Affiliate Summit East 2011: Wil Reynolds Keynote #ASE11
Wil Reynolds knocked it out of the park once again speaking at Affiliate Summit East 2011. Not just the most requested session, but as a keynote speaker! It was the only keynote I attended this time around, and well worth it!
Bullet Point Review!
- We fall in love with the things that are easy.
- This is the 12th affiliate summit Wil’s speaking at.
- Sick of shortcut tactics that win.
- Find .edu clubs on topics that you could sponsor.
- Intitle search.
- Google is matching synonyms so sometimes you don’t have to do as much work as you think
- Believe in the power of 1. What are you doing to turn 10 to 10,000?
- What value do you add?
- Google will eventually figure it out.
- Rel=author (once you get to a certain level, Google starts putting your picture by articles).
- 30-40% of searches are related to brands.
- If you’re being un-followed en masse, you screwed up. Invest your time & find out why.
- Underutilized assets: badges, giveaways, social.
- Invest in assets.
- Find .edus or k.12 that list scholarships – make one!
- Strong connections are always valuable.
- Little tidbit: Press 4 in Google Voice to record. Pay Speech Pad $1 per minute to transcribe and use that as your content!
Wil was goodly enough to utilize the power of the SEER Interactive Blog and his twitter following and posted all the links he mentioned in his keynote here: Affiliate Summit Keynote Links.
Read MoreWhy Online Rep Management is a Must for Any Affiliate Marketer
As an affiliate marketer, the internet is essentially your life. You’re online all the time and your existence is based off how well you are able to distribute yourself across the web. The name of the game is to get to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) and stay there. However, in addition to selling specific products, you are essentially selling yourself, and because of this, you must be in control of your online reputation at all times.
Simply purchasing the best SEO software used could grant you a solid spot on the search engines. You could simply plug yourself in, and gain instant popularity. You really didn’t have to worry about others discovering precarious information about yourself, or about unwanted information taking precedence over your well-created websites.
However, the rise of social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn have made maintaining top positions and an online image much more difficult. Just within the last year, we have watched companies and politicians destroy themselves with one wrong Tweet or wall post.
Old school SEO simply cannot protect you anymore. You have to remain proactive about managing your online reputation by incorporating the use of SEO, social networking sites, and your blog. If you don’t, you risk having your reputation hurt or ultimately destroyed by either your own negligence or a competitor.
If you choose to use social networking sites to help manage your affiliate marketing image, and you should, here are a few tips to making sure that you are using your accounts to effectively manage your online reputation:
- Acquire multiple social networking accounts
- Actively post to each site daily
- Quickly and politely respond to any negative comments
- Keep your Followers actively engaged through varied media
- Maintain a consistent message across all sites
Finding success with affiliate marketing is no easy task. You have to expend time and energy to produce substantial income, and then you have to maintain a positive online image to stay ahead, not to mention additional time spent traveling for speaker events and conferences.
Affiliate marketing may not be super easy, but maintaining a positive online image can definitely make it easier for you. Not only will you be able to gain a stronger following, but you will also be more likely to gain the attention of bigger clients. So don’t place all your hope into basic SEO. Take control of your online reputation by incorporating social media and common management practices.
Read MoreHas Photo Sharing on Facebook Met its Match?
Photos are always an excellent way to attract more people to your personal website. Facebook has always been the best way to store your photos and share them with the people on your friend list. By sharing a glimpse into your personal life, your readers will associate a more human element with your website, blog, or company. Over the summer, Twitter unveiled a new photo sharing service that is set to rival Facebook’s dominance and make it easier to market your website.
Facebook has recently changed the privacy settings on how you can tag people and places when uploading a photo. The steps to posting a quality photo for your followers to see are more complex than they have been in the past making it a more selective way to share photos with friends and family.
Twitter’s ease of access and openness make it a simpler tool for people to share content quickly. Recently, bored New Yorkers stuck in their apartments due to Hurricane Irene used Twitter as an escape mechanism to deal with their boredom. As reported on Yahoo News, they posted pictures from the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” where the Statue of Liberty was destroyed by tidal waves.
If you are a marketer using an integrated social media campaign over several different platforms such as Facebook, Foursquare, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube; it has always been a struggle to seamlessly blend all of the social networks together. By posting a photo or video and sharing your location directly to Twitter, the need to market on other social media websites becomes less of an issue.
A couple of months ago, in order to share photos through Twitter, users had to use a third party service like Yfrog, Twitpic, or several other similar sites. Facebook had the advantage of offering a centralized photo sharing service that made it easy and convenient to store content. Now with a centralized gallery available on user’s profiles powered by Photobucket, pictures sent to these photo sharing websites are collected and stored in a gallery on Twitter profile pages.
