general - 9/10 - Adam Yamada

I’m Heading to Affiliate Summit East

I thought I would let all my readers know that I will be heading to Affiliate Summit East 2013 taking place in Philadelphia from August 18th-20th. I was fortunate enough to win a Network Plus Pass courtesy of eBay. They had a contest on the eBay Partner Network Blog, which is their affiliate network, and I gave the best answer to the question, “What is the biggest opportunity in Affiliating Marketing today?”

Here is my response using the username CarNewsCafe, which is my new auto news site that you should totally check if you haven't.

This might sound strange to some but I think the best opportunity in affiliate marketing is educating people about it. I've met a number of successful bloggers that surprisingly don't know what affiliate links are. Someone I know with a successful photography blog and YouTube channel didn't know that eBay had an affiliate program. I recommended he check it out since his audience buys a lot of gear on eBay.

I thought my answer was the best and pretty well thought out. What do you think? Have another answer to that question you think is better? Leave a comment below and prove me wrong.

The reason I said this is I recently recommended the eBay Partner Network to my uncle who runs a successful photography blog and has a Youtube channel with almost 2 millions views. People that are into Lo-Fi photography buy a lot of stuff on eBay and he didn't even know they had an affiliate program.

The ironic thing to me is that eBay and other affiliate marketing programs ‘preach to the choir' but don't to people, like my uncle, who could really benefit from these affiliate programs. I've met a number of bloggers who are quite successful and have a lot of traffic and large social media following and they don't do affiliate marketing. They mainly do paid ads or sponsorships which always surprises me.

Anyway, I am excited to be going to Affiliate Summit East and learn about affiliate marketing which is something I know how to do but not that well. Hopefully I can pickup some advice and tips at Affiliate Summit East this year from expert affiliate marketers to help grow and take my online businesses and websites to the next level. I will share my thoughts about Affiliate Summit and some of the tips and tricks I learned on this blog, so stay tuned for those posts.

If you will be attending Affiliate Summit please send me an email – cool AT adamyamada.com – or catch me on Twitter @AdamYamada. I'd love to meet and connect with you if you are a blogger, publisher, advertiser network, or just want to talk.

If you have been to Affiliate Summit East in the past please let me know what I should do to maximize my time and get the most out of the conference. With a Networking Plus Pass I can only attend 1 session per day but I still think I should get a lot out of the conference. Partying included! 🙂

[Source – eBay Partner Network Blog]

Gmail Tabs make Email Enjoyable Again

Gmail, the most widely used email service in the world, has just added a great new email tabs feature. Since the new Gmail tabs are going to be affecting a lot of people it is something I thought we could be exploring together.

To get a better idea, without me explaining, here is a video Google released on May 29th showcasing Gmail's updated tabs. The title of the video is “Meet Gmail's New Inbox.” Google of course uses a great Motown song “Please Mr. Postman” by The Marvelletes as the soundtrack.

New customizable tabs put you back in control so that you can see what's new at a glance and decide which emails you want to read and when.

I like how in the beginning the video it reads, “Inboxes can be overwhelming” which is sooo true. However as the video points out “Unless you have the new Gmail inbox.”

Basically what this means is Google has several tabs for your inbox now and it automatically sorts incoming email into those different tab categories. What are the different Gmail tabs?

Primary – This is for all your important emails from say friends, family, etc. As Google describes it in the video “One tab for email you really, really want to see.”
Social – Essentially any emails or updates from Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. What is surprising to me is that the
Promotions – This tab is for any promotions or special offer emails. So you love Groupon or getting special Amazon deals this is where all those emails would go.
Updates – This is where you put any orders you have made from online retailers or shipping information or order status updates you might receive from them.
Forums – If you take part in any discussion forums this will sort your emails from them into this tab. Reply to topic emails will go in here too.

Gmail defaults to using Primary, Social, and the Promotions tabs. You can add the Updates and Forums tabs if you want or feel the need. Since Gmail sorts the emails automatically it may not put the right email in the right Gmail tab category. If you don't feel like Gmail sorted an email correctly you can Drag and Drop an email into the tab you want. Any future email from that sender will go into that specified Gmail tab. So if an email that should go in the Promotions tab goes into Primary, and you drop into Promotions, all future emails go into the Promotions tab.

