Years ago, I created a WordPress blog and chose the All in One SEO Pack plugin to handle my post title tags and meta descriptions. Later on, I learned of WordPress SEO by Yoast and used it on all of my other blogs. Yet this early site still had the other plugin installed, with lots of data.

Today, I replaced All in One SEO Pack with Yoast’s WordPress SEO, and kept all of my customized title tags and meta descriptions. Here’s how:

1. Install WordPress SEO & activate it
2. Backup your database. Specifically, wp_postmeta
3. Run 2 sql commands:

   update wp_postmeta set meta_key='_yoast_wpseo_title' where meta_key='_aioseop_title';
   update wp_postmeta set meta_key='_yoast_wpseo_metadesc' where meta_key='_aioseop_description';

4. Deactivate All in One SEO Pack
5. Remove All in One SEO Pack

That’s it! Now you can use all of the other features in WordPress SEO by Yoast with all of the data you originally entered while running the All in One SEO Pack.

Skimlinks and VigLink are two services which allow publishers (bloggers, website owners) to monetize their content. By adding a snippet of Javascript to the site, links to merchant sites will be changed to affiliate links, and select keywords can even be automatically hyperlinked.

Skimlinks

Skimlinks

www.skimlinks.com
@skimlinks

Skimlinks is the leader when it comes to auto-linking merchant sites via affiliate links. Based out of London, they have relationships with nearly 18,000 merchants on 33 different networks (as of April, 2012).

SkimLinks

The Skimlinks product will change merchant links into affiliate links, on-the-fly. Adding some JavaScript is all that’s required to make this work. A nice (advanced) feature here is the ability to use your own custom subdomain, such as go.ericnagel.com.

SkimWords

SkimWords will change product and merchant names into affiliate links, especially on sites with consumer electronics & technology, fashion & beauty, automotive, mothering and lifestyle content. A new feature of SkimWords is a flyover for product & price comparison. This will show the user options on where to buy an iPad, for example, along with pricing information.

Other Tools

Skimlinks also provides

• Search Widgets
• A URL Shortener
• Link API
• Product API

The URL Shortener is nice because you can get a URL to use in your own redirect script. As a programmer, I’m always a fan when I can use an API, instead of off-the-shelf solutions, which typically cover more than I want, but not everything I need.

Installation

When setting up Skimlinks, you must first add the site to your account. Then, you can copy / paste the JavaScript, or use their vBulletin, WordPress or Ning plugins.

Reporting

Skimlinks will show you revenue by day, merchant, or site. While the Daily Report shows revenue for a timespan by day, the Merchant Report breaks this down by merchant. You can choose the timespan yourself.

Payment

Skimlinks pays via PayPal, check or Direct Deposit 60 days after a period closes. So, for earnings in July, you’d be paid at the end of October. They claim that because of their volume and merchant relationships that they can actually get you higher payouts than if you worked with the merchant directly. For a merchant I was using them for, I was seeing a $1.984 EPC, earning $16.41 per sale (compare this to VigLink below).

Support

I haven’t had to use SkimLinks support myself, but they have a full Knowledge Base online, full of FAQ.

VigLink

VigLink

www.viglink.com
@VigLink

VigLink allows you to change merchant links into affiliate links (VigLink Affiliation), and/or automatically insert links around certain text (LinkWeaver). Headquartered in San Francisco, they’re a bit newer to the game than SkimLinks, but are a service worth checking out.

VigLink Affiliation

Turning on VigLink Affiliation will change links to merchant sites (ex: ebay.com) into affiliate links. In addition, you can opt to have affiliate links overwritten by VigLink, thereby consolidating all of your commissions under one roof.

VigLink LinkWeaver

Using VigLink‘s LinkWeaver, you can choose to omit certain blocks of text from having links inserted into them, choose to have links open in a new window, change the link color and more. You cannot, however, define your own keyword:link relationships.

Installation

You can simply copy and paste some Javascript into your website, or use a plugin/installer that VigLink provides for Blogger, phpBB, Tumblr, TypePad, vBulletin or WordPress. VigLink also has an API for building links, but I haven’t dug into it yet.

Reporting

One major thing missing from VigLink‘s reporting is the ability to choose your own date range. The VigLink Dashboard shows you a calendar with revenue by day. Clicking on a week further breaks that down, and then shows number of merchants, links, and clicks for the week. You cannot see daily details, however.

