[This is a follow up to: Blackhole SEO: Has Googleâ€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.

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 building a big ball of indexable content that appears in the SEs and brings customers to your social network.

Granted, there will be organic clickthrough on resource links, especially if you post great content, but I don’t understand why the nofollows are there.

Argument #1: Prevent links to bad neighborhood which could deteriorate the originating site’s authority status. -> evolving rules-based content filters + spidering destination sites + some manual review will address this.

Argument #2: Prevent PR leakage – so why aren’t you nofollowing links to Amazon Web Services? If you’re paying AWS and not users, shouldn’t you no-follow AWS and follow users?

Argument #3: Want to build up authority status and PR by keeping PR circulating with the network, using nofollows/redirects to other sites, instead of direct links and minimizing/eliminating leakage. Which is probably the worst un-social message that you’re sending out, especially in a social network context.

–

Does anyone see the irony in writing a review about a new product or service then pointing to an internal page? Am I the only one who see an overall positive review being undermined by a “but I don’t trust you enough to link direct to you”.

–

So it seems like there is some old school thinking when it comes to DoFollowing and NoFollowing.

And if Web 2’s big boys become the “Man” where the priority is on maxing out the analytics/stats to boost your branding/visibility/ad rates, it’s just a matter of time before users head over to another hub where users and content are a priority.

What is Blackhole SEO anyway?

As described by BlueHat SEO Eli, it’s where link authority AKA ‘link juice’ is trapped within a site and the outgoing link authority is severely capped or restricted altogether.

In layman’s language, it’s a site which happily accepts your backlinks, but holds back the goods when it comes to linking out to other sites.

The consequence? You’ll rank lower in Google’s search results and these blackhole SEO sites will bubble up to the top or get more firmly entrenched, if they are already there.

Blackhole SEO is achieved by the use of “no follow” tags or by directing links to an internal page, like a resources, reference, glossary or database/encyclopedia page like the TechCrunch Crunchbase.

The blackhole sucks linkjuice and doesn’t send much, if any, of it out.

Among the named suspects – the New York Times, TechCrunch and Wikipedia.

What does this mean for internet marketers?

Offsite SEO efforts will be restricted by these blackhole practises and has Seer Interactive’s Adam Melson’s wondering if Facebook is stealing your hard-earned earnings?

Likewise, Quadzilla defines a black hole and gives you some ideas for rolling your own blackhole.

Unsure of whether to try to beat them or join them? Aaron Wall lists the pros and cons of blackhole SEO.

In the final analysis, you might be wondering about the implication of being able to build link authority for your own sites, especially as more high authority/high trustrank sites start implementing this insidious site structure into their business operating model.

For user content generated sites like Wikipedia, will there be as great an incentive to provide quality content if you will be denied a linkback to your site?

The situation is far from being resolved, but the wave of discontent is certainly starting to build.

Stay tuned for more developments.

Affiliate Summit co-founder Shawn Collins recently uploaded Wil’s slides from his presentation together with other presentations and they can be access here: Affiliate Summit East 2008 presentation slides.

From his “My Favourite 5 SEO Strategies Exposed” session, one of the items Wil talked about was Google’s recent Knol, or knowledge aggregation site.

Located at Knol.google.com, the site seems like a combination of Squidoo in that users can create topic-focused resource pages, with the authority of a Wikipedia.

Knol pages have ranked prominently in Google’s results, such as Aaron Wall’s recent experiment with Search Engine Optimization.

The pages (highlighted in red above) provide opportunity for outbound links, with Wil mentioning the following factors:

And the following factors affecting Knol page ranking:

In addition Wil provides a more tips for refining your Google Knol by using Aaron Wall’s Rank Checker together with other tools like Google Trends, editing your Knol regularly and leaving it open to editing by others.

2 other SEO resources that Wil went into detail for fine tuning your SEO efforts were:

Link Diagnosis:

Link Diagnosis seems to operate on the Yahoo! Search API. During my trial with it, it seemed to take some time and the job didn’t complete. More testing due in time.

The other resource is SEOQuake, which I’ve blogged about before.