Personally I have found the new Gmail tabs extremely useful and a huge time saver. For the most part Gmail is very accurate in sorting emails but once in awhile it will get it wrong. Hey, it is is a computer doing the sorting and not you. Still, this makes me love Gmail and all it's other great features even more. Kudos to Google and the Gmail team that came up with the Gmail tabs idea. As it said at the end of the video, “The inbox has gone Google.”

What is interesting to note is that the pre-filtered “Promotion” tab has caused a lot of internet marketers and those that have email lists to become quite concerned. Since Gmail rolled out the tab features about 2 weeks ago all of the those emails go into Promotions mostly. If an email slips by and goes into Primary I usually immediately drop into the Promotions tab. I don't open these emails nearly as much anymore. A lot of emails from these people are titled “Urgent”, “Don't leave in Promotions”, “Open if you use Gmail” and more things like that. It is clear email open rates have gone waaay done Gmail tabs rolled out. Sorry, but you guys are staying in Promotions since it is making my life a lot easier! 🙂

The only complaint I have is it would be nice if you could customize the tab lables. A Primary tab isn't a problem but I might want to relabel the other tabs to fit my personal email needs. Other than I think is is a great Gmail update.

While the Gmail tabs change is not good for companies or marketers, it certainly is for Gmail's 1 billion+ users. Since Google is always says they are focused on the user experience it is great they back it up with great changes to products. I totally love the new and updated Gmail tabs and look forward to Google's continued improvements to Gmail in the future.

What are your thoughts about Gmail's new tabs? Do you love it as much as I do? Is it saving you time? If you run an email list have you seen a drop in open rates? What do you think Google could have done better with Gmail tabs?

Only72 Podcast Answer Man Course Review

A few weeks ago I purchased a set of courses via Only72.com. The courses were from various internet gurus that specializes in different fields. One of the main reasons I bought this Only72 set of courses was that one of them was a podcasting course by Cliff Ravenscraft, aka the Podcast Answer Man. Cliff is pretty well known for providing great free podcasting advice and has a few paid courses. Since Only72 was $200 and most of his courses go for $100 I thought it was a pretty good deal to jump on. (The Only72 set of courses ran for only 3 days at the beginning of July. It is “Only72!”)

I thought the Podcast Answer Man course would be useful for me since I am embarking on podcasting with my CarNewsCafe colleagues and have other audio content that I would like to make for other websites. I am going to share my thoughts about the Podcast Answer Man Course in a review here. This should help other if you are thinking of paying for another one of these Only72 set of courses in the future or if you are considering buying a podcasting course from Cliff Ravenscraft.

Before your Record your First Podcast

This is a MP3 download you can listen to and a PDF file that you can read. Basically it is Cliff Ravenscraft talking about how you need to have a clear vision and set goals for what your podcast wants to accomplish before you start investing time, money, and effort in it.

If you think you can just start a podcast, you really need to think again. It is not something that will be easy and not something and you should have an interest and passion for whatever you are going to talk about since an audience will be able to feel that. Your podcast should have a “Mission Statement” essentially before you even think of buying equipment or recording anything.

Like a lot of businesses and websites these days the most successful ones cater to a certain group of people with a certain interest, aka a niche. He encourages people to figure what audience you want to appeal to and how you will make your show engaging. If you don't have a clear idea or set goals, you probably will not be able to start and keep a podcast going. Cliff mentions you need, “Focus, Focus and more Focus” which I agree with.

While this might surprise some people I think this was the very useful part of this Only72 Podcast AnswerMan course. Essentially this is what you should do before you start a new website or blog too but it is good to hear it again in audio format. There was great advice in that 30 minute MP3 even though I knew most of what he was saying. Sometimes you just need to hear the same thing again.

WordPress for Podcasters

The Podcast Anwer Man broke these part of the podcasting course into 8 short videos that varied 10-20 minutes in length. Let me just say if you know how to use WordPress then the first 2 videos are a complete waste of your time. Kind of felt like a way to get you to sign-up for BlueHost, using his affiliate link obviously. This made me flashback to going to the BlogPaws conference recently. If you don't know how to use WordPress why would you show-up to a blog conference? If you don't know how to use WordPress why would you buy the Only72 courses? I don't know seems weird to me but I guess you have to try to cater to a wide audience with these Internet products.

