Nanacast has become quite a popular shopping cart service for many people selling products and services online but it can take quite a bit of getting used to as it is quite different from most other services especially when it comes to affiliate management.

If you are wondering how to email your nanacast affiliates their swipe emails then check out this walkthrough video on how it’s possible through the Nanacast Advanced Outgoing API:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2631gvVdLrw

If you are using nanacast and you would like me to set this up for you, just contact me through this site and I’ll get back to you.

Stop obsessing over HTML5 and CSS3 | Webdesigner Depot
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2011/06/stop-obsessing-over-html5-and-css3/

As web designers, we all seem obsessed by HTML5 and CSS3 at the moment. Endless posts, tutorials and discussion about them dominate the blogosphere. But how much are we learning that can be applied today?

Don’t get me wrong. We all need to understand HTML5 and CSS3. And a lot of it can be used today.

My point is that we seem to be spending a disproportionate about of time reading up on the subject when so many other areas deserve our attention.

It’s true. As techies we are often more interested in bits and bytes rather than the things that actually generate business for us. 

Link tracking is a fundamental part of online business. If you don’t know where your traffic is coming from then you don’t know how to optimize your website, your sales process, and your business.

Google provides a set of parameters you can add to any link which automatically get tracked through Google Analytics. This means you can now easily track exactly where your traffic and conversions are coming from. Problem is, these parameters aren’t easy to remember, and its rather tedious to navigate to the Google URL builder page everytime you want to create a trackable link.

Now you don’t have to. You can create Google Url Builder links very easily using the Magic Url Shortener extension for Google Chrome. You can even shorten those links using the popular bit.ly shortening service all through one interface.

Check Out Magic Url Shortener here…

Download the Magic Url Shortener Tutorial PDF

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXnmy_U6xeg

Here is a super easy way to integrate: WordPress, affiliate links, and Google analytics…

The benefit of this method is that all you need to do is create a new page in WordPress and input your affiliate link. Everything else is done for you.

If you are tracking your blog through Google Analytics you will now see those links as content pages in your report.

You will need the WP Page Refresh Plugin to use this method. You also get the Affiliate Cookie Drop Plugin as a bonus. Scroll to the bottom of this post to purchase these plugins.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5wjnpGzFBY

Click Here To Download The PDF Walkthrough


To create a sample redirect page, click the “Add New” link under the Pages dropdown

media_1305680448405.png

You can also do this with Posts. You might like to create a category called “recommends” and then have each Post under that category redirect through your affiliate link.

Specify a title for your new page

media_1305680690188.png

Note: You may want to click the “Edit” option on the permalink setting and delete the dash so your permalink looks something like: http://mikeleembruggen.com/productname/

Note: Make sure you have the WP Page Refresh and Affiliate Cookie Drop Plugins checked under “Screen Options” at the top of the page

media_1305680984717.png

Scroll down to the WP Page Refresh section and enter your affiliate link into the “Destination URL” field

media_1305680889878.png

Enter a “Delay Time”

media_1305681156160.png

0 means that the page will redirect immediately after it has finished loading. This will be fine for most uses.

Click the “Publish” button

media_1305681311060.png

That’s It!

Now you should see a new link on your home page and when you click that, it will redirect through your affiliate link.

Affiliate Cookie Drop settings: If you want to redirect to a custom page other than the direct affiliate landing page… Select your affiliate link, right click, and select “Cut”

media_1305681529680.png

Example usage: You can use this Affiliate Cookie Drop plugin to direct link to an order form instead of the sales page if you have already pre-sold the customer.

Paste that link into the “Affiliate Link” field in the Affiliate Cookie Drop settings

media_1305681681802.png

Enter your custom landing page URL into the “Detination URL” field in the WP Page Refresh settings

media_1305681772166.png

Click the “Publish” button

media_1305681854623.png

That’s It!


