TrishaLyn

Do You Poken?

Trish — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:00:03 +0000

Poken seems to have taken over the techie space as the next big thing in conferences and networking. Don’t know what a Poken is? Well, it’s basically a USB drive with a cartoon character for a cover. The drive has software installed on it that automatically connects to the Poken website when you plug it in. It also has a sensor on the hand that flashes when you “high 4″ with another poken, effectively exchanging virtual contact information.

I first learned of this product at Affiliate Summit East 2009, thanks to Peter Shankman mentioning them in his keynote. It seemed like everyone wanted a Poken after that – and many people bought some from Peter before the conference was over. Peter has obviously identified these cute little virtual business cards as a significant advance in sharing contact information, a “game-changer”, even.

But are Poken really the wave of the future?

It depends who you are. If you travel and network a lot, they could be incredibly useful as they pick up popularity and more people are available for you to “high 4″ with. Shelly Good-Cook says of the device, “I bought one a couple months and other than my twin sister, for whom I also bought one, I haven’t found anyone to “high five” mine with. I took it to a networking event I attended in Arlington, VA recently where most of the attendees were young, hip and computer savvy, but none of them had heard of it yet. I even met a reporter who covered that beat and it was new to her, so I gave her the scoop on it, hoping she covers it. They may have won a Tech Crunch Award in Europe, but they still have work to do in the U.S. before they get wide spread adoption. For me, this is like the early days of the fax machine. I have one but there isn’t much value in it until a lot more people get one. Most of the people I talked to about it at the networking event thought it was a great idea, although some of the men were less than thrilled with the limited design options. Most thought $20 was reasonable for the functionality although a few balked at the price point, stating it was much too high.”

Poken has responded to the cartoon complaints and come out with a more professional looking Poken, the Poken Pulse, that looks much closer to a traditional USB drive and boasts 2GB of space and traditional USB drive functionality in addition to the Poken networking features. At a higher price point, I actually expect more professionals will go with it over the cartoonish regular Poken as it does have that added functionality. Most of the feedback I get about Poken are from my contacts in the affiliate marketing community, and I wonder now that there have been a couple more conferences if they’ve gotten more use. Elizabeth Hannan said of her Poken, “I have had a experience with Poken at SXSW 09 where I was first introduced to Poken. It was incredibly helpful and made awkward introductions into easy conversations.”. I can definitely see how that is beneficial for those of us that are friendly but not incredibly extroverted.

Whether or not these are the wave of the future, time will tell. The buzz has seemed to died down in the last few months, but they’re not being tossed aside with that m100 Palm Pilot just yet. Do you Poken? Share your story!

Affiliate Marketing Fanatics 17: Coming Soon – Black Friday!

Trish — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:00:53 +0000

Affiliate Marketing Fanatics – A Publisher (Mike Buechele) and an Affiliate Manager (Trisha Lyn Fawver) talk about all things Affiliate Marketing. From blogging to branding, social media to search, video and more!

Well, it’s been awhile, hasn’t it? Schedules have been ca-razy lately and Mike & I just haven’t been able to get together to record. So, welcome back as stand in co-host Eric Nagel! We got back to our roots in talking strictly from the affiliate vs. affiliate manager discussion. We come in at a cool 42:50. In in this episode we discuss:

The new Retweet function on Twitter – meh.
Holiday affiliate contests
- Paulson Management Group’s “A Jingle for your Jangle”
- ShareASale’s Fourth Quarter Frenzy
Increased communications from affiliate managers during the holidays
Still more emphasis on Black Friday than Cyber Monday
Happy Monday: The Importance of Mondays this Holiday
Affiliates buying products through their own links
Debate: Affiliates Buying Clickbank Products

We promise not to go this long again!

60% Off Create or Die Artwork

Trish — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:45:47 +0000

A couple years ago, I had a pleasure of attending a real estate trade show in San Francisco where Hugh McLeod was the keynote speaker. At the time, Hugh spoke at length about his work for a small tailor in London and with the Stormhoek Winery. He also talked about his humble beginnings as a struggling copywriter who started to doodle on the back of business cards while sitting at a bar. He has parlayed his art into the social media marketing space very effectively. His ideas were incredibly interesting, and I instantly became a fan.

Ever since, I’ve made it a point to follow Hugh’s exploits through his blog Gapingvoid.com. As a big fan of unique business cards, I’ve become a big fan of both the artwork he’s done for businesses and the quirky doodles he’s published from the backs of business cards. Hugh has really leveraged social media and blogging more than most artists I’ve seen. Some of his work, like Microsoft’s Blue Monster, has really become viral.

