I take working online for granted these days. In the morning I turn on my PC and connect to the internet, check my daily earnings and look at email. Barring a catastrophic failure of my PC, hard drive or Windows, I expect every work day to start out the same.

That didn’t happen two days ago on November 16th.
Read the rest of this entry »

Following on from Amazon pulling the plug entirely on associates in Colorado in March this year due to a Sales tax measure introduced in that state, yesterday they fired out an email to associates about an upcoming change to their API which will affect a huge number of associates who use various plugins to add products and customer reviews to their sites. Here’s what they said in their email:

On November 8, 2010 the Reviews response group of the Product Advertising API will no longer return customer reviews content and instead will return a link to customer reviews content hosted on Amazon.com. You will be able to display customer reviews on your site using that link. Please refer to the Product Advertising API Developer guide found here for more details. The Reviews response group will continue to function as before until November 8 and the new link to customer reviews is available to you now through the Product Advertising API as well.

What this means is that Amazon will, as of Nov. 8th 2010, no longer be providing customer reviews through their API. So you won’t be able to add customer reviews to your posts and articles as you have done in the past. Amazon, instead, will provide a link to an iframe that you can include on your site. Since search engines can’t parse the contents of an iframe, there’s no SEO benefit from including them on a page. Visitors will, however, still be able to read the customer reviews in the iframe on your site and your associates ID is encoded into the iframe so you will still earn commissions on sales.

So why are Amazon making this change?
Read the rest of this entry »

[Update: August 17th: Greg Jacobs' "The Assassination target" launched today. Copies were expected to sell out in about 5 days. However, demand has apparently far outstripped what was anticipated and the doors are expected to close within 24 hours. That's quite phenomenal for a $1997 product! So the question is: am I buying this product? No. That's not because I think badly of the product, think it's over-priced or any such reason. I simply don't have the time available to follow another course as I'm already invested in Alex Jeffreys marketing course and Mike Johnson's Autoblog Blueprint course. The Assassination might be the course for you, so check out the video on the sales page.]

I just received word from Greg Jacobs that he’s launching a new training course called The Assassination on August 17th. It teaches how to create a product and launch it, starting from nothing and ending up with a viable product.

Beyond that, the only info I have is this short blurb on the course:

The Assassination is an 8 week webinar coaching program that will take participants through the course materials to ensure success.

By the end of these 8 weeks they will have created and launched their own product.

This takes students from the beginning, starting with nothing, to creating a complete product, sales letter, website, running a launch and creating a sustainable long term income.

We also provide them with the tools they need; members receive lifetime access to The Assassins Guild (an online networking platform to build their team). They also receive lifetime access to FusionHQ – revolutionary software allowing people to build their online business from a centralized platform – no coding required, even a non-techie can do it.

I was poking around checking some affiliate links today when I came across some offers on quality internet marketing products. I’ve no idea how long these offers will last so use your on judgement.

First up is Market Samurai, a top-notch keyword research tool. If you build websites for profit or you’re looking for keywords to do article marketing on, then this is a superb tool. It pulls keywords from Google and provides a range of tools for analyzing those keywords for relevancy to your niche, checking the competition (and strength of that competition), hoe much traffic those keywords get and whether they’re profitable or not. There are numerous way to find out more about your competition so you can decide if a niche is worth going into or if it’s just too competetive. If you’re stuck for an affiliate program to match your selected niche, it will provide a list of suitable programs for you and will advise you on the best offers to promote. It will even find content for you. Use the above link to save 35% on the regular price for the software.

Next is Keyword Elite 2.0. Another top-notch keyword research tool. While it doesn’t have the same set of tools as Market Samurai, it does pull keywords from other sources as well as Google, so keywords come from other search engines and may not be used as search terms in Google. This gives you a wider range of keywords. The software itself provides SEO insights, quickly allows you to determine if your keywords will target buyers or window shoppers, find high CPA offers, uncover niches and sub niches pretty much on demand. Normally selling for $297, Keyword Elite 2.0 is currently on offer for $97.

