SEO

I’ve been doing online affiliate marketing since 2002 and have noticed a worrying trend for affiliate marketers: Google doesn’t seem to like us as much as they used to.

Whether your affiliate business gets its traffic from pay per click, search engine optimisation, email marketing or social media, I’m sure you’ve found it’s getting a lot tougher than it used to. Google is cracking down on many affiliates both through SEO and PPC. People on social media are increasingly likely to report you as spam if you even hint at trying to sell them something and email delivery rates are pretty poor.

At the risk of causing you to set fire to my website (digitally, of course), may I suggest that you take your skills and begin to move beyond affiliate marketing? Build an actual, sustainable business that you have control over.

Yes I know it’s a little scary. Maybe you “don’t want to be bothered with all that customer support stuff”, maybe you still crave the “set and forget” business model. Maybe you just don’t think you’re any good. Hey, we’ve all been there.

It’s time to take some of those eggs out of your one basket and spread them out a little.

There are still fortunes being made in affiliate marketing, no doubt about that. But if the food being on your table is reliant on your affiliate income, that’s just not smart. I know a lot of people who do just that. They think that diversifying means getting traffic from another source.

It’s not.

If you’ve had some success with affiliate marketing, you already have a killer skill set. You are already at an advanced (maybe even expert) level at getting traffic to a website.

Use that.

Some ideas of extra business models you could add to your current affiliate model:

Offer your traffic getting skills to some local businesses for a fee. I’m sure they’d LOVE some of the visitors to their website that you could get them with little effort!
Create and sell your own products. Don’t create internet marketing products unless you’re truly elite (in which case why are you reading this? hehe). Build a product that competes with your current best selling affiliate program – you already know the market like the back of your hand and probably have all the funnels in place. The product can be one you write, or go to Odesk and get an ebook ghost written. Flesh it out with your own knowledge, understanding and research and make something you’d be proud to sell.
Write a blog. You’d be amazed at the benefits that can come from blogging, whether that’s

Full article at A Lot More Than Affiliate Marketing

With over 100,000 followers on Twitter and a pretty engaged audience, I often get asked by new people what they should tweet about.

Let me begin by saying I don’t have all the answers and there are many different approaches to tweeting.

Now that we have that out of the way, here’s my opinion.

Regardless what persona you decide to go with, you should do a good mix of tweets, but keep the personal tweets to under 1 in 100.

Here’s the mix, in no particular order…
Industry News
Twitter’s main strength over its competition is that “news breaks first on Twitter”. Both news and ideas spread quickly there, so it’s easy to become a thought leader.

My workflow for staying on top of this is:

Subscribe to the main industry blogs through Google Feed Reader.
Skim through the articles on my ipad using the MobileRSS app or iphone using the Reeder app.
When an article catches my eye, read through it.
If I think it’ll be interesting to my Twitter followers, I email it to Twitter using Buffer (so it goes out on a schedule), segmenting it with @p username if appropriate.
Go on to the next article, rinse & repeat.

Of course because of Buffer, I can post scheduled tweets from anywhere just by sending an email with the right email address.
Quotes
I use quotes to keep my tweets ticking over. Over the years I’ve built up a pretty good list of great quotes, ranging from inspiring, to comedy, to clangers (love Yogi Berra!).

About 10 per day go out, spaced over random periods throughout the day. This is great for keeping “front of

Find out more at What For You To Position To Twitter

On 10 January 2012, Google announced the rollout of Search Plus Your World.

This is the next stage of integrating search and social. Read Google’s announcement at the link above for the full story, but essentially logged in Google users will start to see private results and posts by people in your Google+ circles.

A lot of people in the online marketing space are up in arms about it. After taking a few days to process the changes and read various opinions, I’d like to add to the conversation by looking at the issues a little deeper. To do this we’ll have to take off our blogger or marketer hat and view it from others’ perspectives.
Google’s Perspective
Forget asking whether Google is good or evil and look at it from their point of view…

If you’re Google, you would see Facebook incrementally taking control over large chunks of the general public’s time online. Not just with Facebook.com and Facebook games, but with deep integration in websites, through things like comments or logging in using Facebook’s protocol. Facebook, being a walled garden, has access to enormous amounts of data invisible to Google.

Microsoft, with Bing, much of Yahoo!, its Windows desktop systems and now Windows Mobile also control an enormous amount of data that Google doesn’t have access to.

Data, for a company like Google is worth its figurative weight in gold. With it, Google can understand user behavior, test new products, track changes to current products and keep an eye on browsing habits. Starving Google of data is like us having a cut in oxygen. Not good.

Think of it another way – Facebook, Microsoft & Apple all have their own universe where users visit. Take away Android & Google+ (both pretty recent products) and what does Google have? Um… a place where people go to look for stuff…? A bit of email & some document software? If people figure out they can find what they’re looking for just as easily on one of the platforms they spend most of their time on, Google is up a certain creek without a certain paddle.

That’s why Google’s pushing so hard to create a virtual universe for people to “live” in, so to speak.
Everyday User’s Perspective
Think how the Search Plus Your World would look to an everyday user…

Because Google+ is very new and still quite unfamiliar for most people, I’ll substitute it

Full article at Purpose Of Seek In Addition Your World

For some inexplicable reason, “blogging” seems to be a taboo word to a lot of business owners. I’ll often suggest it as part of an ongoing business building strategy and the business owner will jump like I just zapped him or her with 1,000 volts of electricity!

People say things like:

“But I’m a businessman, not a writer”.
“Everyone knows you can’t make money running a blog”.
“Only hippies blog”.
“I don’t have time for that nonsense”.

It baffles me how people can still think this way. But I guess a lot of business people are still to get on “this internet thing”, so I shouldn’t be too surprised.

Let me put it to you this way:
If you’re not running a blog as part of your overall online business strategy, you should probably close your business now and get a job.
Bold statement? Yep

Care to prove me wrong? Didn’t think so

To paraphrase Blaise Pascal’s Wager:

If I’m wrong and it doesn’t make a difference to your business long term, what have you got to lose? A few hours that you would have spent watching TV or on Facebook.
If I’m right, what do you have to gain? Prosperity in a grand new world.
Come to your own conclusion.

As I’ve said before, both social and search marketing are transforming into a single entity. The pinnacle of that combined entity is blogging. It builds your home base, provides ample content to build your authority on Facebook and Twitter and generally builds the “I’ve Seen You Out There” factor.

Blogging, no matter your business, should be the focal point of all your marketing. It’s one of the easiest and best ways of distinguishing yourself from your competition and building your market dominance.

You might say “but I don’t have anything to write”. Yes you do. You’re an expert in your field aren’t you? Or at least pretty damn good at what you do? If you aren’t, you better get good at it or again, go get a job.

The way the world is going, the people who are really good at what they do will be successful, while everyone else will work for them.

My sister had really bad warts that no skin specialists could cure her of. After years of painful treatments she finally went to a great doctor who was

Read more about this at Blog Or Even Into Receivership