Tied to your desk.

I just had a great conference session with James Martell and the focus was about affiliate marketing and travel.

I think one of the big draws of affiliate marketing, or any Internet based business really, is that you can do it from home, free yourself up from travel to the office, live a better lifestyle... but the reality is that many of us become just as tied to our desks now as we did when we had to go to the office to work. Heads down 7 days a week, we barely take note of where we are or what we could ... should... be doing.

If the Internet is our place of work, and our laptops our desk then we should all be trying to take our desks outside, away, far far away, hit the beach, the pool, where ever and start living a little of the lifestyle we planned, but didn't do.

I'm as guilty as everyone else on this, but I wonder how many people do manage to get out and do work where ever they lay their hat.

So here's my challenge for everyone, start working away from your "home" , head to a local pool with wifi, a cafe, library, where ever, experience working "out of the office" and then once you've overcome that nervous first step, see how far you can take your desk, and live a little of that lifestyle we should all be enjoying :-)

Pre Coded Video via RSS Feeds...

It's late and it's the weekend, and I should be in bed, my eye sight is kinda blured, but the truth is there in front of me... I've managed to put a Gaiam video into the LinkShare RSS and have it spit out the other side pre-coded with the affiliate link... and I've played with the content, updated it, changed it and generally mucked around and it's still working, still updating in real time and still tracking perfectly. You can check out the sample I threw together here. It is rough and ready. Or log into LinkShare and grab the raw feed Gaiam (TEST) from the RSS section.

And I must admit when the LinkShare RSS for merchants email arrived in my mail box on April 1 I thought it was some ones idea of a really poor joke... especially when I logged in and couldn't find it.

As it turns out I've been able to plug our own custom RSS feeds for merchant news direct into the LinkShare system with no fuss at all and now I have Video. I shouldn't, but there was nothing else to do at 2 am this morning so I thought I'd have a crack at it before breakfast.

So now it's working I better work out how we can put this to the best use.

Vancouver Affiliate Meet Up

This will be my third trip to Canada and the 4th Annual Networking Dinner is on at the same time again, great timing there Ian. It's strange to think that for first few years working in affiliate marketing I met no one from the business, not one. And then when I attended the Vancouver Networking Dinner for the first time it was stunning to find some many people in one location speaking about the affiliate business, from all kinds of backgrounds too!

This years event looks like being the biggest yet and we'll have the Western Union team as our guests too. Brian from Shareasale looks set to roll in , as do a good number of ABW folks that I have worked with for years and never met! That will be awesome!

For anyone in the area who'd like to attend but is short of a few dollars, let me know we're sponsoring 10 tickets to the event. Just drop me a mail, comment or post on ABW and I'll be more than happy to grab you a ticket.

I'll personally be looking for anyone with the insider news on how to skip over the border into the USA.... or has a large boot on their car :-)

Affiliate Marketing, the only equal opportunities employer

It occurred to me the other day that affiliate marketing offers the opportunity to make money to everyone who wants to try. Yes you've heard that before, but think of it like this. In the offline world, when a person walks in for an interview for a sales job (or any job) , the person doing the interview already has an idea of the kind of person they want to hire, based on their own preconceptions or prejudice , or based on the target market they are looking to sell to.

Regardless of qualification a person can fail to get the job, based not on how good they are, but on a companies personnel preferences or dislikes. Sure most Western firms have rules on how they advertise jobs and how they say they hire people, but do they really follow those rules/laws once the interview process is in action? I doubt it.

On another front how many companies will take on a total novice to be a sales or marketing person for them... and let them market other companies products at the same time!

Affiliate marketing is the only business that I know where a person regardless of education, experience, race, location, physical condition, personal habits or fashion sense (or lack of) can get right to work with some of the top companies around the world and be looked upon with respect for their results, not who they happen to be!

If anyone knows another business that is truly an equal opportunity to everyone, then I've yet to hear about it.