I only just noticed a video interview (above) that I did with Dr. Ralph Wilson of web marketing today on how to attract affiliates. In it, one of the things I talk about is looking for affiliate link signatures to track down your competitor’s affiliates. I should probably explain how you might do that. For example, let’s look at Amazon affiliates. I just searched the web and found an Amazon affiliates link for a self help book. A right click on the image lets me copy the link into, so that I can see how the affiliate links to Amazon. It is a link like this:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1572244135/theguidetosel-20

Looking at another book on the same site we can see this link:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1572242205/theguidetosel-20

So between the two, we can see the difference between the two links. If we want to find all the people that are affiliates of a particualar book at Amazon, say the “anger control workbook”, then we are looking for links that START with http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ … MajesticSEO’s link analysis let’s you sort by url – or even by part URL. So you can use MajesticSEO to find affiliates of a certain genre and use this to attract them to your program.

Here’s another example, more suited to most of us in small businesses. Mary Ferrin writes and runs www.dinnnerandamurder.com one of her affiliates is http://www.great-murder-mystery-games.com/death-by-chocolate.html and you can see that his page links to: http://www.dinnerandamurder.com/games/chocolate.htm?family=acc396a2&game=6a49e062 For a much more reasonable cost, I can find other affiliates linking to that page with the same ?family prefix by forcing an analysis in Majestic for links that ONLY contain “http://www.dinnerandamurder.com/games/chocolate.htm?family” in them.

He presto! Here are her other affiliates!

boardgamecentral.com
murderandmysterygames.com
partymerchant.com
play-dead.com
great-murder-mystery-games.com
signaturestyledecor.com
book-club-queen.com
corporateeventchannel.com
mbtb.com
mainlymurder.co.uk
mysterygamecentral.com
movil.be
registeredsite.com
murdermysterygames.com.au
adultthemepartyideas.com

Guess what you should do next with this data as a Merchant? Check these against your own affiliate list to see who you haven’t got. Since I own Murder Mystery Games… guess what I plan to do next week?

by Dixon Jones

Attracting Affiliates

Dropbox is pretty much everything you ever wanted in a web disk in the clouds. It just DOES what you want. It feels like a local folder on your computer. Indeed, it IS a local folder on your computer. So even if you are offline, you can update and work on files in your Dropbox folder. Doing it this way is great, because there is no worldwide wait problems. Whenever a file is updated on your computer, Dropbox encrypts it, zips it, and syncs it with your cloud based Dropbox folder on Amazon’s s3 servers – all in the background.

It’s simply brilliant!

Yesterday I found myself doing a spreadsheet on my Mac, which wasn’t connected to my printer. I had a Windows machine on the desk fired up. I saved my spreadsheet on my Mac, ready to put the file onto a USB stick, but Dropbox worked faster. In the time it would have taken to save the file, it was aready there on my Windows machine. I printed it off without a second thought.

Then, later, I took the printout to the pub (Taking spreadsheets to pubs is a whole different problem for me) and gave it to a colleague. He didn’t have his reading glasses… so no problem. I just took out my iPhone and showed him the file directly from the phone.

Brilliant. Simply Brilliant.

I like that the data is encypted, hosted on decent SSL server.

I like that even Dropbox employees can’t even read the files without your username and password (which they don’t have)

I like that, once installed, you don’t have to enter your username ever time (although this as a preference option might be good)

I’ve tried it on my Mac, Widows XP, Windows Vista, my iPhone and through the web. It works on Unix machines too.

I like that it keeps a changelog history – so I can always role back up to 30 days for any file. Brilliant!

I like even better that it is free for the first 2GB of space, but if you register using THIS LINK, you’ll get an extra 250MB free (and so will I, so please use the link!)

Dixon.

by Dixon Jones

The Best Virtual Web Disk in the Clouds

Let me start things off. I just found Google’s Internet Stats page:

Try to search for anything containing the word “internet” and the system just seems to hang. It was still hanging after I downloaded and upgraded my Wordpress installation.

Dave Naylor, another UK SEO has been finding loads of broken SERPs recently around Geo-issues. He spotted this one today:

There are BOUND to be more. Got an insane search result? Found a way to crash Google scholar? or Chrome? I would love to build a list of ways to break the system. I’m sure the boys and gals at the ‘plex would be interested too!

by Dixon Jones

Top Ways to Break Google

By contrast, I find myself heading to Pubcon next week in Las Vegas. Smack bang on he heart of Nevada’s desert – blistering heat and hardly any rainfall. Yet Sin City thrives. The hotels rise out of the ashen ground and water flows from the taps, supplied courtesy of the Hoover Damn.

