Jeff and I are performing maintenance throughout the blog and forum today. Sorry for the inconvience but the problems should be relatively minor. Hopefully, there are no connectivity issues.

Here’s where you have to decide if you want to be the lazy affiliate or actually use Kaboodle to your full advantage being an Affiliate Marketer. There is nothing wrong with being the lazy affiliate here, I actually encourage it. However if you have your own storefronts, mashups, and/or datafeed sites than you will appreciate the fact that after constructing your site, you know the biggest part is getting traffic, links and ultimately sales. By adding each product from your own webpages you really get the benefits of built in Kaboodle traffic seeing your products, clicking over to your webpages and maybe purchasing something. You also get the benefit of getting deep links to each of your product pages. It’s like Parasite SEO on steriods.

The fast way of adding products:

The Kaboodle toolbar makes it very fast. When I say fast, I nearly dropped a load when I realized how fast you can make lists. If I were to set at my computer all day just grabbing affiliate links and adding them thru the toolbar, I have no doubt in my mind I could list at least 500 products. I think my ass would be really sore and I know I would probably suffer a boredom seizure (Do these exist?). The only argument I have with the toolbar is the lack of editing you can do. Adding with the toolbar creates a thumbnail of the product you are promoting. Just download the toolbar and read the little documentation. It’s self-explanatory.

 So what do you need to do?

Most of you know I am not into holidays. Valentines Day definitely being one of them. However I managed to cut a few hours out of my 100+ hour work week yesterday and went and got (L) some flowers and picked the boys up a couple of balloons with Teddy Bears attached to them. (L) told me this was the first year I have done something like this. (See, I told ya I am not into that).

However the mood around the house has been super pleasant and the boys are absolutely going crazy by throwing their balloons around. Today is a lovey dubby day men. Get off your ass and show your ladies you care. Women, you do the same. Except buy your men something a little more manly.

Anyway, Happy Valentines Day to everyone!

When assessing a site such as Kaboodle, you really have to buckle down and get to know the site inside and out to take advantage of every money making opportunity available to you. Now we covered how to use Kaboodle to find products and give you ideas on how to create your own listings and we even covered some of my own ideason how to incorporate products using datafeed sites or coupon sites. These are just great ideas to utilize the Kaboodle user base the way your supposed to without breaking any terms of service. Key point to remember here is that Kaboodlers ARE spending money. That’s why the site is there.

Well, let’s look at another awesome thing about Kaboodle and what it can do for us. Forgive me now, I am making this post very brief so that you can look at it and try to tap into my mind and see what I see when I start assessing sites and how to get the most money out of them.

These are located on EVERY product page individually and throughout the site :)

 Best of both worlds here everyone. Not only can we list products as affiliates and use the site like it’s supposed to be used, but now we can even advertise blatantly inside it.

BOOYAH! Anyone familiar with Google Placement Targeting? … Nuff Said.

 Thoughts?

From the emails I got yesterday I thought I would break this up a bit over the week. Yesterday we covered product research and features on Kaboodle and today we are going to cover ideas on what you have already built on the web in your affiliate marketing businesses and how Kaboodle can help you. First I would like to cover something though. You know those posts where I write something and later on someone comments and figures out that I failed to mention something? I would pay real close attention over yesterday’s, today’s and the future posts we cover over Kaboodle. I’m not going to sit here and hype it, but I can tell you that I would not a spend a whole week covering it for nothing. Keep that in my mind, and any questions you have, feel free to ask them in the comments section here. Tomorrow I will cover more.

 {Edit} All graphics for this post were lost.

In my last post we talked about utilizing Yahoo Groups to conduct some initial market research. While there are tons of options available to assess markets and look for hungry people wanting solutions to problems, let’s shift our focus a bit and utilize a source I love personally to conduct some PRODUCT research.

Kaboodle is one of those sources that are one in a rare few. When I first started scanning their site and assessing products and reviews it kind of reminded me a little bit like Amazon and Ebay in one. However, the social interaction aspect of Kaboodle is a heck of a lot cooler than either of those two in my opinion. It’s because Kaboodle was built on the foundation that it was initially a social networking site. However it has evolved into a system that allows users to create lists of products, articles, websites/webpages and share them among the Kaboodle community. A hidden gem among this is optimizing each product you list within your targeted theme lists with proper on-page SEO and you can snag some great Search Rankings as well.

I am going to cover Kaboodle in depth this week (maybe like a series) but for now let’s look at it on how we can go there right now and get ideas on what type of products we as affiliate marketers may want to promote.

The first thing you need to do is sign up to become a user. I am not telling you to do this for the hell of it. I am going to show you an image of my account right now and hopefully you will see why the inside of your profile is truly a gem for product research. There are hundreds of features to utilize on Kaboodle, but let’s look at the goodies that are presented to us right off the bat after joining.

Widely known but heavily under-utilized. Yahoo Groups are one of the best ways to conduct market research online. This resource is nothing new, in fact it’s been used for a long time now. However not a lot people really talk about it. Well, let’s dare to be different.

Yahoo Groups is vast. It is worldwide. As a matter of fact here are the countries they cover along with the US:

Yahoo! Groups Worldwide: Asia • Argentina • Australia & NZ • Brazil • Canada • France • French Canada • Germany • Hong Kong • India • Italy • Japan • Mexico • Spain • Yahoo! Telemundo Groups • Taiwan • UK & Ireland

There are thousands of established groups already covering nearly every topic on the planet. For all the digital information sellers this is a potential goldmine for you. This is like the biggest forum ever covering everything from questions, discussions, problems, and answers in one easy to manage place. There are niches I have never even thought about in there. Let’s look inside some of the health groups:

To effectively utilize Yahoo Groups you really need to look at groups with a large member base (obviously) as well as the amount of recent activity going on within the group. As an example I have picked out Healthy Recipes For Diabetic Friends. Now before we jump right into market analysis I want you to think about why I chose this group.

1. First I chose it because the headline “Healthy Recipes For Diabetic Friends” told me right off the bat that a potential niche for diabetics could be formed here. Not only are there going to be a large number of diabetics involved in the discussion here, but there are also a large number of diabetics that already have TONS of problems identified for us, and will give us the easiest of easy answers of what they are eating.

A lot of forum drama and a boatload of bickering between bloggers has spawned this post. You know that part when someone like John Chow says that you should not reveal your failures to have a successful blog? I think that is utter bullshit. I’m going to come right out and say it from the bottom of my heart. I’m not looking for self-pity or compliments. I am going to straight up tell you why this blog will never be a chart topper in the Make Money Online niche.

1. Because I dont feel it can be – No Confidence is a bad thing.
2. Because my business and blog postings do not revolved around one business model online. People have always said in forums that you cannot be an expert in everything from PPC, SEO, Email, and yada yada. Oh yea? Well, I’m f#cking doing it. I do it everday, and the income is not going down, it’s going up. I may not be an expert and I never claimed to be, but I do this day in and day out fulltime and it is not doing anything but making my bank deposits larger and securing a better future for my fiance and 3 kids.
3. Because I am a smart mouthed asshole. This I will admit has had ramifications on me. However if your a tenderfoot who cant handle it, I did not want you reading this blog in the first place. My blog and the people who read it daily are winners. Winners dont quit when they get hammered on something they messed up with, they rise to the occasion and do it right the next time.