Wil goes into detail into how you can use these 2 tools in his presentation.

For more details, visit the ASE08 Presentations Download page.

If it’s anything like previous Affiliate Summits, Shawn might have the videos up in due course.

First off, the site has undergone a design revamp:

Looking very sharp.

Yesterday (Monday), my buddy Amit Mehta presented his series of Pay-Per-Click strategies – the slides and recorded presentation are available for download.

Today, SEO specialist Aaron Wall will be presenting SEO and linking strategies.

It looks like the Black Ink Project will get many new affiliates off to a flying start.

On Friday, I’ll be presenting a session on social marketing strategies and building your online brand.

If you don’t already have access to this quality training, you should register at:

–> The Black Ink Project

Going from the social marketing angle, rather than looking at it from the search engine’s point of view, I’d look for links from high trustrank sites – these would typically be authoritative blogs and websites in your niche, and the traffic will send over will be higher quality too.

One indispensable tool I have installed in my Firefox browser is the SEO Quake extension. (extension = Firefox plugin).

SEO Quake is available for both Firefox and Internet Explorer.

When I’m at a search engine result page, SEO Quake will gather various analytics data and domain data.

For example, when combining Google Blog Search with SEO Quake:

It’s a little small, but below each search result is the number of google links, yahoo links, domain age, alexa ranking, del.icio.us links and other information is shown.

[For the actual SERP page, click here]

I wouldn’t use a single metric as a guide, but taken together a high trust site would tend to be older and have multiple backlinks for the search engines.

If you’d like to audit a blog, here is the search string at Google BlogSearch:

And if you’d like to monitor specific blogs, you can configure the Google Blog Search alerts which function in a similar manner to Google News Alerts:

SEO Quake and Blog Search is a good combination for me to measure the quality of inbound links.

If you’d prefer an alternative to SEO Quake, I know Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds likes Aaron Wall’s SEO for Firefox extension.

You can find the link for SEO for Firefox.

For more SEO advice, you can also check out Aaron’s SEO Book.

Note: The notes are pretty detailed, though the podcast itself contains even more content.

Enjoy!

Duration: 18 minutes | Filesize:  4.5 mb

Notes:

I get many questions about the tactical aspects of internet marketing, like what’s the best webhost, which is the best CPA network, how to configure a xml datafeed, how to use an autoresponder, which is the best ebook.

If you’re interested, I mention a number of these in the course of my blogging and i’ve listed a couple in my recommendations tabs.

But here’s the kicker, although these ‘technical’ questions represent about 90% of the questions that get asked, it’s the 10% of other questions that will help you grow your business and explode your profits!

The other questions deal with building your business, and positioning it for long term growth.

At the root of it,
Succeeding in internet marketing is simple and fundamental
1) Find a need.
2) Match it with a solution (could be a product/service)

Macro Issues in Internet Marketing

Most important than the ‘how do i learn HTML’ type questions are the macro or higher level considerations of your business strategy.

Your business strategy works as a business plan or blueprint to help you identify what you should or should not be doing.
It also goes into how you should be doing it.

If done correctly, your business plan will give you the answers to the questions you might be wondering about – like how do I select a partner, how much should i budget for my expenses and how much you should charge for your products, which offers or products should i promote.

Your business blueprint will drive what you do and when you’re stuck or you’re wondering about the next action you should take, it determines which of the tiny pieces of blog or affiliate or seo or ppc tools and software you will need.

I want to give you 5 important factors to take note of as you’re building your business this year.

————————-

1) TRUST

If you’ve dealt with a bank, insurance provider, realtor or another service provider who’s serious about building a long term relationship, you’ll notice that they will spend time to get to know you and what you’re about. If they were to try to force you to buy something the first time you met, it would seriously damage or even kill the relationship.

A significant part of the success I experienced in my business last year was due to the network i built up and the relationships and contacts i had made.

Spend a moment to think about the people you consider your good friends, and the people you do business with.
what is it that makes you trust them?

How would you bring those values and attitudes into your business?

Consciously or unconsciously, we buy from people we like and we trust.

