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 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

• Ian Fernando
• Miles Baker

PR 5

• Zac Johnson
• Oilman
• Shawn Collins
• Joel Comm
• Wil Reynolds
• Andrew Wee (me)
• Todd Malicoat
• Reg Saddler AKA Zaibatsu

PR 6

• Darren Rowse AKA ProBlogger
• Michael Gray AKA Graywolf
• Sam Harrelson
• Guy Kawasaki
• Jim Kukral

PR 7

• Chris Brogan
• Barack Obama

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?

–

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

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.

While I was huffing and puffing on Sunday manhandling my heavy desk and moving the computer, monitors and bunches of cables around, I was listening to the huge backlog of MP3s I had downloaded over the past couple of weeks.

I probably listened to about 10 hours of audio over the weekend and was more active than usual in my twitter stream too.

I think it’s important to use your “downtime” well, especially if you’re working on your taxes, cleaning the desk, clearing your inbox (snail mail and email), or sorting out your baseball card collection (or samurai katana collection if that’s up your alley).

Here’s my list of favorite podcasts at the moment:

#1: Geekcast (the podcast, not the network…) -  A collaboration between Shawn Collins, Sam Harrelson, Lisa Picarille and Jim Kukral, I’d classify it as a industry banter session. I can identify with Lisa’s sentiment that it seems unstructured at times, but I think it’s part of the fun, especially as the show hosts go off on each other.

There was some drama recently as Shawn and Sam had a spat with Jim, but all seems well now, and we should have the 4 musketeers back in the seat. The show is recorded every Tues and Sam usually has the podcast up within 24 hours.

Be sure to check out the “Sorry, Jangro” drinking game that accompanies the podcast.

#2: Affiliate Summit Sessions Podcast: If you missed the recent Affiliate Summit West, or even if you attended, you probably wouldn’t have had an opportunity to attend every session as there were 4 simultaneous sessions with many great sessions in the same time slot. I enjoyed listening to the “How To Futureproof Your SEO Efforts” by Wil Reynolds, the video innovation panel chaired by Buy.TV’s Melissa Salas, the social media panel chaired by Sam, the super affiliate panel with Kris Jones, Zac Johnson, Amit Mehta and John Chow, the ABestWeb panel….I haven’t had a chance to listen to all the sessions yet, but there’s quite a hoard of great content there.

You might also like to check out the editorial panel I appeared on.

#3: Affiliate Fortune Cookies: A 5-day a week podcast from Sam, it’s his take on Lost, science fiction, social media, affiliate marketing and whatever else comes to mind. As Sam mentions, it’s intended to be a personal podcast and you can kind of hear his existential angst, especially when it comes to affiliate marketing/internet marketing in recent episodes.

Those are my top 3 podcasts at the moment, given the limited time I spend sitting and listening to podcasts.

You might also like to check out Shawn and Lisa’s Affiliate Thing podcast on Webmaster Radio, Linda Woods’ Affiliate Marketing Insider also on WMR. They’re other podcasts on the Geekcast network.

Another resource I highly recommend are the past episodes of Affiliate Marketing Today, especially the episodes hosted by AbestWeb owner Haiko De Poel and the later season hosted by Jeremy Palmer. These sessions provide a great foundation in affiliate marketing for new marketers.

I keep hearing that GarageBand is a great software suite for podcasting on the Mac, and I might fire up my new MacBook to test it out soon.

Also on the cards is a live podcast via Skype’s SkypeCast service one of these days when I have a little more time on my hands.

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.

Shawn Collins (left) with new Affiliate Summit intern Jack Collins

Shawn is one of the most experienced and friendliest contacts I have made since getting involved in affiliate marketing and I appreciate the fact that he’s a friend whom I consult over IM and through the email.

