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Now that we’ve got that out of the way, here’s how to sub­mit your article.

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth in a series of five quick affi­liate tips by guest blog­ger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also pos­ted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
– Michel Fortin

The best favor you can do for your­self and your busi­ness is to always focus on one task at a time, and always finish what you start.

How the heck do you do that on the inter­net, when there are dis­trac­tions everywhere you look, and in affi­liate mar­ke­ting… when there are new offers every day ripe for you to promote?

The ans­wer is: if you’re going to pro­mote a new affi­liate offer, write all your emails and blog posts in one sit­ting, before you get bored or dis­trac­ted with another offer.

Sounds inti­mi­da­ting? It doesn’t have to be.

Remem­ber that when you pro­mote someone else’s offer, they tend to give you at least one cut-​​and-​​paste email. Sche­dule it as a future broad­cast and paste it in as-​​is, because time is limited!

If the email they pro­vide is more than a page long, I’ll split it up into two parts and sche­dule the second email to go out a week later.

Once you have those first cou­ple of emails, look at the sales let­ter and see if there are any huge chunks of sales copy you can paste into an email to further pro­mote the offer.

Any decent sales let­ter usually has an inte­res­ting story, a bene­fit list and a fea­ture list… so there’s three more emails right there.

After chec­king out the sales let­ter, I’ll tend to think of one or two things the sales let­ter hadn’t thought of, and I’ll write two quick emails explai­ning each one. Emails don’t have to be long, just a cou­ple of para­graphs will do, with a call-​​to-​​action at the end to get peo­ple to click on your affi­liate link.

And finally, I’ll type up a cou­ple of remin­der emails for peo­ple who might have mis­sed the offer and need to see it again.

Now you have 7 or 8 emails to pro­mote the affi­liate pro­duct. Don’t save them in a text file for later… sche­dule them in your auto­res­pon­der right now to send out a month apart.

Using this tech­ni­que, you can sche­dule over six months of email pro­mo­tion for just one pro­duct, in 10 to 30 minutes.

If you were really moti­va­ted, you could find the hot­test con­ver­ting pro­ducts in your niche (I pre­fer to look at the Click­bank mar­ket­place since those sort by the best pulling offers first) and in one day, fill up your auto­res­pon­der with affi­liate email promotions.

Or simply make it a point to add one new offer to your auto­res­pon­der every Mon­day mor­ning, before you do anything else.

If you have a blog of your own, you only need to write posts and sche­dule them on the same dates the emails get sent out… don’t overthink it.

That’s the key to finishing what you start: work in sprints so you can sche­dule it on a timer and not have to work on that promo, or even think about that promo ever again!

I hope you enjo­yed this series on affi­liate mar­ke­ting. Please leave your com­ments below so I know peo­ple like it and I can write more of these. If you want back-​​issues, here they are!

1. Add Your Own Unique Slant to the Offer.
2. Interview the Originator or Add Your Own Bonuses.
3. Bring Something to the Table: List and Traffic.
4. Invest in Your Business: Don't Ask for Review Copies.
5. Write Affiliate email and Blog Posts in One Sitting.

I know your time is valua­ble so I’ll get right to the point.

Pro­duct owners and affi­lia­tes for the last cou­ple years have lived a happy co-​​dependent exis­tence. In the begin­ning, affi­lia­tes had limi­ted choi­ces. Today, it’s an ocean of opportunity.

The rea­son I’m wri­ting you today is because I feel the industry needs a wake up call.

Here are the problems…

1. Affi­liate mar­ke­ters are beco­ming less depen­dent on pro­duct owners
2. Affi­lia­tes have more choi­ces then ever before
3. Affi­lia­tes have evol­ved with the times but pro­duct owners have not
4. Pro­duct owners are rel­ying too hea­vily on affiliates

Affi­lia­tes Don’t Need You Anymore

In the old days, an affi­liate could simply link to a pro­duct owner and that was enough.

Then over time, more and more affi­liate mar­ke­ters were crea­ted by the pro­duct owners — so many new affi­lia­tes that, in order to start making sales, you had to offer some sort of bonus or incen­tive that no one else was offering.

Now in 2009, you need to go even further than just bonu­ses, because almost everyone’s doing bonu­ses at this point.

