The DEMO conference happened this week and it gave a lot of companies the opportunity to step out and show their new, innovative ideas/concepts to industry leaders, bloggers and journalists. Needless to say, social media, communication and collaboration were hot topics at the conference.
As I was looking through some of the blogs covering DEMO, I ran across an extremely positive post from prolific tech watcher Marshall Kirkpatrick talking about a widget creation web application called Sprout.
Sprout describes its service as a way to create sophisticated and dynamic interactive content. That pretty much means it’s an easy to use, drag and drop widget maker. The widgets can be anything from an RSS feed reader, like the one I created below, to a countdown clock, to an MP3 player.
After getting my invitation from Sprout I took about a half hour to build my first “sprout.” After a bit of tinkering (and some UI frustration) I ended up with this feed reader for this blog…something that I could add to any website I choose. Pretty cool, but what I really like is that sprout is made to hook into dozens of social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace and Orcut. So, in effect, you can create a Facebook widget without having to know how to code for Facebook…pretty neat. Here’s what the widget looks like:
Marshall thinks Sprout has a lot of potential, and as long as they can build some post DEMO buzz, I think I agree with him. As Sprout’s features grow I can see potential for using the service to create interesting affiliate-type widgets…so if I were you I’d sign up for an invite and spend a little time seeing what you can come up with.
If you are one of those affiliates who find other affiliate marketer’s success annoying and demotivating, it’s best that you stop reading now. If, on the other hand, you get extremely motivated by affiliate success stories, I highly recommend that you start reading the UberAffiliate blog.
UberAffiliate, is a 19 year-old guy named Paul Bourque who got into the affiliate game about a year ago and has managed to quickly move into the 6 figure per month earnings range.
The thing I like about the UberAffiliate blog is that Paul seems to be a fairly open guy, and it looks like he’s willing to share a bit more than your average affiliate blogger. As an example, here is a video post he did recently, where he answers questions from his readers. I find the section about his strategy for setting up PPC campaigns quite interesting.
Leo from the Zen Habits blog recently quit his day job to become 100% self-employed. Needless to say, he was a bit nervous about being his own boss and, even more so, working from home. So Leo, being the organizing, list-making, uber-blogger that he is decide to reach out to his work at home readers and ask them what they do to stay productive and sane when working at home.
The list is a good one, with a lot of mention of separating work and home life, managing time, taking time off for breaks, and creating schedules and lists of tasks.
I received news from our CFO Mike that the PPC Summit, which he was planning to attend, called its registrants informing them that the conference has been cancelled. While this is not the first time I have heard about a search industry conference being cancelled, this is certainly the first time I have heard of one being killed A WEEK BEFORE IT WAS SCHEDULED TO HAPPEN.
That’s right, the people at PPC Summit have announced a cancellation a week before the conference was supposed to happen, leaving at least two people I know holding plane tickets for Dallas, Texas that I’m sure won’t be 100% refundable.
Even less impressive is the fact that the people who throw the conference, Alteract Marketing, have no mention of the cancellation on the site, with the only hint being a message that says:
Please call 800-507-2958 ext. 703 for information about the Dallas PPC Summit. Registration is closed.
I’m not sure what happened, but after this I would advise anyone thinking of spending money on any future PPC Summit events to reconsider. Any company that pulls a stunt like this doesn’t deserve your business.
[Update: Another company that is going to be peeved about the Summit, Lyris, who just put out this press release in the last hour. Guess they didn't get the message.]
[UPDATE: Mary from the PPC Summit left a very good response to this post in the comments. Sounds like they did a lot to try to take care of their attendees. Make sure you read it!]
The “one stop shop.” Based on research done by Phrases.org.uk, the term originated sometime in the 1920s or 1930s, with the oldest known usage coming from an auto shop advert in The Lincoln Star newspaper.
The concept of a one stop shop, a place where you can get all sorts of products and services in one place, has worked well for the mega retailers of the world like Wal-Mart, Tesco, and Target. We all know that the combination of a super retailer’s massive buying power, mixed with location based convenience creates a powerful draw on offline consumers looking to get what they need as quickly and cheaply as possible.
But as small scale marketers, we need to be careful when we assume that what works best for the biggest and brightest in the offline world is the right way to do things in the online world.
Here’s the thing, if you are an affiliate marketer, and you are aiming to be successful and build a business, the one stop shop concept is of no use to you. To begin with, half of the draw of an offline one stop shop is the ability to get a lot of different purchases made the same physical location. But in the virtual world, physical location really isn’t a concern since every product or service is just a Google search away.