Also the 7th video was a Q&A that was a bit basic for my taste. There was a first question about HostGator vs BlueHost. FYI for anyone else they are owned by the same company (Endurance International Group) and as of 2 weeks ago share the datacenter, which isn't a good thing.

I found the other part of the course useful though as the Podcast Anwer Man explains how to use and setup the PowerPress WordPress plugin which is for podcasting. I will use it in the future as I have searched around and honestly don't see anything better. The videos that show how he setups the podcasts with PowerPress are useful in my opinion.

In one of the videos he explains why you need to get media hosting and not use your own or current shared hosting provider. You probably can get away with storing the MP3 files on a shard hosting server but you don't want to do that for the long haul. If a lot of people are listening to your podcast online and downloading it your account with get shutdown for excessive resource usage. Cliff uses Libsyn, Liberated Syndication, and video 5 shows how it works and what the backend looks like.

Video 6 is useful since he shows how to setup Feedburner for podcasts so people can access your podcast from RSS feeds and so it will push out out out to iTunes. Since I don't know how to do this I obviously found this informative. I didn't really like video 8 since that is basically another basic WordPress video.

No PDF was included with the “WordPress for Podcasters” videos.

Equipment Options for Every Budget

This video goes though what equipment that Cliff Ravenscraft uses to record his podcasts. The video is a bit long at 1 hour and 44 minutes long but it was useful to watch. (Well you might listen to parts of it like I did.) This gave me an idea of where I could possibly go with my audio equipment when I get really professional and serious about recording podcasts and videos.

Cliff talks about his setup and some of the equipment he uses but he does not think are required for recording a podcast. This includes a Compressor Limiter Gate which helps make it so that if someone is calling into your show the audio recording quality is better. He goes through explaining everything in pretty good detail.

I like how he explains how to setup and configure some of the equipment in the video, and he clearly knows a lot about setting up and configuring audio equipment. The Podcast Anwer Man also clearly explains what the benefits are of getting certain pieces of equipment.

It doesn't necessarily make sense to me though that he would make this video part of the paid podcasting A to Z series. I guess Cliff doesn't like to reveal all his tricks and tips for free, which I understand. He does sell Podcast Answer Man equipment packages so you can get the same basic setup he has. I think he would probably make more using affiliate links for these products rather though.

2 PDF downloads were included with this showing you the different setups and another was on the slides in the video.

Mixer Basics

This video was really useful to me since I had no idea how audio mixers worked. The Podcast Answer Man clearly shows what is what on a mixer and describes what the settings mean. This is part of the course has given me a lot of more confidence in mixer shopping now that I know what to look for and what not look for. Also I know how to work and setup a mixer. I thought this was the most useful part of the Only72 Podcast Answer Man course.

The video runs 1 hour and 14 minutes and is there is a PDF you can download showing the slides.

Guide to Recording Co-Hosts, Guests and Telephone Interviews

This talks about the different people you can have on a show and the various situations where you record them. So obviously there is live “in the studio” and remote. Cliff again goes different equipment options and setups you can use to record different people.

This was useful to hear about the different possibilities and equipment. I sort of wish he talked about how to deal with slow or bad internet connections but I am not sure there is a way.

This was 1 hour and 5 minutes and there was PDF.

Passive Income Strategies for Podcasters

This was a set of 4 videos done with Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income. For those that don't know Pat Flynn is a internet marketer's wet dream. He has an extremely loyal audience that will readily buy anything he says. He makes $30,000 a month just from his BlueHost affiliate links.

While some of what Pat Flynn and Cliff Ravencraft talked about in this course were useful, such as email marketing, I found it a bit annoying. It felt like webinar that is designed to get you to buy something. I mostly skipped through the videos. Most of what they went over about affiliate marketing I know.

A PDF was included.

Conclusion

While certain people will take away more or less from this Only72 podcasting course depending on their skill level and knowledge, I do feel like I got my money's worth. The Podcast Anwer Man's Podcating A to Z course runs $2,000. Since I definitely have that type of money (right now but I will someday) it was nice to be able to get some of the information a little less.

I wish the course was designed more for experienced writers, like myself, who are interested in getting into podcasting. This seems like the largest and best segment to market to in my opinion. Of course like I said before I get he wants to have a course for a wide range of people.

