I’ve praised the Power of Twitter many times over now. And it was a twitter conversation after my 4/17/09 Free Shirt Friday post that led to today’s featured Free Shirt…

@kimarketing Does this shirt make my butt look big? http://twurl.nl/dgpm0d It’s Free Shirt Friday! Gotta love pre-publish, I’m actually still in my pj’s.

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@mookie94 @kimarketing can you please send me a shirt that MAKES my butt look big? i’m a member of the NBA — No-Butts Of America!

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@kimarketing @mookie94 Wonder if Lipo could be transferred? I’ll share. But I need a http://www.94rock.fm tshirt first!

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@mookie94 @kimarketing that’s one of the few things i actually have the power to make happen! also, i can play the willam tell overture on my face.

Ok, so it only took 6 weeks for me to actually get the shirt from 94 Rock’s Morning Host, Mookie, but like many things, it was worth the wait. And I didn’t even have to sleep with him. 

Anyhoo, I usually don’t participate in the whole #followfriday hashtag scheme of things, and I usually ignore tweets that just list names with no reasons as to why I should follow them.  Example…

@kimarketing #followfriday @shoppingkim @shoeholics @stealthestyle @freebiefox @cybersweeps @preemietwins @huskersetc

Had the above been a real tweet, I do recommend following all of the above twitter users because they are all mine! And they are set up to auto-follow courtesty of TweetLater.com (and auto-unfollow, so you can’t just follow and unfollow to increase your count without reciprocating). I do recommend creating a twitter id for each website you have.  If you don’t have time to maintain multiple accounts, set them up on auto-pilot with TwitterFeed.com to tweets your RSS feeds.  Can you say free traffic?

So today is Friday and I anticipate seeing several #followfriday recommendations. I prefer the tweets that are genuine and tell me why I should follow someone.  Like this…

@kimarketing #followfriday I recommend following @mookie94 because he’s crazy like me and his tweets make me laugh milk out of my nose.

The milk is in reference to yet another tweet.  And that recommendation is sincere - Mookie didn’t pay me (much anyway) to write that.

So thanks 94 Rock for the tee! 94Rock.fm is a local radio station for me in Northeast Nebraska (94.7), but you can listen live via the internet from anywhere! Now what do I have to do to score some free tickets to the Heart/Eddie Money and Big & Rich/Zac Brown Band Concerts coming up…

Okay, so my free tshirt from Affiliate.com is not near as cool as Shoemoney’s Affiliate.com tshirt, but it’ll suffice.

Affiliate.com, formerly known as CPAEmpire (and other names, ie Optin Real Big) is a CPA Network out of Denver with hundreds of available offers (lots of email and zip submit campaigns if that’s what you’re into).

P.S. If you’re looking for a specific CPA campaign for your niche (with the highest payout), check out OfferVault.com that searches thousands of offers from over 30 different networks (Affiliate.com included).

TheSpew TheSpew, Episode 9: Chris Pearson - Naked and Covered in Honey http://cli.gs/theSpew9 w/@pearsonified @karengarcia @kimarketing & @missyward

I used the example of when I was sent a Sumo Omni to review. I didn’t like the thing, so I asked the company if they still wanted me to write about it as I’m not gonna lie. Nope. They still got some advertising from my pre-review. And I used an affiliate link to their store. Should I have to disclose that I may potentially earn commission if they purchase through my link?  I think not.

What are my favorite things to review? Send me shoes!

On the show, we talked about various Wordpress Plug-Ins that we recommended.  Chris, on the other hand is “anti-plugin” and stated you don’t need plugins if you use the Thesis Theme from DIYThemes (hint, hint). Chris gasped and had to pull the sword from his chest after I said I currently have 36 plugins activated on my shoe blog (obviously I don’t use Thesis Theme…. as of yet anyway…) 

I picked 8 of the plug-ins I recommend to highlight…

1. Aggregate - Allows you to place the contents of an RSS feed into your posts, pages &/or sidebar.

2. All in One SEO Pack - Out-of-the-box Search Engine Optimization (I actually forgot to mention this one, but Karen brought it up!)

3. Google XML Sitemaps - Generates a Sitemap.xml for search engines (Chris recommends submitting your sitemaps to Google Webmaster Tools.)

4. Link Cloaking Plugin - Cloaks outgoing links (ie masks affiliate links). Missy recommended the MaxBlogPress Ninja that Shoemoney has been pimping, so I may have to give that plugin a try.

5. phpBay Lite - Adds eBay auction listings to your posts with just keywords.

6. Post-Plug Library Supports Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, and Recent Comments plugins.

7. Subscribe to Comments - Allows readers to receive an email when new comments are posted to an entry. This is the only plugin that Chris recommended!

