In this tough economic climate you have to be really smart about who you hire internally and who you outsource projects to. I personally went from have a large in-house tech team to work with, to hiring a good outsourced IT company to work on my projects. I started searching for tech companies and design companies about 3 years ago through all the typical online channels like sites and forums. I used a few different companies for programming and a few independent designers for my projects. I actually got some good work done, but there was a lot of flakiness from the designers and programmers I was using. Then I found Vtrio. Let me tell you its so nice to have a company that completes programming projects in days not months. I use them for all of my outsourced programming, web apps development, web design, and graphic design. It’s nice to be able to use one company for everything you outsource. And not to mention they are very affordable. Since they are out of Indian you have learn to work to with them to get the most production from them. All the guys at Vtrio are great to deal with. I have my own programmer to work with every day, as well as a full-time designer on my projects. I have been extremely pleased with their work and I highly recommend working with Vtrio on your programming and design projects. They designed and programmed my entire corporate site which you can view here. They have helped me develop all the web apps I have been dying to build all these years. This is bascially a glorified testimonial because I believe in sharing and not hording what I know and my connections. If you know me you will know this. So feel free to reach out to Vtrio if you have any programming or design projects that need to be completed competently, quickly, and inexpensively.

For more information you can contact Vinu at Vtrio.com. <- convert to email address obviously. Tell him Evan sent you for the best rates!

Here are some real-world affiliate marketing strategies that were discussed at the Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas. Why pay for affiliate marketing systems when you can get all the knowledge you require to make money online for free? Here are some really great affiliate tips, techniques and strategies:

Intro: Niche website/blog building is an integral part of publishing content on the web, generating traffic, and therefore producing affiliate sales. Content is king and the more content you are able to allow the search engines to “spider” and then rank, then more possible traffic you can generate to your sites. Here are some site, SEO, and linking concepts to get you moving in the right direction:

Site Building Tools – I highly recommend WordPress to build sites with (our free site builder with free hosting uses Wordpress. There are many sites builders you can use to get a presence up on the web. Make sure to set it up properly with good titles and categories. If using WordPress, utilize tagging as well which multiplies the actually amount of spiderable pages on your site.

Site Organizational Strategy – When you go to launch niche sites, to promote affiliate merchants, make sure to stay organized in a spreadsheet with info like: Merchant promoted, platform used to build it, login info (passwords), and posting frequency, i.e. (Date.com, WordPress, Evan@exper.com (jimihen5478321), twice daily). This will help you stay organized and will allow you follow a pre-established plan of action. Strategize on posting frequency to maximize your efforts.

Daily content posting – Posting content daily (i.e. articles, bog posts, essays, merchant reviews, product reviews) is a great way to ensure that the search engines will be coming back to your site frequently to check for new content to “index”. Over time, the more frequently you post, the more pages you will have in the search engine’s “cache”. The more pages you have in the cache, the more possible times your site’s pages can come up in the search results for various search terms, i.e. “Purchase flowers in Las Vegas”. Daily content posting is the best way to increase the number of pages on your site and therefore increase the amount of possible traffic you can generate with that particular site.

Use the Best Plug-ins to Enhance Your SEO – One of the advantages to using WordPress to build your sites is all the amazing plug-ins you can add to your site to increase functionality and “stickiness”. Here are some links to the top plug-ins available:
http://yoast.com/top-wordpress-plugins/
http://wphacks.com/wordpress-plugins/
http://mashable.com/2009/03/20/wordpress-seo-plugins/

Socially Bookmark Articles – Social bookmarking is a great way to generate traffic, inbound links, and better rankings for your site’s content. You have to join the sites and create a profile. This will allow you to bookmark any articles you wish. You can submit your own articles to these sites and other people may bookmark them if they find them interesting. You should bookmark mainly other people’s articles and some of yours as well, so not to appear like a spammer.

Top Social Bookmarking Sites: http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-bookmarking-websites
Social Networking - Create a Twitter account and Facebook Fan Page for each actual entity you wish to build up. Example, you are running a site advertising flower affiliate merchants, so you would create an identity “FlowerGuru” on Twitter and a FlowerGuru Fan Page on FB. This will allow you to advertise these groups on your sites and generate followers and fans. Then, these followers and friends can be messaged and communicated with to generate traffic back to your sites. Social networking is very powerful and shouldn’t be abused. Always remain professional and post content you think your followers and fans would benefit from, i.e. helpful tips, informative articles from trusted sources, interactive polls, and affiliate promotions. Try to avoid being annoying because you will lose followers. You should also have a main personal identity that you can maintain in order to network professionally and with actual friends and business associates.