To com­pete with the mas­sive amounts of affi­lia­tes, you now have to cap­ture leads from your traf­fic, offer a bonus, and then point the pros­pect to the pro­duct owner.

Don’t for­get that more and more peo­ple every­day are lear­ning that they can sign up as an affi­liate them­sel­ves and buy through their own links.

Affi­lia­tes are now gene­ra­ting their own leads, crea­ting their own offers, and then sen­ding the cus­to­mer to someone else. How long before the affi­liate thinks: “If I’m gene­ra­ting the lead and crea­ting the offer, then why am I sen­ding the cus­to­mer to someone else?”

Basi­cally, to com­pete in today’s world of affi­liate mar­ke­ting, an affi­liate has to do all the same things a pro­duct owner nor­mally does.

Most affi­lia­tes become affi­lia­tes to avoid the res­pon­si­bi­li­ties of a pro­duct owner. You must alle­viate some of the work your affi­lia­tes are having to do or risk losing them or worse gai­ning them as a competitor!

There’s a Net­work On Every Corner

Back in the day, Ama­zon, Click­bank, Linkshare, and a hand­ful of others were the only affi­liate net­works on the scene. Now you’ve got over 32 “major” affi­liate net­works, not to men­tion all the small or start-​​up networks.

It gets worse, too, because new net­works are cons­tantly sprin­ging up and these net­works are offe­ring much more then the typi­cal pro­duct owner.

Inside any one of the 10+ affi­liate net­works that I’m a part of, I’ve got all kinds of affi­liate tools and a dedi­ca­ted affi­liate manager.

The ave­rage pro­duct launcher just scra­pes by with a basic affi­liate pro­mo­tion kit. Ban­ners, emails, key­words, and some links are not enough anymore.

Today, affi­lia­tes need bran­da­ble videos, lan­ding pages, reports, e-​​courses, inter­views, and artic­les… The Inter­net in 2009 is a con­tent beast — your affi­lia­tes need content!

If your eyes are ope­ning and you’re seeing the pro­blems, then you should check out what the adult industry is doing for their affiliates.

The adult industry offers their affi­lia­tes free hos­ting, dedi­ca­ted mana­gers, a plethora of bran­da­ble lan­ding pages, even whole mem­bership sites that the affi­liate can pro­mote the pro­duct owner with.

Inde­pen­dents can beat the big net­works by offe­ring more cus­to­mi­za­tion, uni­que tools, and per­so­nal touch. If they don’t, then they’ll lose their affi­lia­tes. Which actually leads me into the third pro­blem I see happening…

Affi­lia­tes evol­ved and opti­mi­zed their methods for their product-​​owning part­ners. Howe­ver, the pro­duct owners are still offe­ring the same resour­ces they offe­red 4, 5, and 6 years ago. Not only that, but it seems pro­duct owners have got­ten gree­dier and lazier.

Pro­duct Owners Should Be Res­pon­si­ble For Conversions

In this last part, I’m going to speak for myself, and if anyone is fee­ling the same thing they can let me know in the comments.

The other parts I’ve already spo­ken with many other affi­lia­tes so I was com­for­ta­ble spea­king for the majo­rity. This next part could pos­sibly just be a weird fluke I expe­rien­ced and could be totally alone in it.

But I doubt it!

Here goes…

Lately, I have been making some sho­wings in the top 10s of dif­fe­rent joint-​​venture lea­der­boards, which sounds great. Howe­ver, for most of them my con­ver­sions have been almost totally depen­dent on my offe­ring a bonus.

“Wait,” you’re saying, “you make more sales by offe­ring a bonus to your subsc­ri­bers who buy through you?” No!

What I’m saying is, if I don’t offer a bonus, then I don’t make sales. I know because I tried it on the last JV lea­der­board I got on. I was in the top 10 for leads, and then when it came time for sales, I never offe­red a bonus.

Sure enough, I got an egg in my sales column as my reward for that test.

In the pro­duct launch right before that, I offe­red a great bonus and came in top five in sales, making seve­ral thou­sand in com­mis­sions plus win­ning a 52″ flat screen TV.

Here’s my pro­blem though…

I could have just emai­led my list, char­ged for my bonus, made the seve­ral grand myself, and not sha­red my cus­to­mers with the pro­duct owner.

If the pro­duct owner’s sales fun­nel requi­res that the affi­liate offers a bonus in order to make sales…

… Then what does the affi­liate need the pro­duct owner for?

