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Internet usage among all age groups and professions is increasing each year, along with activities that distract you from getting things done online. This past summer I have been learning a lot about increasing efficiency participating in a work lifestyle that maximizes your ability to focus on making things happen. My guide has been the book Getting Things Done by David Allen and the Action Method by Behance. Getting  Things Done makes an attempt to change the way you work and deal with your “stuff”. Meanwhile, the Action Method aims to change the way you manage and execute your ideas. Both examine two vital parts of your work, with the intentions that by practicing the methods, your productivity and efficiency will be maximized.

We always have “stuff” to do. David analyzes what all of this “stuff” really is to us, and how we can work through it:

Here’s how I define “stuff:” anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn’t belong where it is, but for which you haven’t yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step. [pg. 17]

In short, the method helps you turn “stuff” into tasks that you can take action on, or get rid of. One part of Getting Things Done that I liked in particular is David’s idea of scheduled times to review and re-examine what you have gotten done and what needs to get done. I think this is very important to maintain the confidence that you are on top of things, or if  not you can prioritize to catch up. Throughout the book David identifies how we can manage our stuff and get rid of our stuff. In other words from 43folders.com, David explains how to “do your stuff in a way that honors your time, your energy, and the context of any given moment”.

I believe that good ideas are a dime a dozen. What I value is the ability to take the idea you have and execute it. The Action Method helps people take a big idea that when thought about seems complicated, and turns it into simple actionable steps. This way the big idea is not the focus, but instead the critical small steps to get there are the primary focus. They have both an online version and a physical book version, both simple and easy to use. I think the best use for the Action Method is right after a brain storming session, when you are thinking big and have an idea, and then you need to figure out how to execute the big idea.

These two productivity and efficiency tools should reduce the stress when you work, and eventually allowing you to take more action and get more things done!

Just over two weeks ago, I ordered a new pair of Sperry Top-Siders from ShoeBuy.com. Firstly, if you need to buy shoes online, there is a high chance that they will have the pair you are looking for at a discounted rate if you search for their monthly coupon codes. Also, their distribution is setup great (for those that live in the NYC area anyway) because orders are delivered within 3-4 business days.

Now back on subject- I tweeted out a thank you to @ShoeBuy for my happy customer experience and noted that their shipping is fast. Within a couple hours, I received an @ reply back from their brand monitoring employees on Twitter, saying something similar to “thanks for the compliment, we are glad you chose ShoeBuy.com”. The next day I received another @ reply from another rep at ShoeBuy, this time it was to notify me that I had won the “ShoeBuy.com Tweet of the Day”. This simple tweet about my positive customer experience resulted in a free $25 gift card from ShoeBuy by winning the tweet of the day. Props to ShoeBuy and their employees doing brand monitoring with social media. Great work, the Sperry’s fit great!

Now that I have digested the wealth of information offered to me while attending the Affiliate Summit East in New York City, one particular video mentioned by keynote speaker Peter Shankman has stood out; the mention of Stride Chewing Gum’s viral marketing initiative. Large corporations pay millions to develop marketing campaigns that they hope will go viral, for the sole intention of making a particular piece of media go viral (with their brand name splattered across the entire campaign).  Often the yield on the initiatives launched by most large corporations is not nearly equal to the cost of promoting the campaign.

Stride took a different approach to making their marketing campaign go viral. Peter Shankman said, “You can make something viral, but you can make something good.” That’s exactly what Stride did, instead of focusing on making the actual content go viral, they focused on producing really unique and interesting video content. Especially today, us humans love to share great things we find online; the people working for Stride knew this. So, Stride searched for a unique and inspirational video channel on YoutTube, figuring that YouTube is one of the most common launching platform for viral content. The result was choosing Matt Harding to travel, film, produce, and most importantly dance, all around the world with all types of people. Matt was chosen for his previous dancing video, and took the offer up from Stride, who allowed him to fulfill his dancing potential all around the world.

The production cost to Stride was minimal, simply covering all of Matt’s expenses while filming. The entire process took 14 months, from filming to publshing. Nearly 14 months later, the video has accumulated 23,000,000 views. Notice that Stride only reserved a small portion of advertising in the final seconds of the video, this was key to maintaining “good” content. In short, this viral video practically turned Stride into a popular gum choice for people across the globe very shortly.