Coupon Sites – Coupon sites are all the rage because people are looking for coupons to save money with retail merchants. Many affiliate merchants provide coupon codes to affiliate to help them promote. Some merchants provide coupon feeds that you can grab and publish on your site on a page or per merchant. You need some skills or tools to accomplish this. Posting unique merchant descriptions and merchant reviews will allow your site to rank well because it has unique content and isn’t just posting coupon codes. Unique content is absolutely essentially to good rankings, especially for a coupon site when there is so much competition and possible duplicate content.

Communities and Forums – Launching your own social communities is great way to build something real and substantial that will grow over time. Social communities are great for repeat traffic and building a large member base. Like sites, the larger it builds the more traffic it can generate. Ning.com is a tremendous free tool for niche community building. Vbulletin for forums.

Link Building Strategies – Acquiring inbound inks to your sites is essential to building better search engine rankings over time. There are many different ways you can get links to your site, such as:
- Blog roll links – when a fellow blogger links to your blog sitewide, you can reciprocate
- Blog commenting – posting comments on blogs related to yours (Google Blog Search)
- Forum posting with signature link – Join multiple forums, set-up sig links, start posting good comments

Site Stickiness – Site stickiness is a tremendous concept to grasp and implement. Making your site more sticky will allow you to capture more from your site’s traffic. Some essential sticky features are: newsletter signup, bookmark this site, follow on Twitter and FaceBook Fanpage, and RSS Feed.
RSS Feed Submissions – Every blog has by nature RSS feeds included. RSS feeds allow you to syndicate your content all over the web and into people’s feed readers. Your RSS feeds need to be manually submitted to get the best effect. Definitely check out Robin Good’s site for more excellent info on RSS and the top 200 RSS directories to submit to: masternewmedia.org

Content Ideas – Coming up with article and blog post ideas can be challenging at times. Here are some examples of article titles:
- “Top 10 ways to Find a Date Online”
- “Best Ways to Lose Weight in the New Year”
- “What are the Top Phone Service Providers for Home Phone Service”
Also how to’s, breaking news, and new product launches are good topics to write about.
Brand Your Affiliate Sites – Creating a brand with your affiliate sites is a good idea because people will remember your site and revisit them frequently. Give people a reason to bookmark your site or join your newsletter. Treat them well and grow them huge over time!

Content provided by Experience Advertising, a leading affiliate management and social media management agency.

Having great social media management in place is absolute must for any company with an online presence in this day and age. Have a really comprehensive and proactive strategy for leveraging social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook is vital to keeping up with your competitors. There are many good reason to have excellent social media managers in place including:
- Posting frequent, valuable content to your followers and fans
- Increased interaction with customers and visitors
- Capturing more site visitors and facilitating interactions
- Providing better, faster customer service
- Generating more search traffic from your social media postings
- Conducting surveys and generating valuable feedback from your customers and followers

There are many other excellent benefits to have social media managers in place. Don’t settle for less than decent social media management. Your social managers should be extremely proactive, responsive, and engaging in order to do it truly effectively. Make sure to check out Experience Advertising for your best social media management solution.

My friend and blogger Murray Newlands recently contacted me about some blog outreach he is going for the shopping deals website UrbanStone.co.uk. I have seen Murray picking up more and more blog outreach projects and decided to interview him about them.

Murray how did you get the project?
I had a meeting with the team behind UrbanStone.co.uk for another project and they had googled my name and seen my affiliate blog prior to the meeting. Once we had finished the meeting they told me about this project and asked if I could help. They saw the success of my blog and that I offered blog outreach. I always tell people, blog about what you want, the services you want to offer or the products you want to sell, so few people do that.

What is blog outreach and how you can it help?
Well firstly by contacting bloggers I know ad asking them to post about them. They want to rank for shopping deals and compare shopping prices as well as terms like freezers. In the first week I have had either write about them or commit to write about them. This part of blog outreach really is about who you know. Once people start blogging about a company people do start to come to you.