Payment

VigLink also pays net-60 (revenue you accrue in May will be paid at the end of July) and commissions are sent via PayPal. When compared to SkimLinks, VigLink was reporting a $2.34 EPC, and $16.97 per sale for the same merchant that I mentioned above (slightly better payout).

Support

VigLink provides a dedicated support site with full knowledgebase and online request system. From my own experience, VigLink support responds to new and updated requests within 24 hours.

Summary

Both Skimlinks and VigLink provide similar solutions to the same problem. I’ve found VigLinkto have slightly higher payouts, and amazing customer support.

If you just want a solution for turning your links (and certain keywords) into affiliate links, either solution will do. But if you want some advanced options and shopping tools, look towards Skimlinks.

When I first started building my own affiliate sites, secrecy was key. You’d add private registration to your domain name, host it on a separate IP (maybe even a different hosting provider), and not allow anyone to know what sites you owned. I questioned this at the end of 2011:

#affiliates – are we still hiding our websites from each other? Does it matter if I know your sites, and you know mine?

— Eric Nagel (@ericnagel) December 26, 2011

When I wrote about working with Todd and Tricia on our Wine Club Review site, I had to be cryptic and blur out images

This is really exciting when it's not blurred out

But now with all of this talk about AuthorRank and rel author, can we no longer stay discreet?

SEOMoz outlines how AuthorRank works together with PageRank to determine ranking factors

AuthorRank + PageRank = AuthoredPageRank

What are affiliates to do?

Without putting all of our eggs into one basket, we affiliates have to balance being experts in multiple areas.

We could create online personas or pseudonyms for our different selves online. This way, each of our selves is an expert in one topic, and the lines aren’t crossed. Create multiple Google+ profiles, and don’t confuse your split personalities. Living more than one life will eventually catch up to you, no matter how careful you are.

Or, we could step out from behind the curtain and be ourselves – experts in all of our niches. But how does Google know that I’m not only well versed in wine clubs, but also the go-to guy when you want to find a Leg Lamp? Should you trust someone who’s contributing to two vastly different niches? Oh, let’s not forget I’m an affiliate and SEO. And if you need reviews on online backup services, I’ve got that, too.

Affiliates have enough knowledge to research each other, but someone looking to buy a Leg Lamp probably doesn’t know how to, or care to, research the person who published the website.

What I’m Doing

I’ve slowly outted one of my sites over the past year. First was during SugarRae’s SEO training before Affiliate Summit in New York, when I asked for advice. Then I started using my name on the site, and in videos.

Of course, being named as a source in Time magazine didn’t help keep my identity hidden

I’m going to slap Eric Nagel all over Online Backups Review and see if I can take my influence and help boost rankings.

Potential pros: my social circles cause my site to rank better.
Potential cons: more affiliates in this niche.

What are you doing to accommodate Google’s Author Rank algorithm, and to incorporate your social influence into your affiliate sites?

The Art of SEO

When I saw a second edition was recently released, I had to wonder if it was worth buying again. I had originally paid $38.20 at the end of 2009, and the second edition is available for $42.33 ($31.99 for the Kindle Edition). AppSumo had a free chapter available, so I thought I’d compare the contents of the new version versus the first edition, based on the table of contents and Chapter 6: Developing an SEO-Friendly Website.

Based only on what’s listed in the Table of Contents, here are some new topics in the 2nd edition that were not included in the first version:

• Chapter 3: Determining your SEO Objectives and Defining Your Site’s Audience
  • Understanding Search Engine Traffic and Visitor Intent
  • Developing an SEO Plan Prior to Site Development
• Chapter 5: Keyword Research
  • Understanding the Long Tail of the Keyword Demand Curve
• Chapter 6: Developing an SEO-Friendly Website
  • Optimizing Flash (omitted from 2nd edition Table of Contents, but updated in context)
• Chapter 8: How Social Media and User Data Play a Role in Search Results and Rankings – ALL NEW
  • Why Rely on Social Signals?
  • Social Signals That Directly Influence Search Results
  • The Indirect Influence of Social Media Marketing
  • Monitoring, Measuring, and Improving Social Media Marketing
  • User Engagement as a Measure of Search Quality
  • Document Analysis
  • Optimizing the User Experience to Improve SEO
  • Additional Social Media Resources
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 10: Tracking results and measuring success
  • Other Third-Party Tools
• Chapter 13: Build an In-house SEO Team, Outsource it, or Both?
  • The Business of SEO
  • The Impact of Site Complexity on SEO Workload
  • Working with Limited Resources / Budget (omitted from 2nd edition)
• An Evolving Art Form: The Future of SEO
  • Localization added to Personalization, Localization, and User Influence on Search
• Glossary

This does not account for the actual content within the chapters, but gives you an idea of broad topics which have been added (or removed) in the 2nd edition. Closer examination of Chapter 6 will help identify actual content changes.