If you haven’t already seen Matt dancing in “Where the Hell is Matt (2008)”, then I highly suggest you check it out. The movie is incredible, simply one of the best videos I have ever seen on the web-

Over the past couple years a few select companies have been extremely successful because of their ability to develop a revolutionary artificial intelligence tool that improves our quality of life. Why? The startups that have developed these smart applications are revolutionizing their industry, they are innovating new technology that thinks like we humans do, except only better. Algorithms developed by startups with substantial AI applications have proven to be very popular, because they only get smarter overtime, making better decisions from our behavior.

Who are these startups that lead innovation within their industries?

Animoto is revolutionizing cinematic artificial intelligence. Their product thinks and acts like a movie director and editor. No movie sideshow is ever the same.

Pandora creates a custom individual music station catered to each users music preferences. Their algorithms allow for the best passive music listening experience.

In case you haven’t seen the news over the past two years, Netflix just finished a contest with a $1 million prize for the team that could improve their AI based movie recommendation tool for their customers.

Clickable.com claims to have the smartest PPC management tool anywhere. Their tool makes recommendations for your PPC campaigns, so you can attain a larger ROI from your PPC advertisements.

Then of course, with the good, their is always bad. Many scientists have begun to worry that machines will soon be able to outsmart humans, and eventually take advantage of us. While this is likely not an immediate concern, scientists are proposing that research be stopped, so that humans will always have control over computers. Checkout this New York Times article.

Also, largely unseen to consumers, internet advertising is extremely sophisticated now when it comes to targeting. Many advertising networks now allow major corporations to enable targeting to a specific demographic; and then re-targeting based on a users actions if they did or did not buy the advertisement offer.

In the short term internet companies that are funding research and development for their AI products will succeed at having the most innovative, and likely most profitable product in their industry. Not to mention the value proposition against competitors is a major advantage to have in their industry.

A quick tip on landing page optimization for generating more revenue from your existing landing pages-

Add a simple “Subscribe To Our Newsletter” email submit on your landing page, linked to your email management software. If you are driving high amounts of traffic to a specific landing page, chances are a decent percentage of your traffic will want to subscribe to a newsletter that contains relevant information. (Make sure you get your visitors to double opt-in for CAN-Spam compliance.) A double opt-in email list is perfect for you to up sell offers in the vertical that you’re promoting. This will help create more stabilitly within your affiliate marketing campaigns and allow you to test offers for free with your email list.

An optimization technique such as this newsletter subscription is a win-win situation; let me know how it works out for you.

This is my guest post that was published yesterday on the MediaTrust blog:

10 Quick tips that can help you get started making money in affiliate marketing today.

In the past, we’ve offered many in-depth articles on various parts of internet marketing, such as information on SEO, PPC, social media and marketing in general. With more and more people entering this industry every day, it’s easy to succumb to information overload. To many new affiliates, this information seems useless since they are not yet savvy enough with internet marketing to generate revenue with more advanced techniques.

To start generating revenue, a new affiliate does not need to understand the very complex inner workings of SEO, PPC, social media, etc.; they just need to understand a few key tips about internet marketing in general.

I’ve compiled a list of 10 tips that you can help you get started today:

1. Familiarity with HTML is a must in order to edit landing pages, place pixels, etc.

2. Hope is not a strategy for growth, planning and executing your campaigns is key.

3.  Do target online Moms. Why? 67% of Moms online look for help making a purchasing decision. (Marketing To Moms Coalition Survey 2008)

4. Target market is key – targeting a Mom on a free iPhone email submit will not convert well; lip stick samples will likely convert better.

5.  Always track your paid advertising, eliminating poor ad placements can make or break a campaign.

6.  Landing page CTR is very important, you want as many users seeing the offer page as possible. Use click heat maps to optimize landing pages. ClickHeat is an awesome free tool.

7. This is BIG. If you can target Australia or UK, do it, the competition is much less fierce. Or better yet, promote an offer that has a translated landing page (French, Spanish, German, etc) to other countries.

