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.

Doing a search for “affiliate marketing” shows the Wiki entry at the top position for the organic results.

Should Wiki entries be so dominant? Especially as the members of the SEOmoz team point out other high authority sites might provide more comprehensive and relevant information?

As Shoemoney pointed out in his posts Google Video #1 Rank – What Kind Of Traffic Does It Bring? and Top Commentors MyblogLog Integration, the evolution of alternative high authority, high traffic sites like Google Video and MyBlogLog can bring huge amounts of traffic.

Now think about Wikipedia, which generates loads of traffic, coupled with it’s dominance at the SERPs. Can you imagine how a well-placed Wiki can drive hordes of qualified, focused traffic to a site?

A good podcast to kick off SEOmoz’s series (I believe they’re planning another 4).

I liked the content and it’s great to put a face to the team.

My feedback consists of two points:

• Tighter framing

I’m a fan of closely cropped photos and videos, which draw your eyes to the focus of attention. I’d probably have framed the shot like this:

• Publicly Hosted Bugbears

As with all hosted video services, the service will attempt to serve up relevant video content. At the end of this clip, the following “related” clips popped up:

While the “Shoe Shop prank” and “Mixed Armwrestling” clips might be irrelevant to Wikipedia and Google rankings, they could be good for a laugh.

Having “Cheating Wife” served up (even if it’s a joke clip), tends to detract from the informational nature of the clip.

The alternative would be to host the clips on a dedicated server, though the potential bandwidth resources would escalate exponentially, especially if the post ranks high on Digg and other services.

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While you’re over at SEOmoz, you might like to check out Matt Inman and Rand’s Page Strength tool.

The purpose of the tool as listed is to:

I ran the tool on this domain and got the following summary:

Accompanying the summary is a comprehensive set of information, including dominance in the search engines, backlinks, link from .edu and .gov domains (I was surprised to see my blog listed at: Online gaming: Moral panic in Singapore), internal site links and others.

You can see the Page Strength results for WhoIsAndrewWee.com.

And the Page Strength tool can be found here.

In the works too are a variety of interesting SEO-related tools, I’m sure it’ll be worth checking out once they’re launched.

• 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?

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• 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
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• 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

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• 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