ASE09 Session: What the Heck is a Website Nowadays?
Guest Post by Dominic Fawver.
Session Description: Businesses may be changing the way they look at web presence. Can you just have a blog? Is a Facebook presence alone a good idea? Does Web 2.0 mean the demise of websites? The panel consisted of:
- Shashi Bellamkonda, Social Media Swami, Network Solutions (Twitter @shashib) (Moderator)
- Kelly Harman, President, Zephyr Strategy
- Melanie Mitchell, SVP, Search Strategy, Digitas (Twitter @melaniemitchell)
- Ramon Ray, Editor, Smallbiztechnology.com
This session gave an interesting and entertaining look into how the role of a website has been changed recently with the advent of Social Media. One of the chief points that I took from the session was that your website should be the anchor for all the other forms of social media which you use. Ramon Ray brought out some points that are easy to remember and contain a lot of useful tips, these are:
- Focus on the customer.
- Have a plan of action.
- Have an easy to remember name.
- Be informative.
- Security – have as much as is needed for your site.
- Easy customer contact = good customer service.
- Have fresh content.
- Be found.
- Be simple.
ASE09 Session: How to Monetize your Site with Widgets
Guest Post by Dominic Fawver.
Session Description: This presentation discussed how to enhance your site using various widgets, what works and what doesn’t, and how effective different widgets are to your site. The panel consisted of:
- Woody Wood, Product Manager, Amazon (Twitter @AmazonAssociate)
This session gave an overview of what a widget is, and what it can bring to your site. Many examples were given from the Amazon Associate program and a couple of examples from other sources. One of the chief reasons for using a widget is to add interactivity and functionality to your website. A key point that was mentioned was that a widget should be used to augment your site, along with all of the links and banners, instead of replacing them. Several suggestions were made as to what works and what does not. Included in the what works category were things like:
- Use the right widget for the job: focus on targeting the widget at relevant material to your site.
- Place the widget in the most effective spot: for example, in the center of the page for a one off topic specific item, or on the sidebar for something that is more long term.
- Use the widget as a self expression tool: add comments and recommendations to the items to make the relevant to your audience.
- Change content regularly: make sure that people want to return to your site.
The only negative thing I took away from this very well put together presentation was the mention of the very short duration of the cookie given by the Amazon Associate program. This will most likely not stop me from using Amazon widgets on my site, but is a little disappointing.
ASE09 Session: SEO Tools You Can Use Today
Session Description: This session is a quick moving brain dump of how to use the most advanced powerful tools to help you with SEO. Expect to learn how you can walk out and use several SEO tools to grow revenues today. The speaker was:
- Wil Reynolds, Associate, SEER Interactive (Twitter @wilreynolds)
I’d never previously had the chance to hear Wil speak, despite meeting him a few times. It always seemed poorly matched up against other sessions that were more relevant to me as an affiliate manager. This time I made sure to make it to Wil’s session, and I was NOT disappointed. He’s an SEO genius and did, in fact, give us tools that I used TODAY!
Bullet Point Review!
- Tool: Google Insights
- Tool: Microsoft Advertising Intelligence (Formerly MSN adCenter Add-in for Excel)
- Watch your bounce rates, because even if keywords rank this is a problem.
- Always check Google Trends for the keywords.
- Evaluate bounce rates daily for each keywords (this catches problems quickly)
- SEER did this for a client and caught a page 1 ranked keyword with a bounce rate sometimes as high as 80%)
- Home page was ranked for the product search instead of a product page.
- Ranking is a big distraction.
- If you are analyzing search engine performance by where you rank you would never have caught the issue – analyze SEO by more than just rankings.
- Tool: Microsoft adCenter Labs Audience Intelligence – remember to search for singular keywords and plurals.
- Affiliates need to know research vs. commercial queries to help convert traffic.
- Marketers need to know what kind of message to put in front of people when searching.
- Plural tends to convert much better, but is not a hard & fast rule.
- Know the flaws before you use any tool so you know how far to trust the data.
- Yahoo Keyword Suggest is better than Google’s because it’s a general phrase match and not a character match.
- A 40 to 60 ratio isn’t enough to suggest a strong patter – go for closer to 30 to 70.
- Look for the queries highly skewed to one side or the other (commercial v. noncommercial) & look for high degrees of confidence from the engines.
