This is a guest post by Everett Sizemore, who blogs about e-commerce SEO on his website www.esizemore.com. You can follow him on Twitter and connect on Linked-In.

Today is Free Shipping Day and thousands of online stores are participating in what is going to be one of the largest online shopping holiday of the year. The title of a press release from comScore last year says it all:

Free Shipping Day Punctuates Heaviest Week of U.S. Online Spending in History as Four Individual Days Eclipse $900 Million

Gadgets rank at the top of the growing “computer hardware” category for the holiday season with purchases of handheld devices like the iPad, iPhone and Android phones driving sales. Mashable took note of this yesterday when the posted the Top 10 Tech Retailers Delivery in Time for Christmas, featuring Free Shipping Day as a reward for procrastinating tech junkies. But Mashable isn’t breaking any stories here. A search on Google News will reveal a flood of media coverage about this event.

With all the hype around Free Shipping Day, one would think that it is like any other similar shopping holidays like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. But it’s not. The big difference here is that Free Shipping Day™ also happens to be a trademarked day that belongs to the affiliate website FreeShipping.org.

Luke Knowles is the “super affiliate” behind this $1-billion dollar day. When looking into marketing and retail stats he discovered that holiday shopping online peaked around December 10th because consumers were worried that they may not get their orders in time to wrap and put them under tree before Christmas if they ordered any later.

So Knowles, who was already an affiliate with thousands of online merchants via FreeShipping.org, had the idea to get stores to commit to guaranteed delivery by Christmas nearly a week after the December 10 peak. The extended shipping deadlines, combined with coupon offers, was an instant hit with consumers.

Merchants don’t typically like to help their affiliates with marketing efforts, and for good reasons. But this doesn’t seem to apply to the Free Shipping Day franchise (which is now growing in Canada and the UK as well). Below are some of the ways this affiliate manages to get merchants to help promote their site…

Vanity URLs

Every store gets their own URL to share with their brand evangelists and customers via email and social media channels. But having thousands of pages of thin content (i.e. a couple of coupon codes) isn’t a viable SEO strategy these days.

So instead of making these URLs pages the site appends a parameter to the URL that changes the sort order to show each different store’s coupon first. By having Google and Bing webmaster tools ignore that parameter, and by using a rel canonical tag, the site manages to funnel all of that pagerank into their home page.

Social Media Interaction

The next step is to get brands to share their vanity URLs. In addition to sending each merchant an email with their URL, the site encourages them to share it on social media channels (example). In addition to the custom link, they also provide the hashtag to use: #FreeShippingDay . Imagine hundreds of small, medium and huge brands tweeting a link to your affiliate site along with your own custom hashtag. #WouldBeNice

Badges

Every merchant also gets a badge with custom code that links to their vanity URL to display on their website, while badges with a link to the home page are available to all. Badges are nothing new, but it amazes me how often websites create badges, put them on a page and just expect people to use them. What’s the motivation? In this case, it is to show off that you are participating and to link shoppers directly to your vanity URL.

Sharing The Love

If you are an affiliate who is out hustling via guest posts, PR and social media to get traffic and build your own brand, it should be a no-brainer to let the merchants you work with know that you are benefiting them beyond just sending direct sales via affiliate links.

When the LA Times mentioned BestBuy and Toys R Us in an article about Free Shipping Day, an email quickly went out from FreeShippingDay.com to the marketing departments at each company to let them know about it.

Is this possible for all affiliates to add this kind of value? Probably not. There won’t be a one-size-fits-all solution to building links and traffic into an affiliate website. But this example should illustrate that it is still possible to compete with big brands with a little bit of luck and a whole lot of marketing sense. I’ve heard the masses predicting that affiliate marketing is dead, and with recent brand-boosting, affiliate-punishing changes from Google – not to mention stuff like this – you have to admit it is an uphill battle. The days of putting up some reviews on your blog, or publishing coupon feeds from LinkShare and raking in the dough while you sleep are long gone.

The moral of the story here is this: Add value for the merchants and treat your affiliate site like a brand and you may still stand a chance.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

If you need web hosting, you can get a variety of other things, free! Hosting is a very competitive field, because companies can make $100+ / year from each user, and the reality is that most people don’t change hosts. As a result, hosting affiliate programs pay out commissions around $100 – even for new affiliates!

They’re willing to only break even in year 1 or even make that a loss leader, knowing that they’ll recoup their money in the long term.

As a result, you can get free:

- Programming services/code
- Logo creation / design
- Custom landing page designed and coded…

How does this work? You buy the hosting through someone’s affiliate link so that they get the commission, and in exchange they provide you with whatever service you’re seeking. In essence, you get hosting and the hosting company pays for you to get a bonus.

By extension, if you’re willing to move hosting each year, you can get this deal annually…

I’ve done this so I know it works .

Liked this post? Get my latest posts by email or RSS.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Flipping websites is a common and popular practice, but you can make more money in the long term by renting websites out, instead of getting a one-time payment for them.

This technique only works in a few niches; one in particular is the local business niche. Many local businesses are still in the dinosaur age and this means one thing: It’s time to cash up on local businesses that have no Internet presence whatsoever or a very weak one if that.

