Enkay Blog

Last Day For My Contest

Just a reminder to everyone out there, tomorrow is the last day for my $700 contest held with Market Leverage. There haven’t been a lot of entries for the contest so your chances of winning are really high. For those of you who want to enter, see below to see how the contest works.

So here is how the contest works. What you have to do is submit videos and written affiliate marketing tips on my blog through the comments or by emailing me. For these tips, you’ll use Market Leverage as the example network. At the end of the month, when all the videos and tips have been submitted, I will personally view all of them and pick a winner.

The best tip will be chosen based on creativity, uniqueness and effectiveness. Each criteria that I use is weighted so that each of them is of equal importance. So, what does the winner get? Well, the winner gets their choice of a Flip Mino HD which is the new HD Flip Video Camera or they get a Blue Ipod Nano.

If that wasn’t enough, then theres MORE. Yes, MORE! There will be quite a few blogs running similar contests. What will then happen is that the winners from all the blogs will be judged by the blog owners that are running the contest. Based on that, the top three winners will then receive an Amazon Kindle, $100 Market Leverage Rewards Card & $50 iTunes Gift Card. Thats over $700 in prizes for a top winner!

Its really easy to enter. All you have to do is write up a nice affiliate marketing related tip or create a really great video with Market Leverage as the affiliate network of choice, and you’re entered. I’ll pick the winner and then the rest of the bloggers will decide the top winners. Easy enough?

Also, I realize that many of you are visual people and so I created this nice little visual for you to help you keep your eyes on the goal and to let you see the prizes!

So lets see those entries. You can post them as a comment, a post or write me an email!

Get You Some – Blog Blazers

So, I’m sure you’ve seen people talk about the book Blog Blazers by Stephane Grenier lately but I wanted to tell you guys about this book. I was contacted by Stephane himself and he wanted to send me a copy to read and review and I liked the concept so I asked him to send me a copy. A few days later, I received it and I had kept it aside because I was taking finals and so I had to focus on that. I apologize to Stephane for writing this so late but I mean, it was worth the wait.

First off, for those of you who don’t know who Stephane Grenier is, let me tell you that he knows what he is talking about. He is the founder and CEO of Landlord Max Software, Inc. and he owns and operates several blogs. He speaks at the Website Promotion and Traffic Generation seminar and he is well-known for authoring his past ebook, How to Generate Traffic to Your Website. He has done a phenomenal job with this book and maybe having me tell you about it, will make you want to go and get the book.

The book itself is very interesting. The concept is highly interesting and basically Stephane has painstakingly interviewed 40 highly influential bloggers and asked them questions such as what their most successful blog post was, how they make money from their blog and what are some of their favorite blogs. Now, you’d think that wow 40 bloggers, that must be quite disorganized. Well, Stephane solved that issue too. The book is HIGHLY organized. The questions are well placed and it was really easy to go through the index and look up a certain blogger so you can read more about their interview.

It was really great to hear from some of the bloggers that Stephane has interviewed. He also did a great job with the questions and asked questions that most of us would like to know the answers to, so that was really good too. Its an excellent book and I highly recommend it.

Now, you might wonder how much this book costs. Well its actually very affordable. You can either buy it from the Blog Blazers website or through Amazon. The price is $16.95 plus shipping, no matter where you get it from, which is a really good deal if you ask me. If you’d like more options then if you head over to the Blog Blazers website, you can actually buy the ebook version and save a tree for $12.95 or you could get the hard copy and the ebook for $20.95 which is a really good deal. So, if you don’t have the book yet, then go out and get it!

T3Leads Affiliate Review

Making money online may seem easy when other bloggers talk about it but there is one thing that all bloggers will agree upon, and that is diversifying your income. This means that you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. In the sense that you should explore many different ways that you can earn money online. One such way, which has recently become popular is through affiliate marketing.

There are a lot of good companies out there and I’ve talked about a few of them before but there’s another one that I had forgot to mention and thats T3Leads. You may have seen them featured on some other blogs and now its their time to shine on EnkayBlog, so lets take a look.

Background Information
T3Leads is an affiliate marketing company located in California. Their affiliate program directly cooperates with large networks of banks and other financial institutions to bring to its affiliates, a wide variety of ads to promote. These include anything from payday loans, auto insurance to mortgage loans and more. They have a very unique auction system in place that helps maximize profits for the affiliates.

Usability/Support
The idea of an affiliate system is that it should be easy to use not only by experienced affiliate marketers but also new affiliate markets. The sign up process for T3Leads didn’t take but 5 minutes and it was quite simple. If you ever find yourself stuck or pondering on something for a while then you can always find the contact page to get in touch with their friendly customer support who are ready to answer any and all types of questions. They can also help you with technical problems. One of the good things that I liked was that their contact page had phone numbers, email addresses, ICQ user names as well as AIM and Yahoo screen names. This makes contact with a customer support agent that much easier and accessible. They even have a great forum over at http://forum.t3leads.com that you can use in case you have any questions. Below is a screenshot of their contact page.