It was great to hear how Shawn got started in affiliate marketing in 1997 as an affiliate for Amazon, and how he’s progressed to founding the Affiliate Summit seminar/tradeshow with Missy Ward, manages the Affiliate Tip blog, Authored “Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants”, his annual AffStat report, the weekly Affiliate Thing weekly podcast co-hosted with Revenue magazine editor Lisa Picarille, an Affiliate Manager forum and probably 100 other projects, including one which will be launched soon.

Here’re some of the topics we discussed:

• How to get value out of attending seminars and events (as opposed to staying home and reading blogs and forums)
• Important things you should do BEFORE and AFTER attending an event
• How to catch all the conferences free
• How to gain an unfair networking advantage at ASW
• How to get free consulting from industry veterans and experts at the event

The podcast can be accessed below:

46 mins 36 secs : 22 mb

Affiliate Summit West is from Feb 24-26 at the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas. Last year the tickets ran out and scalpers were having a field day on eBay.

And Shawn has given a special Affiliate Summit coupon code for my blog readers “ANDREW10” which will give you a 10% discount off your tickets.

Here’s the registration link: Affiliate Summit West.

Get your tickets early to avoid disappointment, and if you’re headed for ASW, I look forward to seeing you there.

We were talking about how paid search and organic search were converging, and the role of search engine optimization, even for PPC marketers.

Some examples of the convergence of SEO and PPC:

You can study your top converting PPC keywords and develop content pages based around them to attract organic traffic. (One of the strategies that Aaron Wall mentions in SEO Book).

In addition, I use the reverse method: Looking at the high traffic (and more importantly, converting!) keywords from either my AWStats account or Google Analytics from my niche blogs or HTML content sites, and creating PPC campaigns based on them (Highly targeted traffic mechanisms like Google Adwords Placement Targeting tool -formerly known as site-targeting – let you take a crack at attracting traffic with sniper-like accuracy).

So with PPC-SEO convergence, it’s very much a 2-way street.

Some highlights from Wil:

Diversify to break out of what everyone else is doing: Most affiliates will use 1 or 2 keyword tools in their research process. Wil uses 7 or 8. He might have as many as 17 tabs open on his browser during the research process.

Some of the tools he uses includes:

• Microsoft AdLab
• Yahoo Site Assist (Google for it..ironically it’s a search engine UNFRIENDLY URL)
• eBay Pulse

And if you’ve been keeping up with SEO developments, you’d know that searcher mindset and intent are going to be key.

So in line with what I’ve been doing in demographic/psychographic profiling, Microsoft’s AdLab will not just let you harvest your visitors keywords, it will give you tools to understand the demographics – age, sex, education, location of your visitors.

Together with tools like Google Trends, and Quintura (useful for lateral keyword/thematic research), you can build a pretty comprehensive profile.

–

I predict that going forward, smart affiliates are going beyond merely harvesting converting keywords in a product-centered model, and move closer to the visitor in a consumer-centered model.

To some it may not be an obvious difference yet, but it’s going to be something that separates the Super Affiliates from the regular affiliates, as PPC bid prices and organic search algorithms continue to weed out the weaker players from the market in a Darwinian game of “search engine evolution”.

Unlike the past Affiliate Summit where I found myself hiking from Harrah’s (which has great prime rib) to Bally’s every morning, I was determined to get lodging at the Rio where the summit will be held.

Having said that, here’s some summit survival tips:

• Take the bus if you have time and like to see the city. It costs about $6 for a 1-way ticket and stops at most of the major hotels. It does take a little time to get around though because it stops at quite a number of hotels.
• Wear comfortable walking shoes as you’ll be pounding the show floor if you’re diligent about meeting merchants and networks (I only got through about 25% of the booths the last time round because I was talking to and got waylaid by people as I was walking around).
• Carry a backpack if you don’t want to be lugging your schwag all over the place. Especially if there’re booths giving out Plasma TVs, Xbox360s and Nintendo WIIs (I think most of us can go out and buy one, it’s just the ultra competitive streaks in every motivated affiliates that comes out when it comes to competitions…)

With that out of the way, and a 15 hour plane ride (I’m taking a direct Singapore-Los Angeles flight on a brand spanking new Airbus A380 this time) ahead, what’s in store at Affiliate Summit?