One reason local Internet business marketing can be so lucrative is that while the keywords have low search volume, they are still worth an enormous amount of money to the right people, and they also tend to have weak competition. City-service keywords are some of the most unique type of keyword phrases in terms of SEO and ROI on the planet and cashing up on them all starts with owning the exact match domain name.

How to GamePlan Your Strategy

Getting into the local business market fast is all about owning the right domain names to begin with. The “May Day” Google algorithm update of about a year ago – hit people banking on exact match domain names pretty hard. But exact match domain names are still very effective in the local business niche because competition for the keywords is very low, and thus the exact match still holds a lot of weight in the Google algorithm.

Rural Regions vs Large Metropolitan Areas.

Keyword research is absolutely crucial for choosing your domain names.

You don’t want to choose a keyword that has no search volume – and that is the exact problem with areas low in population. The search volume is so low that it not measurable, thus it is a good idea to use this strategy is highly populated metropolitan areas only.

The problem with large metropolitan areas, on the other hand, is that in the last two years, a large percentage of exact match domains have been registered – so you can’t get a hold of one unless you pay a premium on the aftermarket. However, if you find the right niche (HINT: Dumpster Rental is one good one still available widely across America) you will be able to cash up.

Side Note: There is a workaround for keyword research in low populated areas: use Google AdWords.

Create A Funnel of Web Sites

A funnel is when you create multiple websites aimed at targeting multiple different keyword phrases that all funnel people to dialing up the same number and reaching the same company.

You want to take this strategy to the large metropolitan areas. The reason is that in many large metropolitan areas there are suburbs whose keyword data is measurable. Your goal should be to make 3-15 different websites that have exact match city/service domain names. Example: “Miami Bankprutcy Trustee” and its suburb “Grapeland Heights Bankruptcy Trustee.”

Finding Clients and How to Charge

Finding a client(s) will be the toughest part of the whole procedure. The best place to start is with friends, family, or friends of the family. If no one you know owns any sort of local business then it’s time to start cold calling or further networking within the area. The good part about not having a client right away however is that it will give you time to work on the SEO for your websites so that you can establish rankings and have something to show them when you pitch.

Another good idea is to get a phone number up and running on the website. Phone.com is a pretty cheap way to get an (800) number up very quickly of which you can forward to any number you like (they provide numbers for around $5 a month).

It will automatically keep track of all your calls and how much time each conversation lasted and from who it was from. This is valuable information, especially when you are trying to make a sale. Any local business will tell you that there main goal is to get somebody one the phone – and if you can do that for them then you will have done your job in the marketing department. Some local businesses even have it down to how much money it is worth every single time the phone rings.

What you go about charging will depend on a lot of different things. You’ll need to price each niche differently mainly because a potential client is worth different amounts of money depending on what business you’re in. The higher amount of money a potential client is worth – the more likely that you will be able to charge that company on a monthly or annual rate.

The less a potential client is worth – the more likely you will have to charge your clients per lead. Although this is more frequently the case, each situation is different and you might be [doing the opposite:] charging a dentist per lead while you charge a dumpster rental company on a monthly or annual type deal.

When you design them you want to make sure that you use the triangle theory as part of your design. What do I mean by that?

The triangle theory was a study that Google did back in 2005 that shows that the first thing that a person looks at when entering a website is the top left corner, and that their eyes scope it in the shape of a triangle. You want to make sure that you get a logo, phone number, and any free estimate form you have in that triangle.

Side Note: Once you find a client that wants to run with you, this is when you will be plugging the logo and phone number in. A good way to do this is to order a number from Phone.com and redirect it to the company. That way you can see just how many leads you are generating them – which is essential if you are going to charge by lead.

While your off-site SEO like link building and social networking won’t be as important (exact domain name helps that a lot in this niche) your on-site SEO must be flawless. You really want to stress proper placement of keywords. Your link building will consist of 10-50 links obtained through quality paid link directories or some sort of contextual links.

You should begin to see these sites ranking within 3 months given that you chose some quality keyword phrases. After that it’s on you to go out there and get clients!

This article was written by Anthony Benedict. Anthony helps to run and maintain inetzeal.com. This website is an entity of an Internet marketing company which provides many services, which includes a white label link building service as well as many other services that you may get a SEO Quote on at any time.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

In yet another fascinating case study, Mr Green’s blog shares a mobile marketing campaign aimed at recruiting panel members for a demographic research service.

What’s fascinating is the bit about optimizing the campaign by device, carrier etc. Some phone models convert better than others, and not always for reasons of usability. Shoemoney years ago shared a case study of targeting ringtone offers by carrier, and showed how he dug into the demographics of each carrier to find the demographic most likely to convert on his offer.

While that’s well and good for affiliate marketers, it’s another thing entirely for customers of panel measurement services. If you’re buying data, you want it to be representative of the audience you’re researching, for ex.: smart phone users in general.

But if the panel is disproportionately heavy on one particular model or carrier etc, relative to the general audience you’re researching, the data you’ll be buying will be skewed. Of course, you can then slice and dice the data to solve the problem, but that depends on the panel measurement service enabling that.

