Aside from some pure e-commerce sites, most online businesses owners are actively monetizing their own credibility. This is true whether you promote your own products or you engage in affiliate marketing.

Let’s say you market affiliate products via either an email list or a blog. Every time you make a recommendation you are risking your reputation to some degree.

The degree of risk involved depends on several factors. For instance, one factor is the quality of the product that you are promoting. A list of loyal readers that is bombarded with several bad recommendations in a row may soon begin to question their loyalties. Another factor to consider is the frequency with which recommendations are made.

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If a cow is purple in the middle of the woods with no one around to see it, does it really matter what color the cow is?

A lot of us have read Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow, which advocates making products remarkable so that the most powerful form of advertising, word of mouth, will naturally work in our favor. The term for such a revolutionary idea that spreads like wildfire is an “ideavirus”, as in the book Unleashing the Ideavirus by Godin and Malcolm Gladwell.

Here is the question though, are there limitations or even possibly dangers to being remarkable without a platform. When I say a platform, I mean anything which gives you a significant amount of leverage in initially promoting your company’s new offering. For instance in the world of online business your leverage could come from an email list of 100,000 members or a Facebook profile with 2000 friends.

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As Twitter becomes more and more popular, I think it makes sense to consider the possibility that Twitter may become the new standard for providing some of the same basic functions that RSS is known for. From a marketing point of view, I think that one of the most important functions of an RSS feed is the ability to create a crowd.

In our fast paced and frantic world we require the help of others to make many of our decisions. Instead of reading all of the blogs devoted to the areas that interest us, it makes more sense for us to briefly scan over the blogs related to our niche hoping to find a few that send us the signal that says “stop and read further, you may have struck gold”. One of those signs is the existence of a crowd, any kind of group or gathering sends the signal that at least a few people with interests similar to your own think that the site is worth their attention.

As human beings we can’t help but think, if it’s worth their attention, maybe its worth mine. Displaying a feedcount of 50,000 subscribed RSS readers instantly and clearly conveys the message “I am worth your time”. It is for this reason that some internet marketers have suggested “borrowing” the code from another blogger’s stats to display on your site. In my opinion Twitter provides this ability to create a crowd, inherent to RSS with the addition of some bonus features.

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Sometimes just reading text can be a boring way to learn. But it’s not just text, boring webinars hosted in monotone voices can put us to sleep just as quickly. So the question becomes how can we keep our audience interested and transmit information at the same time.

Enter the Internet Marketing Rap Music Video. I recently came across the YouTube video of an artist that goes by the name “Poetic Prophet”, entitled “Paid Search 101 rap”. If you check this artist’s user page, you will find 2 more Internet Marketing inspired rap music videos.

This guy has defiantly created an interesting viral marketing campaign using viral video. So far it looks like this video has received about 15,000 views so far, it will be interesting to see how much this number grows.