The fun begins before the event starts.

Anik Singal and his Affiliate Classroom team have organized Affiliate Classroom Live, a 1-day workshop for affiliate managers on Saturday 23 Feb. What’s more it’s free…Places are very limited though, so check out:

–> Anik Singal’s Affiliate Classroom Live

Chase the workshop with Brook Schaaf’s Affiliate Dinner. Expect to see a guest of honor. Expect to see the guest of honor roasted…What fun!

Is Affiliate Dinner a ponzi scheme? Here’s the answer…

—

So day 1 of the summit kicks off with the “Affiliate Meet Market” from noon to 6pm. I missed this the last time because of a delayed flight, but I’m arriving a day early to make sure I am able to take part in the meet-and-greet and associated networking.

Here’s the floorplan for the Affiliate Meet Market. (PDF format)

–

Day 2 kicks off with Jason Calacanis’ keynote.

With Jason recently refering to “Affiliate Spam” “polluting” the search engines at the Paris Le Web seminar, you can expect some fireworks during the keynote.

–

One note about the presentations that follow. An overwhelming number of presentation proposals were submitted, with the result that about 4 presentations are simultaneously ongoing during each time slot. In many cases, you have great sessions going on at the same time.

I checked with Shawn and he mentioned that the sessions will be recorded and available for viewing later.

I’d suggest prioritizing your favorite sessions and making a beeline for them. In some cases I can see the majority of the crowd gravitating towards ONE session…

Forewarned is forearmed…

I’ve listed some of the sessions I personally am interested in attending:

As I’ve been doing a number of podcast and vlogging (video blogging) lately, I’m keen to check this session out.

I met Buy.com’s Melissa Salas last Feb at ASW, and she present a pretty great show for Buy.com over at Buy.Tv.
(As of last October, on the BuyTV MySpace page it’s mentioned that “BuyTV was just informed that it has been picked up for local programming via Time Warner, Cox, Charter, DirecTV, Echostar, Dish Network and others – Sunday mornings at 11:30am PST”)

And you have a panel of other video marketing/video blogging folks on the panel.

–

Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds is always a popular presenter, and I’m looking forward to checking out his presentation ahead of his session.

—

Day 3 kicks off with an “Ask the Experts” session:

I’m keen to talk to Heather Paulson about her new Paulson Management Group company.

A little later in the day, be sure to check out:

A media panel chaired by Revenue Magazine’s Lisa Picarille. Besides myself, you’ll also see Jim Kukral, Anik Singal and Valerie Stevens on the panel.

In parallel with the media panel is the Super Affiliate panel:

With the likes of Pepperjam’s Kris Jones, John Chow, Zac Johnson and Amit Mehta in attendance.

And if you’re not already torn between two or more sessions, consider that later in the afternoon, you’ll have the ABestWeb panel:

With AbestWeb’s Haiko De Poel, AffiliateCrew’s Chuck Hamrick and Team Loxly’s Loxly AKA Deb Carney in attendance.

In the same time slot you have the social marketing panel:

With a Who’s Who of the blogosphere/social media space, like Sam Harrelson, Tris Hussey, Stephanie Agresta among others.

I would point out more highlights, but my fingers are worn-out from all that typing, so you might like to check out:

–> Affiliate Summit West 2008

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.

It’s natural to measure your achievements by how much you have earned, but I think a more important measure is how much you have learned this year.

Even a salaried employee can go through the year, earning a steady paycheck, with a fat bonus on top of it, and not learn much or be very much improved over the past year…not to mention an internet marketer or entrepreneur who spent all year reading, “finding their direction” and still not be much closer to their goal.