(Read that again.)

I unders­tand there is a “game” to be pla­yed, but this is not the ideal situa­tion for affi­lia­tes. And as a pro­duct owner you want to take care of your affi­lia­tes as best you can. For exam­ple, I’ll never pro­mote for that guy again.

In my eyes, he char­ged too much money for his pro­duct and the price see­med lar­gely based on kno­wing his affi­lia­tes would offer a much big­ger bonus to com­pen­sate for it.

Meanwhile, the affi­liate is only get­ting 50% of reve­nue. Yet the affi­liate is moti­va­ting the crowd, gene­ra­ting the leads, crea­ting the hot offer, and gene­ra­ting the sale…

… While the pro­duct own just crea­ted the product!

Crea­ting the pro­duct is a big piece of the pie, but what I’m saying over and over again, here, is that, if I have to offer such a great bonus in order for your pro­duct to make sales, I might as well just sell my bonus!

More and more of the top affi­lia­tes are get­ting fed up with this.

Lazy launch days are num­be­red because affi­lia­tes are get­ting sick and tired of the pro­duct owners not evol­ving their methods to keep the affi­lia­tes hard work secure.

Here’s a quick solu­tions list so you can easily iden­tify what you need to be doing to make sure your affi­lia­tes are happy.

What You Must Do To Keep Affi­lia­tes Happy

1. You must offer something uni­que to your affi­lia­tes or risk losing them to the networks.
2. You must pro­vide every resource an affi­liate would need to make the sale, inc­lu­ding a variety of dif­fe­rent bonuses.
3. The more you update your affi­lia­tes tools (e.g., emails, videos, reports, lan­ding pages, etc), then the more they will go out and pro­mote those new tools.
4. As your affi­lia­tes’ job requi­re­ments evolve, so should yours as the pro­duct owner to make sure the affi­liate has what’s nee­ded and is doing what’s required.
5. Pro­tect your affi­lia­tes’ com­mis­sions during launches, and make their job as easy as you can — you are the CREATOR, they are the PROMOTER.
6. Never steal from your affi­lia­tes by den­ying com­mis­sions on bac­kend sales, espe­cially during the launch.

I’m not saying I’m the per­fect pro­duct owner, either, since I’m mis­sing a few of these ele­ments in my affi­liate pro­gram myself. Although, you can bet I won’t be let­ting much time go by before I start making sure I have them all.

Thanks for lis­te­ning to my rant. And please post your com­ments and tell me what you think of this situa­tion. I’d love to hear them!

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of five quick affi­liate tips by guest blog­ger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also pos­ted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
– Michel Fortin

Affi­liate mar­ke­ting is not a “push but­ton solu­tion”… it’s just a dif­fe­rent type of selling than pro­duct launch mar­ke­ting or AdSense marketing.

You are not going to be able to just sign up as an affi­liate to some pro­gram and expect to make money… you have to DO something with that link!

The big for­mula for inter­net mar­ke­ting is:

List + Traf­fic = Offers.

When you sign up for something as an affi­liate, that affi­liate pro­duct or ser­vice is your offer. Once you have that offer, you need a list and you need traf­fic if you ever expect that offer to convert.

You’d be sur­pri­sed at how many peo­ple for­get this step!

For this rea­son, I don’t recom­mend pro­mo­ting affi­liate offers right out of the gate in inter­net mar­ke­ting. Build up a list first, even if it’s built from a small $7 report or a free ethi­cal bribe.

Join list buil­ding givea­ways, place your sig­na­ture link at the bot­tom of your forum posts, com­ment on blogs, leave tes­ti­mo­nials for pro­ducts you own, publish artic­les about your niche… do wha­te­ver you can to get as many eye­balls in your niche in front of that opt-​​in box. Add an e-​​mail subsc­rip­tion box to sites that need it, such as your blog.

Bot­tom line: build a list first, and then send offers to that list once you’ve built up 100 subsc­ri­bers or more. Does that sound like a lot? Okay… then focus on 8 subsc­ri­bers a day.

Do you think that with forum, article, blog, and givea­way mar­ke­ting, that you could get a measly eight subsc­ri­bers in a day? If you can, then keep it up for 12 days and you have your­self 100 subsc­ri­bers pri­med and ready to receive your affi­liate offers.