- Test against your own data set on keywords that are currently ranking well before using the tool so you knoe how far to trust the data.
- You have to look at things through a marketing lens and not just take the word of the tool’s data.
- Affiliates need to take advantage of hot keywords because they can move much faster than larger corporations.
- Major competitive advantage: big companies move slow. Their inability to act for mid/long tail/hot keywords = opportunities for you.
- Don’t look back too far because trends rapidly change. Look at more current data sets, around 30 days old at most.
- Check out the Rising Searches area towards the bottom in Google Insights to see what trends are on the rise.
- Don’t go back more than a year data-wise, unless you’re looking for seasonal trends.
- How is a product getting hot? How do you rank for it?
- Try moving it up one level in the hierarchy of the site – possibly link from homepage in a hot product section.
- Top 200 products no more than 2 clicks from home page.
- Suits = slow = opportunity for you
- Google’s algorithm seems to be favoring large brands more and more; you’ve got to find ways to compete. Lots of ideas at blogstorm.co.uk
- Link building is about exposure to stimuli.
- You can’t have all the ideas – you need a Spark. Put yourself in a position to have great ideas.
- Install Greasemonkey script in Firefox.
- Install Twitter Search Results on Google for Greasemonkey
- It’s about being exposed to things that will trigger your brain to a link building opportunity.
- Tool: Google Trends Hot Trends
- Paid Tool: SEOmoz Labs – has a graphical representation of links.
- Put plug-ins and stuff at the bottom of the HTML code in case they hang up loading so they don’t stop everything else from loading.
- Wikipedia links help.
- Paid Tool: Hub Finder from SEO Book
- Tool: SeoQuake
- Seed Keywords allows you to find scenarios if you’re having an interal battle over which keywords would work best.
- Google Universal Search’s thumbnail pictures will definitely start to influence clicks in search.
Questions were really peppered in throughout the presentation, and Wil didn’t get to all his slides but promised they’d be made available and any links would be shared through Twitter if asked. It was a terrific session and I learned a ton that I’m ready to go back and start using now! For your benefit, here’s the presentation:
ASE09 Session: Advertising Tax Impact (Trisha’s Take)
As you noticed, Dominic already posted his notes on the session, but here’s mine! Session Description: Discussion on the Advertising Tax by industry leaders that have played a key role in organizing industry advocates and educating legislators on the impact of state tax nexus legislation. The panel consisted of:
- Brian Littleton, President / CEO, ShareASale.com (Twitter @Brianlittleton) (Moderator)
- Karen Garcia, Partner, GTO Management (Twitter @karengarcia)
- Beth Kirsch, Volunteer, Performance Marketing Association (Twitter @bethkirsch)
- Melanie Seery, President, Affiliate Voice (Twitter @mellies)
I thought it was well done. Unfortunately there weren’t nearly as many people there as should have been. Hopefully they’ll read this and know that they need to get informed before their business is blindsided with these tax issues.
Bullet Point Review!
- The use tax system really doesn’t work right now, hence why states are looking to tax online retailers.
- All this involves Nexus.
- If you make a commission on a sale, you’re affected. Period.
- There’s a lot of misinformation out there – we’re trying to inform reporters enough to make them care about what’s really happening.
- There’s a different between an affiliate company and affiliates, which is somewhat difficult to properly explain to legislators.
- This is putting thousands of individuals out of business.
- We need to keep politics out of it – it’s not a Democrat or a Republican thing.
- SSTP (streamline sales tax project) not going to save us.
- It’s GOING to happen – don’t think you’re safe.
- This year it’s been introduced in 9 states – stopped in 7 of 9 (not RI or NC)
- Be sure to work with like minded people to get things done.
- It helps to have an internal advocate who knows the system’s ins & outs (a lobbyist or lobbying organization).
- The viral-ness worked well to defeat the bills.
- The CA bill would have passed had we not shown up, so it makes a BIG difference to stand up and help and make your voice heard.
- When talking to legislators, there are a few things to remember:
- The term “affiliate” is very confusing, but they understand advertising and small business owner.
- Don’t say you’re going to move out of state – if you do, you’re no longer their problem, so they don’t care.
- Keep your analogies simple – don’t get too technical or use jargon they won’t understand (CPA, PPC, SEO, etc).
