Off Page Criteria:

• When a search engine ranks pages by using data that is not present on the web page itself. This could be the presences of a directory listing, or the number and quality of inbound links to a page.

This just goes to show that you need to build your link profile with more than just the links on your page. A great way to do this is to get out there and respond to blog comments. But don’t just spam them with your link – join the conversation and really participate. It won’t take that long out of your day and will be worth it in the long run.

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Glossary Definition From The Definitive Guide to Link Buying by Patrick Gavin

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I have no clue why this excites me, but overnight I received my first spam comment. I’m going to leave it up just because it’s the first! I guess it could mean that the content is getting indexed faster, which is always good.

What’s not good is Feed Burner. I know I’ve been critical of them in the past for a small jump in subscriber count, but last night my subscriber count was 54 and this morning it’s 32. Mark from 45n5.com responded to my outraged tweet that FB is just as good as guessing, so I assume it’s not really reliable. Which bums me out because I’d really rather have no reporting than inaccurate reporting. Oh well, just another thing to learn along the way.

I’m mostly worried that the switch from blogger to wordpress and the domain change has affected the subscribers, but I followed all the steps outlined by Feed Burner. And I subscribe to the feed myself and it looks fine.

As long as I’m pseudo-rambling here and you’re pacifying me by continuing to read, I’ll also mention that I believe I fixed the issue with my video not playing. I switched over to an embedded video from Viddler.com instead of Blip.tv and it seemed to work fine when I tested it. Unfortunately that does mean that the opening screen grab of me with my air quote fingers isn’t there.

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I should talk about this topic more, but online is just SO fascinating and I’ve been immersed in off line for the last 4 years so it’s routine to me. Since we discontinued our old poorly performing affiliate program at the beginning of February, I’ve been focused on growing our new Reseller Program and much more improved Affiliate Program. We decided, as I’m sure we’re legally bound, to pay out all pending commissions, regardless of whether or not they met our minimum threshold. This meant 400+ checks being processed by accounting, then printed, then signed, then put into envelopes, then posted, then actually put into the mail. This took about a month to get through the internal systems and the checks were sent out a couple weeks ago.

Since many of our affiliates in the old program had long abandoned the program, a lot of checks are coming back unable to be delivered. I’ve been contacting people and resending the checks as I get new addresses, and with every check I’m resending I’ve been throwing in one of my business cards. I realize today that this is the epitome of online marketing (affiliate payments) meets off line marketing (business cards).

It just goes to show that you can’t keep exclusively to one medium or another. There’s such a vast audience out there for your product or service – and they’re not all going to be able to be found in one place. It’s important – maybe now more than ever – to integrate your direct mail marketing with landing page testing. Put your produced commercials for television onto the web and get a piece of the viral marketing cookie. Remember the old adage “don’t put all your eggs in once basket” and don’t put all your money into PPC or direct mailing.

Diversify your marketing efforts and remember that just because you’re an internet geek, not all your customers are.

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