As an internet marketer and as an affiliate,
promotion doesn’t always need to be something that you’re an affiliate or something you own. Might be a free resource.
You may not benefit from it, but your audience could stand to benefit greatly from.

Take a look at the products that prominent marketers like Wil Reynolds, Shawn Collins, Geordie Carswell, Sam Harrelson talk about and mention on their blogs.

Aaron Wall provides a number of free equivalents for products which other marketers are charging hundreds of dollars for, in a list of resources in his SEO Book. His intention is to help you grow your business and that builds trust.

Build trust.

You might recommend something free today, but if you build up your social goodwill bank (refer to blog post), you will reap the rewards later.

*** on a strong, reliable and trusted recommendation, conversions can be higher than 50%.

2) PATIENCE
If you plant a seed today, do you expect a tree tomorrow?

Why have the same expectation for your business?

It’s going to take time.

Drop the make instant money idea, and focus on long term, steady business.

Yes, i have helped generate 5-figure and 6-figure paydays in the course of my marketing efforts,
but nothing beats taking time to build a business which provides steady income

Normally, you can’t start a business today and expect it to generate 100,000 next month.
99% of the time, it doesn’t work that way.

In general any business needs time to build momentum.

Momentum is like moving a huge rock, it’s tough to get it moving, but once it starts going, it’s not easy to stop it.

—-

3) KNOWLEDGEABLE / SUBJECT EXPERT
Too many affiliates and sometimes product owners are creating products or promoting products they know nothing about.

Going through a couple of sales pages, and reading wikipedia doesnt make you a niche specialist.

–The trend is that for high value offers especially, in the range of $50-more than 100 per lead or sale, EPCs can sometimes be in the single digit dollar range. this means that a lot of affiliates are flinging offers at their traffic like throwing mud on a wall and hoping something sticks.

no surprise that conversions will be sub 1%, and could hover near zero

Consumers with the most troublesome, horrible and life-crippling problems will have the biggest wallets.
If you’re in such a position, you’d want to get the best doctor or professional to take care of your problem, not someone who learned root canal surgery out of an ebook!

if you’re going to do something important like debt consolidation or mortgage refinancing, you’re likely to trust a solid and credible finance content website, rather than some guy who shot some spam emails into your email inbox.

—

4) Shift From QUICK BUCK TO LONG TERM MENTALITY
systems are geared this way, pay per lead, pay per sale.

make the sale, move on the next customer

“single-sale, fire and forget, goodbye” mentality
retain customers, needs change in mindset,

going fwd, lead generation costs are going to be more expensive.
customer retention is key.

to the repeat customer mentality.

like popular blog or community site, have customers coming back a couple of times a week.
if really popular, come back every day.

—-

5) FUN
Have a vested interest

Have a personal stake.
***This is the most important factor

some progs are going to pay 75% of sale value, in some cases, get payouts of 150% of the sale value.

I have had offers to promote products with double and triple the normal affiliate payouts, but didn’t take it up.

You’re not going to do well if your heart is not in it.

—

Bottom Line:

A lot of doomsayers are saying that Internet Marketing is getting harder is harder, blogging is getting harder and harder, Google slaps are making it more difficult to rank in the search engines, escalating PPC prices are going to kick all the new PPC affiliates out of the market.

They usually say this just before they promote their product which is going to get rid of all these problems for $97!

What a bargain!

To borrow a phrase from Shawn Collins’, here’s the real deal…

It doesn’t take a genius to succeed in internet marketing, while there’re a number of guys with PhDs, there’re also many marketers who didn’t complete high school.

You don’t always need book smarts to succeed in internet marketing, but you need to be smart enough to have a long term focus on building your business on a solid foundation.

The first element is one that just about everyone is good at – The size of your network.

I say everyone is good at this element because all it takes to massively increase the number of friends in your MyBlogLog, BumpZee, YouTube, Facebook or other community is hitting the ‘add friend’ button and doing it over, and over, and over, and over again.

