none the less, and the video below shows just what could potentially be achieved in everyday life as technology blends from science fiction into science fact.

Google’s Augmented Reality Glasses – Project Glass is a post from: Webdistortion

Timeline is a beautiful javascript library for producing interactive, scrolling timelines. Built on top of jQuery, it offers an easy way to pull in a variety of media types to your document, and display in an easy to browse way. Out of the gates Timeline has built in support for pulling in Tweets and image content from Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, Google Maps and SoundCloud, with more planned for the future. Data can be provided direct to the library through JSON – and according to the documentation, there is also capability for tying this up to a Google spreadsheet should you wish.

It’s not the only game in town though SIMILE Widgets , TimeGlider or Timelinr all offer a similar javascript based solution, albeit not quite as beautiful or with the media support provided by this particular library.

For historic data such as your company growth, or to showcase the rise to fame of stars, Timeline offers an elegant and clean solution for developers looking to get moving quickly.

Open source. Released under GPL.

Timeline – Create Scrolling Timelines with jQuery is a post from: Webdistortion