by Joe & Tiara

This week’s topic focuses on gamers! Weeee! Or Wii. Either way. :B The Wii Laptop was introduced this week – not by Nintendo but by the guys over at engadget.com. Soon, it says they’ll have instructions on how to build one yourself, but I do wonder what the heck you can do with a WiiTop. I doubt that’s going to be allowed on planes. ;)

For those of you who like Guitar Hero (ZOMG WHO DOESN’T??!), Joe introduced us to this nifty article about hacking the game to get some friggin’ awesome custom songs from bands such as AC/DC, Journey, Dragonforce, Jimi Hendrix, Metallica, Ok Go, Rufio, System of a Down, and even Tenacious D! Unfortunately for me, it’s not as “idiot proof” as they say, ‘cause it sounds effin’ harrrrd man. But well worth the time I think if you’ve got it!

And for more news on Guitar Hero II, Neversoft is apparently taking over production of Guitar Hero III. This is big news for nerds, though I have no idea why Harmonix (who did both I & II) won’t be doing the third installment. It’s a huge success, so why push it elsewhere? Well, either way, the people who developed Tony Hawk Pro Skater will be handling GH3, and that probably means – better songs!!! Tony Hawk’s always got the most amazing soundtrack ever.

And no gamer list would be complete without a bit of World of Warcraft. So here are the Top 10 WoW Exploits. Nerds unite!

And to wrap up this week’s Favs, it appears “Playing video games can satisfy deep psychological needs and…improve people’s well-being”. See mom, I told you it would be good for your health to be able to make it past the flying fish bridge in Mario Brothers!

1. Submerge yourself into the affiliate underworld. Join affiliate marketing forums and start networking. You will want to learn form people who are actually making a lot of money doing this and they could help draw traffic to you as well.
2. Join this outstanding program put on by Ed Dale called the Underachiever Life at http://www.underachieverlife.com/30day/
3. Try Pay Per Click for your affiliate marketing but monetize via a niche keyword and do not get into competition for high paying terms. Lay down a blanket test using keyword tools like Overture Keyword Selector and Google Keyword tool. Try to choose low competitive inexpensive keywords that are roughly related to your industry or affiliate. Remember if your small test shows results you can always bring it to scale.
4. Start email marketing. If you do not have a list yet then start one. People who come to your affiliate site and sign up for lets say a newsletter or a free ebook are your target audience. They are giving you their contact information. The fish is already in your hands you just need to take the bite now. BTW you can make money off of selling your lists to list brokers which is another way to make some extra cash.
5. Use link bait to get more visitors and better rankings that turn into sales. Link bait is tactics used to get people to link and visit your site. Here is an example.
6. Utilize your social media. Social media is highly trafficked and by placing articles and or pages within them you can start driving traffic to your site for FREE. Check out affiliate marketing part 1 to see a list of social media.
7. Utilize forums to promote coupons and deals for your affiliate sites.
8. Give things away - give away a free ebook about your affiliate subject and require a person to fill out a form to get it.
9. Evaluate your competition – who is making the most money in your affiliate industry. Look at what they are doing for success and mimic that.
10. Do Article Distribution – write some fantastically creative articles about your affiliate and start an article syndication campaign by submitting your article to many content sites like ezine and article dashboard.
11. Recruit family and friends. Get all of your friends to buy products through your site and offer them the best price available. Once you have your family and friends shopping through you they will start to tell 10 friends and so on. This is a form of viral marketing, again FREE!
12. Get involved with blogging. If you are a web hosting affiliate then research and scope out a bunch of highly trafficked web hosting blogs and start participating in them while promoting your services.
13. Track your results, always always track what you are doing so you know if what you are doing is working or not!
14. Don’t just rely on affiliate income to make your money. Dive into contextual advertising, pay per post, adsense and other forms of monetizing your site.
15. Position your best converting affiliates above the fold of your website.