But even taking the physical location aspect of the one stop shop strategy out of the mix, some affiliate would still argue that it is very convenient to get all of your online shopping done in one place. Naturally, whey would offer up Amazon or eBay as an example of one stop shop success. What they are forgetting is that Amazon didn’t start as a one stop shop, it started as an online book store. And eBay, a place to buy and sell Pez dispensers. You see, these companies grew and matured into a one stop shop of sorts, but they started and originally succeeded because they weren’t trying to be everything to everyone right out of the gate.
If there is one thing I’ve heard from Yahoo! representatives speaking at search conferences it is that Yahoo! ranking algorithm for its natural results is a stickler for clean code. It seems Yahoo! looks for clean code as one of the indicators for a site’s quality, which makes some sense.
This might not be a huge deal for a corporate coder, but if you are an amateur website coder, the clean code requirement can be daunting. I know I have a hard time putting together error-free HTML most of the time, and I’m not totally schooled on what is “compliant” code and what isn’t. Luckily I have a great team of programmers and designers to do 99.99999% of the coding of InsureMe’s pages, but if you don’t have a corporate IT team behind you, there is still hope.
The Web Worker Daily blog has written up a good summary of three tools that can help you tidy up your code. They are:
HTML Tidy - This will find and clean up most HTML mistakes, and if it can’t fix them it will at least tell you where they are.
HTML Stripper - This works really well at cleaning up frames and scripts that are no longer necessary in your website.
Link Sleuth - This application will help you find any broken links on your website, so you aren’t sending people to dreaded 404 pages.
If you are looking to get better rankings on Yahoo! and you haven’t had someone check out the code on your site for cleanliness, set aside a chunk of time in the next couple days to check and correct your code. If could be the thing that takes your site from Yahoo! obscurity to Yahoo! success.
[Note: Download this stuff at your own risk - I have not tested these to see if they will completely melt down your computer once you install them. Just sayin.]
If you’re an affiliate who uses content creation as a channel to drive traffic to your affiliate offers, you know more than anyone that some days creating original/interesting content can be a bit of a challenge. And if you work on sites in niches that just aren’t all that exciting to the average web user, insurance for example, you know how hard it can be to come up with content that will draw in readers and keep them around long enough to covert them.
So what’s an affiliate to do?
In one word, strategize.
There is a reason why top bloggers and other content producers seem to get more attention than the average writer. The difference usually comes down to the level of planning, strategizing and thought that goes into the content produced.
Brian Clark from Copyblogger, home to a multitude of highly regarded blog posts, is a pro at creating original, interesting, and informative content that tends to get the links, visitors and acclaim that we all desire. Not surprisingly, he is a firm believer in strategizing before he creates content to make sure that he is writing the right thing, for the right audience, at the right time.
In Brian’s post, A Three-Step Approach to Strategic Content Development, he shows us how to go about building a content creation strategy that has a better chance of getting read and passed around the net. While the focus might be on blogging in the post, most of the tips, if not all, can be translated over to a site that is creating content that is aimed to bring in affiliate marketing dollars.
Give the post a read, and then take the time to sit down and run through the questions he presents in the post. Who knows, you could end up with a new direction for your content and a chance to take your business to the next level.
I’ve written a bit in the past about how affiliates who are not terribly tech savvy should consider using a content management system to build their affiliate websites. I’ve also suggested that affiliates consider using the WordPress blogging platform to get their sites up and running. Today, I cam across a free e-book that tells you how to do just that.
The book is called How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress and was written by Caroline Middlebrook. The e-book does a fantastic job of outlining how take a domain, get it hosted, and how to install and configure WordPress to build a site that is capable of driving traffic to your AdSense or affiliate links.
While the e-book is a little AdSense heavy, it does a really good job pointing out the various things you will need to do to tweak a WordPress site to turn it into a viable ecommerce site.
For better or worse, my daily perusal of our affiliate applicants through Commission Junction often reminds me of this clip from South Park, where the boys find out who has been stealing their classmate’s underpants, and why:
Having a good business plan is important when you are an affiliate. It helps guide you to your ultimate goal, profit. Strangely, a large number of web entrepreneurs feel that the following, which I like to refer to as the Underpants Gnome Strategy, is an appropriate business plan:
Phase 2 is always the tough part, and if you have no real plan for getting from phase 1 to phase 3, you’re going to struggle. “Virtual malls” tend to be a prime example of the Underpants Gnome Strategy. Thanks to Amazon and mass use of search engines no one is out there looking for a place where they can click through a thousand affiliate banner ads to find a product. Sorry, but they’re just not.