Another related issue is panel recruitment based on giving away freebies. That also attracts a skewed demographic that may exclude the wealthiest elements of the population.

If you liked this bit of critical thinking, then check out my advanced SEO book, which teaches Advanced SEOs’ 7 Rules of critical and creative thinking.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Why not put a news feed of your company’s latest press releases on the homepage?

Because 99 times out of 100, you won’t have news to share on a sufficiently regular basis to make the use of space effective and worthwhile. The net result is that you look silly, when, halfway through 2011, your news section still carries items from 2010.

I admit that I did this for about 3-4 years on my homepage until changing to a new homepage.

Since then, I changed my homepage to be more focused on getting the click through to other pages. However, I recently noticed that Commission Junction still has the News section on their site:

Commission Junction News on homepage

This error is even worse when you think of how valueable homepage real estate is, and how intensely it’s fought over in turf battles.

If you liked this bit of critical thinking, check out a free chapter of my book for easy lessons on doing this yourself.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

The Problem With Facebook Ads

People buying Facebook ads have been getting progressively more sophisticated and large-scale. The problem with scaling is that the web interface is clunky and that the Bulk Uploader is only available for high rollers spending $1000/day + on Facebook ads.

A few years ago, the solution for automated ad creation was the “FB Ad Manager” . It wasn’t based on the Facebook Ads API but was rather a Firefox extension like SafeWallet (password manager for iphone, BB etc). FB Ad Manager was a great product for the time savings, and well worth the $200 it cost. But recently Facebook served the owner with a cease-and-desist letter , and now it has stopped working and I went off in search of a replacement.

After numerous fruitless searches on Google, I finally got to the Facebook Ads API (Facebook’s officially approved way of mass-creating ads) and found out that they have a list of approved developers.

Facebook Ad Creation and Campaign Management Software – for Small Business

The large majority are enterprise-only, tell-us-what-you-spend-and-we’ll-quote-you-a-license type companies. But thankfully, there are two companies in the group that have a price point accessible to SMBs.

• One is Qwaya, which offers a free plan for creating up to 50 ads a day, a starter plan from $79 and going up.

Qwaya is like FB Ad Manager in that it provides mass ad creation functionality. I’m trying it out now. They’ve created a lot of new functionality and rebranded since I wrote this 2 years ago. I don’t know what the current status is – 28/3/2012.

You can create your own account by simply logging in with your Facebook account and authorizing the Facebook app.

• The other is Brighter Option’s Social Ad Manager, aka SAM. It’s free for a 7 day trial and then charges 3% of spend, with no setup fees or minimum spend. So the only cost is really just the percentage of spend.

SAM is a more full featured tool in that it also handles conversion tracking, reporting and optimization functionality. To be honest, the description looked pretty enticing and I’m looking forward to trying it out.

I’ve asked for an account as I couldn’t make an account myself via the site.

If you know any other such software, or have experience with either one, please leave a comment!

p.s. For those of you who are curious what my link is to Facebook ads, I’ve been doing local lead generation. It’s been rewarding so far. For instance, in two days we generated 9 leads for a $500 dental service. The first lead was from their agency’s landing page, and the remaining 8 leads were from the landing page edited per my conversion rate guidance.
(I’m happy I outperformed the baseline that much, but annoyed I had to edit their template rather than making my own landing page from scratch, which limited what I could do). Both landers saw a couple hundred visitors.

If you’re interested in Facebook lead gen or in CRO consulting, contact me or buy a consultation.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Charities already raise a lot of money by word of mouth marketing, with friends being friends and so forth…

Is it plausible that online, charities might use affiliate programs to bring in more money?

On the one hand, I can see lots of people jumping at the opportunity, and more money at least in the short term.

On the other hand, I can see a cynicism arising as soon as donors find out that some people promoting a charity are getting kickbacks.

And then they may carry that cynicism over to their [non-affiliate] friends who promoted that charity to them…

In short, I can see a lot of social havoc if charities do these the wrong way…

But I can also imagine some nice revenues if charities do it the right way, selecting affiliates with impersonal sites such as news corporations.

You can then assume that’s an ad like the rest of it…

Can charities use affiliate marketing?

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

While working on some ecommerce affiliate sites, I tried to find the ecommerce merchant’s shipping prices. Unfortunately, it’s a remarkable pain in the neck to find shipping info at most mom-n-pop ecommerce stores.

I think it’s because they place a blind reliance in their ecommerce store’s shopping cart. The problem is that the cart was usually created by a programmer – not a customer service rep. So the priorities in design were easy coding, not easy buying. As a result, lots of shopping carts cause SMBs to lose sales.

Photo credit: Dan Chace, aka Lacrymosa

Here are some examples of what not to do, and why they’re bad ideas. If the ecommerce cart you want acts this way, switch!

1) Worst idea EVER: Ask for my credit card info before telling me the shipping price.

I don’t care about/believe your reassurance the card isn’t going to be charged until I click confirm.

I don’t know you. And your site looks like a 4 year old made it.

Quality graphics build trust – this is a well-known finding in survey after survey and usability test after test, as to what consumers use to gauge a site’s trustworthiness.

