Teen Internet Marketer

I just went to the Meetup202 Seattle meeting yesterday - it was pretty good. I met up with Steven Troung, Wes Mahler, and a few other guys from the Seattle area to talk about Affiliate Marketing. It was definitely a great meeting! If you are in the Seattle area, feel free to join us next month - newbies are definitely welcome. We hung out for a while - from 2:30ish to 9:00 or so.

At the meeting, we talked about affiliate marketing with paid search marketing. Steven and Wesley run Tracking202 - a service that tracks your keywords for affiliate marketing campaigns. I’ll definitely be running that to track my affiliate campaigns when I start out.

This meeting opened the door for me to get into affiliate marketing - I now know some experienced affiliate marketers and will definitely be trying that out during the summer.

Oh, and I also got a Twitter.

During the SMX Advanced conference, Jay Young gave a presentation on his views of link development. To my surprise, Jay Young gave us some grey-hat techniques to SEO sites. Here are some of the techniques that Jay Young recommends for link building:

Directories

Jay Young still supports directories - commonly overlooked, they are still a good way to build up some links. Don’t waste time submitting to the lower-tier directories - instead, focus on top-tier directories such as DMOZ (bribe an editor if possible), Yahoo, Joe Ant, Blog Catalog, and Best of the Web.

Non-Profit Sponsorships

Non-profit sponsorships can be slightly controversial, but still can be a good way to build up links. Many non-profit organizations will give you a link to your site in return for a sponsorship - they will list you as a “sponsor”. Non-profit links are also arguably editorial - many organizations will need to approve you as a sponsor before you can get the title of sponsor, and the link. Thus, sponsoring a non-profit (and getting a link in return) may not seem like a bought link - and may not incur the wrath of Google.

If all fails and the non-profit link loses it’s value, Young notes that all is not lost: the “sponsorship” is tax-deductible, and you help a good cause.

SEOcialize

Social Networking - a great way to build links. If your post makes it to the front page of Digg, you can get thousands of organic links. Other good services like StumbleUpon, Reddit, and many others can also bring in good traffic.

Buying links via brokers

There are big brokers which can handle link buying for you. They are your best bet if you cannot spend the time to buy links yourself. Otherwise, you have other choices: link networks, blog advertisers, specialty brokers, and amateur brokers. Text Link Ads is a popular link network - although Google has started to remove PageRank from sites with TLA. You can also advertise on blogs with services like PayPerPost or ReviewMe. The lowest quality links are ones purchased directly from sites like DIgitalPoint and Sitepoint - the quality of sites on there can be horrendous, according to Jay Young.

Link Bait

Link bait can be the subject of a whole new blog post - it’s a vast topic with many ways to do it. Matt Cutts defines it as “something interesting enough to catch people’s attention” - not necessarily bad. Good link bait can attract many backlinks - from hundreds to thousands of links. Young told people not to worry about morality when writing link bait - he believes that there is no morality in marketing - and so that stretching the truth - if it’s good for your website - should be done.

Additional tips when buying links

• Don’t kill your self with relevance - if you can find relevant links, get them. If not, that’s okay too.
• Vary anchor text and anchor location - this is the single most important thing when getting links to your page - it tells Google that your links are natural. Also, deeplinks are also helpful for SEO - natural link growth does not always center on the homepage.
• Then again, if you have a new site - vary the anchor text. If your site already has thousands of backlinks, don’t bother varying the anchor text.

Darker Methods

*Of course Jay Young would never recommend these.* Most often - you cannot hurt yourself by employing these methods.

