Newspapergrl

The closest grocery store to me is Walmart, by a long shot. Each time I need to go to the store I rationalize that it’s so close that it won’t be a big deal just to run in and out. But it never goes that way.

Here are the reasons I hate Walmart:

• It’s dirty. From the floors to the parking lot it’s never clean. It feels like a discount store.
• Kids scream. I don’t know what it is about it but kids know what torture Walmart is and they cry. And parents leave them unattended in the toy aisle. I don’t blame the kids for getting grouchy but it’s hard on the nerves.
•  You will have to wait in line no matter what time you get there. You think it’s 2am and there will be no wait. You’re wrong. There is ALWAYS a wait and it’s usually long. There is no such thing as a short trip to Walmart, it’s going to be a long miserable trip.
• The employees screech over the microphone. The voices they use over the PA system could break glass it’s so shrill. It’s uncouth and annoying.
• There is always stuff in the way. There are boxes to maneuver around and I call it the Walmart obstacle course just to get your cart through. It’s the only grocery store where people have nipped my heels trying to get around me and not apologized.
• There are a lot of empy shelves. With the constant restocking going on you’d think that they could never run out. With all the sophisticated technology there is you’d think that they could time things well. But no, they will be out of things - completely out.

Walmart to me represents all that is ugly about American culture. I don’t know why I keep thinking it must be just the Walmart near my house that is bad or that somehow it will get better. I’m afraid of buying any meat there since reading, Fast Food Nation. Call me an extremist but I maintain shopping at Walmart is bad for your soul.

UPDATE: Newspapergrl Blog has MOVED!

The new address is: http://www.newspapergrl.com

I wanted to host my own WordPress site on my own domain. I’m still polishing it off but it’s ready for public view. New social bookmarking, cleaner, a lighter design, and more. I just need better stats and a logo and I’m good to go.

Please update your bookmarks and feeds! All new posts and post updates will be made there. Happy New Year! I can now cross one New Year’s resolution off the list. Thanks to ProvoBoy for your help!

Do I hate black hat marketers? No.

Do I want them to change? Yes.

Use the information you learned selling smut, spamming, or otherwise taking advantage of systems or people and do good with it. Use your black hat ways for good. That’s what I’m saying. If you hate me for it than so be it.

It’s not personal against any one person, it’s against exploitation model of making money. You don’t have to exploit to be rich. I believe that if you’re so good at marketing, you can definitely find value it undoing exploitation. By providing value in a positive rather than negative way online.

What a good year for the newspapergrl blog! You were here through the grand adventure that sometimes felt like a freefall but always ended up well.

I’ve learned social media press releases, ran a successful AdWords campaign, tried out my first MSN campaign, started learning Drupal, gotten two articles published in a magazine, written my first email newsletters to large lists, wrote an infomercial, and am still transitioning into telework. I almost forgot to note I was recently voted secretary at RMAMA (Rocky Mountain Association of Affiliate Marketers).

For the next year I want to

• improve my email marketing savvy
• learn podcasting and do a few of my own
• change my blog to its own domain & make the layout cleaner
• get a few more interviews up on Affiliate Flash
• hire a designer to finish Affiliate Flash
• get up some more affiliate sites
• get a press pass to a big conference and get an article published about it

Thank you for your insightful or funny comments, your supportive emails, and friendship this year.

Famous people who’ve commented on newspapergrl: Dave Taylor of Ask Dave, Craig of Craig’s List, Shawn Collins, Richard Shefren, Matt Mullenweg, owner of WordPress Tim Storm of Fat Wallet, Jeremy Palmer, and Lee Odden. Bambi Francisco responded to a press release I wrote. I also met and exchanged emails with Rosalind Gardner. I hope I’m not forgetting anyone. If you were here, you’d hear a cheer whenever a comment comes in from people I admire.

Hope to see some of you at Affiliate Summit in a few weeks! I’m looking forward to a warm Las Vegas. You can look forward to some great posts about it. To me, it’s the highlight of the year in affiliate marketing. There are always such interesting personalities (like I say, from the high to the low rollers) and so much to learn.

Wishing you all happiness, whatever that means to you but what we all know when it’s there or when it’s absent. Pursuit it.

This is a common theme in affiliate marketing. When an affiliate manager over a program sees what the top affiliates are making, they want to be an affiliate. I wonder if being an effective affiliate manager prepares you to become a successful affiliate.

Last year there was news about account reps at Commission Junction (know Chad Darling - wonder how it’s going for him). They risked their jobs and were asked to leave. I know someone who left a nice paying job at NASA to be an affiliate (but it took several years).

I wonder how that goes for affiliates. Is the income up and down? If you left your job to be a full-time affiliate, has it been worth it? Jeremy Palmer quit after six months but the climb is probably slower for most. Don’t kid yourself that they don’t work hard though, depending on their model and goals. If you want to keep growing richer, it’s going to take A LOT of energy and time - more than a regular job would demand - especially in the first years.

As you know that was my intention early this year. My stomach couldn’t handle the uncertainty. Perhaps one day (like when I’m not the sole breadwinner or have a few year’s income saved) but for now I like the regular paychecks.

The beauty of affiliate marketing is work you did yesterday can continue to bring income today without any additional attention. It’s nice to get those checks in the mail when you’re too busy to spend any time on it. If you were in early and broad enough you could run almost entirely on autopilot.

I’d appreciate your input on this. If you quit your day job to be an affiliate, what was your day job? Were you ever an affiliate manager? How long did it take you? Are you a sole breadwinner for your family? I think this would make an interesting article.