Why did you take on this project?
I saw that they have started their own blog and having spoken to the team at length they are serious about blog outreach.

So is it just about SEO?
No it is also about building traffic and buzz about the site too.

What are you looking for?
Be honest and write for your readers first, I am looking for bloggers who can build buzz about the site.
I want bloggers who have a real audience and can send traffic the only way you are going to be able to do this is if you are able to maintain your audience with quality posts.

What advice would you give to bloggers wanting to offer blog outreach?
Try and think what an advertiser is looking for from blog outreach and what their objectives are and then start working with smaller clients before moving forward.

How can bloggers contact you?
Stop by my blog and say hello or email me at mrn@(nospam)murraynewlands.com

This post promotes SponsoredTweets via their affiliate program (disclosure):

Have you heard about SponsoredTweets.com? It’s the latest way to advertiser through the Twitter platform with people who have a good Twitter following. You have to pick and choose who you want to Tweet your message and you can track the performance through links. From my initial experience with Sponsored Tweets it has been really great exposure for my campaigns. Also, I’m ready to be one of their Tweeters and make some money by Tweeting other people’s messages. I can approve or deny any requests to Tweet which is really cool. I’m completely stoked with SponsoredTweets…they have done a great job with the platform. It’s pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it. And they a really nice looking affiliate program as well. You should definitely check out and sign-up for SponsoredTweets!

Commission Junction, or CJ, is the largest of the major affiliate networks out there. If you are looking to launch a new affiliate program on CJ, or currently have one, it’s imperative that you have good affiliate managers in place. Merely having a program live on CJ is not enough to guarantee your affiliate program will perform like it should. You need excellent affiliate management in place to work with the affiliates and make sure their every need is taken care of. Proactive affiliate management is the best way to increase the affiliate participation level in the program, and therefore the revenue it produces. Having knowledgeable affiliate management help to increase sales because more affiliates have a chance of producing, once worked with. Make sure to have really good affiliate management in place when you run a CJ program to ensure your affiliate program will reach its fullest potential!

Looking for some great examples for affiliate program banners? You should check out the animated gif and Flash banner designs from Experience Advertising. Having great affiliate banners is a must for ecommerce companies looking achieve a high click-thru rate for their affiliates. These are some really great designs, so check them out!

Blog outreach involves communicating with bloggers to engage their audiences with your message. Bloggers are online influencers, and the best of them are prolific writers with a dedicated readership. Bloggers value relationships and will respond well to companies and individuals who reach out to communicate with them and do it the right way. Until recently it was innovative, at this point it is a necessary part of any ongoing marketing or public relations campaign.
Blogger outreach can be as simple as getting them to review your product or as involved as building an extended relationship with bloggers in your field that you can consistently give stories to and get feedback from.

1)Increase Sales- Good product reviews on the right blogs will lead to more sales from that blog’s readers. There are respected blogs in every field and thousands of readers who use the web to research their purchasing decisions-
2)Increase traffic- A review on a blog that ranks well in search engines is a powerful and effective way to increase search traffic. Since the reader is already online, they are just one click away from your product, a huge advantage over a product review in printed media.
3)Improve Search Engine Ranking- More links to your website will increase the search engine position of your site. This will help people find your product online directly through search engines.
4)Lead the Conversation- If you are not leading conversation in your subject area someone else will be. By reaching out to bloggers, you can start the conversation and make sure you are there to comment, respond and take part in whatever direction it goes.
5)Build Relationships- Reaching out to bloggers will help you build a relationship with the online influencers in your market- and that will add value and presence for your company in the online space.
6)Valuable Feedback- Engagement with your audience will lead to useful feedback for your company. If you are reaching out to bloggers, you will certainly get feedback from them. Even more important, you will get the extended feedback and exposure from their network through social media channels and blog comments.
7)Get the Jump on Competition- You should be building relationships with the blogging community before your competitors do. The online community knows what companies “get it” and who is good at
8)Follow Your Own Lead- If you have read this far you already know you need to do blogger outreach. You are getting guidance from a blog right now- the people you need to reach will do the same.
No matter your reason or duration, understand that blogger outreach is building a relationship. Bloggers respond well if you communicate with them as individuals, not to being on an impersonal mailing list. It’s best to learn something about their blog before contacting them and have a good idea of what they write about and their perspective.