Easy WordPress Links – Comes With WP Page Refresh Plugin, Affiliate Cookie Drop Plugin and How-To Guide

Something that’s becoming more apparent to me every day is that I have a finite amount of highly productive energy available to me each day. It kinda sux, because naturally I want to get as much done as possible but when I think about the times that I am most productive and actually get things done, it’s really a small window.

This is the case for everyone no matter how smart you think you are. We, as humans are cyclical by nature, we are not computers and cannot function linearly, which means we cannot produce a high constant output for long periods of time. This became clear to me after watching Tony Schwartz presentation. (Thanks for sharing that video Kyle).

For me, I work best under pressure. This is more of a pressure I place on myself rather than other people placing it on me. That’s just stressful, but when I know that I only have an hour left in the day before I need to turn off the computer, my brain switches into productive mode and I start thinking about what can I do in this last hour that is really going to make a difference to my business.

I find near the start and end of the day are times that are highly productive for me. At the start of the day, I have new energy, and I can get a task done that needs to get done. At the end of the day, I have that pressure situation where I know I need to get something done before the day ends.

Then there’s days where you are down, which is natural. Like I said, we are cyclical. Happens to be today for me. I didn’t get enough sleep last night and I don’t believe I really have the mental enthusiasm to get done a high energy task I wanted to do today. If I do it just because it needs to get done, then there’s a high chance that I won’t produce my desired outcome. I will get frustrated with the whole process, and I may abandon something that is a good idea simply because I attempted it when I wasn’t at a mental high point.

It’s a hard pill to swallow. What do you do? Try work yourself into a high mental state, pump yourself full of guarana energy drinks, or simply leave it until another day?

I’m interested to know your opinion on this and what works best for you.

I think it’s important to identify when you are at high mental capacity and when you are just having a bad day. I think sometimes when you are low, it’s better to completely switch off, give yourself a break, and realise that it’s ok. You need a break.

The danger of thinking about anything business related when you are in a low mental state is that your decisions still stick moving forward. If you make a decision about something when you are down, that decision will carry forward even when you are back up to high mental capacity. It will cause you to abandon things, believe something doesn’t work or is too hard, and make judgemens that affect the rest of your life simply because you were having a bad day and weren’t thinking clearly.

If you are looking for a very simple and easy-to-use mind map software, then bubbl.us might just be the answer for you.

I have got to hand it to the developers of this software. They have made it extremely easy to get started. When you fist load up the website, you see a button in the middle of the page that says “Start Brainstorming”. You click that button and you’re immediately in editing mode for your new mind map. Brilliant. No sign up necessary, but of course once you start creating a mind map, you decide you want to save it and you sign up.

 

Here is a quick video walkthrough of the software showing various different aspects of it. There are a few little quirks I found such as the Pin/Unpin aspect that made it quite difficult to work with large maps, but overall I think it is an excellent platform if you are looking for something simple and easy to use, and best of all… FREE.

 

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pld4pKlllOY

 
Here is an example of the HTML embed option:
 

Some of the other mind map software available is FreeMind, MindMeister, MindNode, iMindMap, Mind42, MindManager, & SimpleMind.

If you like this post and would like me to review other mind mapping software, then please leave me a comment below.

How do you handle rejection? It’s definitely something that is not easy to accept for most people but something that is key to success in business. It’s what separates the top earners from everyone else who jumps from one idea to the next in the hope that their new idea is going to work. Here’s how to measure your rejection rate: How many rejections or failures does it take for you to quit a proven method or strategy?

Most people’s honest answer is 1.

Here’s a story told to me once by a wise man to illustrate the point. If you were to put in two dollars (for argument sake) into a vending machine and click the button for a coke, what would you expect to happen? You would expect the coke can to pop out the bottom right? Say you passed this vending machine everyday and you bought a coke everyday for a year and each time it popped out the bottom just like you expected. Then one day you came to the vending machine just like normal and put in your two dollars expecting a coke can to pop out the bottom, and nothing happened. You shake the machine, give it a kick and a prod, but still nothing. What would you think? You just spent your hard earned two dollars and got no return. You now have doubts about this vending machine. Maybe it’s broken, maybe it doesn’t work anymore. The question is, are you likely to return to this vending machine the next day? Probably not, even though this machine has worked perfectly for the last year, your faith in this machine is now shaken. That’s the point. All it takes for most people to give up and look to something else to be the answer is one rejection or failure.

