Mr Beach Bum.com

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. The holiday season is always a busy one, even for a beach bum. I was recently talking to some fellow bloggers and it amazed me that a lot of them have no idea what Cyber Monday is. Many of them are familiar with Black Friday but not the other.

For those of you who are not familiar with either one, let me tell you. In the U.S. we celebrate Thanksgiving tomorrow. Now most Americans get tomorrow off as a paid holiday. Some of the lucky ones get both Thursday and Friday off (paid)  but many still will take a day off Friday regardless. I don’t know how long this tradition has been around but for as long as I can remember the day after Thanksgiving (always falling on a Friday) has been known as Black Friday.

The reason it’s called Black Friday is because it is a day that retailers consider their busiest - thus they are typically “in the black” as opposed to being in the red to use accounting slang. Basically the retailers see their biggest profits that day. This has resulted in fierce competition between retailers and what amounts to an even bigger tradition for the day which involves offering up huge discounts on items (loss leaders, if you will) to get people to come to your store instead of others.

One more big tradition for Black Friday is to get up extremely early and wait in line for the stores to open. The stores typically open early on Black Friday. Most as early as 6 AM but I have seen ads for some claiming to open at 4 AM. Sheesh! You can expect huge crowds of people and fights over the last of the big sale items before they run out, etc.

Given all that, if you’re like me, you try to stay away from that scene. I like to shop online anyway. Which is where Cyber Monday comes in… In recent years it has become a tradition for online retailers to offer up some big savings and incentives to get people to shop online on the Monday after Thanksgiving. Cyber Monday is November 26. Still plenty of time to get your packages shipped in time for Christmas and a great way to get online shoppers to place mega orders on one huge online shopping day. So where do you come in?

Well, if you’re an affiliate marketer than you are already ready for Cyber Monday. Right?… RIGHT?!!?!??

If not, you’d better get crackin’ and get some of those Cyber Monday deals posted on your websites ASAP!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone and thanks for being a loyal reader!

Do you know how many days there are until Christmas? If you do, then you likely are keenly aware of exactly how little time you have to get all of your affiliate links ready for the holidays. If you’re lucky, you’ve maybe got one or two weekends left to overhaul your site in time for Christmas. Halloween sales are already starting to slow down and the retailers will be putting up their Christmas goodies any day now - you should be doing the same.

I make most of my affiliate dollars during this time of year so if you haven’t seen a post on here in awhile it’s because that keeps me very busy. Many of my sites are just about ready so let this be a reminder to you if you need to be doing the same. Don’t miss out on the Christmas rush, especially if this is your first holiday season as an affiliate marketer. Also be ready with the after Christmas specials when the time comes and you’ll probably see some serious profits!

Some of you out there with blogs may already be using BlogRush. But I am sure there are a few who may have held off for a bit potentially because there was a lack of customization options. Well your wait is over. Blogrush introduced “flavors” which allow you to choose from a surprisingly diverse palette of colors that are sure to match any theme you can throw at it. These just went live this week and all you have to do is choose your default color scheme in your Blogrush settings page under flavors and you’re done. It’s that simple. I really like the way it looks on my site and I hope you do too.

While we’re on the subject, I have to say that so far I am happy with the number of credits I’ve been getting on the Blogrush account. I have seen some fairly steady incoming traffic too so I can say that if you have a blog, you should definitely consider using it.

If you are already using it, how has your experience with it been up to this point?

Maybe you didn’t even realize this but part of having a successful business includes building a brand. In many ways you are a branding expert without even realizing it. After all, you deal with brands in your everyday life and probably don’t even have to put much thought into it. For example, when you see an ad for McDonald’s, you probably know exactly what they stand for, what products they have, etc. This is branding in a nutshell. But let me tell you, when it comes to branding, it’s a lot easier to be a consumer than it is to be a business owner trying to build a brand. This is why you might need some good solid advice from the experts.

This is where the Brand Identity Guru comes in. The guru himself is Scott White, and he authors the Branding Blog . What I really enjoy about his blog is the fact that he takes a witty approach to a topic that might not be second nature to all of his readers. I have taken a few marketing classes in my time but I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know as much as I could about branding, yet I felt perfectly comfortable reading his posts. One of my absolute favorites is this post called “Brands we love/hate” I can certainly identify with a lot of what he says and I am sure most of you can too.