First, I have to wonder how much new content is in the book when Chapter 6 starts on the same page in both editions (page 181). I understand this is a formatting topic, and a mild coincidence, but it makes me wonder if “upgrading” is worth it. Some specific changes I was able to pick out in Chapter 6:

• The section on Indexable Content has been expanded
• Mobile, Image and Video Sitemaps have been added to the Sitemaps coverage
• rel canonical, next, and prev are explained with examples given.
• Schema.org and Microformats added
• Content Themes added (I can’t wait until Google uses this to penalize Guest Posts that have links that are completely irrelevant to the rest of the post or the entire site)

Chapter 6, Developing an SEO-Friendly Website, is one of the most important in The Art of SEO because it is the only part of SEO that you can completely control.

Will I buy the 2nd edition? Probably.

The Art of SEO is the only book on SEO that I recommend. Odds are, I’ll give away my first edition, and pick up the Kindle Edition for myself.

If you don’t own the first edition, it’s a no-brainer: buy The Art of SEO. It may seem silly to buy a book on an Internet Marketing topic that changes so quickly like SEO, but the fundamentals in The Art of SEO are essential for any SEO to master.

If you were at the last Affiliate Summit, or follow me on Twitter, you probably know I’m in a Mastermind Group with Todd Farmer and Tricia Meyer. In fact, we spoke about the topic at Affiliate Summit West this past January.

Mastermind Group Session at Affiliate Summit West 2012

The first year of our group was focused on helping each other build our own businesses. But while at ASW, we brought up the idea of building a site together. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, so working together allowed us to work off of each other, and focus on what we did best. While our project turned out great, there are also somethings to look out for when working with a group

Pros

Deadlines

We set a deadline back in late January, and of course did 90% of the work the week before the date that was set! That’s not to say we did nothing for 6 weeks: we agreed on the framework, a theme (u-design), and divvied up the responsibilities to get the job done.

Forced to think creatively

Working alone, I really miss being challenged. With clients, they’ll say they want something; I usually say No, but then keep thinking until I can figure it out. Todd is a big fan of WordPress, which was used as the foundation for our site. But there were some parts that needed custom programming. The moment I figured out how to use [shortcodes] and the WordPress commenting system within my custom pages, I was thrilled! Now I can take what I learned, and apply it to my other sites.

This is really exciting when it's not blurred out

Low start-up cost

I didn’t have to hire someone to write content, research the merchants, or design the site – Tricia and Todd took care of those things, while I was working on programming. When you have a diverse set of people, it keeps the start-up costs down.

Cons

Threat to friendship

Mixing friends & business typically isn’t a good idea. So far, we’ve managed to work everything out. Business & personal relationships are two different things, and when there’s a problem, get it out there, discussed, and put to rest.

Shared ownership

When the site takes off, and you see it make it’s first $10,000, remember: you get 1/3 of that. However, it’s the teamwork from the beginning that allowed the site to hit the first $10k in commissions.

Democracy

You don’t always get your way. Personally, I custom program everything because I’m a control freak. Todd loves his plugins. Loves. Them. Learn to let go (if I can, anybody can).

Summary

In less than 3 months, we’ve built one of the best-looking sites in this niche, and three months from now, I expect to be pushing some of the existing sites down the rankings. We’re set-up for a strong Q4, and have set exciting and realistic financial goals for the year.