So, if you are one of the many affiliates running with an Underpants Gnome Strategy, today is the day to reset you course and figure out the all important phase 2.
The Affiliate Summit West 2008 in Las Vegas is coming up on February 24-26th and our own April Hartmeister will be there representing InsureMe. If you have never been to an Affiliate Summit, and you have some extra conference cash sitting around (or you just need a worthwhile write-off), you should definitely go.
Traditionally, Affiliate Summit is best known for its networking opportunities, with a heavily trafficked expo hall and plenty of semi-structured networking events. But the producers of the show, Shawn Collins and Missy Ward, have really stepped it up from show-to-show when it comes to the educational sessions and panels at Affiliate Summit.
Here are some links to check out so you can decide if you’re up for a bit of Summiting next month:
When I conjure up an image of an affiliate marketer in my head I picture the successful, full-time, hardcore affiliate type. The kind of affiliate who works hard, plays hard, and lives what most people would describe as “the affiliate lifestyle.”
Reality may be a bit different for most affiliates though. I’m guessing that a majority of you are working a day job while trying to make your online businesses thrive to the point where online work becomes your primary income. Not surprisingly, getting from day job person to full-time online entrepreneur can be a challenging journey, but it can happen.
For example, it just happened to Leo Babauta of the Zen Habits blog. Leo, who has made a name for himself in the online world by writing about simplifying, organizing, and enjoying life, just announced that he quit his day job and is completely self-employed for the first time in his life.
In true Zen Habits form, Leo has created a list of the 10 things he did to get to the point where he could quit his day job. Although Leo isn’t really an affiliate marketer per say, he is an online worker who is now living the dream, and there is much to be learned from his experience.
Leo starts the post a quote from Mark Twain which really hit home with me. Here it is:
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. - Mark Twain
If that quote speaks to you at all, I’d suggest printing it out and keeping it somewhere you can read it daily…I know I will.
As mentioned in Monday’s post, one of Darrin Rowse’s suggestions for enhancing your work-related creativity was to get out and change your environment. If you are a full-time affiliate, I hope that you’ve taken the opportunity of being a 100% web worker to get out of the house and work from stimulating locations such as book stores, coffee shops, and even restaurants.
Beyond that though, the freedom of working on the web can open up the opportunity for you to work from more exotic locales. Due to the proliferation of quick internet connections across the planet, affiliate marketers can take their business on the road and stimulate their creative side while soothing their wonder lust.
But before you buy that airline ticket to Tibet and pack up your home office, you might want to check out the Freelance Switch blog’s post titled Becoming a Freelance Web Worker: Part 4, Working Anywhere. The post gives some real world tips on how to get organized to make your dreams of working while traveling a viable reality.
Hopefully all of you know who Seth Godin is. For those who don’t, you can get educated here, or you can just take my word that he is one of the most forward thinking/well-known marketing mavens of our time.
One of my favorite Godinisms, and the litmus test I have for any business idea, is if the proposed business helps solve a problem of actual consumers in the marketplace. I remember being on a conference call once with Seth where a few people shared their business ideas, and Seth always asked the question:
Do people really have a [your product/service/idea/concept] problem?
In my eyes this is the most important question you can use to test the original/creative ideas you are coming up with after spending the time to think about your business creatively (the topic of yesterday’s post).
For example, let’s say you have taken the time to brainstorm the next big thing and you’ve decided that what you really want to do is create a site that lets people buy (bear with me here) Ziploc sandwich bags one at a time, online. Your logic is that sometimes you only need one or two bags, not a whole box of 100 Ziplocs, and you can’t get that at the store.
So the question you want to ask yourself is “do people have a single Ziploc bag online purchasing problem?”
Now I know this example is a bit silly, but there are a lot of business models out there that seem a lot sillier when you start thinking about whether or not your business idea is solving an actual issue that actual consumers have.
With that said, you might want to attack this question from multiple angles.
Today I read ProBlogger’s 5 Ways to Enhance Your Creativity, I was reminded that some of our up and coming affiliates may not be taking enough time each week to really sit back and strategize creative solutions for the issues they are having with their affiliate efforts. While staying on top of the day-to-day minutia of affiliate life can be challenging in itself, taking the time to step back and think creatively about your situation should be a requirement for every affiliate.