But here’s where it gets interesting, the fine line between social marketing and spamming is drawn when the relationship and more importantly permission and consensus are factored in.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve datamined someone’s email, cell phone from the net, your attempt to game the social network for personal gain falls flat on its face if you don’t have the relationship to back it up.

You might be wondering if this is merely ‘theoretical’ or ‘hypothetical’ or how well it works in real life…

Look at what happened to me last year…

I’ve been active on the WickedFire affiliate marketing forum for some time, giving advice on my pet area of blogging. So having been invited to be a ‘Blogging Guide’, I spend more time on the forum and create an instructional thread on “Blogging For Bucks”

And one day I read a thread on the forum about this new Super Affiliate’s blog, Super Affiliate Mindset.

And after talking with PPC Super Affiliate Amit Mehta for some time, we decide to jointly work on a product, which eventually becomes the Super Affiliate Accelerator. (the site is being upgraded at the moment).

The project is intended to create a series of custom training to provide business strategies and PPC tactics to new and experienced affiliate marketers.

Part of the program involves inviting other established Internet Marketers in on some of the mastermind sessions we’re organizing.

So I ask my friend Wil Reynolds, founder of top SEO agency Seer Interactive, to join in on one of our upcoming calls.

And as part of my research, I watch some of Wil’s videos from Shawn Collins and Missy Ward’s Affiliate Summit Seminar.

If you’re new to Search Engine Optimization, undoubtedly, Wil’s suggestions to check out 3 key blogs to keep you up to date on SEO developments will be intriguing.

What are the 3 blogs?

• SEOMoz: Seattle-based SEO agency, headed by Rand Fishkin
• Aaron Wall’s SEOBook
• Google’s Matt Cutts

Listening to Wil’s recommendations, I opened my copy of SEOBook I’d purchased early last year.

I’d glanced through it a number of times and picked up great SEO tips and subsequently listed it on my recommendations page.

Now, with the weight of Wil’s endorsement, I re-read it (all 350 pages in a 2 hour sitting).

If you have not read it yet, you will not know that it goes beyond SEO, to encompass Aaron’s copywriting strategies and even PPC management. More importantly, Aaron includes elements of his Internet Marketing journey from spamming links to creating quality white hat links.

If you haven’t yet, why not spend the opening days of this year, checking out Aaron Wall’s SEOBook.

What this means is content from this blog may be syndicated through WebProNews, or through the ientry content network, namely:

• Search Newz
• Web ProBusiness
• Small Business Update

It’s a pleasure to be listed among the company of other ientry bloggers, such as:

• Aaron Wall
• Lee Odden
• Michael “Gray Wolf” Gray
• Todd “Stuntdubl” Malicoat
• Robert Scoble

and numerous other first rate bloggers.

When I first started blogging in July 2006, my intent has always been to provide quality content and build a community based on that principle.

Seeing the traffic grow month-on-month and receiving more than my fair share of encouraging emails is icing on the cake and a boost when the inspiration engine runs a little dry.

With blogging already becoming the media channel accessible to everyman, the future certainly looks bright.

Attendees from the first ER paid $4,500 per head to attend the exclusive event.

The upcoming second ER to be held on 19 and 20th March in San Francisco is raising some hackles with its $4,950 price tag.

I’ve often heard the question on the forums and a number of Internet Marketers have been asking me this question:

Is it too much?

And often I hear the gripe that paying $4,950 which works out to $2,500 per day over the 2 day workshop is too much.

I think there’s a major problem here.

And the problem is with the person asking the question.

See, I have been doing business consulting and training and managing start-ups for the better part of 10 years.

I’ve almost never looked just at how much something costs, because that’s only half the equation.

What’s more, ok, I understate it here, what’s of the utmost importance whether you should invest in the opportunity is your return on your investment (ROI if you want the jargon).

If you spend $1,000 on an investment, what would you like to get out of it? $1,050? $2,000? $10,000?

My personal benchmark has always been to get a minimum 10 times return on my investment.

If I were to spend $5,000 on an opportunity, I’d expect to get at least $50,000 back in net profits.

So the question is whether Elite Retreat is overpriced?