Asking for card information before telling me what shipping is going to cost would never even occur to someone offline. Imagine you go into a used car dealership and the salesman says, “give me your credit card info, then I’ll tell you the price!” – No thanks!

2) Aggravating, close second: Delay presenting shipping rate information until I get to the page where I type my shipping info.

While this may be logical, it assumes two things, incorrectly:

a) First, that I’m going to add to cart and go through a step or two in the process without knowing the total price. That’s almost the same as above.
b) Second, that you can’t just include a simple shipping calculator on product detail pages. It just needs to ask the Zip code and return a price. Simple database job that doesn’t cost more than $100 to program.

3) Third worst idea: Making money off shipping.

Yes, lots of people do it online. No, most consumers won’t find out. Buuuuuuuut…

What happens when you get caught cheating customers on shipping?

I’m not the first affiliate to create a price comparison site. Heaven knows there’s lots of them around.
It doesn’t cost much to have a virtual assistant browse the web and do the legwork to find product prices and shipping rates.
And affiliates, including myself, are increasingly SEO savvy, as well as usability savvy.

What happens is that you end up with a reputation management problem that costs you sales of that product. How?
People click on the price comparison result in Google and find you’re more expensive.
Guess who gets the sale?

If it happens frequently enough or blatantly enough, you develop a bad reputation and word gets around. Then you don’t just lose sales on that one product, but across the board. Ouch.

So think long term, rather than trying to take in a few extra bucks at [what turns out to be] your own expense.

A) Excellent approach: For low-ticket items (e.g. below ~$200), offer flat rate shipping countrywide, or statewide/provincewide. Present shipping rates in a chart. If you need to adjust a few dimes/dollars upwards for states further away, you can do so.

This isn’t ‘making money on shipping’ – it’s increasing convenience to customers. You can explain it, and people will understand. Consumers aren’t against profit, they’re against abuse.

Takeaway tips on ecommerce shopping carts and shipping rate information:

1) Offer shipping information on the detail page.
2) If possible, offer flat-rate shipping nationwide. Otherwise, you can present state-by-state (or province-by-province, in Canada) shipping rates in a table. Figure out your average price to ship to that state and use it.
3) If the order is large enough and you can afford it, upgrade the shipping so it gets to customers faster than expected. Amazon is famous for this practice – which they preferred over TV ads – and look how well it’s helped them do.

If you liked this post on ecommerce usability and conversion optimization, add my rss feed to your reader! Also, check out this post on ranking splash pages.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I’ve just been reading some of SEOmoz‘s Pro member tips and seeing their suggestions to use affiliate URLs that use hashtags, also referred to as the pound sign, number sign or hash mark.* For example, site.com/#aff123 .

One of the justifications given was that  search engines ignore everything after the hash tag. As exemplified by Wikipedia and certain other sites, this is no longer the case. Google’s search results provide sitelinks on some Wikipedia articles. This has implications for affiliate links, which I’ll get to in a minute.

Sitelinks are those 4-8 deep links that go directly to a particular page on the site, or in Wikipedia’s case, subheadings within a long article.

The subheadings on Wikipedia are linked to using the corresponding hashtags. Ex.: wikipedia.org/article/#subissue1 . Therefore, it’s clear that search engines are considering hashtags. 

Anyone using an affiliate program that relies on hashtags to track  the source of the visitor should consider using 301 [permanent]redirects, rel=canonical or other equivalents to make sure they avoid duplicate content problems. Each of these solutions – permanent redirects, rel=canonical etc. – are designed to tell search engines what is the ‘official’ or ‘canonical’ page. I’m not saying this is absolutely necessary and that search engines won’t figure it out otherwise, but I prefer a proactive approach where possible.

If you liked this idea on affiliate tech geekery and analysis, add my rss feed to your reader.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Competitive intelligence provides entertainment, an inside-track on industry trend-spotting, and the potential to develop tangential business opportunities before others, or at least catch up quickly. I gluttonously consume information, and thought I’d share some parts of my diet with other competitive intelligence collectors with hearty appetites.

1) Affiliate networks.

Ever wonder what a competitor’s margins are like?

What countries they focus on? What KPIs they use?

What verticals they’re in?

Get the answers to all these questions and many others by joining multiple networks.

2) Email newsletters. I recently got a newsletter disclosing [indirectly] the profitability of certain market segments. For newbies struggling to find their affiliate niche, this is valuable info!

Consumer-facing email newsletter are also valuable, although I admit that I’m slack in monitoring these. Some things you can pick up:

- Benefits emphasized – to model your copy on

- Profitable or high volume products or otherwise desirable goals

- Tone of voice for branding purposes

3) Corporate HQ websites.

I subscribe to the RSS feed of a particular company that I highly respect, where they openly share corporate strategy. It’s pretty impressive seeing the massive, fast-turning gears turning in these people’s heads, but it’s also inspirational here and there.

If you’re a fast-food restaurant owner, you can probably pay attention to McDonald’s, Harvey’s, Wendy’s, KFC and other press releases to see where they’re going in a broad sense. The same is broadly true of many industries.

