Tricia Meyer

Affiliate Marketer, Blogger, and Consultant

Do You Know What You Promote?

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I’ve been watching Tweets come in this afternoon from a lot of mom bloggers and savings/deal bloggers promoting the download of various toolbars. When I check out their blogs, I notice that a lot of them have affiliate links on their sites.

I’m concerned that many affiliates do not even understand that the toolbars that they are promoting are essentially ensuring that they will no longer make any money off of the links in their blogs. Do you know which toolbars are responsible for overwriting affiliate cookies? Even if the toolbar seems like a great idea (i.e. you get cash back shopping or donations to charity), it doesn’t mean that the toolbar is not stealing from you.

One of my affiliate managers actually blogged about one particular plugin this morning (see Geno Prussakov’s post entitled Toolbars, pop-ups and parasites in Affiliate Marketing). However, there are hundreds more out there that no one is even talking about. Actually, people ARE talking about them…they are PROMOTING them!

If you are an affiliate who wants to make any kind of money off of your site or blog, it’s imperative that you check out more closely what you are promoting. You need to understand the affiliate marketing industry and what lies behind those toolbars and plugins. Otherwise, you are not only losing money yourself, but you are helping people take money out of the rest of our pockets as well.

Sponsored Tweets? The Pros and Cons

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Lately the issue of sponsored tweeting has been getting a lot of attention. Last year it was all about the sponsored posts. People weighed in very enthusiastically/critically on either side. Add to that some recent grumblings from the FTC about sponsorship of blogs and you have a very interesting situation.

I didn’t think much about Sponsored Tweets until I met Ted Murphy at Affiliate Summit. I had heard so many negatives from my Twitter friends about ads in tweets that I had no intention of signing up. But then I met him and thought “People immediately think the worst about my rewards site until they meet me and learn what I am doing. Maybe I should give his business a chance.”

Armed with a $100 coupon in my swag bag, I came home and set up a Sponsored Tweet as a sponsor. I told them that they could write whatever they wanted. I didn’t want to influence their writing. They could mark that it was an ad however they wanted as well. I specifically targeted tweeters who posted to moms and who wrote about savings or coupons. I figured that these were people who really could benefit from my business if they clicked on the sponsored tweet.

We did get a number of clicks off of the Tweets, but it remains to be seen how many of those people will become members of our site. I probably should have done a better job of tracking it. Will I continue to use the service as a merchant? Maybe. I genuinely believe that my business fit in with their Tweets and they were all honest with their followers. It’s my hope that they looked critically at my site before they accepted the Tweet offers.

Now this morning I see that Sponsored Tweets has a referral program. I would be silly not to sign up for it because I think it would genuinely interest a lot of my blogger friends. I signed up this time as a sponsored tweeter myself. Honestly, I don’t have a ton of followers so I am not sure that I will even get offers. When I do get my first offer, I will look at it and decide if it is something that I would promote even if I weren’t getting paid. If I would, I might just accept it.

I know some of you are rolling your eyes and already ready to “unfollow” me before we even see if I take an offer. But I think that the medium is too new to draw lines in the sand like that so quickly. Sure, if all I ever do is Twitter junk, you should unfollow me. But what if you are actually interested in the offer that I am Tweeting about? Are you going to unfollow me just on principal.

For the record, this is my Sponsored Tweets referral link. If you are interested, I would love it if you would sign up using the link. If you are totally against Sponsored Tweets, I’d love to hear your comments. We may not change each other’s minds, but it is good to understand where we stand and why.

Treadmill Desk: The Beginning

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Thanks to the Affiliate Summit Feedfront Magazine, I decided to give a treadmill desk a try. I was never keen on the idea before because I like my exercise time to be my head clearing time. But I got tired of sitting in a chair all day. And I figured that I could combine my “work walks” during the day with some cardio walks and runs and night.

