The Business Blog at Intuitive.com

Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is widely recognized as an expert on both technical and business issues. He has been published over a thousand times, launched four Internet-related startup companies, has written twenty business and technical books and holds both an MBA and MS Ed. Dave maintains four weblogs: The Business Blog at Intuitive.com, Ask Dave Taylor, Dave On Film, and Attachment Parenting Blog. Dave is an award-winning speaker, sought after conference and workshop participant and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs.

What does blogging have to do with affiliate marketing?

This coming Thursday is shaping up to be a busy day for me, I must say. Thursday afternoon Steven Van Yoder and I are starting our Growing Your Business with Google teleseminar which will then stretch for three months as we help lots of savvy businesses and entrepreneurs understand how to grow their business quickly and sustainably.

An hour earlier on Thursday, however, I'll be chatting on the phone with Marty Fahncke, Shawn Collins and former pro-ball player Jim Boulton, who was a member of the New York Yankees, best selling author of Ball Four, TV Sportscaster, actor, inventor, and businessman.

We'll be talking about the upcoming Affiliate Summit this July in Orlando, Florida and I know you'll want to take the time to listen in on this free call.

I gave a workshop on blogging at the last Affiliate Summit, a few months ago in Las Vegas, and was so impressed by the audience and energy of the group that I immediately signed up to speak again in Orlando (the fact that it's at Disneyworld doesn't hurt any either, to be honest).

Affiliate marketing is a multi-billion dollar business, actually (learn more here: About Affiliate Marketing), and if you haven't asked yourself how affiliate marketing can help your business succeed, then you might well be missing out on the chance to have a commission-only sales force pounding the virtual pavement to sell your product and service every day.

So how does blogging tie in? Simple: blogging lets you create an effective communications channel with your marketplace, be you a merchant seeking affiliates or an affiliate seeking to encourage potential customers to buy a given product. Blogging hits the sweet spot of search engines too, making it easy to generate fresh content with frequency. I'll talk about why that's so darn important on the call, but I also talk about it at length in my popular book Growing Your Business with Google.

More bloggers than you think are using affiliate links too. On this page, for example, my link to the Affiliate Summit is an affiliate link. If you visit the site based on my link here, read through and decide to sign up for the conference (and you really should, it's going to be terrific) then the folk who are putting on the conference will pay me a small commission for making the sale, probably about $20 or so.

This is a win:win:win, in my view. From your perspective as the reader, you know that you can help support my blogging efforts without cost to yourself by using my affiliate link, I win because I get to help make the Summit as successful as possible and hopefully make a bit of pocket change along the way, and Shawn Collins and the Affiliate Summit team win because, well, they get more people to sign up for the program.

Really the only place where affiliate marketing can go bad is if I were to transform myself into a shill, writing about things that I didn't like and didn't recommend simply so I could push out the affiliate link. But that's nothing limited to blogging - we see this kind of drivel in our mailboxes every day. Instead, I believe that the overall community will learn to quickly discount what a shill blogs about as their credibility plummets to zero.

Anyway, we can talk about that too, both on the call and at the conference itself!

Oh! You probably want to know how to join this free call with baseball player Jim Boulton and I, don't you?

Please click here to register for the free call.

And, yes, that's an affiliate link too.

Before you leave a comment, a tip: If you're interested in blogging, you should sign up for my Blogsmart News so you can stay up to date on the latest insider tips and ideas for your Internet business and marketing efforts. Sign up right now and you'll get a free copy of my "Insider's Guide to Blogging" ebook too!