Author Archives: Andrew Wee

About Andrew Wee

My name is Andrew Wee. I'm 32 years old, live in Singapore and am happily married with a 2 month old daughter. I've gone through a list of various occupations including: * journalist (for a business newspaper) * Internet content developer (for one of Asia's largest media group's Singapore Press Holdings) * trainer in entrepreneurship, business building, life skills * photographer/photojournalist * real estate agent * consultant * entrepreneur (I think that's enough for now...more later!) This is a personal space to express my goals, dreams and aspirations.

DoFollow or NoFollow?: The “I Can Has Backlink” Dilemma

SEO best practises, especially linkbuilding (off-site SEO) has come to the forefront since social networks have built critical mass in the last couple of years. Some ambiguous/enigmatic practices with regards to giving backlinks to users has left SEO specialists like Aaron Wall, Rae Hoffman, Michael Gray, Todd Malicoat, Dave Naylor amused, puzzled, frustrated and at times outright indignant.

[This is a follow up to: Blackhole SEO: Has Google’s Hegemony Spilled into Twitter?]

So the sticking point in recent days (originating from discussions last year) was why Twitter nofollows links from your profile page and your tweets.

Is it because you could be potentially linking to “bad neighborhoods”? Or social spamming links like what some marketers have been doing on MySpace, Squidoo and HubPages and potentially Google Knol?

Here is the thing: the social space and social networks in particular will need some degree of human intervention/curation. That’s why Squidoo has a staff of moderators/volunteers to review lenses, article directories have human editors. The best content review algorithmn still has a couple of years to catch up with user-generated content.

So some human intervention is needed to review content.

i can has backlink

And if users are spending 1-2 hours each day on sites like Digg, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, shouldn’t they gain some outbound link benefit from their efforts? Your users are Continue reading

Blackhole SEO: Has Google’s Hegemony Spilled into Twitter?

Hegemony (from Wikipedia): is a concept that has been used to describe and explain the dominance of one social group over another, such that the ruling group or hegemon acquires some degree of consent from the subordinate, as opposed to dominance purely by force.

Have the forces of blackhole SEO spread beyond the reaches of Wikipedia and eBay to dig it’s claws into Twitter, as Sugarrae has asserted?

Though Rae mentioned the issue last September, SEO specialist Todd Malicoat AKA Stuntdubl tweeted about it yesterday, together with some choice thoughts:

i mean – do you really believe that twitter links are passing NO credibility, NO juice, NO nothing…?? just like wikipedia ….riiiiiiight.

maybe implement a sandbox for new users
certain threshhold until they are trusted enough to get into a non-robots.txt directory

why not utilize robots.txt solution…instead of nofollow?
i guess nofollow in general just gets me riled up and pissed off

What would happen if twitter got rid of the nofollow on all links? How would it affect the web?

So why’re we revisiting this issue?

Blackhole SEO is where an Continue reading

Friday Podcast: Sports Affiliate Marketing With Jason Rubacky

jason rubackyHave you looked at the lucractive world of affiliate marketing for sport franchises and sport-related marketing? Football Fanatics affiliate manager Jason Rubacky came on the Friday Podcast to talk about the wide range of products available under his company’s banner and tips and techniques to successfully promote these items.

During the Friday Podcast, we touched on:

  • Jason’s experience as an affiliate and affiliate manager
  • How Football Fanatics got started and it’s position as a leader in the sport affiliate marketing field
  • Information on the Football Fanatics affiliate program and it’s listing on Commission Junction, ShareASale and it’s in-house program
  • Upcoming enhancements to it’s partner manager (affiliate) interface
  • In addition to football, you can also promote hockey, surfing, NASCAR and MMA (mixed martial arts) products
  • How to effectively generate traffic for your sports affiliate site
  • Pro teams vs College teams: which drive more traffic, and importantly, have greater profit potential

We covered quite a bit of ground during the interview, check out the podcast below:

[display_podcast]

Links:

Jason Rubacky on twitter

Football Fanatics

Surf Fanatics

Jason’s blog

Affiliate Summit West 2009 In Pics and Words (Part 3)

If you missed it, here are “Affiliate Summit West 2009 in Pics and Words” – Part 1 and Part 2.