4) Alerts and keyword trackers.

Think these tools just serve to measure how much brand discussion is happening in social media? Guess again.

If new, as-yet-unknown competitors are linkbaiting, you can’t subscribe to their RSS feed.

You can set up trackers to look for particular keywords linkbait might target, or roll your own solution to monitor Digg, StumbleUpon etc.

Similarly, if the approach is more traditional, why not monitor press-release sites for your industry keywords?

Find ‘em while they’re fresh to the industry and buy those sites out…securely.

5) Mainstream newspapers and newsmagazines.

This week’s edition of Maclean’s (a popular Canadian newsmagazine) has an excellent piece on the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch and paywalls.

There are some fantastic nuggets to pick up in there, which I haven’t seen on places like Search Engine Land (despite Danny Sullivan’s thorough coverage of the issue!).

During SMX Advanced, I picked up the local Seattle paper and saw a piece about Google taking on Amazon for ebooks. Now, Slightly Shady SEO imagined that almost 2 years ago! And I had similar feelings and predictions on Google’s move into ecommerce and the implications about 7 months before SMX Advanced.

Since I love saying I told you so, here’s a little gem from my now 1+ year old post.

“The organic search results for obviously commercial searches will be dominated by Google Base products.” If you haven’t seen Google base practically become the default spot 3 on commercial searches, you’re sleeping:

Oh, and have any of you read Aaron Wall’s interview with eBay’s head of SEO?

Here’s an excerpt:

“[Millions of listings] end up cradle to grave quickly. What are some of the keys to helping search engines understand the structure and importance of content in such a fast changing environment?

[...]

“We have invested a good amount of resources in our data-feed technology & analytics. The Sitemaps protocol plays an important role here. As eBay has so many new listings every day, over the course of the day, you can almost update the sitemaps on a continuous basis.

“However, the effort to source the items from the database, generate the sitemap files, submission and pick up, takes decent amount of time. We have made good headway tuning our feeds in way to get more efficiency out of the items we send. We started optimizing based on probability of conversion. We can make these assumptions based on predictive modeling and data. Predictive modeling on large datasets will become even more important when it comes to scaling the projects. As a company, we are putting lots of efforts in building out a competitive advantage based on analytics, predictive modeling and scaling the technology to handling even larger datasets.”

If that isn’t the integration of merchandising and SEO, what is?

Well, here’s one of 5 calls I’d made about Google shifting more and more into ecommerce:

<“Merchandising will need to integrate more closely with SEO in order to feature more cheap products and expensive products where G’bot can access it.

“As a result, the middle ground of average products at average prices will see its market share gradually lost to either end of the spectrum. Just like Seth Godin suggested would happen, in his book Meatball Sundae.

And if you go to eBay, you’ll see that cruises abundantly listed there, for example, are of the cheap and generic variety. Where something is advertised in abundance, you know the ads work…
[I know about the cruises in particular because my dad combines dental CE seminars with upscale cruises and travel. Our eBay test yielded folks looking for bargains...]

Bottom line? Read, read and read some more! Add my rss feed to your reader, then check out these 30 other advanced search blogs.

Oh, and you might also like some recent guest posts of mine at Search Engine Land, Wolf Howl and Search Engine Journal. (Links go to my author profiles.)

p.p.s. I’m booked on a flight to Israel for tomorrow night. If I’ve been blogging slowly lately (or in the next little bit), that’s why!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

It’s a weird thing that some of the smartest affiliate marketers are also the dirtiest.

1 – Ever heard of “PPV”? Aka pay-per-view? I wish I was talking about boxing matches on TV. No, the larger ROI-centric affiliates are tending to move into “PPV” or “CPV” traffic, which many of you might know under its non-euphemism name, pop-ups.

The funny thing to me is that the dirtier you’re willing to play, the dirtier others are willing to play back. I was watching a TV show I like, and the site hosting it sells PPV traffic. Here’s an indication on traffic quality: the new ad page opens when you click play the first time. Yeah, totally what the visitor intended.

Bottom line is that PPV is the talk of the town in ROI-driven affiliate circles, and that’s a sad thing.

2 – The blackhat SEOs are tending increasingly towards the hacking side of things. In an SEO-driven version of a common scam, interruption marketing is used to make you think your website has bugs and you need to buy the virus “anti-virus” these helpful ‘warning’ providers are offering.

I’m trying to find the right reference on Ben Edelman‘s site, but it’s not surfacing.

Coincidentally, what does show up the overlap in adware makers [which serve to generate popup "traffic"] and phony anti-virus scams. All of which dovetail with Zango‘s jolly products.

3 – Annoying people and slowing their computers with your crummy software, plus hacking their sites … don’t think it doesn’t get better! Indeed it does. Phishers are going for AdWords accounts. Probably for the credit card info, firstly (the fastest cash), but I’m sure the campaign data can’t be something they’re possibly ignoring.

4 – Facebook application providers drive useless incentivized traffic. A whole lot of scaffiliates were pissed when Dennis Yu outed them on TechCrunch, but I’ve yet to hear them complaining about Farmville sending junk traffic to advertisers who will lower their payouts accordingly.