Eric Thomas The Secret To Success

ET took the stage while Fame or Juliet‘s Dreams of Reality played. Here’s the video of the keynote, and my notes

• Excited for 2012
  • Malcolm Gladwell
    • Importance of Environment
• We all have an opportunity for success
  • Backstory
    • ET was born when his mother was 17; she was kicked out of the house
    • It’s not how you start, but how you finish
    • High school dropout, homeless on the streets of Detroit, but write a book
    • First one to go to college in his family
      • Took 12 years to get a 4-year degree
    • Dissertation away from completing PhD
  • Hold on it may not happen in the time you think its going to happen, but it will happen.
    • But if you quit, it will never happen
• What does success mean for you?
  • Showing images of “success” (cars, nice houses, etc).
  • Success starts with a vision
• Information changes situations
• Story about his daughter making the basketball team
  • She made the B Team
    • Good, Michael Jordan didn’t make the A Team
    • On the B Team, you’re going to stay hungry and stay thirsty until you make the A Team
• As a homeless teenager, he was given vision
  • Sight vs. vision
  • Start every day with vision with where you want to be and what you want to do
  • His circumstance was being homeless, but his vision wasn’t
• Plant the seed
  • You’re not planting a seed, you’re planting a tree
• What do you need to know (to be, to have what you want), that you don’t know right now?
• Dr. Ben Carson Gifted Hands
  • From Detroit, became doctor
  • Do not have a victims mentality
  • Why he wears a Detroit Tigers hat on the cover of his book
• Thought our friends are also in this business (Affiliate Marketing) not really, but I do have some friends who I work with regularly
• Use what you got, to get what you want
  • Story about ET fitting in during class
    • Had to change his clothing, sit at the front of the class, maintain eye contact with the teacher, smile & agree / nod with the teacher. Finally, read the teachers books and ask the teacher about what he wrote.
• Failure is not an option
  • Odd that he used a demotivational poster from despair.com
• The show up rule: You can pretend that you care, but you can’t pretend that you’re there.
• Dream Session
  • Take 5, 10, 15 minutes, close your eyes, and see yourself living your goal, then get back to work and make it happen.
• Sight is for people who work in the present have vision!
• For every minute you think about failure, spend that long in a dream session
• Work vs. Wishing
  • Finishing his book took only 3 months.
  • Again referenced Affiliate Summit as a company, where we all worked. Small trip-ups like this distracted me from the message
• Positioning vs. Pouting
  • Star Trek: Beam me up, Scotty
    • You have to be in the right place
  • When you position yourself properly, stuff happens! Opportunities present themselves!
  • “You want the finest things, but you’re not willing to work for them”
  • You don’t get out of life what you want, you get out of life what you earned!
• Change vs. Chatter
• Don’t just talk make the changes
• Earn vs. Want
• Guru story
  • You need to want success as bad as you want to breathe
• You need to know what you want

Positioning vs. Pouting spoke right to me. If you’re sitting around your house, working by yourself, and not interacting with others, you won’t be as successful as if you were networking (online and offline) and working with others. There’s a lot of times (A LOT) that I just don’t want to go places. I don’t like crowds, I don’t like loud places, and I don’t like dealing with idiots. But when I put up with the crowds and loud parties, and filter through the idiots, there are smart people out there that I can help, and who can in turn help me.

Many people have said this was one of the best keynotes from Affiliate Summit, up there with the likes of Gary V. He also brought a few audience members to tear up a bit, which is a testimonial for how powerful of a speaker Eric is.

It was great to hang out with Eric during lunch that day, and I hope to get to hear him speak live again someday.

If you enjoyed ET’s keynote, go back and watch those by Gary V, Cory Booker, Jim Kukral and Peter Shankman (Karma at 26:00).

Pinterest is the hottest little digital curation tool to come along in a while, and Internet Marketers are taking notice. Here are some ways you can use Pinterest to boost your online marketing efforts, and a bonus tip for keeping your content off of there.

Brand Awareness
To start, Pinterest can be used to share products your brand creates. Fans can then like a photo of a product, or re-pin it to their board.

Very Bradley Pins on Pinterest

While your immediate audience (followers) may be small, having the right person repin your content can be powerful (much like getting a RT from a Twitter user with thousands of followers). Tricia Meyer adds:

The key is getting others to repin. You don’t have to have as much of an audience yourself if you get OTHERS with an audience to repin for you.

SEO Benefits
Pinning a product gives you a backlink to the deep-linked product page (anchor text is the main domain name). This is a followed-link.

There’s also a no-follow link wrapped around the image. Unfortunately, the alt text of every image is “Pinned image” so that’s not giving you much value.

Leg Lamp on Pinterest

Affiliate Direct Linking
As Kim Rowley mentioned, if the final destination URL has your affiliate tracking information in it, you can pin your affiliate link and use Pinterest as your publisher’s site. (Make sure the program that you’re promoting allows this).