Meeting people in person at tradeshows and seminars and more importantly, talking to them face-to-face has yielded some of the greatest dividends in getting ideas to grow my business, find partners to work on projects and connect with others.

Here’re more folks:

billy kay knoblach

Yes his name really is B Knoblach AKA BillyKay.

Besides his successful Mail Order Shoppe, BK is friendly and always has a smile on his face.

BK’s twitter account.

deb carney loxly

Deb Carney AKA Loxly always gives highly welcome Loxly hugs.

Besides being the boss at outsourced program manager TeamLoxly, actively running Loxly Gallery and producing a number of new podcast at Continue reading

Is PPC Classroom 2.0 Really Free? What’s The Catch?

PPC Classroom 2.0, a program which incorporates pay-per-click training and affiliate marketing training, launched a couple of hours ago with a reported 13.6% conversion rate for the first 2,500 orders being processed. Over a period of 3 hours, 3,000 orders have been processed.

Not surprising given that the course’ creator’s Amit Mehta and Anik Singal have used the business model similar to “free trial” offers you see listed in the CPA networks.

If you’re ordering from the US, you get the course free and pay a $6.97 shipping and handling charge. If you’re overseas/international, you pay $9.97 for the s/h charges.

Is it’s really free?

Besides the 9 module PPC affiliate training course, a DVD training disc and other materials, you’ll also have access to website templates and a free ticket to the PPC Classroom Live workshop (I was there for the first one in Las Vegas and the speakers and material was excellent).

So yes, you will be getting all this stuff for essentially free (the shipping and handling charge pre-qualifies the lead quality).

But What’s The Catch?

If you look at the fine print, you’ll see that you get access to the “PPC Inner Circle” where you’ll get additional access to training at $97/month. You get the first month free with your PPC Classroom purchase.

So what I believe is that Amit and Anik will do their best to overdeliver on the content and help you get results to motivate you to stay in the program.

If you consciously apply the techniques from the course, I’m sure your profits will exceed the $1,200 per year you’ll be paying for the PPC Inner Circle access.

Will I make $10,000 a month after going through the training?

There’re a number of income claims on the sales page about folks making $5,000 a month, $20,000 a month (even $1,000 a day from my friend Josh Wexelbaum, owner of the Scrappy Business blog).

While you can achieve that, given that PPC essentially allows you to buy unlimited web traffic, you will need to work at it, likely putting in quite a bit of time to test, analyze and optimize your campaigns.

What you’re seeing on the sales page is what the top 1% of students are doing in the course. Use that as motivation to spur yourself to take results.

What will help is that Amit is very open in sharing the techniques, tools and strategies he uses in his own business, and being able to replicate a fraction of what he’s achieved will move most affiliates to the next level in their income level.

The major takeaway is to take massive action, in order to get massive results.

If you’re looking for strategies to scale your affiliate business and bring your business to the next level, be sure to check out PPC Classroom 2.0.

TweetDeck Users Read This…

I’ve discovered a major problem that plagues Tweetdeck users who use the free Twitter client to access and post microblogging updates. TweetDeck is bugged by a fairly major issue which will require a solution pretty soon.

Background: I’m an active Twitter user and have been using what I would consider the best Twitter client, TweetDeck, for a couple of months.

Sure it’s had some weird idiosyncrasies like having to shut it down so I could run more bandwidth-intensive applications or MMPOGs on my system, but on the whole, it’s been a pleasant experience (read my earlier review)

I may or may not be the typical Tweetdeck user – here’re my usage habits:

  • My computers are on 24-7. I run mainly Windows XP operating systems (a combination of Professional and Home editions). I reboot when virtual memory drops “dangerously low” or I get a BSOD (blue screen of death).
  • I follow about 200+ Twitter users, some of whom tweet as many as 50 times a day or more.
  • I live in a GMT+8 timezone (which is 13 hours ahead of EST now. My night is your day. I’m snoozing while you’re working)

As a result, it’s not uncommon to wake up to 500+ tweets during the 6 hours I’m sleeping.

Particularly today, my machine crawled to a grinding crawl, and pulling up the Windows Task Manager (hit alt-ctrl-delete to see this):

tweetdeck memory leak

Coming in at #1, TweetDeck with a pretty monstrous 334 MB of memory usage (followed by Firefox where I had about 30 tabs open).

And a screenshot a few Continue reading