ASW10 Session: Monetizing Blogs for Affiliate Marketing and SEO
Monday
Jan 25, 2010
Session Description: Learn to maximize affiliate commissions using blogging, increasing your community, and utilizing SEO. The panel consisted of:
- Kristopher B. Jones, President, Pepperjam Network, A GSI Commerce Company (Moderator)
- Drew Bennett, Professional Blogger, BenSpark.com
- John Carcutt, SEO Manager, MediaWhiz
- Tim Jones, Owner, TheRealTimJones.com
- Murray Ross Newlands, Founder, Affiliate Heat
Overall the individual panelists did great jobs answering the questions lobbed at them, but I think as a moderator, perhaps Kris should have come up with some questions more centralized on monetization and less about getting started as a blogger. Overall I did pick up a LOT of tips that WILL help me improve this blog, something I’ve been wanting to do for awhile now!
Bullet Point Review!
- Wordpress is the leader in blogging platforms – so customizable and is clean for SEO out of the box. Few tweaks are necessary.
- Murray noted that he built his brand by doing interviews – those people shared with him & then shared his content and blog with their audiences. That traffic is, by nature, viral & drives more traffic.
- The more you can promote others, the more they’ll promote you.
- The daily interesting content brings people back.
- Engage you visitors! They know there’s a real person there. Connect with people.
- There needs to also be a lot of interaction off your blog in social media and networks.
- Plan categories as you get started and have a good foundation. It will be cleaner than added a ton as you go.
- Most common mistake is messing with little options in WordPress. Make sure to check the box that allows search engines to find you!
- Keep your categories simple.
- Use the free Google Keyword Tool to optimize your blog titles.
- Target keywords in posts.
- Interlink between your posts (there are related link plugins you can use).
- Round up posts every couple weeks that interlink.
- Set up your permalink to be optimized for SEO.
- Great Plugins to Use!
- Do not have tags & categories that are the same – Google will only index one, so you might as well keep things cleaner & simple.
- Lots of guest posts (title & link back with terms).
- Deep link – don’t just link to your home page.
- If someone is linking to a page, make sure their page is related. It matters in calculating link popularity.
- Places to help monetize your blog:
- Traditional affiliate networks
- Contextual (AdSense)
- Inline text (Skimlinks)
- Widgets
- Paid links that pass link juice like Text-Link-Ads
- Paid per Post
- CPA
- CPM
- Maintain your credibility
- Build your brand.
- Generate your own products to sell
- Integrate product feeds
- Remember offline avenues.
Points brought up during the Q&A
What’s a good host to recommend?
- Dreamhost
- How do you use feeds?
- End of the blog post.
- Using plugins like GoldenCan, PhPBay, Popshops
- Good for targeted match
- How do you get stuff from a company to blog about?
- Just ask. The worst answer you can get is ‘no’.
- Have a plan & be able to show traffic & data to help convince them of the merit.
- How do you feel about building a blog around a brand?
- You’re going to run out of content.
- The more specific you are, the better.
- You do have to compete with the actual brand’s official social media or blogging efforts.
- Attempt to connect with the brand to get their involvement.
- Show the product in action via video and photos.
- Is it more important to build a double opt-in list?
- Your ultimate goal is to build a community, however you can do it.
- You kind of need to do all of it; long term you need to just provide great, consistent value.
- What are good tools to track more relevant mentions?
- Social Oomph.com
- Trackur
- StartPR.com
- Google alert for your URL (add the Http://)
- Where do you see the future?
- Podcasting is still valuable
- Video
- Integration with social networking
Overall I wish they would have gotten past the intro to blogging stuff and right to the nitty gritty of monetization, but still great speakers.
Sunday Shopper
Sunday
May 11, 2008
On my weekends I do like to look around and expand my horizons. So I’ve put together some books for you to take a look at.
Now I, myself, have not taken a look at these books yet, but I’m going to start with Kris Jones’ Search Engine Optimization. Once I finish it, I’ll be sure to review it!
Day 3 Affiliate Summit – Part 1
Tuesday
Feb 26, 2008
Still sick, I managed to get as much sleep as I could and skipped breakfast in favor of that goal. Once I slept as much as I could without skipping more than just some food, I headed down for the Super Affiliate Strategies that Work panel. I was interested to see how this differed from the What Super Affiliates Want panel I attended at the last Affiliate Summit in Miami.
It was a great panel, and I hear it was standing room only. Rock on – my sick self managed to score a seat otherwise I never would have lasted in there. It was a great panel by Kris Jones of Pepperjam, Amit Mehta, Zac Johnson, and John Chow. It was mostly Q&A from the audience with a little bit of moderation from Kris, so lots of good stuff. Someone actually blatantly asked about black hat tactics…to which he received a pretty unbiased response from John that he was just better off in the long run to stick with whitehat tactics if he wants to be a success overall. Which makes sense to me. Since this session was Q&A style it was pretty different from last year’s panel I already mentioned, which is good for me. I’d hate to get a lot of duplicate content. Some great points I picked up from the session are:
- Amit looks for a niche where there’s a lot of search traffic and builds a site with content & landing pages. Optimizes through SEO.
- Keep working on content & adding new things.
- Relevant content around affiliate links help the buyer make a decision.
- The long tail search terms are more stable for long term success.
- There’s an incredible risk for affiliates using black hat tactics. There’s an incredible amount of opportunity in white hat channels so you’re better off keeping your nose clean.
- John noticed that people were scraping his RSS feed and he started by sending cease & desist orders and trying to go after the culprits, but when the culprits became too many he just started throwing ads into the RSS and continued to make money off them.
- Develop your business system & that’s something that no one can just copy off of you.
- Amit uses an umbrella domain then makes sub domains for the more specialized, high traffic stuff or registers an alias and redirects the traffic.
- Social networks (resources, Facebook applications) are what’s hot right now.
- Yahoo & MSN seem to convert better for whatever reason than Google. Google users are more savvy.
- Spaces between 3 & 5 are the sweet spot in search results. Constantly bidding for the Sponsored Results box may not necessarily be worth your time.
- Day parting (bidding lower during the night) can increase ROI
- Continually split test everything.
- Have a great relationship with your affiliate manager and that will help you to leverage to increase commission rates or added bonuses.
- Amit advocates his strategy of bidding on hundreds of keywords and spread the sales between them, while Kris advocated creating a narrower ad campaign that’s very clearly related to your content.
- Some good programs & tips:
- Winner Alert: everyday it sends you a report with what’s winning
- Efficient PPC
- AdWords Editor
Overall it was a great session, and in case I missed anything J. Botter live blogged from there as well.
After lunch and some hours staffing our booth, I headed to the Asymmetric Warfare: Battling Fraudulent Affiliates session. More on that later.
