Business Management Consultant - Stuntdubl Search and Marketing Consulting

Affiliate marketing is an awesome opportunity for those who are self-motivated. Brand your affiliate program as the best out there for your industry. In my mind, affiliate marketing is the retail distribution channel of the virtual world. I sometime wish I fell into the self-motivated category more often to create a fleet of affiliate sites for myself, but I stay with the security of bein’ a SEO consultant. The affiliate realm has really become an entity onto itself, and takes dedication to stay up to date with changes. Understand how affiliates work.

I recently had a former client who had set up an affiliate program with Shareasale write and ask how he could more actively promote his affiliate program. Again, it made me realize that a program will only be as successful as it’s affiliates, and the pareto principle definitely comes into play (meaning 90% of your sales will come from 10% of your people). If your program doesn’t stand out, you won’t be remarkable. Attracting the right people and keeping them motivated is critical to the success of an affiliate marketing program. Creating working relationships with good synergy is key as well. If you sell peanut butter, partner with a site that sells jelly. Make it EASY for those around you to make money, and they will often try to reciprocate. Work with your affiliates to get rankings and sales.
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I really like Whois.sc for findin’ out information quickly. I also really like bookmarklets. I came across this when diggin’ through bookmarks this weekend and thought I’d share for those interested.

Use this in your bookmarks bar for one-click whois.sc info from whatever site your on.
Drag me to your toolbar

Everybody needs links. Nobody wants to get links. This leaves a bit of a problem, and a bit of an opportunity. Everybody needs links for good rankings, but they want them cheap. Tools make the monotony of link development a bit easier, and the time spent more valuable. Link development is tedious, cumbersome, and tiring. It is also highly valuable. Knowing how to maximize your time when link hunting is quite important. Spending time on getting free directory links and reciprocal links is becoming less and less valuable. Understanding what the right links ARE and how to hunt for them is crucial.
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Andy Hagans over at the wonderfully informational and link-tastic link building blog, was kind enough to put me on he “hyperlink hotseat”. Andy is planning to interview a bunch of SEO/SEM industry type folks and ask them five questions. I think it came out pretty well, and I’m sure there will be some great interviews in the future. The first volume was with Barry Schwartz and is a very good read.

Andy’s doin’ a nice job with givin’ away some great link building tools, and link development strategy, among other things. Definitely a site worth watching on bloglines.

I really don’t do a lot of coding and development these days, but I certainly used to try. I’ve always been fascinated, however, with CSS and it’s benefits to a web project. The use of CSS seperates design from content and makes life MUCH easier to make design changes. There are some potential SEO benefits with CSS like improving text/code ratio, and smaller overall page size. Graywolf even has a niece piece on the benefits of CSS-P for MSN. The big benefits come with the flexibility that is allowed by seperating the design from the content.

CSS is cleaner code than using convoluted nested tables, and it gets much easier every time you work with it. Yes, it’s tough to get it to work in all browsers at times, but using existing code and tips and tricks helps make that a bit easier. Grab an existing CSS site and start ripping and tearing. I learned CSS by changing existing sites and seeing what broke when I changed something. There’s an even easier way to do this now with an extension that is available in firefox to edit CSS right in the browser window (no link the extension site seemed to be down as I was writing this). Start playing, and use the tools available. It is worth the time after the initial learning curve it will save you time and improve your websites.

CSS Tool

Layout Tools

• 12 useful CSS templates
• Glish.com CSS layouts
• Blue Robot
• Alistapart - CSS tips, tricks, and techniques
• CSS templates
• More CSS templates
• Firdamatic CSS generator

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1.Good exportation of bookmarks.

Writing out a folder from bookmarks in multiple types of formats. Tops being HTML and CSV’s.

This would be handy for chunking and rehashing data into different places easier.

2.Export bookmark folder to html right click

Spit a folder out to html quick and easy. Title and url.

I love bookmarks. I’m anal retentive with mine, and firefox has made my life sooooo much easier not having to go back and organize later utilizing the “add bookmark here” plugin (well, at least not as much).

If anybody has seen this sort of thing, has a good workaround that I am missing, or has plans to write it, please let me know.

Thanks to Dean for originally pointing out the source of all our SEO confusion

1. All links work vs. Contextual links work
2. Buy links for click through (or don’t buy them) vs. Buy links for search rankings
3. There’s nothing a competitor can do to hurt your site vs. Googlebowling
4. SEO is dead vs. Long live SEO
5. Directory links are important vs. Google hates directory links
6. All penalties are algorithmic vs. Lots of hand edits
7. Sandbox vs. There is no sandbox
8. Filters vs. Penalties
9. The blue pill vs. There is no spoon
10. Pagerank is dead vs. Buy links based on Pagerank (okay this one is just plain WRONG)
11. Content remix vs. Scraper sites
12. Blogs rank too well vs. SE’s don’t like blogs
13. Real simple syndication vs. Real simple stealing
14. Lots of links vs. Quality links
15. Google knows all vs. Google is dumb
16. Lots of diretories vs. Good directories
17. Automated vs. Manual
18. Linking in vs. Linking Out
19. Global vs. Local
20. Google is good vs. Google is evil

In: Bashing an improved MSN.
Out: Bashing Google
Boring: New Yahoo products.

Added: It’s worth noting that the answers to these contradictions most often exists somewhere between the two, and that is just a testament to the fact that nothing in SEO/SEM is cut and dry, black and white. It’s all shades of #CCCCCC

Tags: SEO, Search Engine Optimization