I often try to remind myself about the differences between perception and reality. And what I mean by that is you may have an idea in your head that you are going down one path, yet others may percieve an entirely different path.  It is all about what you project to others as to how they will perceive you. In many ways this is exactly what branding is all about. The idea is to be mindful enough about what you want to say with your brand image so that others will be able to perceive your reality. Sometimes it can come rather easily if you stay true to yourself, but I would bet that any of the most successful companies with some of the hottest brand names out there today didn’t get their image by accident or without careful planning and well executed strategies.

It is in this same sense that I quote from Scott’s post “How I’m going to beat type 2 diabetes using branding and business skilss” in which he says the following:

“For almost twenty years I’ve been helping clients develop a brand identity. I’ve also fixed some pretty messed up brand identities. You see brand identity is who you want to be, but brand image is how everyone else perceives you. Most of the time we see a gap between the brand identity and brand image. ”

So the question is, how will you handle your brand? Well if that question scares you at all then I highly recommend that you check out Scott’s blog, Branding Blog , and become a regular reader. It is actually quite entertaining but it makes you really think about branding in general and that is exactly what every business owner needs to do. And if you’re really serious about building your brand then you might consider checking out his “Pump up your brand workshop“.

The Branding Blog should definitely be on your RSS feed reader if you plan to start an online business and create an image that will keep people coming back. Do it now as opposed to later and maybe you can avoid the ugliness involved in repairing a damaged image.

This was a sponsored review.

I know this is waaaay off topic for me, but since I have a Nintendo Wii and love it, I happen to know that a lot of people out there still haven’t had much luck in finding one in stock. Well lucky for you I am in affiliate marketing and I just got a special notice from one of my account reps from Buy.com letting me know that they currently have Nintendo Wii’s in stock! But you’d better act fast!!!  Use the link below to get $10 off for new customers. Note: It is the Wii Fall Bundle that they have in stock.

I just set up an account with BlogRush to test it out. In case you aren’t familiar with BlogRush, it is a listing of other blog posts that are somewhat related to the content of your own blog. The idea is that you will advertise other blogs on your site but in return, your own blog gets advertised on other blogs too.  This can really get you some exposure you might not have gotten, but we’ll see if it’s really a “Blog rush” in the long run.

It’s free to join, so why not try it out on your blog?

Graham Langdon, a 21 year old student, started a project called The Million Dollar Wiki. The idea behind it is that he will sell Wikipedia style pages on this site for $100 each and, when all the pages are sold, he will have $1,000,000.00 for his efforts. But what do you get if you purchase a page?

When you purchase a page for $100 for the word that you want, you own that page for life. Just imagine taking the 1 keyword that is perfect for your website and owning it in this micro-economy. Anyone who browses the milliondollar wiki will come across your page and since you have full control over your page’s content you can not only link to all of your own sites, but also sell links to others.  Not to mention Google ads, etc.

To think of it another way, look at it as an opportunity to purchase an ad on what has the potential to be a popular website for life at a very low cost. $100 is a drop in the bucket and this will be your page for life! And even if you grow tired of it, you can always resell it - potentially at a profit.

Of course there is a gamble. There is no way to know yet if the million dollar wiki is going to really take off big time. But I can tell you that some of the top pages on there already are seeing traffic in the 50K range so it’s definitely doing well for a recent startup. And the worst case scenario is that you are out $100 which is a low enough gamble to be worth it.

I won’t say just yet which page I purchased on Milliondollarwiki as I am still waiting for my confirmation for my page, but once I get it up and running, you’ll be the first to know!

A website I like to visit, selfgrowth.com, has informed me of a free ebook seminar coming up. Actually, today is the first seminar and it’s totally free (except for long distance charges that may apply).  While I can’t say just how valuable the information in this seminar will be, I can say that David Riklan, the speaker, has a proven strategy when it comes to running a website. Just check his Google Pagerank or Alexa ranking if you have any doubts.

I have no affiliation whatsoever with David Riklan so I am just sharing this information as a service to some of you who may see value in this free seminar. I intend to check it out myself and wanted to let everyone in on it. Let’s hope it’s not just a bait and switch “Free seminar” just to tell you about his new product for X dollars. From what I do know about David Riklan, I think you’ll find that he is trustworthy, but we’ll be the judges of that after the seminar is over.

Here’s the link to the registration page. Again, this is a free seminar that you call into via a long distance number so be mindful of the potential for long distance charges.