Amazon is a popular one that has your tracking link right in the destination URL. GrahicRiver is another one that you can deeplink to individual products, and maintain your affiliate tracking code (and lots of people are already doing this one).

Books I've Pinned

If your tracking information doesn’t carry through, you can still pin the image from your site. Just remember it’s 1 more click before the cookie is set.

Gifts
Pinterest has a Gifts section, which will highlight products categorized by price ($1-20, $20-50, $50-100, etc). How do you get your product shown here? Simple: include the price in the description! I wish there was more to this trick, but that’s it.

Pinterest Gifts

Pin It Button
Don’t forget the Pin It button for your site! You specify the URL, the image URL, and can even pre-populate the description. Remember what I said about appearing in the Gifts section? Make sure your pre-populated description includes the product price!

How to Block Pinterest
Some people don’t like Pinterest because they make a copy of the original piece. I’m not sure which is worse: hotlinking the image, or copying it. If you’re one of those people who don’t want your content pinned, there’s a solution: block the user agent via .htaccess:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Pinterest
RewriteRule .* - [F]
</IfModule>

If you’re running WordPress, some of this is already in your .htaccess file. Put the two lines (RewriteCond and RewriteRule) right under the “RewriteEngine On” line.

Pinterest is growing quickly (I’m seeing Server Error 500 daily now). If you run a website with Pinterest-friendly content, don’t wait any longer to learn how your audience is using Pinterest!

Curation was a hot keyword in 2011, and it’s going strong into 2012. Scott Jangro, creator of Shareist, held a session at Affiliate Summit West on Digital Curation, which answered some of my questions about what curation is, and why I (as an affiliate) should care.

Digital Curation with Scott Jangro

The beginning of Scott’s presentation reaffirmed that affiliates should build sites with their future audience in mind. He then went on to discuss the (brief) history of curation, from a museum curator to Curation Nation to Scobleizer’s The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators to today’s digital curation tools.

Here are my notes:

• Why are you here?
  • Affiliates build sites, but without an audience, lose encouragement
  • Why are you starting this website?
• What is Digital Curation?
  • Curators collect information for a museum, library, etc. for a collection (bundles)
    • An online curator
  • Curation Nation (book – history of curation)
    • Covers copyright, ethical questions
  • Magnify.net
    • Video curation platform
  • Scobleizer
    • The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators
      • Bundle
      • Reorder
      • Editorialize
        • Adding value / prospective
        • Get comments
      • Distribute / push to social networks
  • MasterNewMedia.com
    • Curation tools
  • Filter through lots of information and pull out bits that are useful to your audience
• Quora released a curation model in December
• Why is curation important / necessary / critical?
  • Internet is growing quickly / exponentially
• Information discovery
  • Random
    • StumbleUpon
    • Twitter
    • Facebook
  • Specific question / search
    • Google
  • Curation is in the middle
• Aggregation is not Curation
  • It’s tempting to automate
    • Danger – it should be filtered
• How to get started with curation
  • Choose a topic
  • Create a profile of your ideal fan / customer / user
  • Discover great content and organize it
    • Use the tools mentioned (see photo)
    • Twitter / Google / Youtube / etc keyword searches
    • RSS feeds
  • Publish and Distribute
    • Biggest mistake affiliates make when publishing is affiliates try to get users to leave quickly & get the cookie set. Make that visitor yours.
      • You’re borrowing Google’s customers
      • Great & easy when the traffic is coming. What happens when the traffic dries up?
      • Pay yourself first.
        • Fan
        • Newsletter
    • Publish to a platform that you own
      • Not ezinearticles, wordpress.com, pintrest
        • Great for marketing, but make these drive traffic to you
  • Engage with your audience
• Curation is a tool and a mindset
• What audience can you build?
  • What problems are you solving?
  • For whom?
  • NOT: What website can you build?
• Using curation as an SEO strategy
  • It adds value to your site

Robert Adler of Microsite Masters (@Bofu2U) presented a session on Link Building at Affiliate Summit West 2012 in Las Vegas.

Link Building with Robert Adler

Adler started his session with a definition of link building that was different than what is normally thought of in the SEO community. SEOers look for links that are keyword rich, and ideally do-follow. Robert, however, will take just about any link.

