A Best Web

You may know Adam as Rollerblader in ABestWeb Affiliate Forum

I am fortunate to be collaborating with Adam Riemer who is the most ethical, hardest working Merchant Affiliate Manager I have come across in all the years I’ve been working with ecommerce stores online.

Adam now provides affiliate management for Executive Gift Shoppe’s gift affiliate program which I wrote about in How to Evaluate an eCommerce Merchant.

I suspect many merchants are challenged to find a good Outsourced Program Manager (OPM) because they don’t know what to call them. I had never heard of an OPM until I met Adam even though I’ve been researching affiliate management for merchants for years.

Reading Adam’s post on What You Should Expect From Your OPM is an excellent place to start for merchants interested in possibly starting an affiliate program or hiring a manager. I suspect that there are not many OPMs willing to work that hard but you can use it as a guideline on pitfalls to avoid.

I also recommend his post on Common Affiliate Management Mistakes. I have been planning to write about Adam since we started working together and am doing so now to share my comments in his latest post Should Merchants Pay Afffiliates For Repeat Sales. [click to continue…]

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Tree Swing Marketing Story

Tree Swing Marketing Story

I clearly remember how appalled I was when IBM told us (us being technical employees known as CEs or SSRs) we had to start selling.

Selling was a dirty word to me.

Marketing and sales were the people who promised what we could not deliver and pressured customers to buy what they did not want or need.

Customers trusted techs and we did not want to lose their trust.

In most organizations, marketing is paid much more because they are seen as an income source. The IBM salesman I knew best made 25 times what I made (and the IBM CEO pay is 530 times more) and their phones did not ring all hours of the day and night like mine did.

Support staff is paid much less because they are considered an expense instead of an asset. At least in IBM’s case that is a serious mistake because what we once called Customer Engineers and later called SSRs are the only IBM employees most customers see on a regular basis and the primary reason those customers keep buying IBM equipment. But we’re getting off track.

Let me explain WHY marketing is NOT Evil.

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It is foolish for any business not to obtain their free listings on at least the major sites offering local directories. Not having these listings is like having someone offer your business years of free advertising and saying “no thanks”.

This benefits Bloggers and Online Businesses too. You do need to provide a physical address and phone number to be listed in most directories.

Nielsen Consumer surveys clearly show the importance of having an Internet presence. Among the latest Nielsen statistics is this:

74% of people determine who they will do business with locally using online computerized search engines such as Google and Yahoo!

These directories offer many advantages to anyone wishing to get more visibility for their local or online business.

WHAT ARE LOCAL LISTINGS? [click to continue…]

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I just replied to an email I had missed last month from Will at Charlotte Fence Company. Will looked at the source code for GrowMap and when he saw nofollow tags in it he thought we were not really Certified DoFollow. It is easy to see how someone might think that so I want to share more details with my readers.

The best WordPress Themes automatically nofollow certain unimportant fields and since we use Thesis that is true here. The nofollow tags Will is seeing are on the Twitter links, dates, and reply links in the comments – not on your anchor text links to your sites.

The best way to determine whether a site adds no follow to links to yours is by using a tool such as the link checker in the SEOBook Toolbar. If you already have the Toolbar look for the red double-arrow to the right of the orange RSS feed icon as shown in the image below: [click to continue…]

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Image Credit ft.com TechBlog

Image Credit ft.com TechBlog

Yelp has been repeatedly accused of manipulating reviews to pressure businesses to advertise with them. Based on the information we share in this post and much more we have seen, we no longer recommend Yelp to business owners.

The East Bay Express article Yelp and the Business of Extortion cites twelve separate instances where business owners confirmed these accusations plus a former contract employee’s statement plus Yelp’s own admission that they pay employees to write business reviews.

Based on the thorough reporting in this story, all the previous similar complaints over the years, and the reviews of Yelp we have read (some of which are excerpted below) it is our opinion that Yelp has lost credibility and using them presents more danger than benefit to business owners. Businesses already listed there may wish to be cautious about their activities.

We base our recommendations on much research and include these excerpts among hundreds we found that seem particularly credible: [click to continue…]

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Originally submitted at O’Reilly

The social web provides businesses with a largely untapped marketing channel for products and services — the trick is knowing how to take advantage of it. With this book, you'll understand how social web technologies work, and learn the most practical and effective ways to reach the people who…


Highly recommended; I use it regularly.

