Happy 4th of July to those of you in the US, and to my fellow Canadians, a very happy belated Canada Day!

Check out this roundup of Entertainment Channel posts:

• Looking for 4th of July recipes? Look no further than Jeanne on Daytime Talk
• Nikki of Prison Break Buff has the very first fall promo trailer for the new season
• Grace has fab spoilers on season 8 of Smallville on Superhero Profiles
• Lynn brings you photos of the London filming for the special 2-hour premiere on Searching Bones
• Diana of 24 Headquarters breaks the sad news that Mary Lynn Rajskub is OUT of 24 Season Seven
• Alexandra reports that Sweeney Todd won the Saturn Award for Best Horror Film on Screamstress
• Soaps On ABC’s Dexie rounded up the Best & Worst In Fashion from the recently concluded 35th Annual Daytime Emmy’s
• Shea’s MTV Reality World says that Tila Tequila will have another Shot at Love
• Lynn on House is Right reports on a new romantic admirer for Cuddy played by Michael Weston
• Check out more info about Seth MacFarlane’s animated web series, thanks to Wendy on Stewie’s Playground
• Samantha of Style Television talks Season 2 of Shear Genius
• The celebrity guest roster keeps growing, with Pete Wentz to guest star on Californication, reports Jill on Showtime Fan
• A limited opening didn’t stop Hancock from pulling in $7 million already, as reported by Brian on SF Universe
• Take a closer look at A&E’s new show The Cleaner with our New to TV writer Cheril
• Wendy of Gryffindor Gazette reports that Lucius Malfoy will not be in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
• Kevin at Pointless Banter is holding a contest for concert tickets
• Chandra’s Grrl TV reports that Tori Spelling’s 90210 debut has been delayed after the birth of her new baby
• Becky rounds up The convicted felon stupidity checklist (what not to do when you’re a criminal) on Simply Dumb
• Victoria on our newest site, Bravo Fan, brings the rumor of Real Housewives going to Dubai
• Chandra on Comedy Centric reports on a new dark comedy coming to Showtime, Nurse Jackie
• CSI Fanatic is reporting that CSI: Miami is looking for a new medical examiner
• Can you dance? Check out Lynn’s dance casting calls roundup on Dance Watcher
• Jyle of Evening Talk brings you an hilarious interview with Will Smith on The Colbert Report
• Gray reports that Tango can boost people’s emotions on Fame or Famine
• Jane has an interview with Lauren McKnight of HottieBoombaLottie on Film Gecko
• Desperate Blog’s Julie has info on Marcia Cross’ role on Peck - her first movie role after Housewives
• The latest Grey’s Anatomy News from Ingrid is that Kevin McKidd may join the cast as the new doctor in town
• My own Gilmore Girls News has a photo of the elusive Alexis Bledel out of "hiding" for a movie premiere
• Alexandra recaps the classic "Lost Boy" episode of Without a Trace on FBI Dramas
• Jeanne’s Idol Stalker has the latest results from Canadian Idol 6
• Kelly of Gossip Girl Report shares news of the confirmed romance between Blake Lively & Penn Badgley
• Jared Padalecki gave a great interview at Supanova, as reported by Jonathan of Supernatural Scoop
• Erin of Top Model Gossip reports on Demelza Reveley, the controversial winner of Australia’s Next Top Model
• Nikki of Approaching Lost reports the good news that Nestor Carbonell is Returning to Lost for 5th Season
• Tom asks if Michael Urie was snubbed for an Emmy award on Ugly Betty News
• Julie’s Disney Society reports on the rumors of a High School Musical 4: The College Years with big bucks for Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens
• Patricia Arquette looks gorgeous at Paris Fashion Week, as posted by Katelyn on Medium Dreams
• Looking for a challenge? Why not try out for The Alaska Experiment 2? Info on Science on TV by Shana
• Jonathan encourages you to vote for Reaper in the Amy Awards on Reaper News
• VH1 Reality World reports on new show I Love Money
• Check out the preview for Project Runway Season 5 from Lynn at Reality Exploits

For all the latest Entertainment news, stay tuned to Spekked.com

Photograph by Ianiv Schweber Tags: entertainment, spekked, entertainment channel, b5media

Happy 4th of July!