Since creativity is essential to the long term viability of any affiliate’s business, finding ways to enhance your creativity will give you a leg-up on your competition and help you future-proof your business. By using Darren Rowse’s 5 tips to enhance creativity, you should hopefully be able to find a way to get into the creative mindset it takes to come up with high-quality, high-impact ideas.
Check out the full post to learn why finding creatively stimulating activities, taking a break from work, changing up your environment, being more involved with other people and recording your ideas can help your creativity levels soar.
If you are looking for another quality link to your website (and who isn’t), Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz has pointed out a way to get one. It seems that Wired Magazine’s online presence has a section called Wired How To - which is essentially a wiki that allows registered users to add and edit pages on the site.
Based off of Barry’s research, the pages on Wired’s How To wiki do have a good chance of getting Google love, and the links seem to pass juice.
Of course with Barry writing about this on Search Engine Land you can pretty much count on Google discounting the links from Wired’s How To…but if you are looking for something to do, head on over, get signed up and add a new page to the site. Even if the link might be discounted on Google, it still might have some pull with Yahoo! and MSN.
[UPDATE: The SEL post about Wired links generated so much spam on the Wired How To site that Danny Sullivan, the SEL chief, had to apologize publicly to Wired. Ouch. Thats what happens when you tell people where to get free links.]
I have heard many rumors about Tamar Weinberg. I have heard she is one of the top diggers on Digg. I hear she is amazingly connected in the online world. I hear she is a prolific blogger and user of social media. And I hear she can levitate.
Ok, I made that last one up.
One thing I can confirm is that Tamar Weinberg has managed to write the Mother Of All Blog Posts. The post recaps the best blog posts of 2007 and links out to over 250 sites.
Total insanity.
Read the post here. It is best read when you have some time to kill…somewhere around 2 1/2 years or so.
It seems that the most successful affiliates tend to be those who excel at thinking ahead of the curve, and diligently working to stay ahead of the curve. Over the four years I’ve been involved in the affiliate world I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to a gifted affiliate and found out that they are experimenting with tactics/products/software/concepts that were blazing new trails and generating a great deal of wealth all at once.
I’m not sure what their secret is, and I’m sure some of them are just naturally gifted, but I personally think that the best way to think of innovative ideas is to expose yourself to innovative or thought provoking inputs.
The funny thing is that a lot of times I draw inspiration for innovation from text that is not all that new. Two of my favorites are 1999’s Cluetrain Manifesto and 2003’s Re-Imagine by Tom Peters. When reading these books years after their original publication you realize that the authors of both books were way-way ahead of the curve when they were writing and that most of their fundamental ideas have stood the test of time.
I know I’m going to try to revisit both of these books to get my creative juices flowing again in 2008. I recommend them both, and you can read the Cluetrain for free online, so why not give it a shot?
What about you? Are there any books that have been an inspiration for your online success? If so, leave a comment!
Last week I pointed you to 7 SEO tactics you might want to reconsider heading into the New Year - today I found a post that points out 6 questions that you should ask yourself about your pay-per-click campaigns at the start of each year.
The post is really a template for giving your PPC accounts an annual audit, which can be very important if you’re running multiple or complex PPC campaigns.
The six big questions are:
Have your goals changed?
Are you using the correct keywords?
Do your ads point to existing landing pages?
Does your ad copy change over time?
Do you still have old tests running?
What do you want to learn about PPC this year?
By asking yourself these questions and taking action at least once a year you’ll end up with more organized, efficient and optimized pay-per-click accounts. Read the entire post called New Year’s Resolutions for Your PPC Campaigns at Search Engine Land.
So I’ve been having a tough time finding anything affiliatey to write about today, so I thought I’d take a step back from affiliate/online marketing and point you to an interesting concept that one of my blog heros, Hugh MacLeod has been kicking around for quite some time - social objects.
Not sure if everyone can find a way to make their affiliate site a social object, but hey, if you can you might get a lead without having to pay Google for it. And wouldn’t that be nice?
I don’t know about you, but the start of a new year has got to be my favorite time for reading blog posts. Everyone is re-capping, looking back, reflecting, and best-ofing.
Since the only constant in the SEO world is change, it’s important for people who might not be ultra-tuned into the daily ebb and flow of the SEO world to make sure they are aware of the important changes that Google made in 2007.
