I was recently elected to be the new RMAMA secretary. That means I should be up on when and where meetings are. Our monthly meetings are hosted at different Utah companies. There are representatives from 1-800-Contacts, Overstock.com, Backcountry.com, Affiliate Crew, Avant Link, and more. They represent Utah’s most well-known affiliate programs. We even get some super affiliates. Overall there are some of the best affiliate marketing minds and performers in the state. My first goal as secretary? Start an RMAMA blog. I hope it will be a joint effort.

Affiliate Summit is in a few weeks. Last year I interviewed Adam Veiner and Collin McDougall. My favorite was meeting a clown who made his own flea circus and who blogs.

Wil Reynolds from Seer Interactive will be speaking again. Jon F. from Wicked Fire will be on a panel.

A year ago I went to Affiliate Summit in Vegas - my first one. It converted me to affiliate marketing. I had only heard a little about it from John Jonas. I asked around for someone who lived in Utah that I could interview for a story. Someone recommended Jeremy Palmer. I had no idea what a super affiliate was at the time. You’ll see the article under affiliate marketing 101.

I hope to do more interviews and take more pictures this year. I also want to meet people I’ve email or Skyped with. My biggest wish is to interview the Rich Jerk. If you’re there please say hello.

In a recent comment someone asked how Yepic differed from Blish and Mochila. Yepic is a new site that is in beta for a few more months.Richard Tripp, one of the Yepic founders, gave this response:

Blish is a listing site, kind of like eBay. You can take a digital asset and list it there for sale. Blish is one of the many marketplaces where you’ll be able to list and buy Yepic content in coming weeks.

Yepic and Blish

Yepic’s content is instantly accessible, open to collaboration, feedback, and updates, and super rich. It fully supporting any type of digital media. Blish’s content isn’t instantly accessible. You have to download PDFs or eBooks, and potentially install additional software before you can enjoy what you’ve bought. Blish’s content is closed to collaboration, feedback, and updates, and their content only supports PDF and eBook style formats (mostly simple text and graphics). These differences equate to a better shop, buy, use experience for both the Yepic seller and consumer. Our hope is that Blish sellers will start using Yepic as a fulfillment tool for their Blish listings.

Yepic and Mochila

Mochila is, for all intents and purposes, a publisher that seeks to get you published in premium content venues. You put your content into their library. Magazine editors, etc., can search the library for content they might want to include in their next publication. If someone finds what you’ve written and wants it, Mochila acts as intermediary and takes a cut of the deal. Mochila is an interesting venue. There might be some partnerships we could structure in the future. But they’re not a marketplace for rich, open, instantly accessible user-generated content.

[tags]Yepic, Blish, Mochila, User generated content, ebay, web 2.0[/tags]

I’ve had bad customer service this holiday season. An hour in Albertsons culminating with my son throwing up and me leaving in frustration. Three hours of Walmart stress trying to buy a phone. (I got a landline. Goodbye VoIP phone, it’s Skype only now).

Today the stress was at the BYU bookstore. I went to return some gifts.
Here’s how it goes:

Wait in line - wrong line, must go upstairs to customer service.

Customer service has no line. Bar code won’t scan, sends for help. Item I’m exchanging doesn’t scan. Clerk calls for help. No answer. Gives up and scans a similar bar code twice. Writes down all the codes for her records. Verdict: in-store credit only (I’ve heard stores are getting more stringent with return policies this season).

Since I spent 10 mins. driving in a circle waiting for a parking place. There are only about 50 in visitor parking. I don’t want to come back. I have to find something today.

I decide on Good to Great and Speed of Trust on CD. It takes forever even when the line isn’t that long.

There is a socialist feel here, like everyone’s jobs are too secure. Something about it drives me crazy. There is little sense of aesthetics or store design/layout.

Next year, I’m ordering all my Christmas online. From stores with good return policies.

Do I hate black hat marketers? No.

Do I want them to change? Yes.

Use the information you learned selling smut, spamming, or otherwise taking advantage of systems or people and do good with it. Use your black hat ways for good. That’s what I’m saying. If you hate me for it than so be it.

It’s not personal against any one person, it’s against exploitation model of making money. You don’t have to exploit to be rich. I believe that if you’re so good at marketing, you can definitely find value it undoing exploitation. By providing value in a positive rather than negative way online.

Great article about Utah’s economy in Utah Business Magazine this month. I feel like writing something scathing about companies treating employees badly. But I will refrain. I’ll just say there’s never been a better time to treat your employees or past employees well.

Quote from the article:
“Utah is doing extremely well right now,” Thredgold says. The state’s current unemployment rate of 2.5 percent is “incredibly low, possibly the lowest we have ever had in this state.”

In the past 12 months, the state has experienced a net job growth of more than 58,000 additional jobs—a growth rate of 5 percent, which will likely rank Utah second or third in the country in terms of job growth for 2006. Utah’s neighbors, Arizona, Idaho and Nevada are also seeing similar growth.

New jobs have been added in virtually every industry in Utah…”

I only feel sorry for technical writers. I read a report that the highest paying tech writers make $95k a year average. Utah is at the bottom at $44k. Pay actually went down $3,000 from last year. Ouch. If I were a technical writer a telcommuting job would look very attractive about now.

I want to write this story. The story of a great company being formed right here in Utah. I predict it will contribute most to the changing of how information is bought and sold. It challenges old school media and power.

