The Affiliate Review 1-18 03/29/08

March 29th, 2008 Len Thurmond Posted in The Affiliate Review Archives |

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IN THIS WEEK’S REVIEW

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• Just Something to Think About

• This Week’s Editorial: Feed me! Sandy’s RSS Addiction

• Now That’s Funny!

• Announcement: ARTICLE INNOVATOR launches on Tuesday

• The Androgynous Stone: Chapter 7

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JUST SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT

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In Hollywood, an equitable divorce settlement means each party getting fifty percent of publicity.

Lauren Bacall

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THIS WEEK’S EDITORIAL: FEED ME! SANDY’S RSS ADDICTION

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“Hello, my name is Sandy Swain and I’m addicted to RSS feeds.”

“Hi Sandy!”

It feels like 1995 again for me because that is when I got my first AOL account and started playing around online.

Well, actually that is not true. I used to have a geeky high school friend named Mark who gave me a 300 baud modem for my birthday in 1985. He taught me how to go on to various bulletin boards to check local weather and movie listings, etc. That was interesting, but it was nothing like the amazing amount of information that was available to me on AOL and then later, the “world wide web”.

It wasn’t like it is now where I am constantly bombarded with information at every turn, I actually went out looking for it. In those days, it was so novel for a company to have a web site that I would go check it out for the fun of it. I was playing with my new “toy” called the internet. Remember when you started to hear radio commercials for companies that would say “Come and visit us ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB!” Then they would give their ENTIRE web address starting with “http, colon, forward slash, forward slash, dubya dubya dubya dot….”

Now I have gone from thinking “I wonder if they have a web site?” to being suspicious if a company does NOT have a web site, or even if their web site looks a little outdated. I took a business startup class several years ago where I argued with my instructor that soon the day would come when a company WITHOUT a web site would be viewed the same as a company without a phone number. Nobody would really take them seriously. I believe that time has come and it is pretty much a given that every “real” company has a web presence.

So this week I’ve been reading more about RSS feeds which I already knew about but hadn’t really done much with. (RSS has been called “Rich Site Summary” but usually I hear it called “Real Simple Syndication”). It is simply a new way for a publisher to distribute information. The user can “subscribe” to the information instead of going to look at it on a web site or a blog.

Now, this is similar to subscribing to an email newsletter right? But as we all know there are some challenges with using email to get our information. First of all…you guessed it….SPAM!!!!! You either have to plow through all kinds of messages about “increasing one’s manhood” to get to the information you actually want, or you can use a spam filter and risk never seeing the message at all. (As a marketer, a lot of my legitimate email looks like spam so spam filters are a nuisance to me). Plus, it requires giving out your name and email to get on the list where it can be sold by unscrupulous list owners to spammers. And if I change my mind and want OFF of the list? Sometimes it is a real hassle to get unsubscribed. Yep. Email is not as much fun as it was in 1995 when I was actually excited to hear “You’ve Got Mail!”

When I finally did some studying about what RSS could do for me, it sounded like the description for the ultimate fantasy for email! Check out the advantages:

-Spam free
-Virus free
-No hassles “unsubscribing” from it. Just delete the feed and it’s gone.
-Receive the information you want without giving your personal email address (no need to use a junk or “throwaway” email address)
-Information comes straight to you. No need to spend your time visiting all of your favorite web sites just to get the latest
-You can customize how you receive the information and sort it however you like
-You can use one application to collect, manage and view information from various sources
-It is FREE!!!!!

There are a few different ways to view RSS feeds and several browsers have RSS viewers built right in. However, just for fun I downloaded a standalone RSS reader just to play around with it. Since I primarily use a Macintosh, I use one called “Shrook” that’s for the Mac. I fired it up and it immediately gave me some suggestions for popular feeds that I might want to subscribe to. (And by subscribe, I mean just push one button and it was added to my list).

What FUN it was! I subscribed to some Macintosh update and rumor sites, to Yahoo news, to Wired magazine’s top stories and to the official Google blog. Then I started searching around for other things I might be interested in just by going to Google and searching for keywords and “RSS” just to see what would come up. I found Consumer Reports had a product review feed. My favorite TV shows had feeds for reviews and episode summaries. Instead of subscribing to my entire local newspaper, I could subscribe ONLY to my favorite columnists. Shrook will also tell me when my favorite podcasters have a new episode and then open up iTunes for me so I can listen to it. It was so easy just to scan over all the headlines for new articles and only open up what I really wanted to read without dealing with ads, popups, or any other crap.

I am so totally addicted! It was 1995 all over again with me going to different web sites thinking “I wonder if they have an RSS feed?” and then getting all excited to find that they did! Sometimes they would have a button on the site for me to subscribe using various services, or I could just find out what their “Feed URL” was and paste it into Shrook. Presto! I was instantly subscribed.