• Comment Spam (do it manually!)
• Trackback spam (don’t forget to turn off the program - nothing tells Google that you’re spamming like 20,000 backlinks in 3 days)
• 3-way links (they still work)
• Link farms

Thinking outside the box

In addition to all of the above methods, Young also recommends

• Making widgets for websites (to get yourself a backlink)
• Templates (embed a footer link in the template)
• Sponsor a popular Wordpress template (contact the author of a popular Wordpress template and ask for a link in exchange for $$)
• Give away an iPhone in a contest in exchange for a backlink
• Content trades (be sure to use original content - you don’t want duplicate content penalties)
• If your competitor is SEOing too cleanly, throw some chaos in the mix - purchase 5,000 links for $50 on DigitalPoint and send it their way (to make your link building pattern seem “normal”)

Lastly, Jay Young stressed that there is too much fear in the SEO industry - Google is not omniscient. Do what you need to do to get to the top.

This is an ongoing blog series about SMX Advanced 2008. I will continue this series tomorrow with the discussion of Stephan Spencer’s presentation on organic link building.

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At SMX Advanced this year, Roger Montti of Martinibuster gave a short presentation on building links from .edu sites. This was one of the shortest presentations - but gave some insightful content on where to look for and find links from .edu pages.

Why get a link from a .edu page?

Differing in opinion from what some people think, Montti says that links from .edus are not magic snake oil - Search Engines don’t give them any advantages over links from any other page. However, .edu links have some of the following advantages over links from conventional .coms:

• They tend to be in good neighborhoods - have you ever heard of a blacklisted .edu?
• They are good for long-term links - some less updated pages may stay static for a long time.
• They tend to have more inbound links.

Although .edus aren’t at all different compared to .coms in Google’s ranking algorithms, it’s particular characteristics and uses make links from them desirable anyways.

Where can you find good .edu links?
Google search strings are some of the best ways to find good .edu links. Montti shared the following search strings:

• site:edu “bookmarks”
• site:edu “links”
• site:edu cool sites
• site:edu tennis links (or your industry here)

These search strings will allow you to find .edu sites with the above content on them. After doing so, you should be able to find relevant link pages from which you can request a link to your site. With these strategies, you can find lots of useful and relevant .edu sites which you might be able to contact and get them to link to you.

While this post was a bit short, the next few posts will be a bit lengthier - this presentation was on the short side. This post is part of a blog series about Search Marketing Expo Advanced 2008 - this series will be continued with a post about Jay Young’s aggressive link building techniques.

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(Above: Driving to SMX in rainy Seattle)

Search Marketing Expo was a pretty big event - there were quite a few attendees. I enjoyed it a lot - I spent the entire day there for Day 1 of the expo. I didn’t attend Day 2 due to school.

The Exhibits

(Above: Google’s booth at SMX)

The exhibits were great to visit for a few hours - I talked with some guys from SEOmoz for a while. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Advertising also had prominent exhibits at SMX. However, the rest of the exhibitors were mostly SEO firms and landing page optimization firms. While interesting, I came to SMX as more of a webmaster than a SEO - so those exhibits didn’t interest me as much. However, I did try to talk to most of the exhibitors to get a sense of what goes on in the Search Marketing world.

The Presentations

I’m really glad that I had the opportunity to attend the presentations at SMX. There were three tracks of presentations at SMX: Organic, Paid Search, and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) Business. I attended the organic track for all three presentations - the discussions were more relevant to what I do.

I will discuss what each of the presenters said about each topic. Here are the topics that you can expect on the blog:

