Earlier this morning I read a great post on Google Adsense optimization tips that Google had released from the guru of contextual advertising.
I’m a big fan of Adsense of course, but it really got me thinking a bit later today…wouldn’t this be a great hotspot map for “link quality valuation” too? Fits in well with the text link pricing criteria that Barry posted about today as well. Here’s another take on text link valuation.
Affiliate marketers -
What they do:
Create “affiliate sites”, rank them high and get commissions off online sales. Affiliate marketing is strikingly similar to a modern version retail sales. Affiliate marketers are paid a percentage based on many criteria…as with retail sales…location is everything….with affiliate marketing the location is at the top of the serps rather than mainstreet. The more traffic to a site (or foot traffic to a retail outlet) the more likely the customers are to pay a higher price. The more people the better the chance of converting enough folks to make a profit. In my mind, the best affiliate marketers are the pros of the SEO industry. They are the people willing to get “down and dirty” and just sell. There is no school for affiliate marketing - learn online and run with it. It takes a true entreprenuerial mentality. An affiliate marketer must understand all aspects of how the web works…user psychology, web development, search engine optimization, etc. Affiliate marketers “control their own destiny”, and seem to see opportunity in every crisis. They are soldiers of fortune that create Christmas sites in July (or July of two years previous now.) Affiliate marketers are often the “blackhats” that give the industry a bad name as well. This works both ways, as they also do the “dirty work” that corporations want no part of to keep their reputation from being tarnished. They will be happy to garner the traffic that goes with cutting edge borderline techniques, they just would rather have the affiliates do them to keep a safe distance from liability.
How it might change:
The techniques will of course change. Competitive industries will become more cutthroat with things like Googlebowling as people realize the potentials spoils. Focus on NICHE. Keep searching for high demand/ low competition areas to target. As algorithms get better the methodology will of course have to evolve with it. Some things that have changed over the last couple years are the rate at which sites grow and get links. The types of links will certainly become more of an issue with links pages, reciprocal links, off-topic links, and other such techniques being devalued as time progresses. Choose one of two routes - 1. 500 sites that make $1 per day. 2. One site that makes $500 per day. Depending on your route you will use different techniques. Learning them all and coming up with a hybrid approach is probably safest and best. Good affiliates are like chameleons. They blend into their environment, and stay well under the radar in failure and success.
How to become an affiliate marketer:
As with any occupation, you must study hard and learn constantly. The initial learning curve is tough. Start with some of the other SEO related occupations I will be covering over the next week or so. Work in web design and development while you start to learn as they are critical skills to SEO. Consulting and making decisions from working theories is generally a good next step. Experiment and read often. Find some good merchants, and build around what you know to start.
Here’s some places to start:
Favorite Affiliate threads from WMW
A little short on resources here for potential affs…maybe I’ll work on building this, or ask Mr. Ploppy to help. Whatya waitin’ for? Go get your slice of the affiliate marketing pie!
Coming soon - other SEO Occupations:
SEO is Dead…again. To be quite honest, it has been doomed from the start. Allowing tech-geeks to become chic marketing people is just a bad idea anyways. I mean, you don’t really “optimize” the search engines anyhow, right? You tweak a webpage or web site to manipulate flaws in a search engine algorithm for top performance. Yes, I am being dramatic like the hundreds before me that proclaimed the death of SEO. It’s actually become quite cliche now, but so has the “evolution of SEO”, but it’s not gonna stop me from writing about it anyhow.
At some point it became fashionable to claim yourself as an “SEO”. Not that being an SEO really means much…it just sounds kind of cool, and seemed to be how everyone else described their services. I found it quite entertaining at the first industry conference that I went to that before six o’clock in the evening everyone was an SEO, and later in the evening more and more became search engine spammers. I don’t really think many were really that either, but the semantics of how we label our industry isn’t questioned quite often enough. We really aren’t spammers, and we aren’t “optimizers” either. The best “SEO’s” are really a culmination of a variety of very diverse skills brought together to improve a business or organization’s marketing performance in the online arena. Top SEO’s are project managers, and “meta-webmasters”.
I’ve been pondering this one so long that I think I’m going to make it a two or three part series depending on how it flows from my fingers. I think SEO is the “second bubble” that really had extremely high returns for minimal investments. It is strikingly similar to how easy it must have been to be a stock broker during the first internet boom.