Look into the psychological mirror and take a hard look at the reflection, is the “You” on December 31, 2007, very different from the “You” on January 1, 2007?

What are 3 achievements you have made this year, and what are 3 achievements you plan to achieve next year.

In his book “The Magic of Thinking Big” author David Schwartz says if you want to get something done, give it to a busy person because it will get done. If you give it to someone with lots of free time on their hands, it’s likely they won’t get it done because they aren’t able to prioritize and take action. And action is where it counts, because ideas and thoughts are not active till acted upon.

In January, I’ll be:

• Developing and launching a membership site as part of the Super Affiliate Accelerator project I’m working on with PPC Super Affiliate Amit Mehta.
• Interviewing Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds (one of the best speakers addressing issues in SEO).
• Launching a guerilla style PPC campaign which I’ve adapted from tactics my buddy Ruck has blogged about over at CashTactics.
• Developing a series of content creation tutorials over at Haiko De Poel’s ABestWeb affiliate marketing forum.
• Launching a contest on this blog with attractive prizes. (I have a $250 prize in the bag now and will aiming to get $1,000 worth by the launch).

And a number of assorted administrative and tax issues for a new Internet Marketing company which Amit and I formed about a month ago.

I can’t really say I’ll get the 8+ hours sleep per day that I’ve enjoyed over the last 2 weeks…

But it’s going to be one heck of a wild ride!

See you in 2008!

Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds

One of the presenters, Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds didn’t fail to shine as always with his “SEO For the New Google / Yahoo! / MSN” presentation (somewhat wordy, but chock full of content as usual).

No word yet on whether Shawn will have the videos up, but you can download Wil’s presentation PDF.

Here’s what you might have missed:

An evolution of search engine ranking strategies from past to present. From the early days of meta tag keyword stuffing to the evolution to linkbaiting / sticky content now.

Wil’s advice?

Drop the tech-focused hard approaches to SEO and adopt a human-relevant relevancy approach, and the focus on business revenue (and ultimately, profit) should stand you in good stead too.

The relevancy theme should be no surprise, with a theme-based approach making for a tight silo approach to site construction (building on the hierarchical vs spoke site architecture Wil spoke about during Affiliate Summit East earlier in the year)

Assets too will play a vital part in your site ranking strategy. Think relevance and providing value to visitors and readers:

If you need a primer on assets, check out my earlier post “Building Your Internet Marketing Asset Base”

Besides building your assets, you need to know how to effectively utlize them as well, this is where your skill as a marketer and a social networker (the human interaction side of Web2.0) comes in.

What I found particularly was this heatmap Wil included:

You might not be able to see this, but assuming the heatmap is labelled from hot (the most popular) to the coolest, in order of popularity, the hottest are:

• Video result (with thumbnail): Result #2
• Organic search result #1
• Organic search result #3
• Paid Search ad block (positioned above the organic results)

This is a quantifiable study that demonstrates SEO gives a higher return compared to PPC (at least for the terms you dominate the SERPs with).

You can install a similar heatmap using Neil Patel and Cameron Olthuis’ CrazyEgg service.

For more Affiliate Summit London presentations, you can check out the Affiliate Summit newsletter.

Now keep your fingers crossed that Shawn will upload the videos…

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For more insights, visit Seer Interactive and check out the Seer Interactive blog.

Aside from the speech by Ze Frank which I understand had the audience rolling in the aisles, almost every other presentation is available for free.

I’ve watched about half of my buddy Amit Mehta’s Super PPC Affiliate presentation, and am looking forward to checking out the other Super Affiliate session with Jeremy Palmer, Vinny Lingham and Ros Gardner, as well as Wil Reynolds andKris Jones too.

Conservatively if I were to put a value on this material, it’d easily run into the thousands of dollars.

Here’s the listing of presentations available:

You’ll need to check out Shawn’s post “Watch Affiliate Summit 2007 East Videos Free” for registration information.