Looking at this issue rationally, value is a function of your return over your investment (Return / Investment).

This are the two constraints on the issue:

1. The investment is fixed ($4,950)
2. The return is not fixed.

The return is determined by what you want to get out of the event.

Speaking to Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney) on the sidelines of Affiliate Summit West, he mentioned that one of the ER participants from the first workshop was now generating $2,000 a day.

Ok, I’d admit that I didn’t nail Shoemoney on whether it was gross or net profit. But even assuming a worst case scenario that it was ‘only’ a 50% net profit, that’s a cool $1,000 a day, or $365,000 a year.

On a $4,000 investment.

So the issue now is whether the ER trainers will be able to deliver on their objectives to bring you to the next level.

This time around, they’ve assembled a cast of trainers comprising:

• Shoemoney (Search Engine Marketing, Branding, PPC, and Arbitrage)
• Kris Jones (Affiliate Marketing and Search Arbitrage)
• Lee Dodd (Community Building and Web Real Estate)
• Aaron Wall (Search Engine Optimization)
• Darren “ProBlogger” Rowse (Blogging and Monetization)
• Neil Patel (Social Media Optimization, Reputation Management, and Viral Marketing)

So between them, I believe they have most of the bases covered. I’d think that if you were more concerned about topics like domaining, copywriting, product creation, which aren’t specifically covered in the presentations (although some of the speakers have experience in these areas), what you can do to ensure your own success is:

1. Do your preliminary research beforehand
2. Do the necessary testing
3. Compile all the questions you have and bring them to ER.

Talk to the panel of trainers and fellow participants and do whatever it takes to get the necessary knowledge to get yourself to the next level.

I’m sure that even if they aren’t able to directly address your query, one of them will be able to direct you to resources to get the information you need.

Will going to ER provide the magic antidote to all your burning questions and make you an overnight millionaire?

Not likely.

Neither will signing up for a myriad of courses, or buying a million dollars worth of ebooks.

What will bring you the success you desire is the determination, perserverance and most importantly, effort, to move yourself one step closer to success.

Obviously, Shoemoney and his team have planned a roadmap for Elite Retreat to make it a major initiative this year with sessions planned in Orlando (May), Chicago (July), Phoenix (Sept), Dallas (Nov).

Should you consider investing the $4,950 for the event?

Only if you see yourself investing the effort necessary to bring yourself $50,000.

You can also read some of the related posts by:

• Kris Jones
• Neil Patel
• Shoemoney
• Lee Dodd
• Aaron Wall
• Darren Rowse

For more details, you can visit the Elite Retreat website or call PlanetAndrea at 1(800) 888-8151.

Typical backlink tracers like SEO Elite and iwebtool give linear tabular reports.

What I liked about TouchGraph’s GoogleBrowser is the ability to visualize the links in 3D.

Witness:

The GoogleBrowser is interactive, meaning you’ll be able to zoom in on a cluster, isolate inbound and outblound links and check out high authority sites you’re linked to.

Obviously, this tool has competitive intelligence functions in allowing you to

scope out the source of authority sites linked to a competitors site.

Alternatively if you’re an affiliate marketer, it gives you an easy way to identify other super affiliates marketing a product (obviously, they’d backlink to the sales page on the product owners site).

Does GoogleBrowser invalidate other SEO products?

Hardly. It gives you a framework to look at links, and more importantly analyze high authority site which are linked to you. It won’t easily replace the other features you’d find in Brad Callen’s SEO Elite, or provide the depth of information you’d find in Aaron Wall’s SEO Book.

[Thanks to Reefer420 for highlighting this resource in the WickedFire Guide to SEO thread]

• SEO/SEM

Shoemoney put out a tasty post and buzzed industry contacts with the hypothetical “Would you hire Matt Cutts? If you had to come up with a dollar figure to offer him what would it be? What would his job title and job description be?”