By GrowMap from Near Dallas, TX on 2/25/2010

 

5out of 5

Pros: Easy to understand, Helpful examples, Well-written, Accurate, Concise

Best Uses: Intermediate, Student, Expert, Novice

Describe Yourself: Social Media Marketer, Business Strategist

Buy this book as a great overview of the major social networks and how to monitor your brand; keep it close as a reference resource.

This book is one of a handful that I keep right next to my computer and use frequently. I review it before visiting Social Media Networks I don’t regularly use to ensure I remember how to maximize my effectiveness and avoid mistakes.

I also use it to answer questions in my blog and on forums and Social Network communities and recommend it regularly. If you could only read one book about how Social Networking can benefit you and your business this is the one I would buy.

(legalese)

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Do Follow Blogs - Click for image credit

Do Follow Blogs - Click for image credit

Time is our most precious resource. All bloggers and business owners wish they had more of it and continually seek ways to accomplish more each day.

KeywordLuv and CommentLuv are effective ways to make every comment we write or receive provide far more benefits.

I strongly recommend bloggers join the do follow movement and install the CommentLuv and KeywordLuv plugins.

We and many of our favorite bloggers are focusing more and more of our time and efforts exclusively in dofollow blogs. The CommentLuv community is especially strong and readers can easily see CommentLuv featured posts.

They may not be aware that installing CommentLuv and registering your site allows you to suggest one of your last ten posts. Andy has already acted on a suggestion I made to allow you to select your most important posts instead and he has even added the ability to select your own anchor text for that post! Used wisely, that new feature can allow you to get ranked in the search engines for your most important keyword phrases.

The benefits of using KeywordLuv are not as obvious to many so I want to spell them out and explain exactly why I so strongly recommend using it. [click to continue…]

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Wedding Affiliate Program

Wedding Affiliate Program

I recently wrote a comment strongly recommending the Bridaluxe Wedding Affiliate Program in reply to this question from JBird85 in the WAHM forum:

“I was looking for different programs for people in the wedding niche and I came across a network called Bridaluxe.
Has anybody here used them, and is it a good (legit ) program?”

Hoping to be helpful, ampris2000, who has an online gaming fun site, replied “just type bridaluxe scam in google and see what shows up”

While it is obvious TO ME that she didn’t mean to imply Bridaluxe was a scam, I was concerned others might not realize she was offering generic advice not specific to them.

I realized what I wrote in my comment is a perfect description to share with my readers about why I recommend Bridaluxe. Here is the comment:

I highly recommend the Bridaluxe niche Wedding Affiliate Program and assure you it is definitely not a scam. It is one of the very best affiliate networks and for any wedding site it is as good as using Commission Junction and ShareASale (considered one of the cleanest affiliate networks) and better for wedding related sites. [click to continue…]

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Image Credit Smith College

Image Credit: Smith College WPMU Award Nominated Blogs

For reasons I don’t completely understand, the obvious best Permalink URL format is not a default in WordPress. Many blogs have dates in the URLs or other extraneous words that make your URLs too long and hard to remember.

A clean URL should have only your domain (and possibly /blog or a subdomain) and then a SHORTENED post name which ideally would be your target keyword phrase.

You can easily change a setting in WordPress so that you your future posts will automatically have cleaner URLs.

WARNING: Changing this setting is retroactive and will change the permalinks to all existing posts. We recommend you first install Platinum SEO and then make the change because that plugin will automatically redirect all your existing links. That alone makes it a great plugin to use as the default WordPress behavior that changes your permalink if you change your post title can introduce permanlink changes you may not have intended.

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Tweet This

Click the Bird to Tweet This

I am asking my fellow bloggers and Twitter users to do their part to support their favorite small and online businesses through the BizLuv MEME. Read more about why we all need to support each other and small businesses in BizLuv Meme.

Here is how you can participate:

TWITTER USER? Please Tweet This and share it on your other favorite Social Media and Bookmarking sites.

BLOGGER? Please Publish a Blog Post:

To make it easy you can use this template (or be creative and do your own thing). [click to continue…]

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