In the past many of the tools that do this have been for geeks. Geeks that get mad when someone ruins their fun by getting money involved. Geeks that want to protect their fortresses by making the barrier to entry too high for the average person to scale.

This takes geek concepts and makes them elegant and invites rather than eschews making money for doing it. I love the Craigslists, the Wikipedias, the Diggs. But how do you fit making money in that’s not supported by advertising? Most rely on that.

Information is the perfect product to sell because it has a high initial intellectual cost (for practical, useful, well-presented content). And it can be sold again and again.

eBay boasts over 100K content listings a month! The delivery of that purchase is clunky. You pay and at some point someone sends you a document, usually by email. But you want you it now, and you want quality. Who’s going to facilitate that? What companies are forming or going to form by doing content fulfilment? How can you more seemlessly get the content you bought off eBay? (or any other marketplace where content is sold).

If you can deliver it to the right person at the right time you will make money. Yepic allows this. It’s a true web 2.0 company.

I’ve been thinking about the dynamics of community online. Like any community for it to be of value there must be give and take. Sometimes companies claim to be web 2.0 which means they utilize (or abuse) social media to make money. When true web 2.0, unadulterated, is two-sided.

When people take and never give, they ruin community. If people aren’t being completely open about who they are or their intentions it lowers the quality of the interaction.

Wikipedia, Craigs list, Fat Wallet and Digg don’t want the quality of interaction ruined by marketers or commercial interests. They actively discourage it.

Marketers are evil people who want to make a buck off you. That’s means they can be less than transparent. But they (we) exist. My question is how do we give them a place and let them participate in the community while keeping quality?

How do you monetize or even allow for and encourage making money online in a web 2.0 community? To make it do you need to be bought out by a large company? Depend on ad sales? Sell links? (Now this is not a bad idea. A paid box on every page of Wikipedia. Companies can buy a link given it honestly provides a service that compliments the content. Maybe take submissions, have the community vote on them. The companies who win pay to keep it there or charge a one-time fee).

I’m a Yepic evangelist (a role I volunteered myself for) because they solve this problem of web 2.0 communities. A problem I’ve been thinking about a lot this year. They encourage and facilitate getting paid or paying others for their contribution. There’s also a lot of free content.

Lunch may not be completely free but it’s affordable. And making money is encouraged. Content that is incredibly popular or useful can be sold over and over (unlike journalism where you get paid once for an article).
People will be able to make a living or supplement their incomes with Yepic. By buying, selling, editing, creating additions, services, and enhancements for their or other people’s content.

It’s a beautiful thing.

Continuing the discussion on content…

In all marketing people pay a different price depending on the context of the sale. You’ll pay more for a glass of coke at a restaurant than a 2-liter at a grocery store. The same product can be packaged or labeled differently and the price will change significantly.

What about the pricing of content, like books? Look at this page by 37 Signals. It’s promoting their book, “Getting Real“.

Here are your choices: buy a PDF for $19, a paperback for $29 or read the entire book free online. As you can see the choices are side by side. So why have they sold over 20,000 copies of the PDF?

People will buy free content packaged differently. That’s why some bloggers have become authors based on giving away the book. It is counter-intuitive to a lot of people. Why would people pay for something they can get free? It’s the context and purpose.

Maybe this is why? You can read the book online but it’s not a pleasant experience. If you want to write in it or take it somewhere, you’ll buy and print a PDF. Or if you want it more permanent you’ll buy the paperback. I do think people appreciate the transparency too (choices and being up-front).

Note: Matthew set me straight. They didn’t have the free online version until they’d sold 20k of the paid.

What a good year for the newspapergrl blog! You were here through the grand adventure that sometimes felt like a freefall but always ended up well.

I’ve learned social media press releases, ran a successful AdWords campaign, tried out my first MSN campaign, started learning Drupal, gotten two articles published in a magazine, written my first email newsletters to large lists, wrote an infomercial, and am still transitioning into telework. I almost forgot to note I was recently voted secretary at RMAMA (Rocky Mountain Association of Affiliate Marketers).

For the next year I want to

• improve my email marketing savvy
• learn podcasting and do a few of my own
• change my blog to its own domain & make the layout cleaner
• get a few more interviews up on Affiliate Flash
• hire a designer to finish Affiliate Flash
• get up some more affiliate sites
• get a press pass to a big conference and get an article published about it

Thank you for your insightful or funny comments, your supportive emails, and friendship this year.

Famous people who’ve commented on newspapergrl: Dave Taylor of Ask Dave, Craig of Craig’s List, Shawn Collins, Richard Shefren, Matt Mullenweg, owner of Wordpress Tim Storm of Fat Wallet, Jeremy Palmer, and Lee Odden. Bambi Francisco responded to a press release I wrote. I also met and exchanged emails with Rosalind Gardner. I hope I’m not forgetting anyone. If you were here, you’d hear a cheer whenever a comment comes in from people I admire.

Hope to see some of you at Affiliate Summit in a few weeks! I’m looking forward to a warm Las Vegas. You can look forward to some great posts about it. To me, it’s the highlight of the year in affiliate marketing. There are always such interesting personalities (like I say, from the high to the low rollers) and so much to learn.

Wishing you all happiness, whatever that means to you but what we all know when it’s there or when it’s absent. Pursuit it.