My husband and I set out to rig up my existing treadmill into some kind of desk. I won’t bore you with details, but we were lucky that we had some great things on hand (first…a treadmill! Then other handy items like a docking station). We bought a shelf and two shelf racks at Lowes and built the “treadmill desk.” I put a cordless mouse and keyboard on it and tested it out. After some trial and error, it seemed perfect. I started using it for a couple of days, but the kids were still home for summer break and I was getting ready to head to Affiliate Summit.

Fast forward a bit and I have now completed my first full week of working on the treadmill. Pretty decent stats. I walked just over 16 hours during the day between Monday and Friday. I burned 3730 calories (over a pound!) and walked 34.5 miles. In addition to the obvious calorie burning benefits, here were a couple that I didn’t plan on:

  • I drank a lot of water. I hate drinking plain water but was so thirsty that I more than tripled my daily water intake.
  • I ate less snacks. Between the time that I spent on the treadmill and the fact that I wasn’t near the kitchen, I just wasn’t thinking about food.
  • I slept like a baby. Combine the mental exercise of working with the physical exercise and I was worn out each night!

I’m hoping to get back to running at least a few days a week in addition to the treadmill work. I know that I need that cardio, and I just need to keep running to stay trained to be able to run the mini marathon again next spring. I hope that this is the first of many posts about my treadmill desk!

Small Business, Big Break?

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I’m one of those small business owners who is always hoping for the “big break” that will take us to the next level. While I have dreams of Oprah or Ellen telling their viewers about how great we are, I would settle for some news coverage or a mention on the Today Show. Every time I think we are getting there, nothing happens. Write-up in the newspaper? No increase in membership. Featured on the local television station as a place people can save money while holiday shopping? No significant increase in membership.

I’m not naive enough to think that we won’t have to work for our Big Break. I submit responses to HARO inquiries, follow important people on Twitter, and participate in my share of networking groups and forums. And yet, I continue to wait for that one opportunity that is going to turn us into a household name.

Are you a small business owner with a desire to make it big? Or maybe you WERE a small business owner and you already got your big break? It can be lonely and discouraging sometimes to see other companies pass you by when you know that you have more to offer. You want to be optimistic but at the same time realistic. Let’s encourage each other and help one another to make those big breaks happen.

<queue the song “Movin’ On Up”>

Want To Be A Trust Agent? Find Out How

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I’ll admit from the start that I haven’t yet finished Trust Agents, by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. Between two conferences in the last week, travel, and the first week of school, reading time has been short. But combining what I have read so far with what I have SEEN in the last 7 days, I can unequivocally say that everyone needs a copy of this book.

A week ago I could barely tell you who Chris Brogan and Julien Smith were. What I could tell you was only from what I read others said about them. Fast forward a week and I could talk your ear off about why I believe in them not because of what they say but because of what they do.

I first saw both Chris and Julien speak at Affiliate Summit. They outlined some of the main points of their new book. That would have been sufficient enough to make me read it. However, actually meeting them and talking to them about what they do and how they do it made me not only want to read the book but also tell everyone I know about it. Chris and Julien have that way of talking to you like you are the only person in the room. You WANT to believe them not because they are buttering you up or trying to sell you something. Instead, they are giving you little pearls of wisdom about how you can be successful.

A few days after Affiliate Summit I had the chance to meet Chris again at Blog Indiana. How excited was I when he called on me by name during a Q&A session? It was a perfect example of how he operates. You build trust, in part, by empowering people. I walked away from that Q&A feeling like a million bucks.

Trust Agents is all about how you use turn personal connections to leverage your message–whatever that message may be. In a “virtual” world where you are more likely to come across someone on Twitter or Facebook than at your local coffee shop, it can be difficult to establish trusting relationships. Trust Agents teaches you how to become a trust agent yourself and how to build relationships with other trust agents (what they call the Agent Zero of each network).

If all of that above isn’t enough to make you want to buy your own copy of Trust Agents, just do a quick Google search and see what everyone else is saying. Learn from people who are DOING it and not just talking about it. Learn from the people who are building networks of trust all over the place–Chris Brogan and Julien Smith.

(Chris Brogan and I at Blog Indiana after his keynote)