He then went on to show how a site can move around the SERPs until it settles into its new position, and discussed what metrics may influence ranking.

The different shades of SEOers were defined (white, gray, black) followed by examples of the different types of links you could get back to your site.

This wasn’t your typical link building session, which may have turned off a few attendees (including the one who blamed Robert spamming his forum and wasting 20 minutes out of his day, every day). However, as an affiliate, it’s important to understand the many different types of link builders out there, what tactics they use, and how to compete against them.

Here are my raw notes:

• Definition of Linkbuilding
  • Game of building connections
    • Getting tweets / Rts to homepage / deep page
    • Activity on Facebook Page / Group
    • Other social links (see KnowEm.com/websites/all)
    • If Google can find it, it counts
• Rank history up & down until it levels off / plateaus
• Metrics
  • Domain backlinks
  • URL backlinks
  • Domain Age
  • Words on page
  • Keyword density
  • Number / Source of ads if any) on page
  • Facebook likes root domain
  • Facebook likes deep link
  • Twitter root domain
  • Twitter deep link
  • digg / Stumble / Delicious / google +1 / etc etc etc
  • pages indexed
• Hats in SEO
  • Whitehat
    • Never breaking the rules
    • Likes
      • Press Releases
      • Guest posts
      • Doing things manually
      • Blogger Outreach
      • Matt Cutts
    • Dislikes
      • Everyone that doesn’t do things manually
      • Anything that may be a too fast form of link building
      • Automation of any sort, unless it’s used for reporting
      • Any type of link that they wouldn’t get themselves
      • Robert Adler
    • Examples
      • Slow & steady win the race
      • Press Releases
      • Directories
      • Guest Posts
      • Linkbait
      • Site wide exchanges
      • E-mailing webmasters
  • Greyhat
    • Sometimes break the rules
    • Likes
      • Obtaining / Producing as many types of cleaner links as possible
      • More complex linking schematics
      • Filtering tiers
      • 100,000 links -> 50,000 links -> 10,000 -> … -> 1 page.
      • Usually has ‘test bed sites to throw new links at for testing
      • Rides the line between obviously blackhat and whitehats wouldn’t do that
      • Whitehat on-page with dark(er) colored link building
    • Dislikes
      • People who report his sites
      • Algorithm updates (sometimes)
      • The idea that he’s doing blackhat
    • Examples
      • Blog comments
      • Blog posts
      • Social Bookmarks
      • Forum Profiles
      • Web 2.0′s
      • Wiki’s
  • Blackhat
    • Always breaking the rules
    • Likes
      • Loves automation
      • Promoting lots of sites simultaneously
      • Linking schematics that’ll make your head spin
      • Building more links that an entire country in 1 day
      • If it’s scalable and has a start button, he made it / has it
    • Dislikes
      • Snitches
      • The time it takes to stay ahead of the curve
      • Deindexing based on a footprint that could take 50% of his assets down
      • Matt Cutts
    • Examples
      • Blog comments
      • Blog networks / posts
      • social bookmarks
      • forum posts / profiles
      • web 2.0′s
      • CMS’s like wordpress
      • (my own example, not Rob’s) Hacking a site & injecting links into site header / footer
  

  Black Hat Link Building

• Test link building methods before doing it on your main properties
  • Do your own tests don’t listen to other case studies, etc.
• Types (based on footprints)
  • Forum links
    • Xrumer
      • Register accounts
      • Crack CAPTCHAs
      • Check email accounts
      • Click the verification link
      • Set-up a full profile
      • Post a message
    • site-wide
    • In-content
    • Signature links
    • Profile links
    • Category-Wide links
      • sponsor a category
      • Category redirects
  • Blog links
    • Contextual
      • Paid Posts
      • Guest Posts
      • Blog network posts
      • Buying a link in an existing post
    • Blog comments
    • Blogroll
    • Sitewide footer
  • Social Links
    • Social Bookmarking Sites
      • Actual bookmarks
      • Comments
      • Digg, Delicious
    • Stories
      • Can be rated, +1, liked, etc.
      • Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Google +1, Twitter (RTs)
  • Article Links
    • Links in the body of the article
    • Links in the resource section / resource box
    • Links on the Author About Me Page
      • 500 articles -> author page -> your site
    • PR links
    • In-context
    • Sidebar / Resource box
    • Author page (only some have this)
    • PR Newswire, PRWeb, PRLog (free ?)
  • Directory links
    • On a page with a list of other links
    • On a standalone page with just your listing
    • Hot vs Not, Best of the Web, Business.com, DMOZ, Yahoo directory.
      • DMOZ: volunteer to be the moderator for the cateogry
  • Web 2.0s
    • Profile links
    • In-content links
      • video descriptions
      • article descriptions
      • updates, posts, etc.
    • Flickr, Vimeo, youtube, daily motion
• 1 Link != 1 link
  • Internal linking
  • Write a Blog post. You link from
    • Homepage
    • Tags
    • Archive
    • Category / categories
    • Recent posts widget
  • The blog post creates a tweet
    • Direct from the tweet
    • Hashtag search pages
    • Every list your listed on
    • syndication on Tweetmeme.com for example
    • then some Rts it. Repeat above
  • digg
    • submit a story
    • thumbs up 20 other stories
    • they all link back to your profile, which links to your story, which links to your page
• How it works overall
  
