If you have some technical skills and the dedication, sign up for Jeremy Palmer’s free affiliate marketing course. Jeremy is completely white hat and he’s a great teacher who really wants you to understand and be successful at affiliate marketing.
The class is delivered via conference calls and it may be full already because he’s capping registration. At other times I’d jump at this but I don’t have the time to dedicate right now. I barely blog. If you are interested, it deserves your time and attention.

Jeremy recently wrapped up a course with Affiliate Classroom that was $500. You can’t beat free but it’s really for the serious student who will treat it like a $500 class. It’s worth more though - there was a time that you couldn’t pay enough to have Jeremy teach you. He just wasn’t available.

Find out more at www.theblackinkproject.com

Like many bloggers, I started on (now Google owned) Blogger, went to WordPress hosted, and last to WordPress with my own domain and host. These posts are really for me to remember, so they are a bit indulgent, please forgive me
Here are some important milestones:

• Got the domain name www.newspapergirl.com in addition to www.newspapergrl.com (without an “i” a clever but ultimately stupid idea but one that stuck). Then last year, a fellow blogger, Jeff Barr found and donated domain with the “i.” I consider it a great kindness still.
• My blog is still a reference for me. I regularly search it at work or home to find something to help a client, partner, or coworker.
• My blogging skills have been the source of jobs and helped pay the mortgage when I was a contractor and had tough times.
• Through blogging I’ve made a community of friends who are very smart and generous. I have two blog cheerleaders, Tawnie and Paul who’ve been reading from the beginning.
• Blogging has made me a better writer.
• Kept me current on my industry.
• Helped get me contract work, jobs, and build my reputation online which has helped in the real world too.
• Helped launch two other great blogs - StartupPrincess and Paul Wilson my business partner and friend who recently sold his blog and will start another one. I’ve also encouraged many businesses to blog and coached them on how to optimize their blogs for search engines.
• Made money from my blog, directly, through advertising. This isn’t significant but it’s a reward. Obviously I write here because I love to write. I have experimented with different things but I haven’t tried too hard to optimize or make money from blogging. First and foremost it’s still what it started out as being - a record of my business life.
• Got mentioned in a real newspaper - the New York Times.
• Was mentioned in a book (brilliant marketing idea!) by online PR expert David Meerman Scott, along with hundreds of other bloggers.
• Included in the 2000 bloggers meme (3rd row) and I felt even more a part of bigger blogging movement and it also brought a lot of links.

Blogging Goals:

• Since my blog has suffered neglect and it really needs an upgrade and redesign. I plan to do both this year.
• I blog on other blogs more often than on Newspapergirl (OrangeSoda local internet marketing, Marketing Pilgrim, and The Latest at Google) but I will continue to give my personal take on internet marketing here.

It’s my blog’s 3rd birthday this month and I wanted to do a 3-post tribute to it. It started out as one but then I realized I had a lot to say. Blogging has been the biggest thing for my career that I have ever done (besides work hard and educate myself). It’s my back up brain, it’s my reference, and it’s a personal business journal.

I started out posting every few months and the quality of my post wasn’t that great. It was a mix of my personal and professional life at a new beginning. I was recently divorced working part time and raising my son who was two. I took a significant pay cut to do that and later went back to working full time and started a new career. I wanted to document my journey because more than anything I wanted to be an internet marketer. I wondered if I’d ever be taken seriously as one.

When I was introduced to Internet marketing all I wanted to do is talk about it. I read and consumed all I could. My background in web development and marketing was a big help (this was in the beginning days of the web).

My first job was answering the phones at a startup web development company. I probably surfed for several hours a day and was pretty savvy on the most popular things. That was the deal, only answering the phones, but I taught myself HTML and went from there. I joined x.com and got my friends to and made $80 in referrals from it. X.com became Paypal and I still have that original account.

I started an email list for my friends and told them about good deals online - it was called Scrapdogs. Most of my Christmas was bought online with a coupon or free (web companies gave away a lot of things to get people used to buying online).
My boss at the time I became an internet marketer hated me blogging during work. It made him angry. It made me smarter. I made a lot of mistakes at first and I fought on despite being the only woman on the team and the only woman I knew in my field. I probably got close to being dooced, but eventually I looked for jobs that wouldn’t discourage, but welcome blogging. I knew there had to be a way to capitalize on rather than squelch my passion (which was really hard to do and I did try).

Next post, significant blog milestones…

Just as Craigslist is streamlined and basic, so is there blog. And like the site itself, it’s entertaining and useful. Just a simple http://blog.craigslist.org. Their branding is no branding. It’s programmer chic. It’s boring in design but rich in content.

It breaks the rules (because they have such a strong reputation and that lets you break or bend a lot of rules that most business must abide by. This goes for you too.).

It is new, but so far….

• no SEO
• no fancy design
• no sidebar
• no ads
• no Wordpress (the standard) or accompanying plugins
• no social media aspects

It DOES accept comments but they go to the Craigslist blog section of a forum, lol. One last thing, the CEO is a hippie, 6 foot 7 inches tall, who used to make tofu at a commune while in college. Here’s a plug for self-expression.

Thanks to Marketing Pilgrim and writing a lot of press releases lately, I’m in the newswriting mode! I first learned this news on Twitter, from Danny Sullivan. Shoemoney said he called it first (a month ago) and Danny Sullivan trumped that saying he and others predicted it a year ago. Oh yeah, and eBay moved their affiliate network in-house because Shoemoney advised them to.

Ah, Twitter. It makes me feel so “in the know.” These days I get news from Twitter as much as from my blog feeds. Egos flare up, people kiss up, rant, and sometimes act childish but I still love it after all this time (and for some ego stroking of my own - I just checked and I’ve been on Twitter for a full year now). But, back to the story.

It’s great that Google sees the conflict of interest with offering SEO and SEM services when they’re the biggest search engine. I’m disappointed that they are not selling all of Performics. They’re hanging on to the affiliate marketing piece.

Has Google ever sold off part of their acquisitions? This is the first I remember. Who will buy it? What is going through Commission Junction’s mind? Google offers a limited amount of affiliate links for advertisers now, but the reporting is terrible and I haven’t seen a single conversion.
However, Performics is the third largest affiliate network and packs some well know brands like AOL, LL Bean, and Motorola. Having their own affiliate network gives Google some real leverage in the market…and more conflicts of interest.