What I really do not understand is why Cliff didn't record some of the shows and make them available as MP3s so you can listen to them on the go. Seriously? He is the Podcast Answer Man after all and I assume a lot of his audience and fans prefer listening to shows. This is probably my biggest complaint about the course. Even if the some of the videos are not ideal to listen to, it still would have been nice to have a downloadable MP3.

It should be noted I didn't review the first part of the course “Learn How to Podcast” since that is available for free via the Podcast Answer Man website here. Since that is something anyone can view I didn't feel a need to include it in this review.

I will be reviewing the other courses part of the Only72 package as well so make sure to follow this blog via RSS feed if you want to make sure to catch the other reviews.

You can also follow me on Twitter @AdamYamada

Ubuntu Forums Hacked

If you are a user of Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution in the world, than you might have heard that Ubuntu Forums got Hacked. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, sent out an email to all users of Ubuntu Forums. Here is the entire email in case you are a member of Ubuntu Forums and have not received it yet;

Hello,

You are receiving this message because you have an account registered with this address on ubuntuforums.org.

The Ubuntu forums software was compromised by an external attacker. As a result, the attacker has gained access to read your username, email address and an encrypted copy of your password from the forum database.

If you have used this password and email address to authenticate at any other website, you are urged to reset the password on those accounts immediately as the attacker may be able to use the compromised personal information to access these other accounts. It is important to have a distinct password for different accounts.

The ubuntuforums.org website is currently offline and we are working to restore this service. Please take the time to change your ubuntuforums.org account password when service is restored.

We apologize for any inconvenience to the Ubuntu community, thank you for your understanding.

The Canonical Sysadmins.

If you have an account with Ubuntu Forums and use the same password for the email account associated with Ubuntu Forums, like they said, I would highly recommend changing those. If this hacker team (this is my assumption) was good enough to hack Ubuntu Forums I am fairly certain they are knowledgeable enough to solve the salted hashes. Who knows what they plan to do with all the data anyway.

Currently UbuntuForums.org is still down and Canonical is working on getting it back up. If you visit the domain here you will see this simple HTML page with information of what Canonical knows and a progress report of of what they are doing to get the site back up and fix the security breach.

Ubuntu Forums is down for maintenance

There has been a security breach on the Ubuntu Forums. The Canonical IS team is working hard as we speak to restore normal operations. This page will be updated with progress reports.

What we know

Unfortunately the attackers have gotten every user's local username, password, and email address from the Ubuntu Forums database.

The passwords are not stored in plain text, they are stored as salted hashes. However, if you were using the same password as your Ubuntu Forums one on another service (such as email), you are stronglyencouraged to change the password on the other service ASAP.

Ubuntu One, Launchpad and other Ubuntu/Canonical services are NOT affected by the breach.

No word on when Ubuntu Forums will be back up and running but hopefully it will be up again soon. I assume for any Ubuntu users looking for help to problems this is quite an inconvenience but there are a number of tech and Linux forums you can use in the meantime while Ubuntu Forums is down. You can also use IRC channels for to get help with Ubuntu issues.

I would imagine whatever security measures Canonical has for Ubuntu Forums they must be pretty good. If Ubuntu Forums can get hacked I thinks that means a lot of companies forums could get hacked.

“Error Unknown Filesystem Grub Rescue” just run Ubuntu Boot Repair

So the other day I got Linux Mint 13 installed along with Windows 7 on my Toshiba Portege. It was working fine… until

error: unknown filesystem grub rescue >

I got this message a few days after I installed Linux Mint 13 and started up my laptop in the morning. My Toshiba Portege would not do anything else when I turned it on besides give me this black screen with these words. First thing I thought,”WTF does error unknown filesystem grub rescue mean?” I then realized something was wrong with the GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) which is responsible for initially loading an operating system kernel software so you can start your Linux computer. If you GRUB is not working, you can't use your computer to do anything. Argh!

After I stopped freaking out I thought something went wrong when I was installing Linux Mint. I thought I would try reinstalling to see if that would fix the GRUB issue. I live booted via a USB drive onto Linux Mint 13 and reinstalled it in the same partition I was using before… restarted my Toshiba laptop… and… “error unknown filesystem grub rescue” Ahhhh… what!

My next step was to check the Linux Mint internet relay chat (IRC) channel to see if anyone could help me there. A few people offered advice like I needed a Windows 7 repair disc to fix this GRUB issue. Thanks to Toshiba for not providing an install disc by the way and since I couldn't boot into Windows 7 to make a repair disc that wasn't going to happen.