• Session 1: Blow your Mind Link Building Techniques
  • Greg Boser moderated this discussion about link building. In this discussion:
    • Roger Montti discussed building .edu links
    • Jay Young discussed various link building techniques, including shady methods of building links
    • Stephan Spencer shared his views on link building techniques
• Session 2: Bot Herding
  • Search Engines may not find the best way to index your content online. How can you help search engines index your content effectively? In addition to the actual presenters, developers from Google, Yahoo, and Live Search answered questions during the Q&A session. Rand Fishkins, owner of SEOmoz, led this discussion with the following topics:
    • Michael Gray discussed the importance of PR sculpting, or distributing PR healthily within your site
    • Adam Audette rebutted Gray’s opinions by presenting eight arguments against sculpting PR
    • Hamlet Batista described methods of cloaking for white hat SEO reasons
    • Stephan Spencer finished the discussion with additional methods of bot herding
  • During the Q&A session, Nathan Buggia insisted that Windows Live Search did NOT adhere to rel=”nofollow” - instead, it only relied on meta noindex. Thirty minutes later, he corrected his statement and said that Live did adhere to Nofollow.
• Session 3: Buying sites for SEO
  • Instead of buying links, sometimes it may be a good idea to buy an entire site for SEO. This discussion, instead of discussing the SEO benefits of buying a site, focused more on methods of evaluating sites to buy and how to direct traffic and link juice back to your site. Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts led this discussion with the following presentations:
    • Jeremy Schoemaker sent in a video to substitute for his presentation - he could not make SMX Advanced
    • Jeremy Wright of B5media (which owns Problogger.net) talked about how to valuate sites
    • Gab Goldenberg briefly discussed how to find good sites, buy them, and keep their existing ranking
    • Todd Malicoat discussed additional methods to find sites, contact site owners, and value/buy a site.

I definitely learned a lot from SMX Advanced 2008 - it opened my mind to many forms of SEO and how to achieve them. It also showed me how sleazy some SEOs can be when trying to get to the top.

This is an ongoing blog series about SMX Advanced 2008. I will continue this series tomorrow with the discussion of Roger Montti’s presentation on organic link building.

If you haven’t yet, please subscribe to Krazyness to keep up with SEO information from SMX 08. Thanks!

SMX Advanced 2008 was an awesome conference! In addition to all of the valuable things I learned from the conference, I received:

A SEOmoz hoodie! This is awesome - on the front, it says: “He wrote the beginner’s guide to being awesome”. On the back, it says: “We wrote the beginner’s guide to SEO”. It’s pretty awesome - not something you get at the everyday conference. (The picture is kinda bad though - kudos to holding the camera myself and taking a picture of myself).

A SEOmoz T-Shirt! I mean…you gotta love their stuff.

A SMX backpack! I wasn’t a networking or full access pass member, but they let me have a backpack because I had three session passes. Thanks to Stephan Spencer for giving me the session passes for SMX!

I also recieved a $5 Starbucks gift card from Click Fraud Network. I might give this away.

I will be blogging about all of the things that I have learned from SMX Advanced 08 over the next week in a series of blog posts. Tomorrow, I will overview the conference itself and list the topics that I will cover in my series.

If you haven’t yet, please subscribe to Krazyness to keep up with information from SMX 08!

I will be attending Search Marketing Expo Advanced Seattle tomorrow!

I’m looking forward to it. Stephan Spencer will be there, along with a great many of other internet professionals.

I’ll post back photos of the event ^_^

List of SMX Advanced 2008 Blog Posts

• Post 1: Lots of Schwag at SMX 08
• Post 2: An Overview of SMX
• Post 3: Building .edu links
• Post 4: Aggressive Link Building

When posting around on forums today and seeing them often go on many tangents, I had an idea: what would happen if forums had a trackback system like blogs?

I believe this would be a good idea. vBulletin’s “related posts” and “tagging” features have already started linking forum posts together - however, some times, I find that I want to reply to a post, but make it slightly off-topic. How will a trackback system work?

The way I envision it, when you post a reply, you should be able to post it as a “tangent topic”. Afterwards, a new thread will be created, and a post in the main topic will be made with a link. Also, near the bottom of each thread page, it would be listed as a “related thread” or “response to a thread”.

What do you think about using this as a new method to organize and link forum posts? I believe that forums are sometimes too linear, and information should be better linked, like in wikis. What do you think?

This is a guest post by AffiliateTips.com - a great resource for anyone looking to find affiliate programs.

Domain Names for Affiliates

If you’re not going to work through a blog you have to register a domain name when setting up your affiliate site. As the domain name will be of high importance for you there are a few things you should keep in mind. Read this article to be on a good start towards the affiliate money.