Before you throw stones at me for not talking about PPC, hear me out! Amit asked me to do a guest post today because he’s out enjoying his ridiculous lifestyle while leaving the rest of us to work

The concept I’m about to share today is something I taught Amit a few weeks back, he found it useful enough to implement the very next day. I thought it was a safe assumption that if he enjoyed it, so would his readers…

Most PPC affiliates I know really look down on article marketing. Mostly it’s not enough “bulk” traffic for them and it takes too long to bring results.

Yes, you’re absolutely right. There is no way you’re going to get 1,000 clicks starting day 1 from article marketing, unless by luck you get syndicated on a major website, but that’s highly unlikely. What’s more likely is that you will get 50-100 visitors within the first few days and continue to get lingering traffic from that article that slowly builds over time (as the article spreads through the internet).

So, First of All, Why Even Bother With Article Marketing?

Well…why not? It’s still free traffic. If done right, it can be highly converting traffic while also helping build your brand.

But, here’s the best reason…

You’re not at the mercy of Google or anyone for that matter. Even if I WANTED to shut my article marketing traffic off, it would be impossible. There is no way I can possibly contact over 100,000 websites that have my articles on them and ask each of them to REMOVE my link.

The Biggest Downside To Article Marketing Is The “Work…”

To really get the most out of article marketing, you need serious discipline. When a site is brand new, you need to submit at least 1 article a day to the top directories. Even after a few months, you want to make sure you continue submitting a few a week to keep building.

Compare that to the concept of pumping a bunch of keywords into Google and simply tweaking and checking every day (rather than writing and submitting) and I start to understand why PPC affiliates don’t care for article marketing.

But what if you could automate it all? What if you can make your article marketing into more of a science where you even calculate things like ROI for each article?

Now, do I have your attention?

The Art of Outsourcing Article Marketing

Let me start by saying that when you’re first starting, outsourcing article marketing is not easy. You’re likely to get burned a bit in the beginning as you learn. Why? Because you need to find INEXPENSIVE QUALITY writers who can produce work fast (that’s a lot to ask for).

So, here are some tips:

1. Use www.Guru.com (I find the best quality writers here at the lowest prices).

2. Never use anyone that has no feedback or rating.

3. Always ask for sample work - make sure they’ve written articles SPECIFICALLY for article marketing.

4. Find out if they have staff and if they can commit to X articles a day. People that have staff never tend to work well for me.

5. Buy articles in lots of 10 (at a minimum) - you get better pricing.

6. Supply the writer with the following: article title, keywords and length desired (keep it around 450 words).

7. If they’re late or submit bad work even once, move on - trust me on this one.

8. Ask them to write the articles in NOTEPAD - easier to copy/paste into directories. Word puts in weird characters.

There are other tips too, but those are the most crucial.

Now, for the MILLION dollar question - how much do I pay the writer?

Calculating Article ROI…

Before you can figure out how much you can pay a writer, you’ll have to figure out what your article ROI is. To do that, you’ll have to first write a few articles yourself, submit them and track your success.

It’s really dead simple.

I create a unique landing page for an article where all my affiliate links use SUB ID tracking so I know which article referred the sale. I write about 5 articles, so I create about 5 unique versions of the page.

I submit the articles, give it a few days and go in and calculate my sales.

Typically, here is what I find…

Of course this is going to be very different based on the NICHE, but when I do my research PROPERLY using my own self-created techniques, I’m usually able to achieve the following results…

NOTE: I tend to prefer promoting Clickbank products when I do article marketing OR high converting and high-paying CPA offers.

I usually can count on each article generating roughly 1 sale/lead for me. The sale will typically average $25 (if it’s a CB product).