That’s what happened with cookie stuffing and other crap at eBay, until they dug into the data, booted the thieves and switched to CPC pricing based on quality. The good affiliates got paid more and the riff raff got the door.

We really, really need consumer advocacy organizations and Attorneys General to sue more of the big-time jokers for the benefit of the industry. Just a shame they can’t sue certain goons in the Kremlin who profit from this. Or, more optimistically, there are market solutions, as per Alex Rampel of TrialPay.

p.s. While I’ve almost never answered her [mostly unsolicited] emails, this interview with Emma Kupiak makes Neverblue sound like a good network to run traffic with. Almost – they still run the scammy junk like the rest of them… But at least Emma makes a good case about them being helpful to affiliates who want to be scammy! …

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I just spent a few hours creating and editing an affiliate PPC campaign with Facebook Ad Manager, a Firefox extension that lets you mass-create, upload and split test ads (including split-testing images) on Facebook.

Now, while Facebook Ad Manager saved me a bunch of time, I screwed up with my Prosper 202 tracking setup and so the whole campaign needs to be rebuilt from the start.

Here’s what happened, and how to avoid it happening to you.I wanted to use Shareasale’s subid for tracking at the campaign level and Prosper 202 for tracking at the ad level (since Shareasale doesn’t let you use multiple subids/variables on a given link).

Well, in addition to redirecting to Shareasale’s link, Prosper 202 adds its own link ID on to the end of the URL, which causes a 404. Or at least, it did in my case because the end of the URL here was a Shareasale ‘custom link” – the name they give to deep links that affiliates can make to particular merchant pages.

So, for example, instead of executing my tracking script and redirecting to merchantsite.com/page.html , Prosper 202 caused the redirect to end up at merchantsite.com/page.html2341 or merchantsite.com/page.html9163 .

Now, in fairness to Prosper 202, this was my own fault.

The program specifies, when asking for your affiliate link at the campaign set-up stage, that you need to have the end of the URL allow for the subid to be added.

Because it’s late, and Facebook Ad Manager says the same thing (so that it can add its own subids to your ads when it mass-creates and split-tests them for you), I got Prosper 202 and Ad Manager confused. When Prosper outputs its own redirect link, it ends with ” t202kw= “. Somehow I confused that – which would allow Facebook Ad Manager to add its own subid numbers after the t202kw= parameter – with the input URL that you need to give Prosper.

The story has a happy ending though. I figured out a simple workaround to get the tracking and redirects to work!

You just move the ” afftrack= ” parameter (Shareasale’s subid) to the end of the URL that Shareasale gives you. Since that subid can be anything, Prosper’s adding a random number to it is no problem. Of course, it’ll make my Shareasale tracking a little messier, since now the same campaign subid will be duplicated multiple times by Prosper 202. Eg. afftrack=campaignA1234 afftrack=campaignA5678 etc.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

@Search Engine Land: How predictive heatmap tools work and how they can lift your conversion rates. I write for SEL’s Just Behave (Usability/Conversion Optimization) column once a month.

@Wolf-Howl: Why Google HQ Really LOVES Thin Affiliates . I write at Mike Gray’s site periodically, when I have something that will fit with his audience.

@Wildfire Marketing’s Marketing Tips: An Interview on Link Building With Yours Truly

If you liked those, you should add my rss feed to your reader because some of the best stuff I write gets published here before it gets cited or repurposed in other contexts elsewhere…

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I’ve used each of the SEO and webmaster services and tools below in the past, and can vouch for them.

I was also interested in sharing certain other internet marketing products (like PPC Coach and Clayton Makepeace’s copywriting materials), but I’ve never used them myself so I’ll pass for now. There are others run by friends

Most of these are affiliate links, but a few are non-affiliate, too.

Competitive Intelligence SEO Tools

Compete – The Rolls Royce of competitive intelligence products, these guys get their data directly from the ISPs and their panel of millions. This is very valuable for impressing leads: bring a sample report to your meetings and say, “You can keep this sample report, and get more of them by working with me. This is also the kind of advanced intelligence and playing field I operate on.”

Compete used to be based on buying credits, but now you need a monthly membership. These start at $199/month.

I’ve personally got the Pro-Advanced Plan, which includes referral analytics. That goes for $499/month. These can be used for retargeting, which aims to make your advertising more effective.

.

Spyfu- Also formerly based on buying credits, Spyfu now offers monthly subscriptions that start at $59/month or $395/year (two months free).

They get their data by scraping search results, and were the first guys with ad copy data, so you could see competitors’ PPC ads. I’ve bought their reports and love em.

A tip on using this to its max potential: Since your reports are based on a domain, buy the reports for mega ad buyers like eBay and Amazon and category killers in your vertical.

.

SEOmoz Pro – As the title indicates, SEOmoz has some of the world’s biggest sites as clients, including eBay and the Marriott, and for good reason. Here are some of the things I like about their pro membership:

First, SEOmoz finally caught up to SEO Book and created their own Hub Finder, plus they went one better and organized the links by mozTrust (that’s jargon for the quality of the link). That’s very helpful in prioritizing link building targets.