I blogged about my friend Carolyn who got laid off from a struggling startup. We both got laid off the same week and wanted to take action. After a lot of brainstorming (which I could do professionally I think) she decided to start a business with $100 and 30 days.

She didn’t want to wait for investors or find a job right away. She knew she could get things done herself more efficiently than most businesses she’d worked for. So she created her own job in 5 days. It was intense.

(Side note: I read China Inc. recently. It’s more common there for people to come up with a business idea, pull resources, and launch it immediately).

CopperRain produced a video about the $100 business and it’s posted on the $100 business blog right now (the $100 business video).

The business model is to open co-op kiosk in a local mall. She worked with vendors to carry products on a commission-basis. They also pooled to cover rental and advertising costs. The products are all from local small businesses.

I’m impressed with the final product. I bet Carolyn and everyone will be glad when the kisok experiment is over. They put in amazing hours. In my short visit I knew I wasn’t cut out to run a mall kiosk.

I challenge her to do a content business next (I’ll be blogging about that soon). Maybe she could assemble the lessons learned and sell the article as a PDF download on ebay. Today I learned content is selling like mad on eBay.

She really should get news coverage. If anyone knows some news stations in Utah, please help Carolyn get the story out. It got her a video and a news station could easily use it in the story. The kiosk has really meant a lot to Kelly at startupprincess. She needed to test market her idea but didn’t have the funding. I hear she’s selling out of her products!

Nice job everyone!

Can you transform a regular company into a web 2.0 company successfully? MyFamily.com is going to try. They are changing their name to The Generations Network. This encompasses all of their sites: MyFamily.com, Ancestry.com, etc.

The Generations Network doesn’t quite make me think of family history, searching for ancestors, connecting with relatives quite like MyFamily.com did. I worked there for a year or so several years ago. We had a normal company mentality. I’ll have to watch to see how this evolves. If they can pull it off it could be amazing. I can imagine the potential of a true web 2.0 experience for geneologists or for families.

I’m surprised my friend Brad broke this (at least the first I saw). Paul Allen must be busy today! This needs to be dugg. I don’t have time (I’m working on migrating my blog to my own domain and putting in social networking pieces to make this easier).

I recently blogged about how press releases, newsletters, and especially web sites need to have a call to action. You need to guide people who come to your site what you’d like them to do and how to do it. Make it easy. Amazing enough I still forget to do this at times - especially on my affiliate sites.

I found a helpful and creative list of “37 calls to action that you can use, tweak, change, twist, alter, swap, substitute, obliterate, stretch, revamp, reload and pimp to fit your own needs.”

Here are some of my calls to action:

• Listen to a short preview of this press release
• Explore the many uses of a tent cot
• Don’t miss a single post of Newspapergrl - sign up for the RSS feed
• Add Newspapergrl (http://www.newspapergrl.com) to your blog roll now
• Hire Paul (mr.paulwilson at gmail.com) to write your social media press release and get thousands of clicks to your web site. (Much of the proceeds from Paul’s business this year will go to some folks in need. Paul tutored me in internet marketing when we worked together several years ago. I’m indebted.)

Please note any creative or effective calls to action you’ve seen or have come up with. Here is a list of 5 Top Headlines.

Guy Kawasaki gets 8-10K views a day on his blog! That’s incredible. You could pretty much sum up his readers as rich men without kids. According to his survey, only 12% of the about 1200 respondents were women. Here are the results of Guy Kawasaki’s survey. It’s a pretty elite group.

I was going to ask you to fill out my survey until someone pointed out that no one would because it’s not anonymous. That hit me as very funny. Maybe there’s just too much going on right now.

I realized when I went skiing with RMAMA (Rocky Mountain Association of Affiliate Marketers) on Friday that even my fun is challenging lately. The snow was icy and it’s been a while. Sitting in front of a computer doesn’t exactly prepare me to be a great skiier. Luckily, I didn’t see any of the backcountry.com guys whizzing by me on the slopes (because I was on the blue diamonds and I’m sure they were on the black runs).

My friend Jeremy Palmer put me up to this (with good company), so here goes.

5 things you don’t know about newspapergrl (Janet Meiners):

1 - In high school I worked for a ice cream and sandwich shop. One day when it was slow I tried to hypnotize my coworkers in the storage room. Just this year I was explaining how I did it and almost hypnotized a coworker at Tahitian Noni. I guess I still have the touch.

2 - I made #151 for a book on how to bootstrap creatively: date men who will help you for free. That was said in jest at an entrepreneur class when describing my business plan related to online dating. But yes, I’ve learned a lot from successful businessmen I’ve dated. I just learned I’m forever known as #151 to the person who wrote the book.

3 - I can be a crusader and love to raise money for a good cause. I once planned an all-day band concert to help restore a historical building. It seemed everything that could go wrong did but it was still a success. Today that building is called Academy Square Library. I still feel a sense of pride when I drive by.

4 - My first entrepreneurial venture was selling suckers  when I was maybe 12. I did well (I even got a competitor) until my parents stopped paying for the ingredients.

5 - When I was a kid my grandma always had the best video cameras on the market. My cousins and I had a great time filming ourselves. I dressed up in her business suit and did a newscast. I was the anchor woman. I made my cousins cover sports and weather. I still love to interview people and get their story.

I tag:
Jason Alba
Chris Knudson
Shahar Boyayan

Tagged means that now you blog 5 things about yourself that we might not know. Please ping me when you do (thanks Chris).