However, that one article probably creates much more “lifetime” income for me, but I’m too lazy to track that far - this one sale that I’m talking about typically comes in within the first 3-5 days.

So, let’s say each article is worth $25 to me…

If I search well on Guru, I typically can find great writers willing to write each article at about $6-7 an article (given that I bulk buy at least 10-20 articles). Additionally, I have built a small “submission” team that submits all of my articles, I estimate that it costs me about $3 per article to get them submitted the way I want.

So, now I’m spending about $10 per article to get it written AND submitted (all I’ve done myself so far is checked the quality of the article and written the title, not too much work so far).

At $10 an article and $25 commission, I’ve achieved a 150% ROI.

The other thing to remember is that the article will continue working for me for LIFE. The 150% ROI may very well become 300% or even 500% given life-time value.

So the key to making article marketing work for you is to apply some of your PPC discipline to the practice. Be smart when you outsource and know what your articles are worth. But even more importantly, make sure you do research to assure that article marketing will actually work in that niche.

Some niches that do very well in PPC may not be that hot in article marketing (and vice versa).

You Probably Have More Questions…

I hate to leave you at that, but at least I’ve gotten you hungry to start thinking about article marketing. Most likely you have questions like…

1. So, how do I do the research?

2. Where do I submit my articles?

3. What kind of landing pages should I use?

4. Are there any special outlines the articles should follow?

5. What about duplicate content penalty?

6. What other sites can I use to find writers?

If Amit allows me to, I’ll be glad to come back in the future and talk more about all the questions above. The good news is that Affiliate Classroom is working on a detailed report on exactly how to do article marketing that is based on my trials and errors from the last 5 years of doing it.

We’re getting ready to launch our own article directory that we’ve been working on for a year, so we’ll release the report along with that in about 3 weeks (hopefully Amit will let everyone know about it).

===============================================

Now, since Amit did not pay me for this post, here are some shameless plugs for where you can read more from me.

1. Affiliate Classroom Blog

2. IwillFIGHT.com - My new “passion” blog (the 2nd domain name I ever bought!)

3. AffSphere.com - The new article directory we’re getting ready to launch (still in BETA).

Where did people ever get the idea that this time of the year is considered “slow” when it comes to games? The volume of releases may not be as enormous compared to the usual fourth quarter deluge, but it’s still of considerable size and its quality is certainly not suffering. And have you been paying attention to the buzz? It’s as frenetic as a mall in December.

Aside from the high brought about by announcements of Diablo III and Chrono Trigger DS, there’s plenty of big news to go around. Fortunately, our channel is in the thick of things to deliver the latest in video games.

• Watch the new Resistance 2 trailer while you still can (FPS Rantings)
• Europeans Prefer Casual Games (Gamerlite)
• Age of Conan dominates PC sales charts (Games Industry Wire)
• Chrono Trigger? On MY DS? (Handheld Age)
• Teddy WoW T6 Priest Cosplay, Neat (Ironic Gamer)
• Photo Essay: Ragnarok Online (MMOtaku)
• Initial D Extreme Stage For PS3, With A Trueno Phone Strap (Play Gadgets)
• Florida Anti-Tobacco Ad Aimed At Kids (Play Girlz)
• Yahtzee Versus Gaming Webcomics (PlayStation Monger)
• Ken and Ryu versus Ken and Ryu (Re:Retro)
• Review: Beijing Olympics 2008 (Sega Nerds)
• Passing our video game exams, playing Bokura no Telebi Game Kentei (Siliconera)
• FreeTime Bohemian Outfit for Adults (Sims Gamer)
• Want to see something cool?! Diablo 3 Trailer (The Adventuress)
• New Nintendo Fun Centers In Hospitals, Help Children (Wii News Daily)
• Reflections On Championing And Reputations (WoW Obsessed)

Image of Chrono Trigger is courtesy of Square Enix.

