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.
Great Parties & Events at ASE09
Monday
Aug 17, 2009
I took it light this time around at Affiliate Summit and only went to two events that weren’t hosted by the conference itself. Dominic and I spent the two days before the conference wandering Manhattan seeing some sights, so by the time the conference started we were not that interested in traipsing all over the city again. But we did make sure to go to the couple of smaller parties we were invited to. I’d have been asleep at the networking wheel had I not gone to any of the parties! So here’s my take on the parties with some thanks and photos I took!
buy.at Party @ Empire Hotel
Big thanks to Ayako from buy.at for extending the invitation! This party was on the rooftop bar at the Empire Hotel, which despite being 12 floors up was considerably shorter than most the surrounding buildings. Only one part of the hotel bar was reserved for the party, so it was a relatively intimate affair. We started by working the area and saying hello to old friends, and ended sitting with Heather Smith of Beautiful British Columbia and Murray Newlands of MurrayNewlands.com. It was wonderful conversation and Dominic seemed to really feel comfortable with the jargon conversation and other assorted topics.
MarketLeverage & John Chow’s Dot Com Pizza @ Original Famous Ray’s Pizza
This was just what the doctor ordered! I had a few culinary goals for my trip to New York: bagels, cheesecake, and pizza. New York pizza is legendary, so I was excited to be invited to share some pizza with Dina and crew. We got there a bit late but there was still plenty of great pizza! I had my first real conversation with John Chow and Ted Murphy, both pleasant. I felt bad because there wasn’t much room to sit with the main group by the time we got there to schmooze and converse, so Dominic and I ended up sitting back in the corner where the surplus pizzas were and didn’t have much chance to talk unless people came back and talked to us.
I thought it was especially funny that Dominic got an IZEA shirt from Heather earlier in the day in the Blogger’s Lounge, and decided to change out of his Blinkstar Media shirt to the Izea shirt before leaving. We walked right up the stairs at Ray’s to see Ted Murphy, who of course commented on the IZEA shirt! Good thing I’d taken some time earlier in the day to tell Dominic what IZEA is! After hearing Ted and Dina and Heather talk about the last IZEAfest and the upcoming one, he really wanted to go! Too bad we can’t afford to go to Florida and have fun with them! Big thanks to Dina at MarketLeverage for the invite!
TechKaraoke @ the Hilton
This was unexpectedly fun, though I wish I had been able to get better photos! Of course, the embarrassment factor of karaoke almost requires the lights to be dimmed, so the photos didn’t turn out. I hear that I missed Chris Brogan singing a Jay-Z number, but I got down there just in time to see Ted Murphy, Shawn Collins, and Drew Bennett bust out some Milli Vanilli! Throughout the evening I got to catch up with Connie Berg while listening to the vocal stylings of Todd Farmer, Jim Kukral, Missy Ward, and Brian Littleton amongst others.
I also never realized that you never truly appreciate how LONG some songs are until you hear them butchered at a karaoke event! All in all though it was a good time and I hope Shawn & Missy bring back the TechKaraoke folks to do it again. And this time bring the lights up for more embarrassing evidence!
