jmarbach.com

This past summer I garnered a lot of attention and reaction on a few pieces of content published on this blog. Most notably this past weekend my project aiming to map out the Hacker News users has been up-voted on the homepage of news.ycombinator.com for well over 24 hours. This recent project harnessing the attention of thousands of Hacker News users has launched my overall unique visitor account twofold for the summer. To be precise, I just surpassed the 10,000 unique visitor threshold this hour for my total summer count. I’m extremely happy that visitors from numerous referral sources have been interested in accessing the content on my blog over the past three months. Thank you!

Summer 2010 Traffic Fast Facts:

• Visitors came from 109 countries. Most popular countries in the following order: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany.
• 93% of the visitors were accessing the site for the first time.
• 12,000+ page views sitewide.
• Most popular site content: Hacker News page, Air France Concorde story, The State of the Kindle.
• Most popular referring keyword: “playlists for parties” (“John Marbach” was 7th with 9 referrals).
• Most popular traffic sources: news.ycombinator.com, google.com, twitter.com.
• Web browsers used: Chrome (44.4%), Firefox (27.9%), Safari (19.3%), Internet Explorer (03.6%)
• Approximately 50 social media reactions.
• Most popular mobile devices: iPhone, iPad, Android. To support the argument of rising popularity in the mobile web, about 1 in every 11 visitors accessed via a mobile device.

_

Interesting fact:

The most popular operating system was a near tie with Macintosh (Apple) edging out Windows (PC) by less than 80 visitors. 3,788 for Mac and 3,714 for Windows, or 37.97% Mac versus 37.23% PC.

Let the Mac vs. PC battle continue!

If you are involved with affiliate marketing, you know that it is hard to go through the day online, and not see the term “Super Affiliate” somewhere. The definition varies from person to person, as seen in Shoemoney’s post here: http://tinyurl.com/cmfr9p. Some say that they are people who rake in tons of cash each month, people who make a lot of money off referral commission, or just have a lot of people following their blog. The way you define a super affiliate is up to you, but one thing is for sure, we can tell if they are for real or not.

So, why do affiliate marketers read the super affiliate’s blogs? A few possible answers could be that people are bored or looking for new content that they are interested in. However, one thing is common among all affiliates who subscribe to these super affiliate blogs: I want to make more money. So, lets be real, if the super affiliate blogs constantly about general ramblings in the industry, they essentially do not help you make any money.

What about the super affiliates who give away all of that cool stuff to their readers? Great, that is super cool in the short term, but you are screwed when it comes to making money long term. The point I’m trying to make is that these so called super affiliates are absolutely worthless, and simply making money off of you, unless they help you make money. Therefore, I can testify that 99% of the blog posts super affiliates make are worthless and unproductive. Just because they have 2,000 subscribers doesn’t mean that they make any money, except from you. Unless they give you information that allows you to be more efficient or make more money. Thus, a super affiliate is for real if they teach you how to make more money.

Lets take a look at the super affiliates who are for real:

Nickycakes

Why? His newbie guide says it all. His posts for n00bs will make you money. If they don’t, then the Cakes chat is full of people who are always offering tips.

Kris Trujillo

Why? His case study PPC videos say it all. Combine Kris’s PPC videos with the Cash Tactics free PPC mentoring and you will start making money very quickly. 

Ralph Ruckman

Why? His step by step tutorials on the Convert2Media forum and his free reports on Cash Tactics have proven to be some of the most helpful advice any affiliate has gotten. Mostly because Ruck likes to take lesser noticed paths when developing marketing strategies. 

Brad Bertsche

Why? His scripts are extremely useful, not to mention sick nasty because they are free. 

Brandon Adcock

Why? He might not have blog very often, but his lessons from his affiliate marketing experience will save you a lot of time and money. Not to mention he offered to help me get started with AM.

Wes Mahler

Why? Affiliates can’t thank him enough for the powerful PPC analytics tools he has developed for you, for free. Ontop of that, his new series of interviews are worth watching.

Other helpful affiliates:

• Scar from Gaming YouTube
• Paul from inspiredmoneymaker.com
• Barman from PPC.bz

If you think someone else deserves a shout out in this post, let me know, I will be glad to add them.