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of five quick affi­liate tips by guest blog­ger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also pos­ted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
– Michel Fortin

As someone who runs affi­liate pro­grams for over 50 of my own pro­ducts, I can tell you 99% of affi­lia­tes are worthless.

They’ll sig­nup and send no traf­fic, or send traf­fic and only bring in a cou­ple of sales. What’s the com­mon thread behind all these affi­liate fai­lu­res I see again and again? It comes in two parts: not making an effort, and not brid­ging their mai­ling list to your offer.

I would be thri­lled if an affi­liate came to me and said:

“I want to inter­view you for 20 minu­tes about (a topic directly rela­ted to both our pro­ducts and skills). My list con­tains (size of list) subsc­ri­bers, and the last offer I pro­mo­ted con­ver­ted at (this per­cen­tage) and brought in (this amount of sales). I’ll record the inter­view, con­vert it into down­loa­da­ble form and get it out to my subsc­ri­bers within 24 hours, with a link back to your offer with me as the affi­liate, at the end of the inter­view. What’s a good time for me to call you up?”

Do you see all the points this e-​​mail hit?

Most impor­tant: this affi­liate already brings in results. He has a decent sized list, already had a pre­vious suc­cess pro­mo­ting affi­liate offers in this niche. He’s doing most of the work: he chose the topic, he will be inter­vie­wing you, calling you, and recor­ding the call.

He’s also going to take imme­diate action once the inter­view is finished, and pro­mote this offer to his subsc­ri­bers within 24 hours.

When you inter­view the pro­duct ori­gi­na­tor with you as the affi­liate, it shows that you care about giving your subsc­ri­bers a good offer, and not just cut­ting and pas­ting the e-​​mail he gave you.

It shows you have an “in” with the ori­gi­na­tor so if your buyers aren’t get­ting sup­port or need a refund, they can get to that per­son through you… they trust the pro­duct ori­gi­na­tor because they trust you.

Finally, it simply injects your per­so­na­lity into the offer. This offer isn’t being made by some outside source, it’s from you and the ori­gi­na­tor at the same time.

If the ori­gi­na­tor isn’t avai­la­ble or you just don’t want to go the inter­view route, offer one of your pro­ducts as a bonus to that affi­liate offer, that way it’s a blen­ded offer.

If your subsc­ri­bers trust you but don’t trust the pro­duct ori­gi­na­tor, they can still order from the ori­gi­na­tor with con­fi­dence… because if that pro­duct doesn’t deli­ver in value, your bonus will.

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of five quick affi­liate tips by guest blog­ger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also pos­ted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
– Michel Fortin

Stop being so lazy with affi­liate marketing!

An affi­liate pro­gram is where you can link to someone else’s offer with your spe­cial ID and get paid com­mis­sion every sale you make. This pro­cess “seems” really hands-​​off and easy because there’s no pro­duct crea­tion or cus­to­mer sup­port invol­ved… just send traf­fic to a pro­ven offer!

Here’s the problem.

Most mar­ke­ters are lazy and don’t rea­lize that affi­liate mar­ke­ting has its own disad­van­ta­ges. It’s tougher to build a list using affi­liate mar­ke­ting, tough to con­vert and split test, and you have to devote most of your effort to pre-​​selling and mar­ke­ting that affi­liate product.

What the heck do you need to know about affi­liate mar­ke­ting in order to pull in decent results?

If you’re serious about affi­liate mar­ke­ting, setup a squeeze page that gets peo­ple on a mai­ling list first and redi­rects to the affi­liate offer. Send traf­fic to that page using forum posts and articles.

Even if they don’t buy right away, you can keep broad­cas­ting to that list every day with remin­ders about bene­fits for that offer… things they might have mis­sed or even things you thought about the ven­dor didn’t.

For exam­ple, once I pro­mo­ted an affi­liate offer about how to create iPhone apps and I wrote a quick follow-​​up asking peo­ple… what if you thought of eBay or AdWords before anyone else? What if you regis­te­red even one or two English-​​word domain names like Busi​ness​.com or About​.com before anyone else? What would those be worth today?

What’s great about this is the pro­duct ori­gi­na­tor prac­ti­cally wrote your e-​​mails for you. You can copy huge chunks of the sales let­ters and add them as e-​​mail follow-​​ups… then add a call-​​to-​​action at the end of the e-​​mail so peo­ple can click your affi­liate link to get back to the page.