Seomoz also have a boatload of useful tools like Linkscape, Trifecta (formerly Page Strength), Juicy Link Finder etc. The price is $79/month or $800/year (ie get 2 months free).

Besides that, I happen to be friends or friendly with most of SEOmoz’s staff, including Danny Dover, Scott Willoughby, Gillian Fishkin etc, and their associates at Distilled like Tom and Will Critchlow, Duncan Morris etc. Those personal interactions only reinforce for me the trust I accord these people.

Majestic SEO – Majestic offers a competing product to SEOmoz, but is different in certain key respects.

Their main service is free, and shows much greater link numbers than SEOmoz’s Linkscape.

The flip side is that they have no mozTrust metrics, so you can’t sort the links for quality. You can also buy ‘credits’ that are redeemable for advanced reports and data.

I’ve also interacted directly with Majestic SEO’s staff, lead by Alex Chudnovsky, and can speak to their extremely rapid and helpful support!

Webmaster Tools

Dreamhost Web Hosting – I use Dreamhost for literally all of my hosting, for 3 reasons: value for money, value for money, and value for money.

Dreamhost offer fantastic customer service, address downtime issues very quickly, reply to support emails within 24 hours and frequently within 2 hours … I can’t say enough good things about them.

I also love Dreamhost’s one-click installs. I don’t mess around with databases, PHP versions and other headache-inducing techie stuff when I setup a new WordPress site. I click, and I’m done.

Use promo code HESREALLYNUTS at Dreamhost for a cash discount, a free Unique IP for the first year (useful for sites you promote aggressively and don’t want tied back to your other sites) and a bonus free 2nd domain registration. Total value: $50! (Valid on full year registration or longer.)

Namecheap domains I switched to Namecheap from Godaddy because they give you both (i) a free SSL certificate for 1 year with a new domain registration and (ii) a free private Whois registration for the first year (they call it “WhoisGuard”). You also don’t need to use it with that domain in particular.

Sitemeter – I love these guys for getting into the nitty gritty of particular visitors and seeing what kinds of patterns emerge. Their premium product costs only $70 a year and is extremely valuable. Instead of only seeing your 100 most recent visitors, you get to see the last 4000, and it also saves the data on that. SO

Business Tools

Basecamp HQ for reporting progress in link buying. I like that it’s online, which makes life easy for everyone involved. Link sellers login to post the URLs on which they sold me links. Clients login to see the URLs and make sure that quality keeps up. And at the end of the month I login to see where we got links and to make payment.

BuzzStream for manual link building campaigns. You can add new prospects in there, add notes and other info to track progress on building the relationship, and finally update with info on links obtained. It helpfully scrapes the code of a site for any emails you can use to contact the webmaster, but doesn’t yet point you to contact forms.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

My friend Geno Prussakov wrote a fascinating book entitled, Online Shopping Through Consumers’ Eyes. This is my review of Geno’s book, for those who might like to buy it.

After reading his affiliate program management blog for several months, I finally got to meet Geno in person at last month’s Affiliate Summit East, where he gave me a copy of the book. I tore through it on the way home and finished it in about 2 days.

As you might guess, the book is an easy read, and not overly long. It’s substance is a presentation of a  107-question survey of consumers who have shopped online.

Geno begins by presenting the question asked, continues by sharing the results (usually in the form of a chart), and then he presents his own analysis of what the answers mean. Frequently, that analysis includes actionable tips for internet marketers.

The questions themselves cover topics that are extremely pertinent to current online marketing challenges.

Question #80 asks: “What would you consider a substantial one-purchase spending for the total of an online order?”

The top answers were $250 – $500 (27%), $120 – $250 (26%) and $500 – $1000 (20%).

Question #60 asks what would make consumers, while browsing for a specific product (eg people in buying mode), choose one store over another. Geno got a list of over 20 factors from the open ended answers!

Do you know how valuable that is for building a point of difference and lifting conversion rates?

Anyone doing online marketing for an ecommerce site, especially in a B2C context, will obviously derive interesting insights from the book. Personally, this gives me an idea on where to make the cutoff points for price-refinement navigation.

Question #60 helps marketers find a point of difference. Geno asked, “When browsing the internet for a specific product, what criteria ultimately dictate you choosing one store over another for your purchase ?” The answers he got came out to a list of over 20 factors!

At the same time, I found problems with how Geno conducted the survey.

- There were leading questions that suggested one answer over another.

-Sometimes the answers were improperly or poorly structured. For instance, 10% of people thought that a purchase of $100+ was a significant total for an online order (eg in response to question #80). If you combine that with the $120 – $250 segment, then really 36% of people think that order totals between $100 – $250 are significant, for an online purchase.

Despite these problems, there are a lot of valuable ideas to be found in the book. You should buy it, just make sure to keep your critical thinking hat on and not accept everything at face value.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I wrote a guest post at Wolf Howl on how to find niches and pick wisely amongst them, for affiliate marketing newbies. Gurus who give you a list and tell you to select randomly amongst them without explaining their reasoning inevitably cause dissapointment, so hopefully this will help you guys discover affiliate marketing opportunities and choose wisely amongst them.

