Last month, I came across Steve Stoute being interviewed by Piers on Piers Morgan Tonight that touched on some of his successes in life, his new book; The Tanning of America: How Hip-Hop Created a Culture That Rewrote the Rules of the New Economy and how he would brand Obama. That short interview was insightful and I just came across this short video that might provide a bit of food for thought for marketers. In it he talks about building a brand and what brands need to do in order to connect with consumers the right way. He has worked with some of the biggest brands in the world and helped position them for success. What he has to say goes to show how marketing campaigns can easily get lost in translation.

The Holiday Season is fast approaching and with it comes the period when consumers let lose of their hard earned cash and send it in the direction of online and offline retailers. For affiliate marketers, this brings along a time when you can earn a lot more money compared to other periods of the year.

The other day I was reading through Search Engine Watch and came across an article, 3 Steps to Happy Holidays SEM Returns. One of the things that stuck out the most was the Retail Demand Curve For Holidays (2007-2010).

As you can see from the graph, there is a steady increase in impressions, clicks and revenue throughout October. As it moves into November, there is a marked increased and as it heads towards the tail end of the month, revenue shots up over 200%. According to ComScore, 2010 online retail sales for the 2010 holiday season reached $32.6 billion. This was a 12% increase on the previous year and some analysts are predicting that retails sales will increase by 12-14% this year. Whether or not it does increase, $32.6 billion is a lot of money that affiliate marketers can get a share of. Keep in mind that these figures as only for the U.S.

Some things that come to mind to get you thinking more about working on the holiday season include:

Marketing Plan – Put together a plan that covers the next 2-3 months and make sure that all of the important dates are on it. Upcoming dates of importance include Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and of course Christmas, just to name a few. You need to know what you are going to promote, how you are going to promote and when you are going to promote.

Pages – If you haven’t already done so, now is the time to get pages ready. Besides the usual to-do’s of content and keywords, one big thing that comes to mind is mobile optimised landing pages. More and more people are accessing the internet via mobile devices and if your pages aren’t mobile optimised, you could miss out on commissions.

Email Lists – If you have an email list, get holiday emails ready now so that you aren’t rushed to do so when the time comes to send them. VerticalResponse is good email marketing service that comes with a wealth of free resources to help you get the most out of your email marketing efforts.

Testing – A/B testing of different variations of your pages and email templates is a good idea as this will allow you to determine which one will produce the best results.

This is not a definitive list of things you can do to work on maximising affiliate commissions during the Holiday Season. The purpose of this post is to get you thinking more about what you need (if you haven’t already done so) to do to work towards a profitable season.

Search engine optimisation is something that just about every webmaster has thought about and maybe even tried to master. There are so many resources out there where you can learn about the subject or get someone to do it for you. Some are good and others may put you into a situation that is counter productive to your SEO efforts and cost you more than just a lot of money. The way I see it, before you decide to get into anything or pay someone to do it for you, it pays to be knowledgeable on the subject matter yourself.

Late last year I was fortunate enough to receive a complementary copy of Search Engine Optimization: Your visual blueprint for effective Internet marketing from Kris Jones. I am not a fan of reading books but I was pleasantly surprised when I flipped through it for the first time and saw the visual format of the book, which made reading and learning a lot easier. This is one of the best resources I have come across if you want to learn SEO and the book follows a step-by-step fashion and covers the following topics:

1. Getting started with search engine optimisation
2. Keyword generation
3. Creating pages
4. Basic web site structure
5. Advanced web site structuring
6. Creating content
7. Creating communities
8. Building links
9. Using Google analytics
10. Social media optimisation
11. Creating pay-per-click campaigns
12. Optimising PPC campaigns through quality score optimisation
13. Optimising for other search engines
14. Monetizing traffic
15. Installing SEO plugins

As you work through each of the topics, Kris outlines what it is, why it is important, how to do it and what not to do to jeopardise your SEO efforts. For example, in the Creating Content chapter he talks about how content is the “lifeblood” of a site how quality content is directly proportional to ranking well in search engines and customers making purchases on your site. He also covered using proper keyword density, latent semantic content and avoiding duplicate content. Latent semantic indexing was something I didn’t know about but after reading about, saw as something that is very relevant in SEO and best of all, easy to implement.

As I was working through the book, I took one of my sites and made a few changes to it. Over the last few months I have noticed and increase in organic traffic and this I attribute to the book. The increase in traffic has correlated to an increase in revenue. A bonus about Kris being the author is that he is more than willing to answer questions or clarify anything discussed in the book. I had a couple of questions and to get mine answered by going over to his blog, asking the question on the relevant post and a little while later I had a response.

All in all, I would recommend this book to anyone who really wants to get a handle on search engine optimisation. The $20 investment is well worth it and will go a long way in getting your website to rank well about the rest.

Click here to purchase Search Engine Optimization: Your visual blueprint for effective Internet marketing

Last week I was looking around for a solution that would allow us to share our printer and external hard drives wirelessly and the only things that seemed as viable options were a Belkin Home Base and a Belkin 5-Port Network USB Hub. Anyway, whilst I was looking around of the stores I visited, I came across D-link routers that had stickers on them that said something like ‘share a broadband connection and make money’. That caught my attention so I decided to look into a little more.

What Tomizone has gone and done is that they are giving people with the high-speed internet connections the chance to earn a little money. All that is needed is a compatible Wi-FI enabled router. Once you have that, getting setup is pretty straight forward. If you don’t have a router that is Tomizone enabled they have instructions on how download their firmware. Once that is all done, all you need to do is follow the setup wizard interface in your router’s admin interface and you are good to go.