Even if they don’t buy that offer, you can even­tually hit them with a dif­fe­rent but rela­ted affi­liate offer as well.

It ticks me off when peo­ple spend too much time on headshots, graphics, and other name recog­ni­tion devi­ces when they should be focu­sing more on web sites that actually make money!

Bran­ding is one of the last things you should worry about — so if you really want to get to the point where you’re wor­king on bran­ding to get that extra 5 per­cent boost in sales, get through these steps first…

The big for­mula is: List + Traf­fic = Offers.

Step 1: Choose Your Niche and Skill Level.

A niche is an area of exper­tise like copyw­ri­ting, stress relief, PHP, article wri­ting, etc., and a skill level is how you will turn that exper­tise into a ship­pa­ble pro­duct. A skill level might mean free­lance pro­jects, affi­liate mar­ke­ting, or site building.

Before you do anything you need to know what your area of exper­tise is. Every­body has one, because every­body has read books, had a favo­rite job, had a favo­rite sub­ject in school, subsc­ribe to cer­tain niches of magazines.

If this is your first time choo­sing a niche, make it a skill you can prove. If you haven’t made any money online, don’t make your niche the “make money online” niche!

Not only that, you need to make up your mind about what your offer will be. If you are brand new, choo­sing free­lan­cing since that is how you will make some quick money.

You might be an article wri­ter for your niche, create videos, make graphics, write auto­res­pon­ders or copy — but it needs to be limi­ted to your niche so that you can esta­blish your­self as an “expert” in that niche and charge more.

Maybe some­day you can move onto site buil­ding, affi­liate pro­mo­tions or even your own pro­ducts, but don’t make that leap until you have some free­lan­cing expe­rience under your belt.

Step 2: Create a Squeeze Page.

Pre­sent an ethi­cal bribe to sign-​​up to a mai­ling list so you can start follo­wing up with pros­pects about your future offers.

This means you’ll have to sign up for an auto­res­pon­der like Awe­ber and paste the sign-​​up code to a very sim­ple HTML page that also lists a cou­ple of quick bene­fits explai­ning why they should get this infor­ma­tion in the first place.

You do this to get peo­ple on a list, so you can send them offers later. These offers aren’t neces­sa­rily pro­ducts but could be entire sales for sale or your free­lance services.

You don’t even need to create the content.

Find the 7 best artic­les in your niche and grab them off article sites, lea­ving the byli­nes and resource boxes intact so the wri­ter still gets cre­dit. Com­pile all those artic­les into a Word docu­ment, put your con­tact info at the begin­ning and end of the book, espe­cially if you are going the free­lance route.

Then con­vert the Word doc to a PDF using either Mic­ro­soft Word 2007, Ope­nOf­fice or a free online tool (you can Goo­gle search for many great “doc to pdf converters”).

Step 3: Fill Your Follow-​​up Sequence With 7 Offers.

This might be 7 more artic­les in your niche and set them as e-​​mail follow-​​ups spa­ced 3 weeks apart. This will keep the leads fresh, and ready for when you have offers for them.

Do you offer free­lan­cing article wri­ting in a cer­tain niche? Your offer then might be that three slots have ope­ned up at a spe­cial price. Or the offer might simply be an affi­liate pro­gram you are pro­mo­ting in that niche for peo­ple who want to pay for the even bet­ter information.

Step 4: Create Spe­cial Offers, an Affi­liate Pro­gram, and Joint Ventures.

Here is the fun part. Now that you have made a cou­ple of sales, you can offer spe­cial deals to your list and repeat customers.

Maybe you want to order a “rush order” option to your article wri­ting ser­vi­ces so for 50% more, peo­ple can get their artic­les from you in half the time. Maybe you’ll give a 30 minute telephone con­sul­ta­tion to each per­son on your list who buys a par­ti­cu­lar pro­duct through your affi­liate link.

Next, you’ll want to setup your OWN affi­liate pro­gram. Most peo­ple think that an affi­liate pro­gram means you offer an e-​​book for sale, peo­ple refer traf­fic, and get a com­mis­sion. But you can also offer an affi­liate pro­gram for your free­lance work!