For several months, I’ve come to know and respect one of b5media’s best kept secrets.  That being Marye Audet and her amazing knowledge of Home Remedies and Treatments.  I’ve often joked that Marye is Martha Stewart meets MacGyver.

I’ve personally called on Marye for a few tips and am 100% sold after seeing the quick successes of her suggestions.

Whether your looking to remove ink from your favorite white sweater or get immediate relief from a nagging migraine - Marye is the best “go to girl” I know - stop over, drop her an email and see what you have lurking on your kitchen shelves that will solve your problem while saving you a bundle in office or service calls.

I’m so pleased to be introducing the long awaited Simply Home Remedies with Marye Audet. 

While the writers of the b5media Lifestyles Channel may be scattered about globally, one thing we all have in common is a celebration of fireworks.  Whether it’s the U.S. and our Fourth of July - or a very different kind of holiday in Perth - we all know the unique smell that penetrates the air and the sense of freedom the mere sound of them instill.  There is truly something so divine about a celebration of fireworks - they do create some of the most treasured memories.

Chloe of Tangled Thread shares a few festive fireworks and needlework patterns.

Kerri and Cory at Marriage Actually talk about why having a shared past is one of the best parts about being married.

Heather at A Creative Journal shares her first memory of firecrackers with a view from Australia.

Christine at Mad Cropper remembers Guy Fawkes Day, a day celebrated in New Zealand with lots of fireworks. Find out why Guy Fawkes is celebrated by the English and most commonwealth countries. It is indeed a blast from the past!

Mary Emma at Quilting and Patchwork, provides a quiz for her readers.  See how many of the quilt designs you can connect with historical Americana - events, objects or people.

Marye at Baking Delights reflects on just how much menu’s have changed over the years while at Kettle and Cup she shares a modern twist that many are sure to love with her Non-Alcoholic Long Island Iced Tea

Kelly Saunders at Thrifty Mommy shares her favorite 4th of July memory - I just can’t spoil the surprise - check it out. 

Char and Christine continue Camp Weary Parent with this weeks Patriotic activities:  Star Spangled Rocket and a week full of other fun projects

Marcie and Mary Emma are blasting through books with Fourth of July and summer recommendations at One Book Two Book. Make sure to check out Fourth of July Books for Teens and The 10 Best Fourth of July Picture Books

Linette at Robust Cooking shares 10 Healthy 4th of July Dessert Ideas.  At Mother Earth’s Garden she calls out the old saying about corn - “Knee high by the fourth of July.”  At She Knows Parties, she shares fond memories of her summers and holidays as a child.

Karen at Thrifty Mommy probably has the most reason to celebrate the fourth as anyone I’ve heard - join Karen as she shares family photos of one of the most memorable nights in her families lives.

Sandy at All Holiday Cafe provides us with a list of when Independence Day is celebrated in various countries around the world.

Christina at SoloMother shares her own experiences of celebrating the 4th of July in the nations capital.

Susan at PlayLibrary shares her memories of playing the classic game of Zimm Zamm during her family’s annual July 4th barbecue celebration.

Eliza at Babylune reflects back on early holiday celebrations with baby on board and looks to this years celebration - their first out of the military.

And finally, there’s me - Gayla at MomGadget - Without fail, each year my memories race back to an earlier time when life was much simpler and we’d celebrate our summer holiday with relatives down in the holler in the hills of Kentucky - this year - I share a Bluegrass Kinda Fourth of July.

To all our readers in the U.S. - we wish you the happiest and safest of holidays - and everyone else, thanks for allowing us to share our own memories with each of you.

I’ve finally joined one of the smallest clubs in the world — the “I back up my data reliably, redundantly and automatically” club.  It’s a good membership to have.  It offers peace of mind, and protection against accidental data deletion.  Here’s how it works.

My local hard drive

The hard drive on my MacBook Pro is 160GB.  My home directory, minus my “Downloads” folder, is about 70GB.