Smart business people know that rejection is part of the game, and persistence is key. They have built up a high rejection tolerance. It takes more than one ‘NO’ for them to quit.

That’s an important lesson. You got to stick to the plan when things get tough and it seems like they’re not working.

Think about that story again, and ask yourself the question… What’s my rejection rate?

If it’s one, then it’s not enough. Think about how you could increase it to two, and then three, and then when you achieve success, solidify this idea in your mind so that when you move onto bigger projects, you know and understand that rejection is just part of the game.

The Internet only become more and more important to business owners in the last 5 years. Although 5 years doesn’t seem like a long time. It’s surprising to see just how far technology has come in that short space of time.

The internet has made communication easier. Dissemination of information and other data has became almost instantaneous. People from all around the globe can now be connected. It has become a solid platform where people can transact and conduct business twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. There’s no restrictions on opening and closing hours and it has opened up the doors to essentially millions of people who can visit your business page.

In this article, I am going to show you a glimpse of the current trend of internet usage specifically for Australia.

 

Australia
Internet Usage Stats and Telecommunications Market Report

Internet Usage Statistics:

17,033,826 Internet users as of Aug/2009, 80.1% of the population, according to Nielsen.

Facebook Users in Australia:
9,520,960 as of August 31, 2010, according to Facebook.

Internet Broadband Subscribers:
4,700,200 Broadband subscribers (connections) as of Sept./07, 22.8% of the population, according to OECD.

 

Internet Growth and Population Statistics:

YEAR Users Population % Pop. G.N.I. p.c. Usage Source
2000 6,600,000 19,521,900 33.8 % $19,992 (’00) ITU
2007 14,729,191 20,434,176 70.2 % $21,650 (’06) Nielsen
2009 16,926,015 21,262,641 79.6 % $32,220 (’06) Nielsen
2010 17,033,826 21,262,641 80.1 % $32,220 (’06) Nielsen

G.N.I.p.c. = Per Capita Gross National Income in US dollars, historic series.

Australia Internet Demographic Information:

Population:

20,507,264 (2005 est.)

Age structure:

0-14 years: 19.8% (male 2,116,875/female 1,943,563)

15-64 years: 67.2% (male 7,085,692/female 6,695,189)

65 years and over: 12.9% (male 1,193,435/female 1,452,002) (2005 est.)

 

Median age:

Total: 36.56 years (2005 est.)
Female: 37.4 years
male: 35.74 years

According to this data, Australian internet users are mostly in the 15 to 64 years old age bracket. This only means that most of them already have the capacity to purchase.

People in Australia alone spend 11 billion dollars in online purchases. The question now is: “Do you want your business to get a portion of those 11 billion dollars that our fellow Australians are paying for online products and services?”

The statistics I have gathered clearly shows that Australians are not shy when it comes to purchasing both goods and services online. Australia is now the third highest country in the world when it comes to utilizing e-commerce.

The internet isn’t a story of how beneficial it is for home usage anymore. The internet now presents an opportunity for your business to step up and reach out to more potential clients. Internet marketing is not easy as it seems but through the proper marketing techniques, and strategy – you’ll reap the harvest of your investment.

The key to internet marketing is to go where the people go. Facebook, Youtube, Myspace, Twitter, Yahoo groups are only some of the social media sites that we can use to reach out to the potential clients and eventually drive traffic to our site.