  

  Link Building: How it Works Overall

  • Focus on top 5
    • These determine if your page should rank in the top 10
• Syndication
  • Submit your RSS feed
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Timothy Kerber (CEO of MemberGate Solutions), moderated a panel at Affiliate Summit West 2012 consisting of Mike Allen, (Shopping-Bargains.com), Tim Ash (SiteTuners and author of Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions) and Jennifer Myers Ward (ebove & beyond) on How to Quadruple Revenue Using Existing Traffic.

Tim, Jennifer & Mike talk about increasing revenue

While the target audience was listed as affiliates / publishers, I personally think merchants who attended got more out of the content, as affiliates can pre-sell then direct the user where to buy, but it’s the merchant who can really increase revenue via cross-sells, upsells and a simple checkout process.

Here are my notes from the session, slightly cleaned up and important parts highlighted

• Split-testing
  • Multiple versions of the same page, randomly show to visitors
  • Tools
    • Google Website Optimizer (free)
      • Integrated w/ Google Analytics
    • Unbounce
    • Optimizely
• Common problems
  • Affiliates give good traffic to back merchant (advertiser)
  • Lengthy content / hard to read content
  • Don’t require a login for guests to buy
  • Don’t keep secrets (show return policy and shipping charges clearly)
  • Keep it simple
  • Navigation is a roadmap, not a puzzle
  • Quick read show content as an outline, not an essay
  • Continue to sell to your customers
  • Leverage cross sells & upsells
    • If selling a suit, recommend a tie. If buying a tie, don’t recommend a suit!
    • See: GoDaddy
    • Be intelligent
    • Put 1 upsell on the thank-you page
  • Have a strong offer give them something they can’t get anywhere else
• Split testing effects on SEO
  • Google is OK with testing, but permanently put winning version live
  • Don’t cloak, bait & switch
• Affiliates: 7 Ways to make more money
  • Be the expert
    • Become an authority
    • Embrace tough questions
    • Find solutions
    • Establish trust
  • Leverage your Advantage
    • Build partner relationships
    • Offer something exclusive
      • data / wisdom / analysis
      • coupons
      • access
      • you!
  • Provide Better Content
    • Be unique
    • Give something away
    • provide real answers
    • demonstrate trust
  • Help People Decide
    • Honest comparisons
      • Reviews & ratings
    • If you have side by side options, show the most expensive one first.
      • Quality Imagery
    • Photos, screenshots
    • Provide details
    • Gently lead
      • Don’t force the sale
  • Increase Touch Points
    • Not everyone buys the first time
    • Social media
    • Newsletters
  • Build Lasting Relationships
    • Customer service
    • Say Thank You
    • Help your users succeed
  • Monitor Behavior (analytics)
    • Survey your users
  • Continual Innovation is key
    • Focus on goals
    • Seek advice from others
    • Make adjustments as necessary
    • Wash, rinse, repeat
• 5 tips to skyrocket conversion
  • Make your call to action clear
    • Declutter
  • Ask for less info
    • Absolutely necessary
    • Current transaction
  • Cut Down on your text
    • People don’t read on the web
      • They scan, look for places to click, look at photos
  • Keep your promises
    • Best Digital Cameras consumers reports example
• Make your trust visible
  • As seen on media logos
  • Over 200 satisfied clients
  • Download statistics (social proof)
  • AttentionWizard.com
    • Upload screenshot, get predictions