Step one: Time Machine
“Backup for the rest of us” 

Time Machine is one of OS X Leopard’s most useful features.  It’s hassle-free backup for non-geeks.  I do an hourly snapshot of the entire hard drive (minus my “Downloads” folder and minus any cache directories).  Although technically a Time Machine backup could be used to restore my data in the event of a hard drive failure, this is not what I use it for.  I primarily use it so that I can revert to older versions of a file or “undelete” something that I didn’t mean to get rid of.  This is because Time Machine backups are not bootable, and take a long time to restore.  My Time Machine hard drive is 500GB and it is slightly more than half full.

Time Machine recommendations: exclude directories where big files are often changing, or your backups will churn.  That’s why my “Downloads” directory is omitted.  A lot of big files live there temporarily.

Step two: SuperDuper
“Heroic system recovery for mere mortals” 

SuperDuper costs $27.95 and is worth every penny.  It functions as a hard drive cloner.  Every night at 5:30am, it clones my hard drive to an external hard drive of the same size (160GB).  I have it set up to do a “smart update backup” which means that it only updates files that have changed (so it only takes about an hour).  Why do I do this when I have an hourly Time Machine backup?  Because it creates a bootable backup.  Here is what would happen if my hard drive failed: I’d restart, hold down Option-Command-Shift-Delete as it booted, and then select the external SuperDuper backup drive as my boot device.  That’d get me going with my system as it existed as of 5:30am that morning.  I could then access TimeMachine backups to access the files I’ve been working on, and that’d get me back to within one hour.  I’d be back up and working in about 5 minutes, and I’d only lose (at most) an hour of work.  That gives me a lot of peace of mind.

Step three: JungleDisk
“My house burned down, now what?”

JungleDisk is my safety net in case my laptop hard drive and both my backup drives crash, are stolen or are destroyed.  JungleDisk is an online backup tool that interfaces with Amazon’s S3 storage service.  You pay $20.00 for the JungleDisk software, and then you pay Amazon $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used, and $0.10 per GB of data uploaded.  I have JungleDisk back up my home directory (minus Downloads and minus cache directories — about 70GB) every night at 4am.  I pay anywhere from $15 to $30 a month (to Amazon).  Restoring from S3 would be a long, horrid task.  I hope I never have to do it.  This is strictly my safety net in case of a catastrophe. This is so that I don’t die running into my burning house in order to try to save my data.

So there are three components.  All of them operate automatically.  This is critical.  A backup system that relies on human memory is no backup system at all.

How do you back up?  If you don’t, what is stopping you?

I go on twitter maybe once every 3 weeks. I hardly ever update it, rather I just like to see random tweets from different people. Every time I try to use twitter it is down and I am presented with a giant whale being carried by pigeons saying “We’ll be back soon!”. Twitter and maintenance go hand in hand.

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b5media’s Music Channel has added an exciting new blog, Canadian Music News!  Written by Music Channel editor, Jeanne Dupuis, the site will cover it all - if you love Feist, Michael Bublé, Nickelback or the many up-and-coming artists in our nation, you’ll want to bookmark this blog! 

This inaugural month should be bursting with news, pictures and video since Jeanne will be covering the "world’s greatest outdoor show."  That’s right, Canadian Music News is going to the Calgary Stampede (starting July 4th)!  Make sure you check the site frequently for updates!

Don’t you just love summer time?

It’s the time of the year when traffic and conversions take a hit, and even a big hit depending on the market that you’re in.

If you’re new to the game and have hit the Summer Slowdown for the first time then rest assure that profits will pick back up in the fall.

Here’s some tips on how to best deal with the summer slowdown :

1. Don’t Panic or do anything rash, such as completely pause your campaigns or make drastic changes that you can’t undo. It’s really easy to lose perspective when your profits take a dip. Instead of trying to fight market trends its better to go with the flow.
2. Use the Adwords Ad Scheduling Feature to adjust your bids down by 10%, 20%, or even 30% (across the boards) depending on how much of a slowdown you’re seeing. This will improve your profits and ROI. And what’s cool about Ad Scheduling is that you can easily restore your original bids once the market rebounds in the fall.
3. You may want to consider holding off launching new campaigns during the slowdown period, since it will be much more difficult to make them profitable. Keep researching new markets and offers, setup your landing pages, and your campaigns, but wait until the markets swings backup to launch your campaigns. I’m sure there’s also markets that do well over the summer, you can also consider focusing on those.

