Earn passive income by promoting and referring new business to us.

This is a free to join affiliate program, promoting our Internet Marketing Training, Tools and Services.

How much can you earn?

This is really down to you, the commission structure is simple. It runs between 15% and 40% for sales directly made which originate from you and, if you would rather a quite life, 5% from sales produced by other partners you introduce to us.

For business generated by you in any given month we will pay the following commission rates;

If you have introduced a partner to us also, they will be paid the commissions above and you will receive 5%. It’s that simple!

It’s not difficult, it won’t take up your time and you can earn from it!

It isn’t difficult nor will it consume your time or detract your attention from your day-to-day activity. Implementing our affiliate scheme can be as simple as adding a link to your website or blog. Or, you can choose to spend a little more time and send out an email to your contacts or even discuss our products and services through your favourite networking sites such as Linked-In, Twitter, Facebook or perhaps you can write a review on your blog or newsletter. It’s entirely up to you!

Our system has a video tutorial, some online “Getting Started” guides and we are always at the end of the phone or email if you want some ideas or guidance.

I’m a people person, how can I get involved?

I guess by this you mean that you generally meet with people all day long and your referrals are normally done in an exchange of telephone numbers. No problem, you can email links to your contacts instead of just reading out our telephone number. Our system will provide you with your unique affiliate link and that’s what you use in your email.

What if my referred visitor doesn’t buy straight away?

You still get paid, this is covered in our frequently asked questions, so I won’t elaborate here. It’s suffice to say that we use a number of techniques to track visitors and once a visitor is recorded as coming from you, you own them and will be paid if and when they should buy anything from us.

So what do I do now?

The first thing you need to do is enrol, but don’t delay, we are offering to credit your account with a welcome £10.00 for a limited time only, so don’t loose out, signup now.

Please remember, don’t delay and make sure you benefit from the £10.00 credit today and also feel free to call or email me if you have any questions.

We are looking forward to paying you oodles!

Signup Link: http://affiliate.beginning-internet-marketing.com/affiliates/signup.php
FAQ Link: http://affiliate.beginning-internet-marketing.com/affiliates/faq.php

Like me, I’m sure you’re tired of seeing the same old junk SPAM online about some get rich quick schemes. This SPAM seams to be everywhere, Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, email, just everywhere. You click a link and up come some guys sitting on a beach and they tell you that they earn $100,000 per month and all they do is sit on their rear ends all day. If only life were that simple?

We all know these are scams, they are just an Internet spin on an old, and in many countries illegal, practise called Pyramid Selling. It’s a real shame that this is happening as the actual channel of affiliate marketing is fast becoming one of the main driving forces behind online commerce.

In fact in 2007 sales generated by affiliates grew by an estimated 45% on the previous year which attributed £3 billion^* to the affiliate marketing channel. The amount of growth slowed in 2008, which we feel is down to the financial situation we have all experienced, but revenue remained the same.

So, if you are thinking of jumping in to a reputable affiliate program, think in terms of an online business which requires work to get yourself on that beach, but there is a pie, currently larger than £3 billion which you can take a slice from!

Today we have launched our own free to join affiliate program, which begins by selling Internet Marketing training material but will extend to Internet marketing tools and services in the very near future. Plus, for a limited time only, we are paying new sign-ups of our affiliate program £10.00 for just signing up.

You can read more about our free affiliate marketing program on our affiliate partner site.

* The eConsultancy Affiliate Marketing Merchants Report 2007

You've probably seen it on the end or beginning of a Twitter tweet, it normally looks something like "#FF @BeginInterMktg", but what does it mean?

Well, #FF stands for Follow Friday and the hashtag (#) is a Twitter search feature which allows users to group information into a category of some kind. Try a search for #FF here. OK, I know that hasn't really answered the question, so what does Follow Friday mean?

People, especially marketers, want to grow their followers. #FF is a way to recommend others to follow them. In doing this, you can also grow your followers because of a kind of mutual gratitude.

Here's how it works:

You identify people you follow and decide to recommend them. You obviously can decide who to recommend yourself, that part's up to you. You may like someone's tweets and find them useful, so you want to share them, they may have previously re-tweeted one of your tweets, or they may have already recommended you, the choice is yours.

Next, pull up Twitter and start an update as follows:

#FF @UserName1 @UserName2

Where you replace @UserName1 and 2 with the users you want to recommend, but don't forget the @ sign in front of their user names.

Hit the 'Update' button and your done. Now make a note of your current follower numbers, you should see it increase over the next few hours.

The reason your followers are likely to increase is because anyone watching the #FF stream may well follow the people your recommending but are also highly likely to follow the people doing the recommending.

It's that simple, so don't delay, get Following on Fridays, and then have a great weekend.

The Google Wave is gathering momentum and the beta testers are having quite a ride. The question is what and how can the Wave be leveraged by business users? Firstly take a look at this superb video which contains strong language but does demonstrate the Waves amazing functionality of the search mega giants embrace of social media.

