miles baker – Andrew Wee | Blogging | Affiliate Marketing | Social Traffic Generation | Internet Marketing

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

Andrew Wee — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 03:37:26 +0000

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?

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So why’re we revisiting this issue?

Blackhole SEO is where an inherently social site like eBay or Twitter decides to shut it’s doors and stick “nofollow” tags to outgoing links. So in SEO speak, you won’t get any “link juice” or benefit to your Google PageRank from the PR you’ve built at the site.

Taking a survey, Twitter profile pages (the page that is twitter.com/[your username]) does garner pagerank over time.

A rough survey with either the Google toolbar or the search status firefox plugin yields:

Google PageRank (PR) 4

PR 5

PR 6

PR 7

PR 8

Twitter Home page

How do these profile pages build up PR?

It’s unlikely that many twitter users would link build to their user profile, especially since Twitter resides on a public network (ie you don’t own this piece of virtual turf). So it’s likely that these could be links might have resulted from links pointing to your profile page from other twitter users’ profiles, or high authority blogs including blogroll or blog post links to your twitter profile, etc.

If the weight of inbound links is high enough, your twitter profile will earn pagerank. If that’s the case, labelling all outgoing links from your twitter page with the “nofollow” basically tells Google (whom “nofollow” most clearly influences) that the content you’re pointing at does not merit much weight/authority/value…

So given that a PR 5 backlink or 2-way link would be beneficial, the “nofollow” tag may put a downer on twitter users perception of their value to the community, especially since the “blackhole” structure favors twitters own efforts to increase its pagerank.

Granted, there may be some logic in preventing spammers from sqeezing twitter for link juice, but a blanket “nofollow” on links within tweets and on the user profile page (use “view source” to verify the nofollow flag), puts a dampener on things.

As Todd mentions, this blanket approach could be remedied by either a temporary sandbox/holding area for new accounts, or handled via a robots.txt file.

If sites like Squidoo can be effectively managed, and pass link juice to external sites, couldn’t twitter do the same with a little additional intelligence?

If users are spending 1-2 hours each day on your site, why this continued distrust of sites that users are linking to?

If users pointing to poor quality content is an issue, couldn’t the whiz kids at Twitter use some suitable metric to filter the social scammers out?

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Followup post: “DoFollow or NoFollow: The I Can Has Backlink Dilemma“

Friday Podcast: Strategies For Scaling Your Affiliate Business With Miles Baker

Andrew Wee — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 01:12:03 +0000

Veteran marketer Miles Baker gave an insider look at how he’s grown his affiliate business through the process of automation and outsourcing elements of his affiliate marketing business.

Having been on the Friday Podcast series before, you can check out his first podcast interview.

With his experience as an affiliate and affiliate manager, Miles has insights into the affiliate industry which has helped him develop a set of strategies to “work less and earn more”.

In this Friday Podcast, Miles spoke about:

How to grow your business
How to focus on what’s important and high value within your organization
Budgeting how much to spend on scaling your business
How to train your employees and outsourcers efficiently
What criteria and considerations to factor in as you’re scaling your business

Check out the podcast below:

Links:

Affiliate Summit West 2009 In Pics and Words (Part 2)

Andrew Wee — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:17:02 +0000

If you missed it, check out: Affiliate Summit West 2009 in Pics and Words (Part 1).

Here’s more goodness from the Affiliate Summit:

ShareASale’s Director of Client Services Carolyn Tang AKA Catango is one of the most pleasant and knowledgeable individuals in the industry and it was a pleasure to talk to her at the SaS booth, even though there were lots of people there.

As a tradeshow visitor, I’ve got more than my fair share of t-shirts, notepads, pens, paper weights and stationery to last 2.5 lifetimes. I liked how SaS did a little out of the box thinking to provide a photobooth where affiliates took some crazy pics (I’ll post mine later), and thoughtfully gave out baby T-shirts and bears. For affiliates with families or significant others, they’ll likely be seeing the SaS logo on a teddy bear or baby T for some time to come. (a good thing).

Check out the Friday Podcast interview on Affiliate Program Strategies with Carolyn Tang.

It was cool hanging out with top affiliates Colin “Google” McDougall and Ros Gardner over dinner at the Nobu Japanese restaurant at the Hard Rock for the private launch of Jim Lillig’s Offeratti network.