If you have solid campaigns running on autopilot like I do here’s what I suggest: drop your bids and take the rest of the summer off!

My wife and I are off to another mini vacation tomorrow, it’s an amazing resort on a tiny island only accessible by boat. I’ll tell you all about it next week!

Ahhhh, summertime! The most magical and intoxicating time of the year. The sights, the smells…the beauty!

Here at the Beauty & Style channel, this month we’re all about everything summer is made of - and our bloggers have shared the very best sights and smells of the season with you. There’s just nothing better.

And speaking of scents, be sure to visit our July Blog of the Month, The Scented Life. Written by the fabulous Amy George, you’ll get daily bytes of all things scent-sual - everything in fragrance for your home, your body, your life.

Join us in this celebrating all the glories of summer by checking out our links below and subscribing to our feed.

Enjoy!!

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Aging Fabulous is surrounding herself in a beautiful new Summer Scent that is making Teri feel like she is in a tropical paradise.

Find some great beach wear with CelebLOOK as they take a look at Gossip Girls’ Blake Lively on the beach.

Style It Less found a sexy “diamond” string bikini on sale for only $12 that’s available in sizes S, M, and L.

Style Tots suggests a cool and edgy summer hairstyle for boys while school is out.

She Knows Best found some patchwork cargo swim shorts to continue the madras plaid trend for the beach.

Shopaholics Daily wants you to know that the next few months are all about stretching out and enjoying the best of what the summer has to offer. And that means spritzing with a gorgeous summery scent, but did you know that there are the superstitions that go along with those scents? I have listed a few of my favorites, but if you know of one that is not on this list, be sure to leave me a comment. I’m just sure that there are more and I would love to know about them!

Shoe Blitz talks about these fun summer sandals that are cute, comfortable and affordable too.

Glamour Gift Guide features the Citrus Spa Gift Basket, which is a terrific gift for someone who loves the scent of oranges, lemons and other summer citrus.

It’s the time of year where blushing brides are everywhere! To help ease some of the tremendous work that bride’s have in getting ready for that special day, I have found the perfect bridal gift favors. They are scented sachet purses that can be used as bridal gifts for her bridesmaids. They are tiny, scent-filled pockets of wonder! A cute gift really for any occasion.

Gleaming Things loves the sweetly scented life - especially when you can smell like these adorable cupcakes!

Her Accessories has an odd confession to make - one of her favorite smells is leather, especially new leather handbags!

Snarkstress shares a perennial summer sight with you: A hot celeb bod in a bikini. This time, it’s Lisa Rinna, and she is something to aspire to, for sure!

Teen Style Lounge invites you to score the best summer sight of all: Gorgeous Skin! Enter to win a tube of Clean & Clear In-Shower Facial and you’re on your way to skin greatness!

eBeauty Daily keeps your peepers looking summer-iffic with a fabulous no-smudge mascara tip.

Chic by Nature took a chic break from eco-fashion to fall in love with Sage perfume oils. They’re totally natural and smell pretty.

You can almost smell the beach when you look at the mesh swimsuit found over at Indie Style File. Retro, demure and sexy all in one.

Makeup Minute found a way that you can brighten your smile this summer and moisturize your lips at the same time…with tarte cosmetics and BriteSmile’s enbrightenmint of course!

From Manscaping a few good reads for guys and, believe it or not, a manscaping music video.

Pretty By Nature is crazy about the smell of vanilla .It’s even better when it comes in the form of a lovely eco-friendly fragrance oil.!

Excited to experience all those wonderful sights and smells? Get to it! And Happy Summer!