The affiliate network space has long been dominated by four major players - Commission Junction, Linkshare, Shareasale, and Performics. But there’s a new kid in town, and they’ve managed to capture 17.5% of the market in just 6 months time!

Pepperjam Network has taken the world by storm, and they’ve used the power of the blogosphere to get their name out there, and the results speak for themselves!

Even more impressive is the roster of clients that Pepperjam Network has, including eBay, Playboy, Roca Wear, Phat Farm, Jelly Belly, among others..

In an attempt to recruit more affiliates, they’re offering $10 just for signing up. And if you blog about them, you can make up to $50 per month!

Bloggers are the lifeblood of the PJN Publisher Referral program and tend to be our biggest supporters and closet friends. As a result, we thought we’d create a sort of “Pay Per Post” incentive program where any PJN publisher / blogger will receive $10 for each post you make (up to 5 per month) that promotes Pepperjam Network or any Pepperjam Network tool.

So what are you waiting for? Sign up with Pepperjam today!

Enjoy the 3-day weekend, and try not to blow your fingers off - It’s hard to type when you’re missing fingers!

Attend any trade show, and you’ll come home with hundreds of business cards. And if you’re like me, you’ll eventually lose them.

We’d like to think that wireless technology, Microsoft Outlook, and the Internet are making much of the old-school paper pushing obsolete. Yet when we meet a new business acquaintance, the first thing we do is exchange business cards.

CardScan’s Executive V7 is perfect for mobile users who understand this reality. With its three-second operation, a powerful OCR reader that correctly identifies contact data, and standalone contact management software that supports the most popular contact managers, CardScan deserves a place in your laptop bag.

The CardScan is certainly portable; it weighs only seven ounces and measures a mere 5.8 x 3.3 x 1.5 inches. Your laptop supplies the power through USB. The included software helps you find duplicate contacts, supports online backups, and syncs perfectly with contacts on a Palm or Windows Mobile device.

Once you use one, you’ll wonder how you lived this long without it! They’re running a special on refurbished units this month, so why wait? Get one now!!

If you’re a one-man show, you’ve probably got a daunting list of tasks that need to get done. It’s easy to feel defeated even before getting started. The trick is simple - Break down large projects into smaller components, and chip away at them a piece at a time. This way, you get the satisfaction of completing an item from your list, while working towards a greater goal.

That said, it’s important that you don’t put off an important task and focus instead of the easier ones.. I know I’m guilty of that, and that’s why my May Newsletter still hasn’t been sent out.. (as we now enter July. )

Spend 10 minutes today, and look through your to-do list. Are there entries on there that have been ignored for months on end? Why are you avoiding them? Can you break them down into smaller pieces and chip away at the problem?

Whoops! A bunch of our blogs are still on a shared host, and I guess they were putting too much load on the server. Without warning, I’m staring at a “Your Account Has Been Suspended” message! We are getting ready to move everything over to a new dedicated server, and as such, a few things have slipped through the cracks.

If you’re running Wordpress, it’s vital that you keep up-to-date with plugin updates. WP makes it easier than ever, since it now tells you when a new version is available for download! Our “excuse” was that we had 25 blogs running on this host, and going through each one and updating the plugins was very time consuming. Whoops!

Another HUGE oversight was not installing any sort of caching. Most people use WP-Cache, and it works very well for the most part. But for whatever reason, when I setup these blogs way back when, I didn’t enable WP-Cache. (I think it was screwing up one of our counters - A stupid reason not to run caching, in retrospect..)

I discovered WP Super Cache awhile back.. This is WP-Cache on steroids! We had a story picked up by a major news media source, and it resulted in 18,000+ hits in 24 hours! It was chaos, and our server became COMPLETELY unresponsive. I was able to enable WP Super Cache, and the situation was quickly contained.

At that moment, I should have gone out and installed it on all of our other sites. But with a thousand other things going on at the time, I put it on the backburner. Big mistake! Luckily, I was on the server when we got shut down, so I was able to contact support, find out what was going on, and address the issue immediately. But what if this happened next month, when I’m down in Punta Cana without Internet Access? I’d be SOL, as I’m the only one who knows anything about the servers - The rest of my staff just writes..

So learn from my mistakes, and protect yourself from future issues.. Update your plugins, and make sure you’re using caching so you don’t piss off your hosting company!

Recently, you’ve probably noticed that I haven’t been posting as often as I usally do. I’ve been working on a number of projects, and I’m just totally burned out! So, I’m taking the day off. A simple concept, but one that the work-for-yourself crew doesn’t get to enjoy as much as they should. Eventually, you get to a point where you’re completely lost and unproductive. That’s where I’m at now.

So I’m just going to relax, watch a movie or two, read some magazines, and chill. I won’t be able to escape work completely, as I’ll still have phone calls and e-mails to deal with, but I’m not going to spend 12 hours in front of the computer screen!

If you’re feeling worn down, and a little out of sorts, take a day for yourself.. You probably deserve it!