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!
  • Find the Plugins at BenSpark.com
• 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.

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Some interesting things going on this week, but overall it’s been a bit slow going in the marketing world.  Most of the media has been focused on the third and final Presidential Debates, the economy, and Joe the Plumber.  So let’s give you a dose of some marketing goodness, shall we?

• Amazon Associates launched a nifty new toolbar to help affiliates create links on the fly.  It’s very nondescript and barely noticeable.  Excellent job on Amazon’s part.
• PPC Classroom 2.0 came out this week with some devastating server issues that locked out a lot of interested parties.  This is an Anik Singal of Affiliate Classroom and Super Affiliate Amit Mehta project, with one of the longest sales pages I’ve seen in awhile.
• The PMA updated their blog to keep interested parties informed on where they are in the formation process.  Good to know work is actually getting done.
• Jim Kukral says get rid of the negative A-holes in your life.
• One of my favorite tools Trackur has now added influence measurement and TrackurRank.  Very cool addition to an already excellent reputation management service.

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I vow to present you with unbiased notes since I’m a big fan of Trackur & Andy Beal on the Reputation Management school of thought, so I hope to expand my own knowledge a bit.  The panel consisted of:

• Paull Young, Senior Strategist, Converseon
• Todd Steinman, COO, M80
• Daniel Riveong, Head of Search Marketing, e-storm.com

The presentation was a good overview on reputation management.  All three had their own slide shows which was a bit awkward, but I’m just a girl in love with unity.  Daniel’s presentation was more of a high level overview while Todd’s was a best practices lesson.  Todd’s was also too fast for the amount of data he had within the slides.

Paull didn’t even start until 1:52 for the panel that’s scheduled to end at 2, so it was pretty rushed, but his was mostly a case study on what Converseon did with Graco.  Is it just me or doesn’t the note “proprietary and confidential” in the footer of a presentation usual mean it’s only meant for internal eyes?  I’m not saying he was presenting something that wasn’t for public eyes, but it irritates me when people don’t pay attention to details like removing that from the template you use.

Bullet Point Review!

• “Word of mouth is now a public conversation, carried n blog comments and customer reviews” – Chris Anderson.
• Google has turned into a reputation engine.
• News travels faster and further (Good news travels fast, bad news travels faster).
• Ignorance is throwing money away.
• Bad Customer Experience -> Unsolved Issues -> Bad Reputation
• 2% reduction in negative word of mouth boost sales growth by 1% (London School of Economics study).
• How do you start?  Build customer relationships, offer great customer service.  You need to increase the goodwill invested in your brand (make whuffie!)
• Listen -> Respond -> Engage.  Measure is an underlying factor and the listening process continues.
• Know how to respond to the community in their own language.
• Understand where your customers are when deciding where you want to be – don’t just jump on the bandwagon with the newest technology.
• Where are people talking about us?
  • Search your company name, url, products, public facing employees (not always the CEO), competing products, descriptions (company name + sucks, company name + rocks, company name + review + sucks).
• How do you track the conversation?  There are tools that can help you beyond Google Alerts, like Trackur, BuzzLogic, and Cymfony.
• Find your voice – how do you engage with people?  Often you might make this more complicated than it is.
• There’s a certain amount of casualness and informality when engaging.  When you think about “how do I talk to bloggers or twitterers” remember that they’re people too, just talk to them like a person.
• Public Relations vs. Public Relationships is a required mind shift.
• Speak as a peer, not a spokesman.
• Negative comments?  Be transparent and honest.
• When you get feedback you still have to process it and decide what works – don’t be dictated by negative feedback.
• It’s easy to say “Home Depot sucks” but it’s harder to say “Daniel from Home Depot sucks” when you know he’s listening and engaging.
• Good examples of corporations finding their voice: 10 Downing Street, H&R Block, and Zappos on Twitter.
• Advertisers are talking about it because they’ve heard it will “go viral” and that it’s cheap.
• Advertisers are still coming from a world where they want to control the message and are sticking with known, comfortable advertising methods.
• Be useful – the best advertising is something that is useful to the target customers.
• Make a social media commitment – advertising used to be about campaigns, but not anymore.
• Read & react in real time – engage without delay.  Helps to relay that there’s a real person on the other end and softens interactions.
• Keep the channel open and on.
• Establish a baseline to help measure effectiveness and set the benchmark for a brand or roduct.
• Listen and understand while setting up access for social influencers and media.
• Necessary considerations: preparation, messaging, conversation focus, authority, tonality.
• It’s about nuance messaging.
• Tonality: formal, canned, contextual, echo.
• Authority: accurately state who you represent – it’s slightly above and beyond just transparency.
• Use subject matter experts!
• Also amplify positive sentiment to overturn any negative sentiments.
• Another tool for brand management: Visible Technologies (allows you to track sentiment and top authors and the screen shot of the dashboards did look awfully cool), sentiment maps.
• Quick & Dirty tools: Twitter Search, Google Blog Search, Technorati Search.
• Converseon as a tool called eResponder that easily aggregates what people are saying.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• For a mid-sized company that can’t hire a community manager to engage or monitor, how do you train someone internally to handle a social media crisis?  You have three sentiment types – positive, neutral, and negative.  Go to the positive sentiments and amplify, try to sway neutral, you may choose to pass on negative if you think they’re obviously goading you into the “wrong” reaction.
• You have to understand who’s behind the negative sentiment – if they’re usually a pretty sarcastic blog then you might just want to ignore it, but if they’re a serious publication you may want to pay more attention & tackle it.
• Let a community manager “take their lumps” with another company, then hire them.
• Any difference in reputation management between B2B and B2C – nope, you’re still talking to a group of people.  More subject matter expertise is needed in B2B but the general approach is the same.
• With B2B there might be less volume but the price tags are higher so it might even be more important to engage and sway that ill sentiment.
• At the very least, understand what’s being said about you.
• Working with both the PR and Marketing teams, but also research, media buying, advertising, and more and more customer service departments.  It really differs from company to company, and they usually touch base with legal as well.  Adapt from company to company.  More and more, it’s whoever the social media representative it is, but many companies are hiring someone specific relegated to that position.

At least Paull’s presentation was really short, so he did finish by 1:59!  I appreciated that there was still about 10 minutes of Q&A because some of the questions were really good.  Although sorry Daniel – one Office Space screen shot is just not enough for my blood!  Overall, it was an effective presentation and I actually did pick up a lot of tools that I previously didn’t know about.  I appreciated that Daniel didn’t really throw out what his company does and just stuck to the facts that people want to hear, and Todd kept his plug to a very minimum only once really mentioning what it was that M80 does.  Of course with any case study the company who helped them has to toot their own horn, but I expected that from seeing past speakers who represented Converseon.

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