I then went Googling which lead me Linux forums and started searching around. I tried some of the suggestions that people had recommended while I was running Linux Mint off the USB drive. Nothing seemed to work. I then started my own thread to see if I could solve the problem but sometimes people on Linux forums are really annoying. If I knew how to fix it I wouldn't be other asking, you know.

Then I found this page on Ubuntu Help and Documentation and ran the code in the terminal.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair && sudo apt-get update

Hit Enter, then run

sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && (boot-repair &)

Waited for the Ubuntu Boot Repair to run, it outputted a Paste2.org URL, and then restarted my computer… voila! I could boot into Linux Mint or Windows 7 and my GRUB boot repair problem was solved.

Sometimes Linux is a bit annoying but once you figure it out you feel great. Just thought I would post this in case anyone runs gets the same “error unknown filesystem grub rescue” message with a dual booted computer using Linux Mint or Ubuntu.

If this post helped you let me know below, as I would be happy to hear about it.

4 Easy Ways to Monetize a Blog

If you are looking for ways to monetize a blog or website there are tons of different affiliate programs, advertising networks, and other options you could look into. Just because there are a lot of options for blog monetization doesn't mean you should use them all though. My believe is that you should find what works for your blog or online business and stick with that.

Having been online for awhile these are 4 good programs to monetize a blog which I think meet a wide variety of needs for your blog or website.

Amazon Associates: Have you bought something on Amazon? I assume you probably have since they are known as “Wal-Mart online.” Amazon stocks a huge inventory and with their third party shipping programs offer a huge selection of products that no other online retailer can match. This includes their massive Kindle self-publishing platform as well as MP3 and video downloads. Chances are if you want to review a product or recommend something on your blog Amazon sells it or you can find it. You can use Amazon Associates and link up to those products or display banner ads. Amazon Associates also lets you built “stores” on your website. I've found Amazon Associates has worked well for all of my blogs but especially Adam's Auto Advice. (It seems auto products are something a lot of people order online.) I've been happy with the Amazon Associates program and have been pleased with my reasonable earnings I have received which is why I recommend it.
eBay Partner Network: I have not had as much success with the eBay Partner Network but it is still worth a mention. Why? eBay is the world's largest online auction site and there a lot of different ways to use this affiliate program which could benefit your blog. You can get paid just for sending qualified traffic to eBay and obviously get paid when users buy products through eBay. If you have a specific hobby niche the eBay Partner Network is probably most ideal for you. Ebay only accepts publishers with high quality content and decent traffic though. Keep that in mind if you apply to the eBay Partner Network.
Google AdSense: Google wouldn't be the huge company it is today if it wasn't for Google AdSense and contextual advertising. (Well technically Google AdWords, the counterpart to AdSense.) Google AdSense allows online publishers big and small to display relevant ads to site visitors. This means a better experience for your visitors and a higher Click-Through-Rates (CTR) for online publishers and Google, which means more moolah for everyone. AdSense also allows you to monetize Youtube videos with contextual advertising. Unfortunately I was kicked out of Google AdSense last year and I have no idea why. So I would be careful of how you use AdSense and what sites you display ads on. (Google only likes sites that are family safe.) Since Google recently celebrated 10 Years of Google AdSense you don't need to worry about this program going anywhere.
Media.net: Media.net is a Yahoo and Bing's contextual advertising program. I won't pull any punches, it is not as good and will not earn you as much money as Google AdSense. I was invited into this program though and feel that it is good alternative those who were booted from Google AdSense. There is a large advertising pool bidding for keywords and you can really fine tune the colors and look of ad units. I'd recommend giving Media.net a shot if you have decent traffic to your blog or website. However do not rely on it for your advertising income.

Be aware any affiliate program you sign-up for you should understand the terms and conditions clearly. I recommend reading the entire affiliate contract even though this is time consuming, painful, and probably a big hassle with all that legal jargon. You really should if you want to avoid what happened to me with Google AdSense.

Like I mentioned before there are a ton of different advertising and affiliates programs you can choose from and these are just 4 popular ones that a lot of bloggers and webmasters use. If you have found a way to monetize a blog that works better for you please leave a comment below and let me know.