Recently, Hugh’s taken to creating larger format 21″ x 30″ art pieces that sell for around $400. He also recently published a book, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Keys to Creativity, which goes into more detail on his ideas about marketing and mostly creativity. He’s also having a great sale on his Create or Die! print, normally $400 is just $165 for a limited time only. All you have to do to take advantage of this great deal is to go to the Gapingvoid Gallery, add the Create or Die image to your cart, an d enter the coupon code cod235 in the appropriate field at checkout.

Free Toolsday: Digsby

Trish — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:00:39 +0000

I know it’s been probably over a year since I did a Free Toolsday post, but I want to get them going again. So if you know of any good free tools to share, let me know and I’ll review them!

This week I’m going to review an application I use daily. I was a big user of Trillian for a long time in an effort to effectively manage all the different Instant Messenger programs I have friends on. Digsby goes one step forward and not only allows you to connect to multiple accounts on MSN Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ, and Google Talk, but you can also connect to Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter.

I use this to effectively manage the fact that I have friends, colleagues, and coworkers that all use different instant messaging platforms to connect. It saves system resources to run one application instead of 4, and is just more convenient. I do see the basic emoticons, but sometimes I miss the more advanced features of some of the various messengers. The one thing I wish Digsby would add is IRC support. I was able to open an mIRC chatroom I used to frequent in Trillian, but Digsby does not have that feature.

The social network features work for statuses, not all the features of Facebook, MySpace, etc. It does work like a basic Twitter client, but is a little clunky. I mainly use it to tweet on the fly and check statuses, but I do still mostly just use TweetDeck for my heavy twittering. Best of all, as you can imagine considering I’m posting this on Free Toolsday, it’s a free application. So you can streamline your instant messaging at no cost.

You can download it here. (Download link has been fixed!)

Game Changer: Prfessor.com

Trish — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:14:41 +0000

According to a May 2009 report by the U.S. Department of Education, “Online learning… is one of the fastest growing trends in educational uses of technology.” This is a great opportunity for ANYONE to share their knowledge of any subject with others and actually make some money. This is a game changer as it takes education to a level more easily accessible for everyone. Anyone with extensive knowledge on any topic can create their own university and spread knowledge to others.

Prfessor is to online universities what Blogger is to online weblogs – a super easy, brandable way to start your own university. The genius of Prfessor is that you can set up the university to teach whatever you want that you hold expertise on, whether that’s business and marketing, or something more fun like cross-stitch and needlepoint or model train building. You don’t have to bear the brunt of the work either – many Prfessor based online universities have grown to include not only the founder as a professor, but other skilled teachers have been recruited to offer students incredibly well rounded content.

Online learning (a) helps increase the availability of learning experiences for learners who cannot or choose not to attend traditional face-to-face offerings… (b) is a cost-efficient way to put together and disseminate instructional content… or (c) helps instructors to “handle more students while maintaining learning outcome quality.”. I can tell you that this is true – my husband is about to graduate from DeVry University after having taken three years of courses part-time online after work. There’s no way he could have achieved this if he was forced to attend a physical school as his work hours often include on-call service calls and overtime. People want to learn, and online is the way to go.

Prfessor just launched yesterday, and only 200 accounts are being offered to begin with. It’s a relatively low barrier of entry to start a university – $1997 for a custom-skinned (designed) account, and that after 30-days you will be charged only $49.97 a month for the use of the software. You’ll also get the bonuses of the branding, help from content experts to get you going, and hands-on premium support. Go ahead – start sharing your extensive knowledge on a topic and let me know – I just might take your class!

VSEO – Ranking Factors Behind YouTube

Guest — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:00:25 +0000

Guest Post By Ryan Sammy

Everyone knows the importance of video marketing as well as the tremendous potential YouTube offers in creating a strong presence for your brand and company image. However, does everybody know how to use YouTube optimally to gain the desired advantage and leverage for your videos and thereby your company?

Just creating a good video of your company, or a video containing information intended for your target customers and uploading onto YouTube is not enough to get the desired results. There are many ranking factors behind YouTube that you should know if you want your video to score high marks in the popularity charts. Good VSEO takes into account these ranking factors to help build a good brand image and enhance the reputation of your company.

Apart from creating quality video content that information seekers will be willing to watch, there are other important factors that you can use to optimize your videos for YouTube and get higher rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). The first and foremost is not to be just a passerby, but a player. Create a presence in the YouTube community for yourself. Listen to others and be heard. The rankings on YouTube depend on various factors, just as the factors behind organic search results on Google or any other search engine. YouTube in itself is a major search engine now, and it adheres to its own algorithmic parameters to decide rankings.

YouTube ranks videos that are watched most number of times rank very high on its SERPs. So you need to make videos that have a strong viral capability to bring in more viewers for your videos. The more people your videos can bring in to watch, the higher in rankings your video climbs. Now, this does not mean that by simply uploading a video that will be watched by many people can get you top spot in rankings; the videos have to be acceptable and engaging to make people vote for the videos. The more times your videos get viewer votes; the higher the chances of you getting top billings in the rankings! Another factor that could push your videos up is the number of times your videos are bookmarked for attention. These are the basic factors that can help your videos to get maximum visibility, and your attention when making videos should be to make them in such a way that they satisfy all the conditions stated above.