Wow, the system is a fully integrated media extravaganza, with the ability to pull in images, movies, sound clips, background tracks and multiple format text. The user can start multiple waves (conversations) and select participants by their wave avatar (image or photo) and then start collaborating.

The end result is a single platform which looks like it can be used by business, not only for marketing, but customer support, project management, quick internal and external conversations, the list just goes on.

Many dispersed workforces have been using chat-room technology to connect quickly for quite sometime, but the interactivity is normally limited to some text and a smiley :o). Recently with Facebook and Twitter, some have started to use these slightly richer platforms to perform the same tasks. However, the very real and rich components of The Wave may well be so compelling that business once again migrates to the better platform.

From a marketing perspective, the Wave will need to encourage the same mass buy-in as Facebook and Twitter. Googles Friend Connect hasn't yet hit the big time but we are sure The Wave is going to hit much harder.

On the 16th to 17th October 2009 the Internet saw a new trending topic. Promoted by Social Media Marketing of Atlanta GA. People were told far and wide to post to Twitter, Facebook and on their own blogs the hashtag #beatcancer.

Superb sentiment and with 209,771 recorded posts, a superb result, which is now being proclaimed a world record. Twitters' search of the hashtag reported that eBay/Paypal and MillerCoors would be donating 1 US cent for every recorded hit. Well as far as we can tell, all three companies could afford to bump that up to a nice square dollar, but hey, I'm not one for spending other people's money!

So what now? Although the intention in this case was obviously sincere, what's going to happen next? There's enough SPAM on Twitter as it is, all we need now is a bunch of copycat marketers "Trying to beat the world record". Suddenly you're being asked to tweet #abcelectrics because they want to hit the 300,000 recorded mentions.

I know it's grumpy and perhaps a bit sceptical, but I just hope we don't see an overuse of this strategy, at least, save them for the really important things.

Having said that we got involved with our partner iPhone App iCamWait which donates 10% of pre-tax profits to a number of charities one of which is the World Cancer Research Fund. So at least we can say we did our bit, however #abcelectrics? Well Goodluck if you do try I guess!

On the 15th October we wrote about corporate management of social media. The article was titled "Manage the conversation with Comment" which introduces a new platform for larger organisations to engage their audience through social media.

The article also demonstrates the key issues which face corporate business where social media is concerned. We feel that these issues are extremely compelling and certainly pose a very real challenge.

The key concepts which we are sure are keeping many marketers up at night are the ways social media can be used to promote products/services and brand along with crisis and negative feedback management.

It's the crisis and negative feedback management which poses the real threat. Flare-ups of negative attitude and posts occur within the Twitter time-line stream, as an example, on a daily basis. Just a few weeks ago, a major mobile telephone network had significant outages and their brand name made it to the top of the Trending Topics (TT). That may seam like good news for some in the marketing department, until they actually looked at the posts from disgruntled, upset and downright annoyed customers. So how can such organisations manage such criticism?

Social Media is real-time, business doesn't have a 24 or 48 hour window of opportunity to devise a response and react to negative reports in newspapers, television and radio reports. If it's happening now on social networks, it needs to be addressed now!

The key to tackling this very real and growing problem is to take more control.

Companies can attempt to engage their customers and prospective customers on their own turf and setup networks of their own. In order to do this they need to build solutions which they can integrate into there own Internet Marketing Landscape. This is where we feel Comment Technologies can help greatly. Its platform is sophisticated and feature rich and provides the tools required to setup such an environment. 

However, the corporate companies also require the tools to allow them to keep track of mentions on networks like Twitter, Facebook, Linked-In, Google Wave etc. This is one of the most important parts of the puzzle. So we have started our search for what looks to be the holy grail of social media reporting. We'll keep you updated on what we find. Please feel free to add a comment if you know of any such solution.

Here are a few links you may find of interest;
Hootsuite (http://hootsuite.com) is a Twitter client which allows organisations to manage their Twitter accounts as well as reporting on Brand and statistics.

Comment Technology (http://www.commenttechnologies.com) is a Social Media technology company which provides a feature rich platform for companies' to produce and manage their own networks.

Over the years you may well move office or change contact details on a number of occasions. However, if your clients don't know you have moved or can't get in contact with you, you could be loosing them, or at least, upsetting them.

You're probably answering this with a comment something like, "We'll send them an email or a letter!". Of course you will, but how many of your recipients will actually take the time to update their contact system such as Outlook as an example?

The truth is, very little, but when they do need you it becomes a mad panic and in the worse case scenario, it means a lost opportunity for you.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could just automatically update your contact details in your clients CRM systems or Outlook contacts lists?

Unfortunately, I don't know of a way to do this yet, but here are a few suggested remedies for the problem.

1. Update your Linked-In profile with your correct contact details.
2. Ensure your website and email signatures are updated and ALWAYS, include your signature on ALL of your emails. Yes, even replies and forwards.
3. When informing your clients of your move send them a vCard contact file.