Sadly, it’s likely that 90% of the people who watch the videos will never take action or put the techniques shared into practise.

Strive instead to be part of the 10% that does.

Founded in 2003, Affilaite Summit brings together affiliate marketers, affiliate networks, vendors and merchants. The event has been going gangbusters with this year’s Affiliate Summit West and Affiliate Summit East nearing or breaching the 2,000 attendee mark.

I had a chance to talk to Shawn about the upcoming Affiliate Summit UK. Aside from a June 2004 Affiliate Summit held on a cruise ship from New York City to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, this’ll be the first time Affiliate Summit’s heading outside of the continental US.

Andrew: Hi Shawn, how did you pick the UK? Are you seeing a lot of growth in the affiliate marketing industry there?

Shawn: We were seeing a significant percentage of our attendees come from the UK, so they indicated to us that there was a demand for an Affiliate Summit that was local for them. I can’t speak to the growth of their affiliate marketing industry, but we’re seeing an increasing percentage of our audience come from the UK.

Andrew: What’re the highlights of AS UK? How’s it different from ASW and ASE.

Shawn: The keynote is Linus Gregoriadis, Head of Research at E-consultancy, and then we’ll have six breakout sessions and some structured networking.

It’s different from the US shows in that the US events run three days and this one will be just one. Also, it’s significantly lower in price in the UK, and a smaller, more intimate crowd.

Andrew: Do you see different behavior among US and UK affiliates and affiliate networks?

Shawn: I just had Malcolm Cowley from buy.at on the Affiliate Thing podcast, and he laid out the differences. [Check out the Affiliate Thing podcast: The British Invasion: Affiliate Style!]

We brought on Jess Luthi of AffiliateProgramAdvice.com as a partner to aid us in catering to the UK audience.

Andrew: What’re the prospects for the UK and Europe in general like?

Shawn: From everything I hear, they are in a constant state of growth.

Andrew: Anything special we can look forward to in this show?

Shawn: I had expected this show to be very UK centric, but we’re seeing a wide variety of countries registering. In fact, the Gold Sponsor will be the M4N Affiliate Marketing network from the Netherlands.
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Notes: Affiliate Summit London (UK) will be held on September 28th at the Olympia Conference Centre (Hammersmith Road, Kensington, London).

The speaker lineup includes:

• Matt Bentley, Chief Strategy Officer, Sedo
• Shawn Collins, Co-founder, Affiliate Summit
• Todd Crawford, VP Sales & Business Development, Digital River’s oneNetworkDirect
• Linus Gregoriadis, Head of Research, E-consultancy
• Alison Guise, UK Managing Director, Commission Junction and Mediaplex
• Robert Kelly, Publisher Sales Manager, OSOYOU & TradeDoubler
• Wil Reynolds, Associate, SEER Interactive
• Sri Sharma, Managing Director, Net Media Planet
• Andreas van de Ven, Partner Sales Manager Europe, Lycos Europe GmbH
• Missy Ward, Co-founder, Affiliate Summit

I hear that Wil Reynolds never gives the same presentation twice, so if you heard him speak at ASE in Miami, I believe he’ll be presenting something new.

Shawn is giving away a limited number of “Exhibit Hall Only” passes for the event. You can check out the post: here.FULLY REDEEMED

To register for a full event pass (including the keynote address and breakout sessions), you should visit the Affiliate Summit Registration Page.

Note: There’re a total of 500 places available for the event and if you’re interested, you should register now.

In recent weeks, there’s been news coverage from the likes of TechCrunch that some Squidoo pages have seen as much as a 75% drop in traffic, due to lower rankings in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

With a Google PageRank 6 and Alexa 493 traffic ranking, Squidoo is among the Internet’s most popular sites. [You can see my earlier: Squidoo review]

The reason? A number of marketers have been using Squidoo lenses as a parasite host for hosting pages for spam marketing purposes. [The Squidoo team lists their anti-spam measures]
With the drop in Google’s SERP positions, a number of marketers have since moved their pages over to Hub Pages (PR6, Alexa 3,220)

But does adopting a “nomadic” approach of shifting to another authority site solve the puzzle of generating a continual stream of traffic?