Having good titles, meta-descriptions, tags, comments, flagging, shares, comments, channel views, subscribers, inbound links, and latency do matter, but if you stick to the ground rules and include some, or all the above factors, there is no reason why your videos should lag behind. That said, being an active member of the community will help tremendously, and using video analytics such as “YouTube Insight” and “TubeMogul” should help make your videos better and to stay constantly updated on developments. Make good videos and stay engaged; that should drive you to the top spot very soon.

Affiliate Marketing Fanatics 16: Wade Tonkin & Blog World Expo Guilt

Trish — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 22:00:00 +0000

This week we are FINALLY joined by Wade Tonkin of GTO Management and the man behind the Christian Affiliate Marketers Association. We had a fine conversation, accidentally recorded in Mono instead of Stereo since I forgot to switch the defaults on this new computer. I think the sound quality is good though, but welcome any feedback. Since we’re all busy people, I opted for no intro music this week and we come in at a sultry 34:25. In in this episode we discuss:

Who Wade is, i.e. a partner at GTO Management
Blog World Expo and their affiliate program (which GTO Management professionally manages)
The events put on by and the Christian Affiliate Marketing Association
SponsoredTweets and how that’s going to Mike & Trisha

Affiliate Marketing Fanatics 15: Be My Yoko Ono

Trish — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 03:00:26 +0000

We kept it short & sweet this week, but hey! We did two weeks in a row! YES… I’m patting us on the back for that. We talked briefly about some things that have been going on in the industry this week, and had a short & sweet conversation with limited tangents. And almost no discussion of Twitter, other than a third party service mention. Since it was so short I messed with outro music too, which brought us to a pleasantly succinct 19:30. In in this episode we discuss:

The fantastic fill in job Eric Nagel did last week.
Affiliate Day came & went on September 14th.
Sponsored Tweets picked up their traffic
CJU, despite neither of us going.
How cool it is when industry celebs remember you!
Halloween & Fall promotions are upon us!
Fantasy Football with Jason Rubacky and Shawn Collins… and a brief girl’s guide to how scoring works.

Affiliate Marketing Fanatics 14: Eric Nagel in the House

Trish — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 01:00:39 +0000

Once again, our schedules just were not fated to correspond this week. So we enlisted the help of good ol’ Eric Nagel, the king of awesome business cards, to co-host with me. Watch out Mike – Eric may give you a run for your money! It was a good conversation, a bit more focused than some. And in Eric’s honor – no intro music! It’s a short & sweet episode coming in at 42:30. In in this episode we discuss:

CJ Keyword Links expiring – how will this affect affiliates?
Affiliate Day on Monday September 14th
Twitter changed it’s Terms of Service, and strangely announced it via email.
Wordpress getting hacked last week and some discussion of upgrading Wordpress, plugins, and Wordpress MU.
CJU, ShareASale ThinkTank, Affiliate Summit West, Affiliate Convention all on the West Coast – no love for East Coast!
The phenomenon of Poken, custom logo Poken, and more business-like Poken coming soon.

Send Trisha Lyn to Blog World Expo 09!

Trish — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:00:10 +0000

Have you been to Blog World Expo before? I went last year and I can’t tell you how invaluable it was to me as a blogger to go. There were a ton of great sessions geared for those of us who call a blog home. It was a terrific learning experience!

That said, I want to go again! Unfortunately last year I went on the good grace of using prize money from a contest to pay for the $395 for the Weekend Pass level of registration. Comparatively yes, I’m doing better than some considering the state of the economy, however I still don’t quite have the dough to make the $400 registration + $120 for a hotel + $150 for a flight = $670 is outside my price range!

So, that’s where I ask for your help. I’m looking for a sponsor to swing the registration fee and any part of my travel they have it in their wallet to cover. Or, if you’re going to BWE, willing to share a hotel room for Thursday & Friday night, and I deem you a good person, I’ll totally split a hotel room with you!

So, here’s what a sponsor will get for sending me to Blog World Expo 2009!

My undying love (link & otherwise) & affection
A glowing blog post about your kindness in sponsoring me
I’ll wear a t-shirt with your logo both days of the conference (Friday & Saturday)
I will send you all my notes before posting them on my blog
A ton of photos of me with high profile bloggers and affiliate industry insiders wearing YOUR logo
Tell me what else you might want in exchange – I’m flexible!

I hope to find a sponsor before September 14th when the prices go up. Please contact me through my contact page if you or someone you know is interested in sending this poor blogger to the best blogger and new media conference in years.