Considering that Colin doesn’t take raw food, it’s a testament to the great food at Nobu that Colin was enjoying the sashimi with the rest of us during the meal. It was also interesting to hear Colin tell his stories about his towed trailer that he rolls out for holidays. And if you’re looking for inspiration as you’re working towards your ideal affiliate lifestyle, Ros has bought a lot of nice toys/trinkets to enjoy the fruits of her labor.

It was great to meet affiliate network Market Leverage‘s marketing manager Dina Riccobono after talking to her over IM and being interviewed for MLTV late last year.

Market Leverage has a proactive outreach and affiliate recruitment program and it’s refreshing to see a network take the intiative in getting to know affiliates. They hosted a dinner at Switch at the Encore hotel, with Market Leverage CEO Mike Jenkins in attendance. It was a great opportunity to talk to affiliate managers Mike Kelly and Jen Fluker to get insight into how affiliate managers operate.

At the dinner, Mike announced the launch of Market Leverage’s greenlinks program, which provides links to video-based affiliate training from the ML website interface.

Here’s an earlier Friday Podcast with Market Leverage CEO Mike Jenkins

Jen Goode, better known as JGoode, headed the Affiliate Summit mentors program and did a great job (I believe there were more than 100 mentees in the program). I also had a picture taken with the penguin and nearly kidnapped him. Ah well, maybe next time.

In the meantime, check out the Friday Podcast with Jen talking about Print-On-Demand product strategies

With Jon Fisher AKA AOJon , founder of the WickedFire affiliate marketing forum. I started making these “gang signs” because a number of the “affiliate gangstas” started making them.

Before the panel discussion on Affiliate Strategies for Traffic Generation and Sales Conversion on the first day of the summit with Miles Baker, Geordie Carswell, Nickycakes.

The session went well with positive feedback submitted by the session attendees.

I’ll likely plan and submit a proposal for another panel in the future.

Nicky was recently interviewed by Tracking202’s Wes Mahler. You can check out the interview here.

Here’s my Friday Podcast interviews:

With Team Mystery from VH1’s The Pickup Artist season 2. Pickup artist Mystery AKA Erik Von Markovik – we both share the same birthday btw.) and “Hawaii” and Jason Adams.

Soon a crowd gathered:

It was a pleasure to finally meet Todd Crawford in the flesh:

I was trying to do my best impression of a “Todd Talk” impersonation.

what I found was interesting is that his wife has been keeping a record of all the celebrities he’s been mistaken for. And if you met him in the flesh, you might mistake him for a rockstar.

Check out Todd’s Friday Podcast interview on Affiliate Management

Mike Krongel is founder and CEO of the Copeac affiliate network.

It’s been one of the better performing CPA networks on my sites. If you haven’t yet, check them out.

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That’s it for this update.

More to come.

Do You Have A Question For The Affiliate Panel?

Andrew Wee — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:46:42 +0000

In about a week’s time, Affiliate Summit West will be in full swing in Las Vegas.

Affiliate Bloggers Speak Out Panelists: (Left to Right) Nickycakes, Geordie Carswell, Miles Baker

I’ve the honor of moderating an affiliate marketers panel with panelists: Geordie Carswell, NickyCakes and Miles Baker in attendance.

The session is geared towards newer and experienced marketers who’d like to tap on the expertise of the panel which spans search engine optimization, pay-per-click marketing, social media and blogging.

The panelists and I are compiling questions for the session.

If you’ve a question or issue, go ahead and list it in the comments below.

Are You Engaged In “No Rest For The Wicked” Internet Marketing?

Andrew Wee — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 06:58:01 +0000

At this time of the year with Christmas and New Year’s reducing the number of official work days in December, has your productivity been affected? Especially for those of us who are tethered to our computers, either because we’re:

Working
Hosting/calling in to a conference call
Playing games
Watching a movie
Going through our business balance sheets
Coordinating with our remote operations team

Or some other activity of your own choosing, I have found that I spend about 1.5 to twice as much time in front of my computer as I spend sleeping on my bed every day.

So do the holidays represent a boon or bane to the internet marketing continually building their business (especially during the holiday shopping season).

Specifically, Do the holidays disrupt your business momentum and do either you and/or your business suffer as a result?

With the 24×7 nature of the internet, it’s inevitable that there’ll be a number of casualties (direct or indirect) are suffered along the rush to be the first and #1, especially in a high stakes game where “Speed can be of the essence. If a blogger is beaten by a millisecond, someone elseâ€s post on the subject will bring in the audience, the links and the bigger share of the ad revenue.”