You can create a vCard easily in Outlook, I'm sure the process is similar in other systems also, but I'll demonstrate it here.

Firstly, create a new Contact in Outlook and fill it in with all of the information you wish to share with your contacts. You have space to add your home contact details and date of birth etc. However, just because you can, doesn't mean you have too!

Your screen will look something like this;

Next, pull down the File menu and click Save As.

Now find a location on your computer to save the vCard to. Don't forget to change the "Save As Type" to vCard or vcf file.

Click Save, and there you go. You now have your contact details nicely packaged in a vCard which you can email to your contacts and they can quickly and painlessly import into their contact system.

By the way, they can import it as easily as double clicking the vCard and their contact system, like Outlook, will guide them the rest of the way.

We hope this helps and happy moving!

The age of social networking is well and truly here!

Facebook™, Twitter™, Linked-In™ and Flickr™ are just a few of the household names we stumbleupon™ on a daily basis. We may not use them all or even know how they all really work, but you just can't help switching on the TV, radio or even browsing your favourite website and not see or hear about one of these services.

The question is not are you doing it yet? It's have you dugg it with digg™ yet?

Companies large and small are trying to leverage this new form of word-of-mouth marketing to spread their message in a passive, but effective manner. However, there in lies a problem. This problem is especially true for larger organisations where the control of information is paramount. Maybe the word control is a little too strong here, perhaps we should say "Analysis & Response".

What I mean by this is, the larger the company, the more they are in the spotlight and bad news can hit like a tidal wave. Companies need a quick way of responding to trending discussions on such news and leveraging social media is fast becoming the new, and lower cost, way of doing this.

Ok, that is the bleaker side of the commercial use of social media, simply transmitting flight information as Lufthansa's has started with its http://myskystatus.com/ service is a cool use of the medium along with the growing trend to promote movie releases and new products and services are all there too, but it all does come back to control, management and marketing finesse.

There are a few services around that offer social networking solutions for companies, KickApps.com has been on the playing field for quite sometime, but released just recently, at the end of last year, Comment Technologies launched with a new angle on corporate buy-in to social networking.

Their philosophy is to "bring the conversation back home" and the platform appears to do just that. With common tools and services like RSS boxes and content panels (Facebook wall etc.), Member profiles, Member pages, Blogs, Polls, Opinions, Surveys, Forums, Photo Albums, Messaging & Groups to name just a few. They promise the epitome of a dream social networking solution for any wide-eyed and bushy tailed corporate marketer.

The Chococo Community is a featured implementation of the platform and you can take a look through it here http://community.chococo.co.uk/.

As for Comment Technologies? We think this is going to be a very interesting few years for them and I look forward to reporting back to you on their progress.

Today our friends at Google(tm) released Fetch as Googlebot. This is a new tool available in your webmaster control panel (http://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/) under the Labs link in the Dashboard links.

It's purpose is to display what Google sees when it visits your web pages. The reason this tool is going to be useful to webmasters is that it will enable them to ensure that what Google received is what you intend them to see. This is not a tool to allow you to change the content you send to Google, that would be a real no, no and is a sure fire way to get your website blacklisted. However, it is intended to allow you to check all of the;

• HTTP headers
• Cookies
• Content types
• And overall web page content

At the moment the results are very raw and displays a basic dump of your web pages headers and HTML markup. We feel there is more to come though, we are going to add some comments to Google Labs feedback to include;

• Highlight ignored page elements
• Highlight issue elements found on page. e.g.
  • Poor markup
  • invalid doctype
  • invalid links
  • not followed links
  • un-indexed page areas
• Page Improvement recommendations
• Heat map of indexable content so that a webmaster can see areas of the content which are going to have higher index priority than others.

Why not let us know your thoughts and together we can make the Fetch as Googlebot a tool for everyone to benefit from.

Using the same password everywhere is a big mistake. Everyone knows it, but equally, most people do it.

The problem is that your online security is a bit like an egg, Hmmm, funny analogy isn't it? OK, stay with me and I'll explain. An egg is a very robust and durable thing, it's hard and most eggs, if held in the palm of your hand, are really quite hard to break by just squeezing them. However, once you Peirce an egg, all of its strength is lost.

This is the key to my previous statement. If you use your password in the wrong place and someone gets hold of it, they can start to create real trouble for you. Think about all of the places you have used that password and you can start to see why it could be an issue.

So this undesirable person has grabbed your password from www.wearenotsafe.com what do they do now? Well they probably got your email address also, so they may start trying to log in to your;

• PayPal account
• Amazon account
• Google profile
• etc. etc. etc.

So, apart from writing down your passwords, what's the next best solution?

Well, our friends at DailyBlogTips.com just posted a great article on keeping your password safe by creating a formula so that you can have a different password for every website, but never forget them. Wow, fantastic job guys! View it here.

They demonstrate the steps to take but make sure you apply your own letter & number elements otherwise we'll all end up with the same damn password and that wouldn't be great!