What Domain Name to Choose

Working as an affiliate the first thing to do is to figure out what your site’s name should be. There is really only two ways to go – either you choose to go with a brand name or if you prefer a domain which consists of your number one keyword.

Add Your Brand Name

When it comes to brand names they have to be recognizable and easy to remember or risk the chance of losing visitors. The name doesn’t necessarily have to reveal much about what the site is about or what it contains. Important to remember is though that they have to be kept short and catchy if you want to stick in your visitors head. This will give your site an edge that is hard to obtain elsewhere. Once you’ve been able to establish your brand name and it has become somewhat of a household name, people will be more inclined to return. If you’ve been able to do all of the above, you’ll find it easier to make deals with potential partners. Businesses in your segment won’t have to think twice about partnering up with you.

Use Your Keyword

If you on the other choose a domain name which consists of your single most important keyword you have the chance to get a high ranking on the search engines. As the domain name is extremely important from a search engine optimization perspective, you can have great success if you manage to get a hold a domain name, which really represents your business and the segment from which you work as an affiliate. Don’t forget that you have to put the keywords in the same order as people do their searches – otherwise it won’t be worth much for your business.

Best of Both Worlds

In the ideal world, you would use a combination of brand name with keywords. Remember though, that this is not always an easy task – many have tried and failed. The reason for this is that many names already have been taken. If this is the fact, you should put all of your energy on just one of the two.

Where to Find It?

Domain name registry services can easily be found on the Internet. A .com domain name can be registered for the tidy sum of $10 – starting your affiliate business will be cheap!

If it’s taken?

If you’ve decided upon the perfect domain name for you, but it’s already taken, there are a few ways to go. Through after market services, you can get in touch with the owner of a domain name, and offer them what you think it’s worth. Hopefully, you can come to an agreement. If not, when a domain name expires, it’s up for grabs again – be quick!

If you haven’t noticed, I have added Feedburner to Krazyness’s RSS feeds. Feedburner is a handy tool provided by Google which allows blogs to keep track of unique visitors to RSS. It collects statistics about RSS, and makes RSS subsciption easier by providing a pretty landing page.

Previously, I was skeptical about Feedburner’s RSS service. I was skeptical of “outsourcing” my blog RSS feeds to another provider - one which could fail and cause me to lose my subscriber base. However, after realizing that allowing people to subscribe to a XML feed on my site would become problematic, I quickly relented and added Feedburner to my site.

Why is Feedburner Good?

I always wondered this myself when thinking about Feedburning. This is where Feedburner is lacking - it never fully explains it on their own site. Anyways, here are some features that convinced me to move to Feedburner:

• Feed statistics - Awstats doesn’t track RSS feeds well - it doesn’t say how many uniques used that versus my main pages - it just gives hit counts. Feedburner tracks the number of RSS readers/users which track my website.
• Optimized landing page - it makes it easy for people with blog readers to subscribe.
• Email subscriptions - this allows people without RSS readers to subscribe to my content.
• Feed advertising - you can advertise in feeds so that when people read your posts in a reader - they still see your ads. While I’m not going to use this, it’s still a nice feature.

For those reasons alone, I decided to use Feedburner. Google has a handy plugin for integrating Feedburner with Wordpress. I’ve installed that, and viola! I’m burning my feed!

You’re at your Google Reader, Bloglines, or Firefox Live bookmarks. You click “reload live bookmarks”. No new posts.

You’re desperate for new blog content to read. Firefox must be giving you the wrong information. You then open up each and every blog that you read daily, looking for updates. None.

I know this can be a really annoying phenonomeon. I know that I get really annoyed each time I read a blog that should update daily, and I don’t see any updates.

I want to update this blog to a regular schedule. What do you think is a reasonable schedule? Daily? Weekly? M-F?

I’d like your opinion on this matter. How often should I update Krazyness.net? Comment now!