In the words of TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington: â€œI havenâ€t died yet,â€ although he’s gained 30 pounds in the last year, developed a severe sleep disorder and has mentioned that â€œAt some point, Iâ€ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen. This is not sustainableâ€

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Affiliate marketers and those of us who own our own products or services may not have the same breakneck “be first to publish” blogger mentality, but still the onset of Christmas shopping and New Year’s resolutions campaigns will force some to go to extreme measures as they’re fighting against the clock.

There’s a saying that there’s “No rest for the wicked”. If that is true, there will be quite a number of marketers going sleepless in Seattle or wherever else they might be.

So is it ultimately having to make a choice between work and taking a break?

Here’s what some marketers had to say:

“On the YES it breaks my business momentum” bandwagon

Michael S Copeland: “Yes it does… Launched a service right before the holidays.. may not do that one again”

David Temple: “Yep, but just have more to do when I get back. Enjoying it for the moment though!”

Miles Baker: “Holidays give me a time to refresh, reflect, and refocus. My momentum slows, but when I come back to work my momentum higher.”

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On the “No, Holidays do not disrupt my business momentum” bandwagon

Geno Prussakov: Not for me. It’s definitely hard to balance between the two: biz (especially the urgent needs) and family at this time though.

Deb Carney AKA Loxly: “Holidays revitalize me holidays are days when I can work on what I choose to (see tweets about my sites, lol)”

JGoode: “no, holidays force me to take a much needed break I’d otherwise rationalize as not necessary – family days do the same”

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From my own observation, I tend to take on a couple more projects than I should, so if anything the holidays are a wake up call to shed some of them and focus, focus and focus (as Kelly McCausey mentioned in the previous Friday Podcast).

One resolution I’ll be implementing in the new year is to automate my business more and delegate/outsource more tasks.

In my view, you’re still stuck at the “sole proprietorship” mode of operations, until you build a team. Only then the machine continue running when you’re not there and you’ve built the foundation for a solid business.

Sometimes even the wicked need to rest.

What do you think?

Affiliate Blogger Panel At Affiliate Summit West 2009

Andrew Wee — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 04:32:12 +0000

Nickycakes had a headstart in making this announcement.

The speakers for the workshop element of the Affiliate Summit have been selected, and I’ll be moderating a session “Affiliate Bloggers Speak Out: Tips on SEO, PPC and Sales Conversion” at the upcoming Affiliate Summit which is from Jan 11-13 in Las Vegas next year.

Together with me for the session will be the panelists:

Affiliate Bloggers Speak Out Panelists: (Left to Right)Nickycakes, Geordie Carswell, Miles Baker

This’ll be a great session not only because the three panels are highly skilled affiliate marketers, but they have very different strengths too. Although Nickycakes and Geordie (former affiliate network Revenuewire CEO turned affiliate) use PPC (pay per click) in their traffic generation efforts, there’s a number of differences in their methods, while Miles Baker uses powerful SEO techniques.

We’ll likely be collecting questions for the session a couple of weeks before the summit, so you can get your burning questions answered.

Stay tuned!

PS: I’ve also heard that the other speakers at the summit include affiliate management firm’s Paulson Management Group founder and president Heather Paulson will be presenting a session on “Advanced Affiliate Management Strategies”, while top affiliate John Hasson will be “Automating Websites and PPC Management” (a technical session which will provide you with massive leverage in your business).

The Affiliate Summit continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Be sure to check it out.

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If you haven’t yet, be sure to check out these Friday Podcast sessions:

Friday Podcast: Affiliate Success Tips With Miles Baker

Andrew Wee — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 20:41:18 +0000

I “met” Miles Baker online about a year ago through a mutual friend, Amit Mehta, and we’ve been exchanging business tips and online marketing strategies since.

Miles has done it all – as an affiliate, affiliate manager, merchant, he’s even owned and operated a forum and been active on eBay.

I got Miles on the line and we talked about success strategies for online business owners, including resources you can use to bring your business to the next level.

Here’s this week’s Friday Podcast:

These are some of the resources Miles mentioned during the call:

Swift To-Do List software

Books:

Action by Robert Ringer

Sex Money Kiss by Gene Simmons

4 Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss

Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T Harv Eker