In this edition of the Affiliate Buzz, James Martell is joined by his wife Arlene Martell and JambMedia’s manager of business services, Kimberly Juchnowski, to talk about the game changing tool Basecamp. This virtual team management tool is brilliantly developed to help with business building and online success.

James begins the podcast with an introduction to the business game changers he has taken on board over the years. In 2001, he came across Google, which was really big for affiliate marketers. The next new finding was Elance, while he was a speaker at a university. The third was WordPress in 2007 and the fourth is the topic of today’s podcast, Basecamp.

James has given advice on WordPress in a previous Podcast and other tools which affiliates can use to boost production and their profits.

Kimberly was quick to embrace Basecamp, which offers a 60 day free trial not requiring credit card details. James is at a point now where he is awaiting an invoice for the first 30 days of paid subscription to the site.

Arlene goes on to describe the situation prior to the use of Basecamp. Arlene has always been a real ‘to-do list’ maker. These lists would have questions to be answered or actions to undertake for current projects on the go. Everything on her ‘to-do list’ had a due date and she struggled to know where everything was, often unsure if her note was on a piece of paper or on Google Drive.

James knows that Arlene is strong on business organisation and when she gets a little disheveled something needs to change. To show how important being organised is, James recalls that when they were finishing off the Affiliate Marketers Handbook in 2002, they settled on the first chapter being ‘How to Get and Stay Organised’.

James clearly feels that organisation is a big challenge for those with an online business and reflects on his own experience that virtual team management can be tough. He was getting very frustrated at one point earlier this year and having to conduct regular meetings with Kimberly, to discover what stage they were at with certain projects. This is when they discovered Basecamp.

The Moment of Enlightenment

Kimberly hadn't realized how bad the organisation had become until she started using Basecamp but she admits things were getting messy with the numerous simultaneous projects. She had to spend countless time checking everything to ensure nothing was being missed, going back and forth between different team members to get work completed on time.

The situation resulted in a team which was not cohesive and it was hard to reference a recurring aspect or issue in a project. To Kimberly, Elance is a great tool, but when you have many threads contributing to one project, it can be difficult to stay on top of things.

Since the team started using Basecamp, only one meeting has been required and James laughs that they really had nothing to discuss.

During the podcast James, Arlene and Kimberly go into detail about the benefits of Basecamp. Here are some of the topics they discuss:

* The problems with another virtual team management tool they have used called Action Method.

* Have any problems been experienced with Basecamp?

* How James can use Basecamp to keep all his ideas organised.

* How Basecamp can create an excellent team environment.

Information at Your Fingertips

James loves Basecamp as it can easily tell him the status of any project. He looks at the statistics on the site and it shows him there are current...