8.  Are you thinking about doing SEO? Before investing in SEO, make sure you test to see if the traffic converts for the keyword that you are targeting via PPC.

9.  Be aware of macro environmental trends that may cause a certain campaign to convert higher. For example, weight loss products typically convert higher in January, right after many people make a New Year’s resolution to lose weight.

10. Affiliate marketing income can fluctuate, find multiple traffic sources that are profitable to create stability in case one traffic source is terminated.

Recently I setup a blog dedicated to a certain celebrity, and I added a description with keywords to each picture. I did this to provide the user with some information when they scrolled over the image. To my surprise, I unexpectedly saw hundreds of organic visitors from Google Images within a few weeks. By seeing these organic visitors from Google Images, I discovered a potentially profitable traffic source, with zero competition at all, in any niche!

This is sort of an “out-of-the-box” approach to SEO, because no one thinks of recieving organic visitors from Google Images, everyone thinks of web search. However, we all search for images all the time via Google and other search engines, except very few, if any people, have ever thought of the possibility of competing to be on the first page of images in a Google Images search.

In order to profit from this technique, you must place the images on a landing page with your links. Therefore, everyone who clicks on the image will be taken to your landing page.

This may spark a few of the performance marketers out there to dive into Google Images SEO! It’s worth a shot, here are my recent traffic stats from this technique-

Read the rest of this entry →

The final post in this series of sources of information that I recommend. As most of the readers of this blog would agree, most of the information we take in now in 2009, comes from the internet. Fittingly, today I will list the websites/blogs that I seek daily for news, information, and more.

Websites that I read daily-

Twitter –

Just thought I would get this one out of the way…

THEWEBLIST.net –

Their title explains it the best: “What people are clicking on today.” And in even simpler terms- Stories that have made it to the front page of digg, delicious, reddit, etc.

Mashable –

Stay informed on everything related to social media. They often provide comprehensive insight into the socialsphere.

TechCrunch –

Seriously, how can you be on the web and not read TechCrunch? This is one of the most read blogs in the world.

RedHerring –

This is also a magazine, and they cover mostly stories connecting business and technology.

VentureBeat –

Really cool information on the latest startup companies on the web.

Hacker News –

Nope, it’s not what it sounds like. This is a real quality stream of news related mostly to startup companies.

SocialTimes –

I like their tag line: “Technically social.” They cover all news related to companies making money via social media. Such as virtual currency networks.

If you have any recommendations for a website that belongs on that list, feel free to leave a comment; I’d be happy to add it.

Hopefully this series of my daily reading materials will keep you busy, and better informed. Thanks!

Yeah, that title is kind of an oxymoron, considering magazines are published once a week, month, or two months, etc.

Magazines are probably my favorite sources of information, since the articles are the most in depth, and they are usually complemented by nice little graphics to understand the issue. 🙂

Here are my favorite magazines:

Fast Company

Business and internet technology, wow. Does it get much better?

Entrepreneur

The issues mostly highlight successful startup companies that are moving and shaking.

Wired

Wired keeps an update of all things digital; anything about how emerging technology is impacting the way we live.

Fortune Small Business

Are you are planning on starting your own business? Read this magazine.

The Economist

The #1 source for any political news, and worldwide issues. This magazine is a must read to stay in touch with global trends and problems.

Those magazines will keep you anxious for each issue, be sure to pick up one of them. They are worth reading for sure.

Next up is Websites of course. Check back tomorrow to see the websites that I read daily.

This is the first part of a 3 day series listing my favorite daily media sources. Enjoy!

Today’s medium is the newspaper! To be honest, this is the medium that I read the least, but they are definitely part of my daily reading materials. Those few minutes of down time while eating breakfast allow me to gain a small bit of insight of what’s happening in the world through newspapers. With that said, here are the newspapers that I take a look at daily:

The Wall Street Journal

The WSJ is probably the most respected source of business and financial news… anywhere.

The New York Times

The NYT has top-notch coverage of all breaking news, and expansive coverage of events throughout the world.

The Star-Ledger

My surrounding area news. Always interesting to see whats going on.

Tomorrow is magazines, check back soon.