- There are ways around it in New York
- First you have to meet the minimum sales threshold, so if you don’t make that you’re not affected.
- You can rebut the nexus.
- They haven’t yet found a way to rebut the nexus in Rhode Island and it’s too early to tell for North Carolina.
- Merchants can just charge tax to keep affiliates – but it is something they have to start working on NOW in the back end to avoid being blindsided.
- Affiliates need to prepare your business for it and keep lines of communication open.
- Solutions: retain a sales and use tax attorney and understand the law as best you can.
- DO NOT: incorporate your business in another state, use a false address, follow advice of someone who’s unlicensed, follow advice of a lawyer for another party, or try to circumvent the law. Working within the law is your best option.
- Being shady brings a bad name to the industry – your rep and the industries rep is under scrutiny
There was no time for a Q&A session because of all the awesome information they jam packed into that session. It was really great and I’m still just sad to see that more people weren’t there.
Please help by spreading the word about what’s being referred to as the Advertising Tax! And for your pleasure, here’s the presentation:
Read MoreASE09 Session: Advertising Tax Impact, Accomplishments and the Future
Guest Post by Dominic Fawver.
Session Description: Discussion on the Advertising Tax by industry leaders that have played a key role in organizing industry advocates and educating legislators on the impact of state tax nexus legislation. The panel included:
- Brian Littleton, President / CEO, ShareASale.com (Twitter @Brianlittleton) (Moderator)
- Karen Garcia, Partner, GTO Management (Twitter @karengarcia)
- Beth Kirsch, Volunteer, Performance Marketing Association (Twitter @bethkirsch)
- Melanie Seery, President, Affiliate Voice (Twitter @mellies)
This session was very informative and gave a lot of information concerning the current problems affiliate marketers are having with some of the new tax laws, or rather the new interpretations, of the tax laws. One of the most important facts given was that the definition of “Nexus” has been recently changed, or rather updated. For a business to have Nexus, they must by physically present in the state. The change in definition holds that affiliates living in a state count as Nexus in that state. This is important because it requires all of the merchants to charge their customers the state sales tax. The issue is not that the companies should charge this sales tax, but that it is often cheaper for them to drop their affiliates in whichever states are affected, instead of adding the ability to charge the sales tax on their site.
The chief purpose of this session was to bring people up to speed on the legislation that has been put into affect or has been defeated in several states such as New York, Hawaii, and California. This is important because it will soon affect any state that charges sales tax, which is most of them.
From the standpoint of someone new to the industry this was a very important session to attend, as it helped to bring me up to speed, so to speak, with some of the major issues which are currently impacting Affiliate Marketing.
Read MoreASE09 Session: Getting Noticed FAST
Guest Post by Dominic Fawver.
Session Description: Regardless what your role in the industry is, it’s important to be noticed within the industry. Learn the networking and social media techniques that make it possible. The panel consisted of:
- Lisa Picarille, Online Marketing Consultant, LisaPicarille.com (Twitter @lisap) (Moderator)
- Michael Buechele, Owner, MikeBuechele.com (Twitter @mikebuechele)
- Trisha Lyn Fawver, Affiliate Manager, Paulson Management Group (Twitter @trishalyn)
- Jen Goode, Doodler in Charge, JGoode Designs (Twitter @JGoode)
- Stephanie Lichtenstein, Affiliate Program Manager, Andy Rodriguez Consulting (Twitter @StephARC)
This session, Getting Noticed FAST, contained a lot of valuable information from people who have gone from being a nobody in Affiliate Marketing to being well known by many of the top people in just a couple of years. Some of the suggestions were:
“Get involved in the response…go to other sites and comment” Jen Goode
“Start blogging” Stephanie Lichtenstein
“Don’t flame people” Trisha Fawver
“Do something different the first time you meet in person” Mike Buechele
Many tips were given on the importance of using social media to get your name out there. Also mentioned was the importance of personal branding and being consistent between all of the different forms of social media that you are on.
From the standpoint of someone who is new to Affiliate Marketing, this was a very good session with plenty of examples from the panelist’s personal experience. It gave me ideas on where to start on getting noticed so that I can further a career in Affiliate Marketing (if I so chose) by meeting people who are already successful in the field and learn from their experiences and mistakes, while at the same time possibly being able to help them out with my own expertise. In many cases it is not what you know, but who you know.