Just get an account with an affi­liate pro­ces­sor like Click­bank, setup a pitch page explai­ning your ser­vi­ces, a pay­ment but­ton where peo­ple can pay you for ser­vi­ces. Now you’ve given your friends and busi­ness part­ners a rea­son to pro­mote your ser­vi­ces — because they get a cut of the profits!

Take affi­lia­tes to the next level — find joint ven­ture part­ners. Co-​​host an inter­view or webi­nar to pro­vide con­tent (with a link back to your web site).

Con­tri­bute to their con­tent by giving them a ridea­long pro­duct (a report of yours they can bundle with their paid pro­duct). Write a guest blog post.

Create a spe­cial offer just for that joint ven­ture that they can place on their thank you page after they’ve made a sale, where they can get com­mis­sion. Basi­cally, cus­to­mize an offer for them and make it as plug-​​and-​​play as possible.

Step 5: Brand Your­self.

Once you’ve got your niche and skill level, squeeze page to build a list, offers, affi­liate pro­gram and joint ven­ture part­ners, it’s finally time to esta­blish your brand.

But it’s not as hard as you think. If the domain name with your name is avai­la­ble, for exam­ple, Michel​For​tin​.com, regis­ter that domain name and add a blog to it.

You don’t have to make a big deal about your blog. To be honest, for the first few months I had only my resume on my blog. Later on I added a cou­ple of artic­les, but it’s not worth your time until you get some traffic.

Let’s recap…

• Step 1: Choose your niche (copyw­ri­ting, stress, blog­ging, etc.) and your skill level (free­lan­cing, affi­liate offers, site buil­ding, your own products)
• Step 2: Get an auto­res­pon­der, and add a squeeze page using a report com­pi­led from free artic­les as an ethi­cal bribe. Then use even more artic­les as follow-​​up messages.
• Step 3: Create seven offers for this list which might be affi­liate pro­grams, your own report for sale, a site for sale, or even your ser­vi­ces for sale.
• Step 4: Create an affi­liate pro­gram and joint ven­ture sys­tem to reward peo­ple for sen­ding traf­fic over.
• Step 5: Regis­ter Your​Name​.com if it’s avai­la­ble, add your pic­ture and post a cou­ple of your articles.

That’s all you need to know about branding.

If you chec­ked out my pre­vious post, “Websites That Write Your Salesletter For You,” I recom­men­ded Digg​.com as one of the sites to help you write bet­ter head­li­nes and create bet­ter hooks in sales copy.

Spe­ci­fi­cally, find popu­lar news sto­ries that grab atten­tion, and model your head­li­nes based on them using word-​​substitution.

For exam­ple: when I go to the site Digg​.com and choose a ran­dom headline…

“The Dan­gers of Not Drinking”

I can turn that into a head­line for myself.

That article title took something con­si­de­red to be bad (drin­king) and found a way to tell you that NOT doing it… is dan­ge­rous in some ways. The sub­ject in this head­line is “drin­king”… so you can just change the word “drin­king” into something that’s com­monly thought to be bad.

For exam­ple, in the weight loss niche, you might say, “The Dan­gers of Not Eating Des­sert!” In the pay-​​per-​​click niche: “The Dan­gers of Bid­ding Too Low!” All those head­li­nes demand that peo­ple read on.

Check Digg.com once per day and copy down the three or four most attention-​​grabbing or fun­niest head­li­nes you see. This will not only build up your swipe file, but will also make the head­line wri­ting pro­cess intui­tive for you.

How about a cou­ple other great head­li­nes I found?

• 5 Peo­ple Who Broke the Rules of Social Media and Succeeded
• Man Steals Car to Get to Court on Time
• The Death Penalty for Porn
• Man Arres­ted Trying to Smug­gle Wife In A Spea­ker Box

Here’s how you make the Digg swipe file pro­cess a daily acti­vity. If you’re using the Fire­fox brow­ser to Digg, click the orange RSS icon to subsc­ribe to that feed, and save it into your Book­marks Tool­bar… NOT the book­marks folder.

This will add a but­ton to your brow­ser that you can click at any time, and read the list of head­li­nes without actually rea­ding the artic­les or visi­ting any web pages where it might dis­tract you.

Add the RSS feed to your browser’s tool­bar and take three minu­tes out of your day to write the best five Digg​.com head­li­nes of the day so you can become a mas­ter head­line wri­ter… and even if you don’t want to wait that long, you can still use word substitution.