 

Australia’s Fastest Growing Social Media Activities
Activity 2009 2008 YOY Change
Read messages on Twitter 23% 7% 16%
Interacted with a brand via social network 38% 23% 15%
Read a wiki 72% 61% 11%
Posted on Twitter 13% 4% 9%
Browsed/followed brands on Twitter 14% 5% 9%
Interacted with people on a social network 63% 55% 8%
Watched online video for product/service 63% 57% 6%
Updated a social networking profile 57% 51% 6%
Looked at a social networking profile 73% 67% 6%
Posted pictures online 68% 63% 5%
Source: The Nielsen Company

 

The opportunity to take your business online and reach thousands more customers is already in your hands.  It’s either stay in the traditional OFF-line market where people sell and advertise through newspapers with less and less readers each week, or we reach out to the entire country through a website, or social media platform which is open to thousands or even millions of visitors. It’s time to think outside of the box.

The quest for creating unique content has taken people down many different avenues over the last few years. There are dozens of spinning tools and software out on the market now, and they each work well to varying degrees.

One of the best ways I have seen to create quality spinnable content is to rewrite content based on sentences rather than words. This makes your article much more readable and human friendly.

Most of the services out there are independant software apps or membership websites. When I was searching for tools and software for content spinning I came across SEO Wordspinner by Zack Katz, which is a wordpress plugin that allows you to show different sentence combinations each time your page is refreshed. It works by putting brackets around each sentence and then the pipe character between multiple versions of that sentence. I thought this plugin was a great idea since most people will be putting content and articles on their wordpress blog.

One thing lacking in this plugin was the ability to easily create rewritten sentences. I had been using a very popular service called Article Ranks which has a fantastic editor for rewriting sentences. So, I thought why not create a simple visual editor plugin for wordpress that gives users an easy way to rewrite their articles just like this service and make it compatible with Zack’s SEO Wordspinner plugin.

So, here it is… 100% free for you.

Click Here To Download SEO Content Rewriter

I’m talking productivity here. The question is… Is digital actually better or worse for brainstorming, organising, and planning your thoughts into actionable processes?

As technology abounds in today’s society and everyone is using word processors, spreadsheets, mind maps, and slide presentations to communicate ideas, it’s not a matter of choice anymore. Digital is it, but is it really the most effective way to explore your own thoughts and achieve the highest productivity out of your own time.

I don’t know about you but I keep a simple notebook on my desk to write down a list of tasks that I want to achieve every day. It’s a great way to keep focused and I’ve been doing it for a few years now, so it’s something that I’ve developed into a habit and find it very useful.

I find writing with a pen is much more intuitive and thought provoking than typing on a keyboard. I guess because it’s a little more creative, a little faster, and it produces a greater mind-body connection. The problem is that you can’t just copy and paste that text, format it, and transfer it to another application. Of course there are various new hardware devices like the Livescribe pen making this idea more of a reality today, but that is topic for another post.

Today I did something a little different than just writing tasks in my notebook. I decided to write down everything I was thinking. I would be half way through writing a list of action steps and then I would hit a step that would spur a new thought process. Instead of trying to keep focused on the bigger picture and bury those new thoughts, I wrote them down and continued that thought process until it was resolved. I found this actually helped me to work through a lot of things that my brain would usually not be able to focus on, either because the thought was too large and I needed to break it into smaller chunks or because it might be an area that my subconscious was avoiding. That is also topic for another post but I found instead of letting my mind go cloudy, I would write questions to myself, and then I would answer them. Once I had answered or eliminated all my objections, I was able to return back to my action step list and proceed.

In just half a day I had already written 10 pages of scribble, which is something not really worth doing in digital form, or something that you wouldn’t bother doing in digital form because it’s all about concise, to the point text, and reducing the number of words needed to express an idea. Creating digital content definitely has it’s advantages as you can easily segment content, add new content to previous sections, and create a document that’s easy to share with others, but if you are stuck on a idea and can’t seem to work out the steps you need to take to make it happen then definitely try just writing in a notepad.

It’s a great way to establish that mind-body connection and really explore your deepest thoughts and objections that may be holding you back from achieving your goals. Even though it can take longer to write every thought out on paper, and then rewrite some of that content into digital form, you might just find that your actual productivity level shoots through the roof.