It seems more like a “slash and burn” forest clearing measure. You forage in an area, turn it into a wasteland, shift to the next plot – slash the trees, burn it to the ground – and move on.

Sure, there are a lot of “forests” on the Internet, but if we were to take the “Live Earth” idea of a sustainable, long-term and long-tail approach to Internet Marketing, wouldn’t it be better to master the dynamics of social networking and build a brand AND a business from there?

Howie’s interview with Seth provided a number of insights. If you’ve read Seth’s works like Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, the Idea Virus and All Marketers are Liars, the interview will reasonate with you and you’ll see the principles put into action.

 Master Marketer Seth Godin

If you’re not familiar with Permission Marketing, Seth provides a good illustration of the evolution of marketing from disruptive to a permission-based model:

“Marketing has become a consensual process. In other words, you can’t yell at people (on TV, on the radio, on the web) and hope that you can earn enough to yell more. As a result, the most successful marketers are the ones who have a product that people are eager to use and talk about (think iPhone). This is great news for people who have useful information to sell, because human beings are drawn to insight and knowledge and things that help them succeed.

Like Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds had mentioned at Affiliate Summit East, building a site optimized for humans, rather than search engines will bring you the biggest returns.

You may detect a bias towards “content development” and “content sites” in recent posts, but that’s only because “content IS king”.

As Seth skillfully illustrates:

Like the booth at the carnival that has a great barker outside bringing people in, but not much in the tent, at least as far as I can tell.

So SERP rankings can bring you so far, but you’d need something substantial inside your tent/website/blog to keep the audiences there.

When that happens, “people flock. They tell their friends. They engage. They give permission. It works.”

Ah, the essence of social marketing/social traffic generation succinctly summarized in 13 words.

The root of Squidoo (which I see as an embodiment of Seth’s word-of-mouth marketing principles) “we give anyone an easy-to-use platform where you can help people understand your little part of the world. A page where you can include links and content and pointers and a bit of community to help people figure out what’s going on.”

How to get the most out of Squidoo?

Build yourself as an authority, the “go to” gal or guy for your niche subject.

If you are building great pointers to great stuff and profiting by being an expert, by engaging people as they look for something to help them, we need you and will continue to work to help you.”

The nucleus of “social marketing”? It lies in:

“What Squidoo does when it does things well: it gives people meaning. Squidoo is not some sort of amplifier where you can place a paragraph or two of text and maybe a banner and get some juice.

A great Squidoo lens is a hand-built piece of insight into a given topic. You list your offering, perhaps your competitors. You point to pictures or videos that teach people about what you do. Include links to customers who are also giving testimonials.”

Implicit in Seth’s statements is the idea of creation value for your readers, and more broadly, your community.

Destroy that value by scraping keywords devoid of any context, or by overly being sales-focused, without being information-focused and you risk alienating your very customers and relegating yourself into a pitch-fest freak.

In case you’re wondering about the duality/dichotomy which seems present in the marketing world, between white hats and black hats (and sometimes gray hats), Seth spells it out very clearly:

There are only two kinds of marketers:

• Marketers who spend all day trying to do more and give more to their customers.
• And marketers who try to do less and charge for the rest.

How would you achieve victory in this war of opposing marketing paradigms?

Seth’s belief is: use your lenses to be the expert and to give it all away. The more you give away, the better you’ll do.

The bottom line in social marketing for me has been in line with eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s mantra “Do No Evil”.

Seth has more nuggets of social marketing information and you can check out the full text of Howie’s interview at:

–>  Howie Schwartz Interviews Seth Godin