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There is one thing that I haven’t spent much time doing during my career as a blogger and that is learning about affiliate marketing. It seems like it is a whole strange world off on its own, with different rules, and business ethics. It looks like it can be very hard to compete and really make a living in the industry, with so many of the learned players gobbling up as much money as they can as quickly as they can.

I recently ran across a forum where many of the members are making four figures a day in their various making money online endeavours, and I must say, it is very intimidating.

Have you tried affiliate marketing, and were you, in your own mind, successful? Let me know in the comments below.

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So, I have been building a new site for my new employer, and I am learning lots as well as coming across various issues that have slowed my progress down.

In the first post, Insights into Building a Site from Scratch, I mentioned that I was having some issues with WordPress, and so in the second post, Round Two, I talked about that. The Round Three post was primarily about hosting issues, and the slow downs that the site was having.

Today, I want to talk about data entry as I am slowly but surely entering in the data needed by the site to be a resource and be successful. Usually, I build blogs where the content builds over time, but this time, in building a site, I need a wide base of content that the blog will be referencing, linking to and promoting.

Getting the data on the site has been a bit frustrating as much of it is similar in nature, and so the repetition is quickly tiring me out. It kills my focus to do the same thing ten or twenty times. I feel like I am working on a conveyer belt, grabbing information and moving it from one spot, to another.

I understand that every project has its boring part, but usually it is quickly over and I am able to move on to the more entertaining and challenging aspects. This project has me working on the boring part for quite some time.

To keep my sanity, I only give the boring part so much effort before working on other elements of the site. I am still organizing plugins, and their settings, as well as thinking about the big picture and how it is all going to come together in a useable and helpful way.

Recently, my boss mentioned that he didn’t like the search results that WordPress provides, and so I am going to do some tweaking based on suggestions by Joost de Valk’s article, Make WordPress’ search suck less.

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Today, I saw one of the best advertisements for a Golf video game that I have ever seen thanks to Micro Persuasion.

Some companies try too hard to go viral with their advertisements, but EA did it right in doing an advertisement for Tiger Woods 09. First off, let me say that I hate golf, and even more so as a video game unless its arcade-like.

And now the video…

A great response to the online community that might be interested in the game, appealing to the YouTube generation, and doing something that made me laugh. I don’t see anything they could have done to improve this ad. Very impressive.

Has there been an advertisement lately that you have seen that really made you interested in something you otherwise would have ignored?

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Why would I subscribe to your e-mail newsletter that is just your RSS feed and here and there some special notes sent to my e-mail inbox when I already subscribe to your RSS feed? Sure, it makes your subscriber count go up, but it doesn’t really help me in any major way.

Sure, it gives you an opportunity to up sell me on some affiliate products or services you might have, but those things rarely help me with my blogging goals.

You should be happy that I subscribe to your RSS feed rather than punish me by making me get the same information two different ways so that you look like you have twice as many subscribers.

The race for subscribers is silly, and if anything, you are making people deal with both information overload and saturation sickness, which then causes them to unsubscribe to all things that they decide are no longer necessary.

Add value to my life, add value to my blogging, and stop trying to spam me with your content over a variety of different services so that you appear to have more unique subscribers than you really have.

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Over on the Perfomancing Hive forum, I have been hearing a few people rumble about the decreasing number and per job rate of blogging and web related positions.

Some very talented and experienced people are starting to find it harder and harder to find new contracts that can pay their bills. Other bloggers are noticing a decline in advertising revenue.

Has anyone else experienced this? To me, this goes against my own thoughts that as businesses tighten their belts, they will want to transition to the web, where a larger audience can be found at a less expensive rate. Or is that not the case?

Has there been a slow down in blogging related jobs? Has their been noticeable drops in advertising revenue? Sure, big companies have cut their blogger pay, but does that mean the whole industry is suffering?

Please, if you have any insights on this, let me know in the comments below.

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