Copy Brighter’s Brett Borders put together a solid list called 7 SEO Techniques That Google Smashed in 2007 that you should read to make sure you didn’t miss anything SEO related while you were glued to your TV this year watching the train wreck that is Brittany Spears.
Brett’s 7 dead techniques are:
Reciprocal links (that’s like saying Google killed something that was already dead in my opinion)
No more visible supplemental index results (because if you whine about something enough, Google will take it away from you)
Directory links from small directories (so save that $2,000 you’ve been paying your sketchy SEO service)
Open link brokers and link networks (although the closed ones should have a killer 2008)
Sponsored blog post networks (things might be bad for the networks, but there could still be value here)
Owning the SERPs with subdomins (now you have to own them with multiple websites)
Google only showing Web results (if I lose another spot on a competitive term because of a news story or blog post coming up in Universal Search, I’m going to go postal.**)
The funny thing is that I was looking though an SEO agreement for an old friend of mine’s company today and saw that the SEO firm was going to charge them to do number 3, 4 and 5 and had no plans to do anything different to tap into number 7.
Hit up Copy Brighter for the whole post and Brett’s well written explanations of the 7 techniques.
It’s a new year, and if you’re one of the few affiliates out there who are still trying to make money online without having a website of your own, it’s time to get off your backside and build something.
And no, I don’t mean setting up a spam blog on Blogger.
Building a professional website will not only give you a lot more control over your business, but lets you control your online destiny as the future seems to be increasingly bleak for spammy hosted pages and “thin” doorway page websites.
The good news is that getting a professional site put together is really not all that hard, and in most cases it can be done in a couple of hours (this doesn’t really include time for creating content for the site, which should be your next priority). In a world where having an online presence is no longer optional; a whole industry of easy and inexpensive (if not free) website creation platforms has cropped up.
One good example is Weebly - a site that lets you create and download entire websites for the low, low price of free. Weebly gives you a number of attractive templates to choose from, the ability to add all sorts of page elements, and even options to add Google maps, videos and blogs to your site. The great thing is that you don’t have to know HTML to use Weebly - but if you do you can do some customization to your site as well.
Once you have your site built, Weebly will either host your site for free or will let you download everything you created into a .zip file so you can upload it to your server (if you are doing PPC or SEO, make sure you host the site yourself, ok?). It’s easy as that!
If you are still one of those affiliates who relies on framing, redirects or just plain old direct linking to merchants, make a resolution to get a site of your own up by then end of January. It’s not hard to do and it will help you future-proof your business.
[Big thanks to Web Worker Daily for pointing out Weebly. Also check out their other two recommendations SiteKreator and SynthaSite. And if you are looking for more of a content management system, make sure you read my posts about WordPress and Web Site Baker.]
As you may have noticed, I’ve been out of the office for the last week and a half. Because of that I’m sitting here catching up on emails, deleting the amazing amount of spam I get (in Russian no less), and trying to see if I missed much in the search engine world (right now most signs point to “no”).
Instead of boring you with stories of how my neck and back are sore from too much Xbox (yes I am a dork), I though I’d direct you too a list of the top 25 posts on Search Engine Land in 2007. It’s funny to see that the most popular stories tended to be the ones that are more entertaining and less about important industry news.
Leo from the 
The “one stop shop.” Based on research done by 
If there is one thing I’ve heard from Yahoo! representatives speaking at search conferences it is that Yahoo! ranking algorithm for its natural results is a stickler for clean code. It seems Yahoo! looks for clean code as one of the indicators for a site’s quality, which makes some sense.
If you’re an affiliate who uses content creation as a channel to drive traffic to your affiliate offers, you know more than anyone that some days creating original/interesting content can be a bit of a challenge. And if you work on sites in niches that just aren’t all that exciting to the average web user, insurance for example, you know how hard it can be to come up with content that will draw in readers and keep them around long enough to covert them.
The Affiliate Summit West 2008 in Las Vegas is coming up on February 24-26th and our own April Hartmeister will be there representing InsureMe. If you have never been to an Affiliate Summit, and you have some extra conference cash sitting around (or you just need a worthwhile write-off), you should definitely go.
When I conjure up an image of an affiliate marketer in my head I picture the successful, full-time, hardcore affiliate type. The kind of affiliate who works hard, plays hard, and lives what most people would describe as “the affiliate lifestyle.”
As mentioned in Monday’s post, one of Darrin Rowse’s 
If you are looking for another quality link to your website (and who isn’t), Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz 