8. Youtuber - Adds YouTube videos to posts easily.

Other Wordpress Plug-Ins we discussed were…

AdRotator - Rotates Ads (duh)

Adsense Deluxe - Inserts ads into posts

Category Visibility - Post only certain categories (Karen recommends this for “hiding” personal stuff from the main category line up)

Linkshare Link Lookup - Shawn Collins reviewed this.

Do you have a favorite plugin for Wordpress not listed above?  Please leave a comment and tell us!

When I toured Zappos‘ headquarters while in Vegas for ASW09, they handed out cool bookbags and let us pick out a complimentary book.  Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos personally read and recommends every book choice. Since I finished reading my book, I tweeted this to Tony yesterday asking if he had a list online of all the recommended books so I could add some more to my library… 

Tony direct messaged me today with this link:
zappos.com/zappos-library 

I was not only impressed to receive a response from the CEO within 24 hours, but also impressed by what I saw when I clicked on the link!  Not only were the recommended books listed, but with links to them for sale directly from Zappos.com!

Then being the bargain shopper that I am, I did some price comparison shopping on the “Most Popular” book titles…

Flipping The Switch by John G. Miller, $13.57 with Free Shipping (remember Zappos offers Free Shipping Both Ways on ALL orders). Amazon Price $13.57 Plus Shipping if you’re not an Amazon Prime Member.

Purple Cow by Seth Godin, $14.25 Free Shipping. Amazon Price $14.25

The Big Moo by Seth Godin, $13.57 Free Shipping. Amazon Price $13.57

See a trend here (besides Seth Godin’s association with cattle)? Yep, all the same prices.  Coincidence? I think not. Being an Amazon Prime Member, I’m probably more apt to order from there, as I get Free 2-Day Shipping.  But for those of you not as “prime” as myself, then ordering from Zappos.com would be the better option.

Now which book should I order first?  Which books have you read yet?

P.S. You are following me on Twitter @KIMarketing, right?  I was playing around at TwitBacks.com, so check out my new (free and made in under a minute) background.

Since I’ve started my “Free Shirt Friday” posts, I’ve gotten several emails from people wanting to know how they can obtain free t-shirts, too.  Well, you’re in luck, as I’m not only an internet marketer, but I’m also the Queen of Free. And this gives me an opportunity to pimp some of my other sites.

The free shirt I’m wearing above is from Alpha Geek Nation. One of our ShoppingBookmarks.com visitors submitted the tshirt freebie (thanks Clint and Barb), so I requested one myself.  My tee arrived in 4-6 weeks just as promised. So if you’re looking for free tshirts for yourself, here’s the whole Free Clothing List. If you know of any free offers not listed, you can submit the link yourself and earn “SB” points for free stuff!

Also, if you’re really into freebies, sign up for the RSS feed over at Freebie Fox to receive a new featured find daily, which includes free tshirts!

I think the free shirt looks quite nice with my pink Crocs - whatcha think?

The pics of me are none too flattering (and I sure didn’t think they’d pop up online), but they are fun nonetheless. Check out my mugs with Brian himself (head honcho of ShareASale), BajaLori (my mentee) and Mike (of Synner Design aka my brother).

And they plan to bring back the photo booth for ASE09 in New York City!  Will I see you there?

P.S. Jason Rubacky now works for ShareASale, too! What a fun place to work!

Today’s Free Shirt is courtesy of Markzware.com - the leader in preflight solutions, catering to the worldwide graphic, printing and publishing industries. Markzware’s flagship preflight product is FlightCheck, an essential preflight tool for Professional Designers, Layout Artists, and Prepress Production Departments within the print and publishing industries.  Thanks for the shirt!

Want me to model your shirt?

I was looking at my stats this week (I use StatCounter.com - it’s free) and noticed the the top referring keywords for this site were “gilbert gottfried as octomom“.  Did I blog about this?  No.  But I twittered it! And I use Alex King’s Twitter Tools (also free) to pull my tweets into the sidebar of my site.

So, I thought I’d write a quick post to actually add the content that those visitors are looking for (Gilbert Gottfried playing Octomom on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno), courtesy of Hulu.com, and give you all some free advice - add your twitter feed to your website for some possible free traffic! Do you follow me on twitter yet?

P.S. Do you think I’ll make a better looking Octo-mom for Halloween than Gilbert Gottfried?

Today’s Free Tshirt is courtesy of GetAds.com, a CPA Network.  After I was accepted as a publisher, I emailed my Account Manager, Jamie Stephenson, to ask if GetAds offers a 2-tier or referral program so I could pimp my link, and here was her response (I guess I presumed Jamie is a she, but could be a he?)…

Kim, unfortunately at this time we don’t have a referral program setup because we are working with mostly high end affiliates and wish to keep the network on a more exclusive tier.  We might look to change this in the future but that’s where we are at for now.  By the way I read an article about the story of you getting into affiliate marketing and what you’ve done since, very cool.  Congrats and keep rocking.

Nice, eh? Thanks Jamie!