If the topic is of interest, have a look also at how to protect your keywords from a loose-lipped affiliate manager.

And all that said, you should add my rss feed to your reader to keep up to date with my latest posts. You can also subscribe by email. Both are free .

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

In June I spoke at SMX Advanced. Earlier this week I spoke at Affiliate Summit East. Time to show some love to the folks I met! Here they are,  in no particular order:

Igal of PartyPop Wedding Planning

Jordan Glogau, 1800 Flowers

Jeremy Dearringer, Slingshot Indiana SEO

Amir Rabinowicz, Etoro Forex Affiliates

Eric Adamowsky, Armitage Marketing + Consulting

Scott Brinker, Ion Interactive Landing Paths

Rotem Amar, Eran Horowitz, Yossi Shalom of Investhead / 10PIPS Affiliates

Liat Fuchs, Affiliate Ply (Video Aff Network)

Chris Pearson, Thesis

The Bosers, 3 Dog SEO / Consulting

Jonathan Treiber, RevTrax offline affiliate marketing

Alex Schultz, Facebook

Emily Boss of CSN Stores

Michael Gross, AJ Madison

Carolyn Shelby , Chicago SEO

Negev Nosatzki – Ava Financial

Carolyn Tang, David Zelken of ShareASale Aff Network

Joe Stepnieweki, Skimlinks

Lucinda Worsfold of GlobalDirect / Unanimis affiliate + display network

Jennifer Moor and Byron Taylor and Paul (? didn’t get your card) of Linkshare

Michael Ouellete and Leigh Rogers of CJ

Susan Bridgers, Link Connector Aff Network

EJ Hilbert of Online Intelligence Affiliate Fraud Detection

Graham MacRobie, Alias Encore

David Naffziger, Brand Verity

Josh Sloan, IM Consultant

Jamie Birch, JEB Commerce

Bryan Cockerham, We-Care

Eli Toron, NogaMarketing

Chris Rossiter, Offerweb Network

Catherine Duffy, DMI Partners

Shanti Beaurline, AKMG affiliate network

Andrew Coleman, Lead Qual(ification)

Jeremy Shoemoney, Shoemoney Tools

Mike Guida, Get Ads

Betty Hakes, RevMedia Marketing

Brenda, Face Formers

Holly Elkins, Shop At Home

Kim Salvino, Buy.At

Jennifer Reppy, See Vast ads

Brett BumeterSoft Duit Media

Stuart Silverberg, Tech Trainer and Consultant

Darrin Washington, whose cards cleverly were labeled with the show he went to, to help people recall where they met him, and probably for his own direct response measurement. Smart! (But no website listed = no link :s)

Slaven MandicSlavTech Marketing

Jerry MarkIndependence Media Group

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

In no particular order, here are the folks I’m looking forward to seeing at Affiliate Summit East, where I’m on the agenda to speak.

Brian Hawkins, of Pingo Calling Cards .

Paresh Vadavia, with online jewelers Ice.com and Diamond.com

Frank Watson, of Kangamurra Paid Search

Stephen Robinson (my mentor for Aff Summit – thanks for your time Steve!) of JEB Commerce affiliate program management

Scott Brinker of Ion Interactive Landing page management software

Geno Prussakov of AM Navigator affiliate program management

Wil Reynolds or Think SEER Search Engine Marketing

Brian Littleton, ShareASale, a fellow Montreal internet marketing company!

Tim Ash, SiteTuners

Chris Brogan

Chris Pearson, DIY WP Themes

Michael Gray, Wolf Howl SEO consulting

Rae Hoffman, Outspoken seo consulting

Michael Streko

Todd Friesen , PT search engine marketing

Dave Snyder, Search and Social Consulting

Hamlet Batista, Ranksense SEO software,

Todd Malicoat, Stuntdubl SEO consulting

Scott Willoughby, SEO moz

William Martin-Gill, ebay

Gabriel Malca (if he shows up)

Kate Morris, Search Marketing (un) agency Marketing demons

Dennis Yu, Blitz Local Marketing

Jeremy Shoemaker, Shoemoney

and anyone from AOL, Amazon, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, PlentyOfFish (Marcus Frind, are you attending personally?? Would love to meet you!) Prosper Inc (assuming you’re the same as Prosper.com), and any people who are into buying links .

If you’re one of these folks and/or are attending and would like to meet me, leave a comment and let me know when is good for you!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

The scams described in the video below have a lot in common with the Google cash, Google Money and other similar scams prominently found all around the internet.

FYI to affiliates promoting these things in Canada: You’re asking for jail time. Read the Competition Act.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Shawn Collins and Missy Ward have been nice to enough to give me a speaking spot doing an “Advanced Search Marketing for Affiliates” roundtable. If any of you plan to attend, I always love to meet blog readers, Twitter friends or other internet marketing correspondents of mine in person! And I’ve got some neat ideas for people launching affiliate sites, some of which ideas I plan to use myself (or do already )!

You can use the following discount code to get in cheaper, too: ASE09SPEAKER10. FYI: It’s restricted in age to people 21+ only.

Here’s the Affiliate Summit East agenda, and registration.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.