Interface
The user interface on the main page can be seen below. Its a bit graphically challenged and sometimes its not all in English but aside from that, its not that hard to navigate. The menu is located at the top and its a drop down menu so navigation is not an issue even if you are new to affiliate marketing. I would suggest that adding a bit of color and better language functionality would help them reach out to a lot of new affiliate marketers as well. On the plus side, they provide their users with lots of high quality promo tools that are constantly refreshed by their creative team to maximize performance.

Offers
They have lots of great offers that are seperated by public and private websites which are websites that are owned by people like you and I. They guarantee the highest conversion rates in the industry ranging from 1:6 to 1:9 in terms of ratio. Those are some pretty impressive numbers. Furthermore, they do not resell generated leads. Their leads help maximize the profits for its affiliates. They pay for each customer sent to them after the customer responds to your offers for qualified products and services. Here is how the offer page looks and as you can see im viewing the Public websites page.

Payment
T3Leads gives you several options for payment. The minimum payout is $100 based on the option you chose and you have several options to choose from. There is ePassporte, Company Check, Bank Wire Transfer, WebMoney, Paypal or Fethard. Some of them have a commission percentage which is subtracted from your payout but there are a few such as check and Fethard that don’t have any additional fees. Here is the payment screen below.

Final Thoughts
So, In conclusion I’d say that T3Leads seems to be doing a good job. They have some good offers, great support system in place and they have several payment options. Their user interface could use a little help in terms of navigation but aside from that they have it all figured out. If you haven’t tried them out yet, now is your chance to do so – Sign up!

Hatching The Blog Egg – Blog Development

Many of us have blogs, I mean ofcourse I do but, I know that several of you do too but there are also people that read my blog that don’t have blogs themselves. This post is for everyone, whether you have a blog or not. It really doesn’t make a difference but it will give you an insight into the process of how a blog develops. Theres several stages in the blog development processing and I think its interesting to see how this process works. So lets take a look:

1) Initiation – The initiation phase is usually the first two months of blogging. This is where you start getting things figured out. You set up pages, and get the design together and write some great posts. During this time, you also start setting up things like Twitter or MyBlogLog.

2) Recruiting – The recruiting phase has a start period, which is usually the third month but it should never end for your blog to be successful. This phase involves writing comments on other blogs and interacting with other bloggers so that you can recruit readers and visitors to your blog. This is the phase that helps establish you in the blogosphere.

3) Establishment Phase – This phase usually begins 6 months into the blogging process. By this time you begin to realize how popular your blog is. You begin to realize whether you are established in the blogosphere or not. Some blogs disappear during this time because they realize that it hasn’t worked for them but if youre able to stick around then you’re doing really good so far. This phase is important for the blog to survive.

4) Acknowledgment – The acknowledgment phase is usually 10 or 12 months into the blogging process. This is when you acknowledge blogging as a part of your daily life. This is a good phase to be a part of because you realize that you love blogging. If you’ve been in it for that long then usually youre successful and youre happy with the way things are. Its a phase of celebration for your confidence. Sticking it out to this phase means that youre definitely in it for the long run. You also begin to acknowledge yourself as a “Blogger”

5) Contemplation - Sometimes what tends to happen is that bloggers go into this optional 5th phase called contemplation. This is when they think about selling their blog but aren’t completely sure whether thats the route they want to take. Its when they want to sell the blog but also want to keep it. Not everyone goes through this phase but most of us are faced with the contemplation phase. Personally, I’ve had to deal with it and I’m glad I kept my blog. This phase requires quite a bit of thinking and making the right choice in the end.

So hopefully you’ve seen these phases with your blog if you have a blog. Even if you dont have a blog you may have seen these phases with some of your favorite blogs. Let me know what you think about my little list and I hope you guys have a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone! Have a great day!

Do You Believe In Blog Holidays?

So for those of you who dont know what a blog holiday is, its the day that most bloggers take off during the week. Usually I take either Saturday or Sunday and some times both days off during the week but that depends on how the week is going for me. Lately ive taken quite a bit of time off but now im trying to return to my normal schedule.

The idea about a blog holiday is normal and most blogs do take a day or two off per week and some more depending on how many posts they do a week. The idea about a blog holiday is to give your mind a break and your readers too.

What tends to happen is that when you write new and interesting posts every day, sooner or later you’ll feel that youre running out of ideas. What happens is that sometimes you only have one or two tag worthy posts a week. That means that posts that are so good that people will link to them. The more you write, you’ll use up your tag worthy posts faster. You want to save your posts and so usually you would take a day or two off.

Aside from that, the idea of taking a day or two off means that you give your brain some rest. That allows you to spend time with the family and in that process come up with more ideas. The best ideas come around when you least expect it so taking a day or two off actually helps you become more productive in terms of creativity and helps you come up with more ideas. Its an interesting idea if you think about it and I’m sure those of you that take a day or two off actually notice that you come up with your ideas during that period.

So my whole point of this post is. Do you guys think that taking a day off is important and how many of you actually take a day off. Do you think it makes you more productive? I’d be interested in finding out. Well you guys have a great week ahead and I’ll catch you tomorrow!