Besides covering the basics of article marketing, Rachel also talked about some of the intricasies of:

• How you can use the “useful, but incomplete” strategy to get high clickthroughs on your resource links
• An update on her weight loss membership site which had received publicity as the cover story of Woman’s World magazine (more popular than Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and Forbes)
• The benefits of article marketing and how you can get more bang for your buck for each article you publish
• Recommended article directories, article submission services, article analytics and social bookmarking strategies to enhance your profits
• Incorporating press release strategies into your marketing campaigns
• Going the multimedia route to further boost your traffic generation efforts
• Her new meditation niche site
• Her new article-based traffic generation service

Check out the podcast below:

Links:

• Rachel’s personal blog
• Rachel on twitter
• Your Best Meditation meditation site
• Turnkey Article Traffic
• Rachel’s previous appearance on the Friday Podcast

Video is a powerful branding medium, especially if you personalize the channel, rather than merely to fire out product launches or marketing announcements.

If pictures say a thousand words, I think video easily convey 10,000 words or more.

Some observations I’ve noticed about video:

• Brevity is great: people have short attention spans. If you can convery you point in 1-2 minutes, just do it.
• Content is still king: you need to include something useful in your entry. There’re too many “seinfeld” videos (about nothing) out there already.
• X-Factor: Either you have it or you should go find it…But it has a lot to do with your personality.

Check out one of Rachel’s video’s below. I like the hair flipping and low-grade swearing at the end. Adds color!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YttPDDqncmk[/youtube]

Rachel’s headed for Cancun and I’m sure there’ll be some interesting videos coming out of the trip.

You’ll want to read that and come back to catch my Friday Interview with her.

She’s not only one of the most knowledgeable SEO and analytics-based marketers I know, she’s someone you want to keep an eye out for.

In this interview, I squeeze the truth out of her, as she reveals…

• How she started out as a spammer, earning $500-800 a day as a newbie
• How she’s moved on to building real businesses, one of which is projected to reach $1m in value by Feb 2009
• The strategies she uses to employ her goals, and how she builds her network
• If you’re wondering about her “Internet Marketing Party Girl” moniker, I’d like to think I played a small part in that too.

She’s appeared on the cover of Woman’s World which is more popular than Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and Forbes.

I don’t think she’s publicly talked about some of the stuff covered in the Friday Podcast, so you’d want to check it out below…

I first met Rachel on the Warrior Forum when I purchased her WSO (Warrior Special Offer). For a new Internet Marketer then, she certainly put out a great product on niche research, keyword strategies and putting your marketing campaign together.

A Drexel/UPenn grad, she’s also a member of the Phi Eta Sigma honor society, so I guess you might say we’re fellow “nerds”.

But then again, I think she’s a tough chick (can I say that?), having made a looong road trip from Philadelphia to LA to pursue her Internet Marketing goals.

She already has a successful membership site under her belt, YayFood – a caloric cycling/weight loss/weight management community – which has been featured in Women’s World magazine.

Although I’ve not met her yet, I have an intuition that she’s pretty hyper – going by her blog postings, and her penchant for T Harv Eker’s seminars and workshops.

She’s currently hanging out in LA, leading the Sex and the City Lifestyle (set in LA, rather than Manhattan) – getting hit on by Cuba Gooding Jr. (We’re still waiting for that follow up post, Rach…)

And hamming it up with the likes of:

Eben Pagan, creator of the Altitude program (and also known by alter ego, Pick Up Artist guru David Deangelo)

as well as

4-Hour Workweek Author Tim Ferriss and Rachel Rofe

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After Affiliate Summit West, I’ll be headed to LA, and perhaps have a chance to meet up with Rachel.

If I do, I’ll certainly post an update.

Just take a look at the signs of the times:

• Implementation of stricter quality measure (eg Google Quality Score) to clamp down on “thin” sites. Especially hit hard are single page landing sites.
• The noose tightens. You can get somewhat around the QS issue with an about us, contact, privacy page and sitemap. But you can be sure that the quality control noose will continue to tighten.
• Expansion of the PPC and Affiliate market: Just like in the dotcom days, you’ll have fools rushing in, especially as PPC and affiliate marketing start to go prime time. Already, the “pseudo gurus” have shifted from pimping “Adsense in a Box” products to “CPA in a Box” products. [I’ve looked at a number of these products and the only person making anything from them, is the guy who sold it to you].

So is some “guru” out there going to exploit this market by issuing a free “Death of Affiliate Marketing” report?

If so, stay as far away as you can, because most expensive advice you will ever get is “free advice”.