Murray Newlands on blog outreach.

I wanted to let you all know about Experience Advertising’s new affiliate management client: pingg.com.

Just in time for the holidays, this service allows you to send ad-free
custom designed / branded eCards to your customers, suppliers etc… it also includes a branded eCard web site where you can post interactive content like photos and videos, and integrate your twitter stream etc…it’s really freakin cool. You should check it out.

I know a few people traditionally find eCards cheesy, but this is done *right*! Save a few trees, time and money, and check it out here.

Their affiliate program is available through the CJ affiliate network: https://signup.cj.com/member/brandedPublisherSignUp.do?air_refmerchantid=2838046

Thank you,
Evan

Experience Advertising has been ranked the #1 affiliate marketing company by topseos.com, an independent online marketing review website. Experience Advertising is an outsourced affiliate management agency or OPM focused on growing affiliate programs for Advertisers on the major affiliate affiliate networks. Experience Advertising manages both large and small Advertiser’s affiliate programs primarily on the Commission Junction affiliate network, but also manages programs on Linkshare, Shareasale, and Google Affiliate Network.

Experience Advertising uses personalized affiliate management techniques to connect with their affiliates to increase production. They also have a philosophy of actually doing the work for the affiliates, such as composing original content and helping launch niche sites and blogs free of charge. If you are interested in growing your affiliate program to it’s fullest potential you should definitely check out Experience Advertising.

On Page SEO: Online Marketing’s Building Blocks
2009 Update: Changes You Need To Know

Search engine optimization comes in many flavors, but marketers must think about more than on-page elements and old best practices. Good on-page SEO is only part of the solution you need to attract quality visitors to any type of site. Good SEO is the heart of online marketing. Poor on-page SEO will cause any site’s efforts to crumble in other areas.

Marketers should already know about page titles (aka title tags), alt image text and font decoration. An online marketer must be able to speak with absolute conviction about the characteristics of these and other influencers.

A wise soul described search engine optimization as a predator and prey game where the search engines show just enough about ranking factors to aid their mission, but not enough so that the results can be gamed. As search technology changes, marketers must also quickly change.

Consider these 2009 changes to on-page SEO so far:

Changes To Previous Best Practices: After an off-the-cuff (that’s how it seemed from the audience at SES San Jose 2007) remark about “no follow” links, Google announced in June that this type of “page rank sculpting” was unnecessary. And in October, Google pulled “PageRank” from its Webmaster Tools console. Why? Google says it’s a good indicator to use as a success metric any more.

Google also confirmed in September that meta keywords convey no search ranking attributes. A month later, Yahoo said the same, but then admitted a week later that it assigned a weak ranking signal for meta keywords.

To reduce duplicate content, all four major search engines agreed in February to support the “canonical” tag. Multiple ways to address the same page, including those resolved by rewrite rules or redirects can be winnowed to one “canonical” page, deemed to be the source and authoritative page.

And the fastest way for any site to be indexed, Yahoo’s Paid Inclusion program, will end in 2009.

New Partnerships: After chasing Yahoo! for a web eternity, Microsoft announced a search deal in July that would combine the #2 and #3 company’s search results. The deal is nowhere near final, but happened fast on the heels of Microsoft’s June launch of its rebranded Bing search engine in June. The new entity, quickly dubbed Microhoo, is expected to use Bing algorithms on Yahoo! properties.

New media darling Twitter cut its own deal with Microsoft and quickly announced a nearly identical deal with Google as both companies try to move into “real-time search”.

New Search Results: Google debuted six variants of search engine results pages (SERPs) in 2009, starting in January with a Timeline view that had previously only been seen in Google Labs. The largest search company followed with announcements in March of its “Vince” update that gives more weight to brands and branded terms. Google also previewed “Caffeine” in August – a jumble of traditional search results, news, video and even blog comments on the same page, but mixed together.

Google had already taken steps to assume searcher intent by starting to automatically display local results for service and product searches even if a geographical term wasn’t included in the search. Combined with the Vince/brand update, ranking nationally for generic words that brands traditionally use became extremely difficult using traditional methods.