Compare conditions in the Nevada Desert to those in Ethiopia – taken from the Oxfam blog:

There’s a women standing at the top of a hole in the ground – bright yellow jerry cans and donkeys surround her. There are nine other women down the hole she tells us… forming a human chain to bring water up from the bottom of a cave. They don’t need ropes because, “God has provided a ladder” – a series of rock-formed steps.

They walk all day to get there. They break their backs carrying the water back.

Living in these conditions, how can you expect Ethiopia to compete on a world stage? they can’t.

So I’m going to Vegas and I have a fun packed week of meetings and presentations. I’m also going to enter a poker tournament.

But when the tap water starts flowing like a little miracle out of the taps, think about the miracle that “God has provided a ladder” to the ladies of Ethiopia.

Charity shouldn’t always start at home… it should sometimes start as far away from home as is humanly possible. I looked at Oxfam’s accounts once, and found they were one of the most efficient charities in the world at getting the donations through to front line services. Can you help them? Not even to build the Hoover damn. The ladies of Ethiopia would just be happy with a water carrier like this:

Dixon.

by Dixon Jones

Taking water for granted at Pubcon

Today I had a look in at the work in progress…. Lan cabling lining the floorboards, roofing and the walls.

Apparently… nearly 3 miles of it!

I asked if this would mean we could dispense with the central heating. Apparently not.

So is this necessary? Well without it, any business would need 10 times as many meetings, which would mean loads more travel. So I bet that if it was “carbon tested” so to speak, then yes.

by Dixon Jones

3 miles of Data Cabling

I think it is about time to consider dixonjones.com as distinct from Receptional.com. No longer is it a dilemma of business and personal time overlapping. Now my personal politics and preferences are mixing with my business life.

My wife has gone to bed, but my 9 year old daughter is asking to borrow a key for a magic trick. If my wife was awake, there is NO WAY I would be writing a post on my iPhone using the WordPress publishing app.

It really has gone all Pete Tong. (translation:wrong). Life has all gone arse about tit.

Is this right?

Or is my wife right?

Should I watch my daughter’s magic trick or Flash Forward or @randfish’s Twitter feed?

When I write it down… It becomes clear that of course, I should watch the magic trick.

by Dixon Jones

Time to Reflect?

I thought that a new UK press release system would be a great case study for my presentation next week at a4uexpo.com so I thought I would do them a favour and email them, asking if they would give me some credits to do the test. I couldn’t promise to say it was brilliant, but I also said I wasn’t out to slate them.

Well – firstly – they never replied. So this test is now costing me £110 out of my own pocket, and if it doesn’t deliver, I feel every justification in slating them! But then – I’m not bitter – .

So the release went live this morning. Observation number 1 – unless you want to pay lots more, you need to plan the release several days in advance.

I’ll let you know what exposure I can glean at my presentation at A4U. If there is anything you want me to test and report on, maybe comment here and I’ll include it in the presentation but also reply here in case you won’t be at A4U.

by Dixon Jones

Review of PRWeb in the UK

by Dixon Jones

Save Rishil Campaign

London Excel conference center, but apart from that, it generally rocks!

I always TRY to give something out that very few people will have heard before. Now that I am also Marketing MajesticSEO, I have taken the chance to delve into it probably more than most. I recently did a link audit for a very powerful affiliate site and found a new way to find links. Since Lee McCoy is going to be getting ready for honeymoon, I thought it would be great to annoy him by sharing the technique when he wasn’t around. (I’d link to the Facebook thread that would have made that last sentence make sense… but can’t work out how!).

There are two reasonably well known link intersect tools out there. The original hubfinder tool and the new Moz one. I’ll talk about both of them, for sure – but I also think I’ve found a way to get a much larger list than both of them.

You can get 10% off the ticket price by using the promo code SPKD10.

by Dixon Jones

A Guaranteed Link Trick at A4U Expo

Here’s my challenge of the day. I have five worksheets in an Excel document. Each sheet contains a list of at LEAST 1000 cells, and each cell contains ascii.

I need a list of duplicate cells in worksheets 2-5 which do NOT appear in worksheet 1.

Can anyone tell me how to do that please? Will – if you do it in the seminar, I’ll do my damnedest to send someone onto the webinar.

by Dixon Jones

A Tricky Excel task