Customers who want to access your Hotspot can pay for it using a credit card, PayPal or you can sell a voucher to them with rates starting from as little as US$2.50 hour passes for 60MB of usage. As far as getting paid goes, Hotspot owners earn 50% of all revenue spent on their network. Payments are made once revenue reaches US$30 (benchmarked to your currency).

Tomizone states on their site that “Security is key” in that their software keeps users away from your internal network so that you don’t have to worry about threats. They also have a free access for guests feature which gives regular users on your list free access.

Given that I don’t have a compatible router this is something that I have not tired out (but would have liked to). If you are looking for a hassle free way of setting up a Hotspot to earn a bit of money from, this seems like a viable option. I you are setting up a Hotspot from your residence this would work well if you live in an apartment complex or place where people meet. A lot of people are addicted to the internet and if you let it be known that there is a connection available for them to use you could earn a good amount of money.

People have mixed feelings about making money via Twitter for various reasons which I wont go into in this post. I personally don’t have any qualms with the whole concept and I have been making money on Twitter via two methods so far. The first is Sponsored Tweets and the second is RevResponse and Twitterfeed (Monetise Your Tweets with Twitterfeed and RevResponse).

I recently came across MyLikes which is similar to Sponsored Tweets with the difference being that you get paid per click and not just a one off payment per tweet. Once signed up to Mylikes, you have access to a list of sponsors, their details and payment per click. All you do from there is choose what you would like to tweet about, write out what you have to say and post it, all from their site. Payments are made once you have reached a minimum balance of $2 and are paid out via PayPal every Friday.

Anyway, the main purpose of this post is to get people who haven’t tried making money via Twitter to give it a go. As an added incentive, I am going to give $25 (via PayPal) to someone once my MyLikes balance reaches $50. Once my balance reaches $50 a winner will be chosen at random and announced via a post and on twitter.

In order to be eligible to get the $25, all you need to do it sign up to MyLikes CLICK HERE via Ninety Nine Ways, leave a comment letting me know that you have signed up (don’t forget to include your MyLikes nickname so that I can verify that you have signed up) and go and make money on Twitter.

Don’t forget to tell your friends for a referral bonus of up to $10!

Eric Schechter from Clickbooth recently interviewed Kris Trujillo of CashTactics.net – Interview with Kris Trujillo of CashTactics.net. Kris is an internet marketer and blogger who provides a wealth of knowledge for people looking to get into internet marketing. If you are thinking of getting into affiliate marketing and haven’t already seen the interview, I recommend that you do watch it. It gives a lot of food for thought and you will be happy that you took a few minutes of your time to watch it. Here you go:

Sign up to Clickbooth and start making money!

I recently did an interview with the famous affiliate marketing expert Murray Newlands at murraynewlands.com. You can get to know a bit more about me by reading through the interview. This is what I had to say:

Tell me about your Blog?

Ninety Nine Ways is a blog on ways of making money online as well as offline. I also write about things that people can do in their everyday lives to try and save themselves a few more dollars without changing the quality of their life. Why do I write about this stuff? Well in this day in age I want to be financially stable and I don’t see the point in making money when you can’t save some or at least spend it wisely and I figured that there may be people out there who feel the same way and may be interested in what I have to say.

What was your first blog?

My first blog was ‘Show Me The Money’ on blogger, a blog that I must say I started off because I wanted to make money. That was not the best move because setting up a blog purely for the purpose of making money doesn’t get you anywhere. I didn’t have any idea about what I was doing and in the early stages it was a mess.

What is the biggest tip you would give to a newbie blogger?

Blog about something you are really interested in and passionate about. With that being the case, finding stuff to blog about won’t be a problem. That was something I discovered when I set up a second blog about the country I call home – Zimbabwe.

What do advertisers do that you wish they wouldn’t?

Not going into too much detail, it does get to me when one day they are you friend and the next they don’t want to know you. One thing I have learnt of late from situations like that is don’t be afraid to ask – you will be surprised at the kind of responses you will get.

What do bloggers do that you wish they wouldn’t?

Lots of ads and very little or no useful content. I literally find it painful on my eyes when I come across a blog that is covered in ads and I can’t see the content because there isn’t much there.

Where do you see growth in the blogging field?

That is a really hard one to answer. These days when something big happens around the world chances are very high that you will hear about a blogger or bloggers having some sort of impact on the the topic being reported no matter what it is. Blogging is everywhere!

What new ideas are advertisers coming up with to take advantage of new trends?

I haven’t really paid a lot of attention to this but one thing I see a lot of with some people on twitter is that their tweets are mainly ads. So maybe a number of advertisers a trying to……………

To Read the rest of the interview head on over to – Make Money Online Blog Blogger Gerald Ndoro of Ninety Nine Ways to Make Money Online Blog

I am looking at starting up a newsletter for one of my sites which means going out and doing a bit of research to see who would provide me with the best solution for my needs. There are a number of email marketing solutions out there to choose from and they include AWeber, Constant Contact and VerticalResponse just to name a few. For some reason though, AWeber seems to be the one of choice for most of the bloggers whose newsletters I am signed up to.

Anyway, whilst looking around for a suitable provider I came across this webinar by VerticalResponse that I thought some of you may find interesting and useful especially if you are thinking about getting into email marketing.

I haven’t decided on who I am going to use yet but the nice thing about the ones mentioned in this post is that they all offer free trials so I might give all of them a try to see who will work best for me.

I hope you enjoy the webinar.