Then: “ummm….buy….ummm…tech stocks?!?”
Now: “ummmm….buy….ummmm text links?!?”
High return low risk. The question is…when will things change…how much will they change…and what will change.
In my mind there are a few types of folks claim to practice SEO -
They are all actually becoming quite intertwined, because the skillsets of all of them are essential for success online. The more of the skills that each of these types of people possess, the more valuable that person becomes (as with any specialized occupation I suppose). Over the next few days, I’m going to try to dive into each one in a bit more depth, and see what types of individual skills are most important, how long those skills will be valuable to the changing search engine climate, and how those skill should change with the changing times. Trying to see in the future as a *ahem* SEO is quite tricky so it should be pondered often. It’s a lot nicer to be right than it is to be left behind the times. Tedster realized several years ago that SEO is really evolving into project management.
It takes a great project manager or developer and when folks ask where SEO is going I think that’s the direction we’re moving in. A well optimized site is a well planned and developed site. - paynt - May ‘02
SEO *is* project management…except when it’s affiliate marketing or public relations. Even then, success is predicated on having a solid project base to build on.
I noticed another interesting thing at the first conference that I went to…Wherever people started from they got thrust into doing web development, migrated to an interest in search engines, and had progressed to either consulting or affiliate marketing. Those making the *big bucks* were in the aff space and struck up their own deals rather than depending on what was offered to them.
>the ultimate goal
If you take it one step further the ultimate goal is to promote your own sites and not do any work for clients. - NFFC
I actually LIKE clients myself (most of the time), because I try to attract successful clients that are willing to work hard for our mutual success (and it’s fun to see folks succeed). This isn’t to say that I don’t ever want to own and have more of a vested interest in other sites.
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There are so many opportunities for small businesses to thrive on the web. In some instances, it gives a small company the opportunity to be a global operation, in others it just helps them to be found be potential regional customers like myself who still have the yellow pages sitting on their front porch. If you’ve ever purchased or heard the pricing for yellow page ads, it’s REAL easy to justify pulling a few dollars from the old YP’s and putting it into an online local search.
For a small business owner to understand and utilize the web, they just need to be pointed in the right direction. Here are the directions. Firstly, understand that the majority of local internet listings come from only a few different sources. Get into the sources, and you will trickle down to the other areas. I spoke with an intern from my old company who got his two man web design company listed in the G local listings for “Bay City Web Design”, and I’m sure this will pay off nicely for him now that he’s on top of the serps from just a small bit of effort. Here are the sources (in PDF format) to get listed in. More on how to do so below. Be sure to try to get searcher targeted keywords and the best possible location into your listings. “Search Optimization” probably even started before the folks who were “AAAA Legal Team” to be found first in the yellow pages. Understand the rules and use them to your advantage.
Local Search Engine Marketing Tools
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So Tuesday was my first trip to Sleepy Hollow, NY and it was a pleasant one. I was greeted in the morning by one of the most grounded business authors you could hope to meet. He has a nice place for seminars, and did a remarkable job. I’m still trying to stop the flurry of ideas floating around in my melon.
The makeup of the group made for a fantastic chance to self analyze everyone’s business model through the perception of others. I was quite fascinated to hear a bit of the stories about plans for future endeveours and how everyone could use great ideas to better market their companies. It was overwhelming really to try to comprehend and retain the good ideas from such a group of diverse minds.
Seth has taken a bit of flack for comments on SEO, but the subject of PPC was brought up extensively. Paid search is guaranteed. Paid search is safe. I love PPC. It is highly targeted, and in a localized environment it can be like shooting fish in a barrel with a specialized market. Plumbers in Podunk. Safe. Easy. High ROI. PPC is highly measurable which is a direct marketers dream. You can crunch numbers down to the penny. There are direct correlations. At the end of the day, when all the reports come in and all the numbers are crunched. There are a handful that matter. PPC is a calculated risk. It is easy to blow a bunch of money quickly if done improperly. Testing and reaching the client effectively is the goal. SEO can be very similar depending on the approach.
Retention is the key. I don’t give books away often, but the validity of attracting and retaining the type of clients and business that you want is fundamental to the methodolgy Seth lives by. Seth gives away LOTS of books. He gets back by the incredible amount that he gives. I was definitely given what was promised and I am grateful and thankful for that, and will radiate that to others.