I was reading Jim Lillig’s post “Performance Marketing Makes Sense” especially the part where he says:

“I believe engagement is to blame. The final frontier of advertising is to connect a product (and ultimately a brand) with truly interested consumers in a relevant, meaningful andlasting way at a time when they have the propensity to purchase or consider a purchase.“

In my opinion, it’s very much a “chicken and egg” issue.

If you’re promoting $1 or $2 zip or email submit offers, you’d be wondering what level of “engagement” you can work on, especially if you’re running at a 30 – 50% margin at best (or $0.30 to $0.50).

Granted some of us have the priviledge of getting Super Affiliate payouts which are double, triple or even higher than the posted rate, but what about the average affiliate?

You have a couple of options, and both aren’t exactly easy to take action on.

The first is to promote higher value offers in the $20 – $100 range. It’s typical to see something like a $1 zip have an EPC of $50 on the affiliate networks ($50 average commission per 1,000 clicks or 100 clicks depending on the network), while a debt consolidation/mortgage offer with a $100 payout has a $5 EPC.

Huh?

What I believe is happening is that affiliates are sending PPC or other traffic through a thin content site or scraped content site to the affiliate offer.

While a crappy content page might make a zip submit campaign viable (simply because the lure of a free Xbox360 or iPod makes the content redundant), you’re going to get killed with a high payout offer.

With a more sophisticated offer like debt consolidation or a high payout biz op offer, you’d need to construct a focused content page, and pre-selling may involve educating the prospect and motivating them to take action, rather than send them direct to the landing page.

So the first option is to promote higher value offers (and more importantly, understand the mechanics of closing the sale.

–

The second option is to go beyond the pay-per-view or pay-per-lead business models, and instead focus on business models which have a built-in incentive to continually engage your customer.

I understand that a number of CPM business models are coming into vogue again, and having operated web properties at one of Asia’s largest online content networks, have to say that it’s viable only if you have:

• A strong brand (prefably within the top 3 in your niche)
• Access to lots of cheap traffic in huge quantities

I’d probably stay away from CPM business models simply because I prefer the high value market, rather than the mass market.

So what business models are on the table?

Continuity-based business models, the likes of which marketers like Kirt Christensen and Ryan Deiss have developed. Membership-based models like my friend Rachel Rofe have introduced like her YayFood weight management membership site.

If you’re spending the bulk of your time building up the relationship in the beginning and putting in an incremental effort to maintain that relationship (and collect a monthly subscription fee), it gives you the resources to engage your customers.

So one of the questions you’ll need to answer in order to succeed is: “How can niche sites tackle the challenge of content creation, especially if they are in a new area? More importantly, how do they monetize effectively?”
We tackle this quesiton in the Friday Podcast.

Here’re the notes:

Tackling fear of the unknown.

Understanding the problems (also known as opportunities) in any new market is key.
-Cost/performance – fees are based on amount of weight lost. program to lose 10lbs might cost a thousand dollars. that’s $100 per lb. lucrative?
-Weight management sites are the one of the best examples of membership sites. friend Rachel Rofe has a great site and has been profiled by magazines.
-Long term effects
-Mood swings, depression – biochemical balance

Visit forums, blogs and content sites in your chosen area and figure out the burning questions people are facing. Compile a list of the top 50 problems/questions and answer them – that will form the basis of your search engine AND human friendly content.
-Document the process
-Buy weight loss for dummies or atkins diet for dummies, visit wiki, head to google news.

As internet marketer, information is your most significant weapon.
Use it to your advantage.

Take the SERPs for Internet Marketer Rachel Rofe:

Her video clip shot during the recent JV Alert seminar is a blurb for The Next Internet Milionaire. Yet it comes in as result 4, a little below her MySpace profile, personal blog and LinkedIn profile.

It certainly looks impressive.

Another search for Internet Marketer Anik Singal, shows a clip from Affiliate Summit 2006 East coming in as result 8 out of 69,300.

This result ranks above his ezinearticles profile page. Pretty amazing.

And expanding the “+ Watch video” tab, opens an embedded player:

So you need not even leave the SERPs to view the video.

Pretty impressive.

Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz also notes that revshare video site MetaCafe’s clips are appearing in Google Video’s results.

If traffic is going to be consolidated at Google’s web properties, would traffic be involuntarily “stuck” at Google or one of its subsites?

More importantly, is this going to be a “good” thing?

Another interesting development has been my discovery of an additional search tab:

For a brief moment, I was able to pull up an additional table with additional options.

I wasn’t able to replicate this result, but it certainly shows that there are more comprehensive search options in store.

Will video be the next step in Google’s content indexing strategy after text-based information?

All the signs seem to indicate so.