A number of informative and insightful responses from the likes of Kris Jones (CEO PepperJamSearch), Patrick Gavin (CEO Text Link Ads), Greg Hartnett (Best Of The Web), Christine Kim, Rand Fishkin (Owner SEOMOZ), Jason Calacanis (Former CEO Weblogs INC & AOL Exec), Neil Patel – CEO ACS Web Consulting, Danny Sullivan, Aaron Wall – SEOBook

Here’s the link: Would You Hire Matt Cutts?

—

• Blogging

Robyn Tippins looks at the backlash from the bloggers perspective from the proposed acquistion of Performancing’s assets by PayPerPost (as mentioned earlier PerPerPost Acquires Performancing Assets). The PPP and Performancing deal nixed? Good thing or bad thing?

Here’s the link: Pay Per Post and Performancing Deal Nixed
—

• Affiliate Marketing

Has Click Fraud been blown out of proportion? Jon F gives his perspective and gives his fix to the solution. The fact that he filed his post under “Industry Bullshit” will give an indication of his straight up, in your face perspective on the issue. (I’m looking forward to checking out his session together with Shoemoney at Affiliate Summit West)

Here’s the link: Click Fraud – The Overrated Internet Killer

—

• Social Traffic

Social Marketer Michelle MacPhearson is back. Having given birth to a beautiful son, Colum, expect more social traffic tips from Michelle this year. I learned quite a bit from her about social traffic generation last year and will be expecting more good things from her this year.

Here’s the link: 1 Day Old

I was checking out Shoemoney’s post “Elite Retreat Ticket For One Lucky Winner” .

Blogging Guru Dave Taylor, SEO Specialist Aaron Wall, Forum and Communities Specialist Lee Dodd, Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker, Dave Taylor again!

Forum Guru Lee Dodd has posted at his ForumTrends blog that the 4 gurus: Shoemoney, Dave Taylor, Aaron Wall and Lee have decided to put up one ticket for the event (valued at $4,850 by the way).

Just head over to Lee’s blog, read the instructions and best of luck!

The deadline’s Dec 11th, noon CST. There’s a couple of hours to go.

I’d have loved to try for the contest, though the event clashes with a family holiday.

Ah, well, maybe next time.

If you do enter the contest, and win, post a comment!

Here’s an update from Andrea:
—

We’ve got our publicity machines out in full force, and have received lots of encouraging response.

A lot of people who have expressed interest are worried that they might not be advanced enough to attend. We are targeting everyone from newbies to high status sites.

We will also be promoting the Elite Retreat at Chicago SES in December and be able to answer any last minute questions people might have there as well.

We’ve received so much support throughout the industry for this event and looking forward to the event.

—

Facilitators at the event include Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney), Dave Taylor, Aaron Wall and Lee Dodd.

Check out: Elite Retreat information page.

Here’s the launch banner:

Here’s the site: EliteRetreat.info

Shoemoney mentions on his post: Elite Retreat December 18-19 San Antonio

This is a really new and interesting style of conference. This is open to a very select group of people who maybe feel like they are on the verge of something big within their company but just need a little help to get over the edge.

No matter what that is we should have you covered. We have assembled a team that can cover any area of business on the internet.

—

And there’s an application process involved:

People who want to attend the elite retreat need to fill out a brief application of what they expect to get out of the conference. This helps us determine if for sure we can help you. It is not automatic that everyone will be approved for this retreat. If we feel we truly will not be able to help you then there is not use in wasting your time and money.

—

Facilitators for this event-

• Jeremy Schoemaker – Self branding, PPC, arbitrage, SEM
• Lee Dodd – Forum and Community Legend
• David Taylor – Blogging And Online Business Trends
• Aaron Wall – The guy who wrote the book on SEO.

Some points to note:

The ratio of Facilitators to attendees will be an unheard of 1:6.

The role of Elite Retreat is to get to know participants business on a 1-1 level then formulate a “plan of attack” to help them succeed.

The Elite Retreat team will have follow up calls to see if there are any obstacles and to check on your progress.

Sounds interesting, doesn’t it?

Already 2 of the 35 slots have been taken up.

—

Here’s a word from Elite Retreat project manager, Andrea Schoemaker:

Download audio file (andrea.mp3)

Here’s the site again: EliteRetreat.info