I think Seth is the most spectacular consultant I’ve ever met that would most likely not own up to being a consultant. He identified flawed logic and helped folks to examine their business in a way that had not been done in some time. It was the most pleasurable cognitive dissonance I’ve ever experienced to see some things that just plain WON’T WORK. He sold million dollar ideas in the course of a short workday that may have taken years to identify without the right experience.
At one point Seth told a story about a building that had a problem with brown goop oozing from the walls for years and years. Every time the goop was removed and painted over it would seap back through the paint in a very short time. Finally, after years of this fiasco and expert was brought in to take care of the problem. He looked at the walls, told them the price for his services, and they accepted. The expert then wrote the name of a chemical on a piece of paper and handed it to the building owner. If you don’t understand the moral of the story, here is another shot at it from a story of Henry Ford I had read at webmasterworld (Msg 10):
The other side of the coin is a story told of Henry Ford. Back in the 1920’s when Henry Ford was pioneering the assembly line to build his cars, the line went down. His onsite experts couldnt solve the problem, but isolated it to a specific piece of machinery.
Henry called the manufacture and demanded that someone get out to solve the problem immediately. Shorthly thereafter the repair man showed up, looked things over, hemmened and hawed, and then reached into his tool box for a screwdriver. He turned a screw a half turn, then turned it on. The assembly line roared to life.
The man scribbled on an invoice and gave Henry a bill for $5.00 (remember this is 1920s). Henry took one look and yelled at the guy, “$5.00 for turning a screw?” The repair man quietly responded, “No sir. It is 50 cents for turning the screw. It’s another $4.50 for knowing which screw to turn.”
What was so wonderful about the conference for me was it gave me a chance to get outside my comfortable line of thinking. That is a difficult thing to invite into your life, but is was welcomed by the entire group when they walked into the building. They KNEW Seth was going to tell them what wouldn’t work in their business. We weren’t looking for self affirmation, though I’m sure there were a lot of aspects to everyone’s business that WERE affirmed by what he had to say. I was excited during the first bit of the day when Seth showed everyone Technorati and Bloglines. Was a bit bummed that I hadn’t put in my technorati tag that morning as usual because I was in a hurry, but that was self-affirming. Having Seth suggest that we put a skull and crossbones on our website was a bit extremist, but made me think about the public perception of SEO and how misunderstood it can be. This is a problem for SEO’s who want good clients. It calls for creative solutions. One of the main riffs that Seth had with SEO was that you can’t build a business on it. I totally agree. Don’t take out a mortgage on high search rankings. PPC is a good supplement even when you get there, or if another “Florida update” happends. The ROI can be incredible though. Watching a company strap itself up based largely on SE rankings is an exciting proposition very similiar to watching a company grow because of a great idea. A lot of the time the rankings COME from some great ideas. If they’re really lucky, they come from a remarkable idea.
If you are a business person do yourself a favor and look up some of Seth’s work. Get outside your normal line of thinking and find ways that your company can be remarkable. Good companies fail, great companies flounder…consistently remarkable companies flourish.
There are many other ideas from the conference I’d like to tell about, but I’m sure they will ooze into this site over the next few weeks. I would only end up babbling if I attempted to communicate the profound influence that Seth’s work has had on my own. I feel honored to have spent the day with him and such a fine group of people. I also got a few new sites to read out of the deal including Rick Segal - a loonie with a toonie (who has his own commentary on the seminar) and Aaron - the brand evangelist. Thanks to all who helped to incubate a host of new remarkable ideas. I’m sure Seth’s newest book will have some wonderful insights as well.
G releases search history - personalized search.
Click SEO and Search on me.
- Aaron
Hey people can determine what is relevance better than a machine now. Let’s collect that data. Personalization should be fun. It’s pretty easy to go off on tangents.
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Sounds like a good day to me. Drivin’ to Irvington, NY this morning to attend a seminar with Seth Godin. Should be a good time. Seth has wrote a host of good books including Bootstrapper’s Bible, Permission Marketing, and Big Red Fez among my favorites. He really has a keen sense of observation for business and marketing, and it will be nice to thank him for some of the great ideas they have provided me.
All Marketers are Liars is Seth’s latest adventure, sure to be full of his razor sharp observations about the subject. More on the seminar later. Have a look at some of Seth’s daily observations.
SEO/ Internet Marketing Training