Because tweets are searchable through Google, you can optimize your post with organic SEO keywords so it will appear higher in search results. Twitter’s new photo sharing service will soon be available on smartphones and will be easy for LG Android phone users to instantly upload a photo for their followers to see. This will give you the opportunity to perform important search engine marketing while at the grocery store checkout lane or out for a jog. You can easily attract new followers while away from your computer.
Facebook is still a great way to organize and store personal photos, but Twitter’s new photo gallery is an excellent way to make your content public as well.
Read MoreContest: Win a Gold Pass for Affiliate Summit East 2011!
Just getting into Affiliate Marketing and unsure where to start? You should attend Affiliate Summit East 2011! I haven’t been around much lately, with work and having my wisdom teeth removed, but I’m back for awhile and I have a Gold Pass to give away ASAP! The gold pass will give the winner admission to the Meet Market, Exhibit Hall, Keynotes, Sunday educational sessions; access to all recorded session videos; and PowerPoint presentations. This pass does not include access to Monday and Tuesday sessions in person. However that means that you can still come to my session, The Future of Coupons in Affiliate Marketing, on Sunday from 3:30pm to 4:30 pm in the Grammercy Suite. There are a few ways you can enter this quick contest!
Ways to Enter
(Leave 1 SEPARATE Comment for EACH Entry).
- 1 Entry – Follow TrishaLyn on Twitter.
- (Leave a Comment here with your Twitter name)
- 1 Entry – Follow Affiliate Marketing Fanatics on Twitter & Give us a shout out
- (Leave a Comment here with your Twitter name & a link to your Tweet with @AMF_Podcast in it.)
- 1 Entry – Like Affiliate Marketing Fanatics on Facebook & post what your favorite part of our podcast is.
- (Leave a Comment here with a link to your post)
- 1 Entry – Post on Twitter something like “I’ve entered to win an #ASE11 Gold Pass on TrishaLyn.com & you can too! http://www.linq2.us/ase11pass @TrishaLyn”
- (Leave a Comment here with a link to your Tweet).
If you don’t know how to get the link to your tweet, you can check out BenSpark.com’s handy directions for getting a link to a tweet. I’m taking a page out of Drew’s book and using Random.org to select the winner. You have until midnight Pacific time on July 31, 2011 to enter and the winner will be selected on August 1, 2011. You’ll receive a code to use for registration for Affiliate Summit East 2011. Please spread the word if you don’t need a pass yourself as someone else out there does!
Read MoreHow to Add Twitter Followers Every Day…And for Free!
Guest post by James Martell.
If you have a Twitter account but are clueless about how to get more Twitter followers, then you’ve come to the right place! I’m going to share with you three very useful strategies that will enable you to get free Twitter followers, guaranteed.
Be Careful:
Even if, for some reason, you decide not to use my strategies, I do want to caution you about using software programs supposedly designed to increase your Twitter following. Most of these programs don’t work, and they certainly don’t teach you how to get more Twitter followers.
What’s worst of all is that they are almost always against Twitter’s term of service. This means that they can actually cause you to lose your Twitter account, leaving you even worse off than when you started. So stay away from these programs, and instead follow my steps for how to increase Twitter followers.
What’s Twitter?
I have to tell you that I was once in your shoes – maybe even worse. Just a few years ago, I didn’t get the “Twitter” thing at all. But I decided it would be a good idea to at least try it out.
Now, it’s a huge part of my business. I might not have millions of followers like all the major celebrities, but I do have 5,403 loyal followers to date. Also, since I’ve started using the three strategies we’re going to discuss, I’ve watched my following grow a little each and every day!
I can promise you that no matter what you’re promoting with twitter- whether it be kids rocking chairs, dental services, or joovy caboose reviews – my strategies can and will work for you.
Strategy 1: Syndicate an Online Newspaper
So, let’s get going with Strategy 1! For this strategy, all you have to do is syndicate your own online newspaper based on a Twitter list, user, or a keyword. Then, you publish the newspaper to your Twitter followers each day.
My newspaper, The Guest Blogging Daily, was created using paper.li, my Twitter account, and a Twitter list. You can check it out here: http://paper.li/JamesMartell/1308523225.
I absolutely love paper.li, and I can’t recommend it highly enough!
Not only does the site create a lovely paper, but it’s so very easy! Everything, and I mean everything, is 100% automated, so you barely do any work at all. The site posts to your Twitter when each daily paper is released, and it even tweets to your followers.
Plus, contributing authors are tweeted as well. These writers will often follow you and –best of all- retweet the newspaper. This means that not only will you gain the writers as followers, but some of their followers as well!
It doesn’t get any better than this. So, start out with strategy 1 today! Simply pick an interesting and informative topic for your paper and then use paper.li to get your idea up and running!
