Posts Tagged ‘wil-reynolds’
Together with my buddy Amit Mehta yesterday, we had a great call with Seer Interactive founder Wil Reynolds (right) for our Super Affiliate Accelerator program.
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 (more…)
Over the weekend, I stayed up till 1:30 am to plan my flights and get my hotel confirmed for Shawn Collins and Missy Ward’s upcoming Affiliate Summit West, at the Rio in Las Vegas from Feb 24-26.
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…
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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)
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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.
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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 (more…)
In this edition of the Friday Podcast, I go into 5 important considerations if you’re serious about building your web business this year.
Note: The notes are pretty detailed, though the podcast itself contains even more content.
Enjoy!
Duration: 18 minutes | Filesize:Â 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.
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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%.
(more…)
Two elements are critical to the success of any social marketing campaign.
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?
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.
…There’s just a little more than a day to finish what you were supposed to have completed this year.
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!
Affiliate Summit co-founder Shawn Collins has kindly put up the presentations from the recent (and inaugural) Affiliate Summit London.
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 (more…)