AND OF COURSE everyone should subscribe to The Affiliate Review! Here is our Feed URL:

http://www.theaffiliatereview.com/feed/

So what comes to mind for us as affiliate marketers, is that NOW is the time to get involved in this while it is still a “hot” technology and people are excited to find sites that have RSS feeds. You can publish an RSS feed of your very own and be one of the “cool kids”.

The video I made this week shows you how you can very quickly make your own RSS feed using Len’s new Article Innovator software. It will turn a bunch of articles that you have into “snippets” or short summaries with links back to your site in order to read the full article. Then it will create a little RSS file that you can submit to dozens of RSS directories so when people type in a keyword for your affiliate site or blog, YOUR feed will come up for them to subscribe to. Whoo-hoo! FREE TRAFFIC to your site!

http://www.articleinnovator.com/AIVideos/05_formatting

So if you will excuse me, I’ve got some news to read. Gotta catch up on my Desperate Housewives episode summaries and the latest Mac rumors!

Until the next ‘review,
Sandy Swain

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NOW THAT’S FUNNY!

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Hi Len, this one’s for you and the fun time you’ve been having with Windows!

Bill Gates in Heaven

When Bill Gates died, he went up to Heaven, where Saint Peter showed him to his house, a beautiful 20 room house, with grounds and a tennis court.

Bill Gates was pleased, and spent many months enjoying the amenities of Heaven.

One day, he was enjoying one of Heaven’s many fine parks, when he ran into a man dressed in a fine tailored suit.

“That is a nice suit, my friend,” said Gates. “Where did you get it?”

“Actually,” the man replied, “I was given a hundred of these when I got here. I’ve been treated really well. I got a mansion on a hill with a huge five-hundred acre estate, a golf course, and three Rolls Royces.”

“Were you a Pope, or a doctor healing the sick?” asked Gates.

“No,” said his new friend, “Actually, I was the captain of the Titanic.”

Hearing this made Gates so angry that he immediately stalked off to find Saint Peter.

Cornering Peter, he told him about the man he had just met, saying, “How could you give me a paltry new house, while you’re showering new cars, a mansion, and fine suits on the Captain of the Titanic? I invented the Windows operating system! Why does he deserve better??!”

“Yes, but we use Windows,” replied Peter, “and the Titanic only crashed once.”

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ANNOUNCEMENT: ARTICLE INNOVATOR LAUNCHES ON TUESDAY!

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Len is putting the finishing touches on to Article Innovator right now and we are going to officially launch it on Tuesday, April 1st. (It might be April Fools Day, but this ain’t no joke!)

This software has been two years in the making and turned out better than either of us had imagined! If you have been watching my video tutorials in the newsletter then you have an idea of just how much you can do with this program. It’s just about the handiest darned thing I’ve ever used and I have a WHOLE LOT of marketing software on my hard drive. I personally love, love, LOVE all the stuff it does for me as an Affiliate Marketer who is always looking for quality content.

For example you can:

-Create a new WordPress Blog right in the software–with only one click!!

-Easily post content to your blog from your desktop

-Find articles quickly without having to go to a bunch of different directories

-Sort them and filter them for relevance to your project before you even read them

-Check them for duplicate content on Google

-Use the writing pad to create unique articles from the ones you find

-Add your own articles. Either write them with the software’s editing tool, or include one that you already have on your computer

-Generate web pages out of your articles, even wrap the content around Google Adsense ad blocks

-Syndicate the content you find using an RSS XML file that the software makes for you

-AND we have a lot more planned for future upgrades

Len is cooking up a FANTASTIC OFFER for you, our wonderful readers of The Affiliate Review. And, because we are going to strictly limit the number of copies that we release to the public, we want you to have first dibs on it before Len lets his marketing buddies promote it to their lists.

Get on the priority list HERE at http://www.articleinnovator.com.

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THE ANDROGYNOUS STONE: CHAPTER SEVEN

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The group meets a mysterious stranger along their journey. Why does Sam feel a strange connection to this oddly beautiful new being–and why does their gentle giant companion feel very differently?

Go here to read the seventh chapter of The Androgynous Stone, a novel written by Len Thurmond.

The Androgynous Stone
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A FINAL WORD

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A Few Last Notes…

The Affiliate Review presents opinions of many of the thousands of online programs available on the net today. We emphasize the word opinion for obvious legal reasons. And that is just what the content of The Affiliate Review is…Our Opinion. Nothing More…Nothing Less !

If you have comments or suggestions, Please feel free to post them here on our blog

Here’s To Your Success,

Len Thurmond, Founder of The Affiliate Review
Len@TheAffiliateReview.com

and

Sandy Swain, Editor of The Affiliate Review
Sandy@TheAffiliateReview.com

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