I learned this sweet tip from Shawn Collins at AffiliateTip.com. You can easily install the Wordpress plugin “Pretty Link”, and it acts as a url shortener – and it tracks clicks, too! Here’s a Pretty Link to the plugin:
Feel free to click that link as many times as you want – I want to see how well the stats work. 
Thanks Shawn at Affiliate Tip!
I found this linkbuilding tip somewhere, I can’t remember where. (My linkbuilding text file is nearly 1000 lines long, full of little tidbits I’ve picked up here and there.) Anyway, here’s the phrase in Google:
“add a blog post” <keyword>
For example:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22add+a+blog+post%22+video+games&sourceid=navclient-ff
That leaves you with a ton of results for Ning communities that have been installed on random websites. Why do we care about Ning? By default, Ning installations let you post blog posts on these other sites with dofollow links!
On the first pages of results you get these great sites, all of which you can free make a blog post on:
http://geeks.pirillo.com/profiles/blog/list?pageSize=15
Page Rank: 5
DmR: 5.84
DmT: 6.01
http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blog/list
Page Rank: 4
DmR: 5.25
DmT: 5.36
http://vghvinet.ning.com/profiles/blog/list
Page Rank: 3
DmR: 3.66
DmT: 4.16
http://www.29gifts.org/profiles/blog/list
Page Rank: 3
DmR: 4.92
DmT: 4.94
http://community2.myfoxboston.com/service/searchEverything.kickAction?as=71243&mediaType=blog&sortType=recent&includeBlog=on&d-7095067-p=1
Page Rank: 5
DmR: 3.97
DmT: 4.43
http://www.nanopaprika.eu/profiles/blog/list
Page Rank: 5
DmR: 2.13
DmT: 2.54
http://www.mamasfallenangels.com/profiles/blog/list
Page Rank: 1
DmR: 3.59
DmT: 3.66
http://community2.myfoxdfw.com/service/searchEverything.kickAction?as=78592&mediaType=blog&sortType=recent&includeBlog=on&d-7095067-p=1
Page Rank: 4
DmR: 4
DmT: 4.41
At all those high trust sites you can add a blog post right now, with plenty of dofollow links! One word of caution, though. Don’t spam those sites. Add meaningful content, with just a few of your links. If it gets abused, it gets shut down.
The Weird Amazon Purchase of the Week this week is definitely the Chewbacca Talking Dashboard Driver. Having some sort of Dashboard Driver is weird enough – but Chewbacca? Every time you turn or stop, he just says “Rooooowwwwrrrrrrrrrrr”, I guess. That would be a funny gag gift, I suppose. Especially for a Star Wars nut. Regardless, I made about $1 from it.
Chewbacca Talking Dashboard Driver
This was a tough week to decide on a Weird Amazon Purchase of the Week.
Let’s start with the 3rd place entry. Even though I love this Firefly t-shirt, it isn’t very odd. But it is awesome.
For second place, I’m going with the Tattoos for the Elderly. I’ve just got to believe that it’s a gag gift. I don’t understand why you’d get them, but… Maybe they’d be funny for the right person?
And the winner is Sex in the City Perfume! And by winner, I mean loser. Seriously, who would buy this?
So how’s your holiday shopping going? No, I’m not talking about getting gifts for all your nieces and nephews, I’m talking about your holiday marketing efforts! Things look pretty good on my end – there really is an big uptick in online shopping so far this year. But what about Black Friday vs Cyber Monday?
Black Friday at Amazon:
Clicks: 1558
Orders: 267
Cyber Monday at Amazon:
Clicks: 860
Orders: 156
That isn’t an apples/apples comparison, as a decent percentage of my Amazon sales are through PPC. But I still didn’t realize the disparity. What about traffic?
Black Friday Traffic:
Uniques: 5413
Pages: 12215
Cyber Monday Traffic:
Uniques: 6716
Pages: 13482
Well that’s interesting, and unexpected. Cyber Monday traffic was about 25% higher, but sales were about 40% lower. I wonder what that’s about – I’ll have to do some more research on that. I could come up with some theory about on Black Friday people were ready to buy, and the deals were Black Friday only deals, so people didn’t shop around as much… But I don’t know.
What did you see on Black Friday and Cyber Monday? The same thing?
Welcome to Week Two of Weird Amazon Purchase of the Week. I know you’re all as excited as I am about this, so let’s get going. The odd item from this week is:
I had to do some research to figure out what the heck Spam Musabi Sushi is, and apparently it’s a fairly popular snack food in Hawaii and a few other places – it’s rice and fried spam tied together with seaweed. I’m not a huge fan of spam, but this looks pretty tasty. And I guess you need a sushi rice press if you want to make perfectly formed rice for your spam.
So, there you go! It makes perfect sense!
So one of my fun little hobbies is looking through all my Amazon affiliate accounts and finding the strangest thing that someone bought and I got affiliate credit for it. The winner this month is…
A bucket of 72 ping pong balls!
I love playing ping pong, but 72? What the hell are you going to do with 72 ping pong balls? Or maybe I don’t want to know?
Anyway, thanks for buying them. I made roughly $2.24 from your purchase.
Yeah, so I sent out my first press release ever yesterday, through PR.com. It’s actually fairly lame. They market themselves as free, but the free product kind of sucks. If you want to add a picture, that’s $30. If you want to add a link, that’s $30. Per link. And so on… I’ll try PRWeb or PRNewsWire next, and post a review of those. I’m confident the price is worth it.
My least favorite task is coming up with domain names. I do way too much of it, and it always infuriates me. I come up with the perfect, clever name and some squatter already owns it and is charging far too much for it. Really, you think $4000 is a fair price for filereportdinosaur.com? (That’s a terrible name, btw.) Argh.
Edit: I met a guy that sold me a domain for a very fair price. So maybe domainers aren’t all bad.
