Posts Tagged "Affiliate Tip"

Making It Big

Posted on May 13, 2008 in Career |

This week has been full of win, and it’s only Tuesday!

All the Cool Kids (and me)

My humble little blog TrishaLyn.com has been featured on Alltop.com under the Marketing category. Alltop is a digital magazine rack, per se. At each Alltop site, they display the latest five stories from 30+ sites on a single page, aggregating the information as a starting point. Alltop is a great way to expose yourself to blogs and websites relating to your interests that you may not have stumbled upon before. The interests range from women’s interests to sports, religion to geekery. In the marketing category my humble blog is mentioned amongst the likes of Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim, Michael Martine’s Remarkablogger, and Seth Godin’s blog. I’d say that lives up to the “all the cool kids (and me)” slogan!

Guest Co-Host of AffiliateThing on WebmasterRadio.fm

Regular host Shawn Collins of AffiliateTip.com and co-founder of Affiliate Summit invited me on to co-host the weekly Affiliate Thing podcast in lieu of regular co-host Lisa Picarille of Revenue Magazine who can’t make it tomorrow. I’m excited as I know this is a well-produced, professional podcast broadcast on Cranberry Radio, so I can’t wait. I’ll be recording from the pleasure of my own home in the morning and can’t wait to chew the affiliate fat with Shawn. I will say that I’m glad I’m not the one who has to edit it! it’s all recorded over Skype, so it’ll be great quality I’m sure!

Featured Expert on EzineArticles.com

That’s right, yours truly is also now a featured expert author on article site EzineArticles.com. So far I’ve submitted my Top 10 Things That Improve Work Ethic article and plan on submitting many more. If you’d like to see any of my former blog posts as articles on Ezine, drop me a line and let me know!

So that’s it! I feel like all this work I’ve been doing is paying off, and let me tell you, it’s a terrific feeling! I’ll be sure to report back on how the recording of Affiliate Thing goes tomorrow!

Good People Day

Posted on Apr 3, 2008 in Career | 1 comment

So Gary Vaynerchuk at WineLibrary is at it again, enthusiastically making up holidays as he fancies. He’s come up with April 3rd as Good People Day, a day to thank those that help you, inspire you, etc. He explains it better than I, so here:

So I’m left to wondering who I should thank. I guess there’s several peeps out there that inspire me. Here we go, in no particular order.

• Anne Casanova, my manager. She’s awesome!
• Sam Harrelson. A great blogger, generally nice and helpful guy.
• All the people I follow on twitter for constant entertainment.
• All the people who read my blog. Y’all rock and give me a good motivation to keep talking.
• The GeekCast crew for making me laugh hysterically once a week, so big ups to Jim Kukral, Lisa Picarille, Shawn Collins, and Sam Harrelson once again.
• My best friends ever for always being there for me, Katie Shaw, Lorenza Martinez, Rachel Nuckols, and Jennifer Morrill. None of them are big interwebbers, so no links!
• Karen Garcia is a great for random questions via Twitter. So is Deborah Loxly!

NoFollow vs. DoFollow

Posted on Mar 12, 2008 in Marketing | 6 comments

First, the definition, courtesy of Dot Traffic Glossary:

Nofollow
A website can direct a search engine spider not to follow a link that appears on it. The idea being that the target website’s ranking will not influence the website indexed. Nofollow attribute values are most often used on sites with user generated content, like user comments and blogs.

Dofollow is basically the opposite of this. Many bloggers refer to this as link love. By allowing the search engine spiders to follow those links, you’re increasing their page rank status and allowing their ranks to influence your rank. Which is not what you want if you’re looking to increase your page rank, necessarily.

There’s a debate raging amongst bloggers and it seems like most smaller blogs are going the Dofollow route. By spreading the link love you’re helping out your fellow bloggers, who are more inclined to reciprocate. Blogroll’s are a prime opportunity for this. The larger bloggers don’t seem to be weighing in on the issue (at least not from what I’ve seen) so perhaps for a blogger with a larger audience they couldn’t care one way or the other.

Since this is a bit outside my expertise, I’ll admit, I posed the question to my 59 Twitterati followers for their opinions:

Shawn Collins of Affiliate Tip: “Event with nofollow in my blog comments, the comment monkeys constantly attack with their spam.”

Scott Jangro of MechMedia: “I’ve been fighting so hard with the spammers recently, I’m starting to question my own long-time use of dofollow.” He also added “I agree with Sam on the size of the blog though. Mine was until the past few days a PR6 which has me on every must-spam list.”

Sam Harrelson of ReveNews & Affiliate Fortune Cookies: “I’m all in favor of spreading the love, but there are SO many gamers out there that it makes DoFollow really unsustainable.” He followed up to say “Would just add that if it’s a small blog, you might make dofollow work. As it grows, it’s just too hard.”

Of course, these opinions totally fall in line with that I’ve observed in looking around. The little guys are all for dofollow to get the word out, but once you cross that line you become a “comment monkey” target. Scott Jangro wrote a really reflective post about it back in February called Attack of the Comment Monkeys (don’t know how I missed it from the RSS feed…).

I think one thing all bloggers and internet marketers in general can agree on is that Spam is a problem. Not only is it definitely annoying, but it also pollutes the well (as Jason Calacanis pointed out in his keynote at Affiliate Summit West last month). It makes a lot of legitimate internet marketing look bad, and it’s a fine line before someone misunderstands persistent follow up and due diligence for the dreaded SPAM label.

Where do I stand? Long time readers of this blog will note that I use links a lot in my posts. Basically I do this for two reasons: 1. I like to give readers an easy reference of what or who I’m talking about. 2. It’s just nice karma. This blog is hosted by Blogger, and according to their Help Center they automatically add the nofollow tag to the templates. Which is probably why I have a page rank of 0.

So I’m going to edit my template as an experiment. For anyone else curious on how to do this for blogger, there’s a great tutorial online here. Let’s see what happens, shall we?