Bing quickly countered with visual search in September, and as Google shortened its hotlist of trends to 40 terms, other companies including Twitter, Wikipedia and Bing quickly filled the void and reported on what terms were seeing the most search activity.

Title tags are important. But as an online marketer, you must stay abreast of monthly, sometimes weekly, changes in on-page SEO to enjoy continued success.

Guest Blog by Silver Beacon Marketing

These days, it seems like everyone’s either talking about how social media is the next big thing in affiliate marketing, or they’re talking about how social media just doesn’t work for traditional affiliate promotions. As a result, most of us have probably given it a try at some point. Maybe we throw together a couple of Squidoo lenses, maybe we dabble at Yahoo! Answers, or maybe we submit a few things to Digg and see if anything sticks. Regardless, most of us don’t have a clear plan and we’re not giving much thought to how social media might be different from normal ad-driven traffic.

First off, let me say this – you definitely can get affiliate sales by brute force on social media. If you blindly spam enough people and get them to your landing page, someone is bound to buy. To succeed without getting yourself banned on a daily basis, though, you’ll need a different strategy.

Frequently, you’ll hear guys like Gary Vaynerchuk and Chris Brogan talking about how the key to social media success is building relationships and fostering trust. That’s great for them, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that strategy.

The problem with relationship building is that it’s very time consuming. Those guys are heavily invested in a single area of expertise, so it makes a lot of sense for them to go all out with relationship building. What if you want to drive leads to a health insurance offer, though? Do you really want to spend months or years getting to know people and convincing them that you’re an expert? Do people even want to build relationships with an “insurance shopping expert”?

Luckily, there is another way to do things. Let’s take a moment to think about the typical mindset of someone visiting a social media site. Most of the time, they’re focused on either entertainment or getting some kind of specific information. Although people know that ads are a “necessary evil”, they generally don’t take kindly to blatantly commercial messages intruding on the areas of sites that are perceived as being ad-free (namely, in the user-generated portions of the content).

If someone is looking for tips on losing weight, they don’t want to see an shallow answer that refers them to a landing page for acai berry supplements. If they see a link labeled “The Best Way to Lower Your Auto Insurance”, they don’t want to be directed to a page for insurance quotes. If you take that approach, your accounts are going to get flagged, your content will get thumbed down or buried, and you’re probably going to spend more time trying to make sure your contributions stay up than doing anything else.

None of that means that it’s impossible to submit advertisements to social media and get the support of the community, though. What you need to do is find a way to make your message valuable to the user while still maintaining the commercial thrust. A couple of examples that you can run with or build on today:

Auto Insurance - Instead of sending users to an auto insurance landing page, make a list of auto insurance companies you work with and then do a little research about each one. Which states do they work with? What kinds of discounts do they offer? Who offers online bill-pay? Write it up as a one-page guide and then insert your affiliate link beside each company.

If you use promote insurance quote services, do the same kind of thing. Call them up and find out who they offer quotes for, what kind of privacy protection is in place, how long they’ve been in business, etc. You’re delivering real value and you’re going to be much more likely to gain the trust of your users this way.

Weight Loss Supplements – Yes, there are honest ways to promote them. Skip the flogs and instead try piecing together a brief 3 or 4 week action plan that your visitors could use. Make sure it combines exercise and healthy meals along with the supplement you hope to promote, and be sure to make it clear that you’re just a fitness enthusiast – not a doctor, trainer, or nutritionist. Sure, not many people are likely to follow through with your plan – but that doesn’t mean they won’t like the idea of taking the supplement to boost their usual regimen of Diet Coke, Doritos, and couch-warming.

Dating – Pick your niche and then thoroughly investigate the alternatives. Instead of pretending to be a real girl or just pushing users to the landing page, try creating a page that talks seriously about the benefits. I’m not saying you should make a review page – in fact, it’s best not to pass judgment unless it’s to say which ones are best for different types of people. Talk about privacy options, the number of people in different age groups, and the overall feel of the site. Is one better for older daters while another caters to the college and early 20-something crowd?

You could also take the approach of making a quiz that determines which dating site is best for you based on your personality. That way, it’s not only fun but it has some viral potential when people post the results to their profiles, too.

Basically, the idea here is to create the kind of page you’d want to browse. You don’t have to fill a site with 80 articles to add value when it comes to social media – a single page that fills someone’s need will do the trick.