Strategy 2: Become a Guest Writer
There are a lot of sites out there – this one included – that are always on the lookout for guest writers. Also known as guest blogging, writing for such a site is an excellent way to gain positive publicity and, best of all, more Twitter followers.
When acting as a guest writer, make sure that you are a good communicator and that you provide worthwhile information to your readers. Take the time to respond to their comments and/or emails. The more they feel they know and can trust you, the more likely they will be to follow you on Twitter.
Of course, it’s up to you to ask them to do just that! A great place to include the invitation is in your author bio. I guarantee if you follow these steps, this will gain you more followers, so get started today!
Strategy 3: Using Your “Thank You” Page
The easiest and most effective strategy is the last one. Once you hear it, you’ll wonder why you didn’t think of it yourself- it’s really that simple. I can’t take the credit either, though. It was my friend, Joshua Sloan, the former Director of Online Marketing for the world’s largest and fastest growing hosting company, 1&1 hosting, who shared the idea with me.
To carry it out, you simply set it up so that visitors who fill out your option form, either to request more information or sign up for a newsletter, are redirected to a “thank you” page.
On this page, you then invite them to follow you on Twitter. Remember that these visitors went the extra step to find out more or request more information, and they gave up their contact information in order to do so. This makes it very likely that they will follow you on Twitter if you only ask.
The Choice is Yours:
I’ve laid out my three proven strategies, and they couldn’t be any more simple! Now it’s up to you to put them to work and to make them work for you. I personally guarantee that no matter what you’re promoting – and I mean anything from a Bumbleride indie twin stroller to dental services to bar stools – these strategies will work!
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James Martell is well know for his podcasts and affiliate marketing trainings, as well as outsourcing and a specialist in SEO. James is host of the Affiliate Buzz podcast on WebmasterRadio.FM (the first ever and longest running podcast about the affiliate industry), and creator of the Affiliate Marketers SUPER BootCamp. He lives in White Rock BC, a seaside suburb of Vancouver on west coast of Canada with his wife, Arlene.
Read Moread:tech San Francisco: The New Power Brokers – Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter & Beyond
Session Description: Whether you’re launching a company, marketing a product or just keeping your head above water, it’s likely that you’re increasingly forced to plot your strategy around today’s new power brokers—Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter. Does the relative hegemony and power of these companies create a stable, predictable environment for the rest of us, or are we continually guessing what the next chess move will do to our plans? In this highly interactive and thought-provoking segment, Upstream Group CEO Doug Weaver brings together experts from the capital markets, industry journalism and agency leadership to explore the impact of these companies on M&A, marketing and advertising. Are these players permanent fixtures, or are there new power brokers waiting in the wings? And what do you need to know to make the very best decisions in the months ahead?
This session took place Tuesday, April 12, 2011. The speakers:
- Doug Weaver, Founder & CEO, Upstream Group (Moderator)
- Shawn Carolan, Managing Director, Menlo Ventures
- Scott Symonds, General Manager Media, AKQA
- Molly Wood, Executive Editor, CNET.com
I enjoyed the discussion, though I wish there had been more actionable items.
Bullet Point Review!
- Only 10% of Twitter accounts follow more than 50 people.
- What is a tweet worth as opposed to a Facebook news update?
- This curve is pretty similar to any participatory medium.
- 1 in 4 twitter users are African-American, which is sort of the mirrored opposite of Facebook.
- Does Amazon belong on this list instead?
- Already selling more digital books than printed books.
- Many start-ups use their services for storage, hosting, etc.
- $36 billion in ecommerce in 2010
- Who is empowered? They’re more about empowering themselves, not other sellers or users.
- They’ve all built really nice walled gardens. Does that make the web less relevant & by association, Google less relevant?
- When you solve problems, you grow the market.
- You still find all these walled gardens through Google.
- Google is tying bonuses to social media strategy (up to 25%).
- The personal recommendation is the absolute social currency of web 3.0.
- Google should let Groupon and Facebook have their games & get really good at search.
- Is the web less relevant with Facebook around?
- “Control, distribution, & delivery of content is the next battleground.” – Molly Wood
- Clients are more willing to go where good content & readers are instead of the more traditional media outlets.
- NBC/Comcast is just one example of vertical integration where one party own a both the content & the pipe.
- Kinect has reinvigorated some new life into Microsoft.
- Yahoo might have some life left in them.
- AOL? Made some good hires and good acquisitions & trying hard, especially with local & patch, but it remains to be seen.
- Who may end up being a power broker in 5-10 years? Apple may not be as people go towards open source, Facebook & Google may be, but ones aggregating content will be ones to watch. Lots of potential with foursquare. Blogging may overturn.
