In case you’ve missed out on making it to the recent Affiliate Summit East in Miami, the event’s co-founder Shawn Collins has posted the videos up.
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 (more…)
For the first time in its history, Affiliate Summit will be travelling outside the continental US to the UK (United Kingdom) and I had an opportunity to find out more about the event from Affiliate Summit co-founder Shawn Collins.
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 (more…)
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’d have seen news reports that marketing guru Seth Godin‘s Squidoo social networking site has been Google slapped in recent weeks. My friend, black hat marketer Howie Schwartz, interviewed Seth and in the process elicited a number of nuggets for social marketers from the Internet Marketing community.
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 (more…)