Then there’s Auto Blog Blueprint 2.0 which is a course that teaches you how to build successful autoblogs (it’s easy to build unsuccessful blogs; building a successful one takes more care and effort). This is unquestionably the best autoblogging course available. It’s techniques and methodologies can be applied to regular blogs as well to help them do better in the search engines. If you don’t know what an auto blog is, it’s a blog that has content added to it automatically on autopilot. Normally $147, you can get the course for $97 using this exclusive coupon: BEC006C89A. The course is updated frequently (at no additional cost) and consists of a mixture of text pages (like an online ebook) and a series of videos. There’s also a forum for members.

If you do article marketing or are looking for content for your websites, you could do a lot worse than Article Underground. Each month, you get 400 high traffic, low competition, exact keyword phrase optimized articles of at least 400 words. They also have a network of 44 high quality blogs (plus over 80 more member contributed announcements blogs too!), covering broad & specific niches and general topics where you can promote your own sites and pages (i.e. instant quality backlinks). There’s also a load of special reports, tutorials & videos available to members. Membership is normally $97 per month, but using the above link, you can get a year’s membership for $399 (equivalent to $33.25 per month – a saving of 66%).

Lastly, $7 Deals have reduce the prices on all their video sets to $7 (they normally only sell video sets for $7 for a week before permanently raising the price). Video set range from SEO techniques to article marketing, working with Camtasia to creating brandable reports, and other internet marketing related topics.

It’s quite a while since I bought myself a gadget. My trusty old Dell Axim PDA finally gave up the ghost and I also needed a new MP3 player. PDA’s seem to have been subsumed into cellphones over the last few years, so it seemed that the best upgrade/replacement path was to opt for a smartphone.

Apple’s iPhone gets rave reviews, but there have been a lot of complaints recently about their draconian control over what apps are allowed onto the iPhone platform. I’ve been hearing that apps that currently available are actually being removed from the marketplace because Apple deems them unsuitable for whatever reason they deem appropriate. It’s that old monopolistic ethic at work again…”It’s our way or the highway; you’re either with us or against us.” (imagine the only place you could buy books published by HarperCollins was their designated store).

I prefer platforms where such strict controls aren’t in place which is one reason I never strayed into Apple Mac territory when developing software applications. Now I’ve never used a Mac, don’t know anyone who’s owned one or who’s ever written software for one. I’ve only seen them up close in high-street stores and didn’t like what I saw (design-wise). Nothing about Apple’s products has ever enticed me (in fact, they just put me off).

The iPhone does look good though but it’s expensive and, from what I can see, you need to be tied into a contract to use one. Not for me. Things have moved on now since the iPhone was first introduced and it’s revolutionary interface isn’t that revolutionary any more.

So, since I wanted an unlocked (sim-free) phone that would double as a PDA/MP3/Video player, I looked around at what was available. A friend brought the HTC Desire to my attention as he’d just bought one. I guess I fell in love with it ‘cos I went out and bought one! I found the cheapest offer on Pixmania (€469/£399) but cheaper prices might be available on eBay.

It’s a lovely piece of kit. The screen is fantastic – AMOLED (Active Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode) – crisp, bright, 480×800 pixels, easily read in daylight and doesn’t suffer contrast drops when seen at an angle.

The HTC Desire has a built-in MP3 player and video player (though it only plays MP4 files, so AVI’s and other video formats have to be converted for playing). It will sync with my Outlook calendar and contacts, can be connected to my PC as an external drive, can piggyback on my wi-fi connection for surfing the web, has a digital compass and GPS, and on and on. In other words, it’s a techie’s dream.

So, this is a phone I own (I’m not tied into a contract with it) which will probably get used more as a PDA than a phone. There are many places to get software for the phone. The iPhone has seniority here, but the HTC cellphone’s are proving to be very popular and getting great reviews and that means more and more apps will become available for the phone over the coming months.