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- Social networking and microblogging service utilising instant messaging, SMS or a web interface. - Search Twitter in realtime - see what the world is doing right now.
The Performance Marketing Alliance (PMA) working group have finalized the PMA mission statement and objectives for the first year. The PMA is on schedule to launch Jan 1 and will have a booth at the Affiliate Summit west in Vegas this Jan.
PMA Mission
The Performance Marketing Alliance is the not for profit, trade association for the performance marketing industry. Our core objective is to be a catalyst for industry growth by promoting best practices, establishing guidelines and standards, and increasing awareness of the effectiveness of performance marketing.
Initial PMA Scope
· Drive membership
· Publish best practices and standards
· Coalesce issues facing the industry
· Coordinate advocacy efforts
Congratulations to Beth Kirsch and the members of the Scope group, in coming up with a concise and meaningful mission statement. The message is also well contained, and yet flexible enough to allow our future members to shape the PMA. Us marketers all know how hard that can be!
The US Patent and Trademark Office published a handful of patent applications from Google, betraying the search giant's ambition to monetize social networks.
Recent reports find 70% of online adults use social media, and a whopping 93% of online Americans expect companies to have a social media presence. But social networks have proven difficult for advertisers to monetize. If a traditional media site generates a 2% click-through rate on a good day, "on Facebook, you're lucky if you're going to get 0.3%," said CEO Jaffer Ali of online ad firm Vidsense.
Google's three proposed patents — Open Profile Content Identification, Custodian Based Content Identification, and Related Entity Content Identification — rely on language processing and other algorithmic features to locate data patterns in conversations, profiles and friend lists. If the technology is leveraged to serve better advertising, users will be more likely to click through (and ultimately purchase), reports IEEE Spectrum.
Open Profile and Custodian present a way to mine data from both a user's social networking profile, and the profile s/he is currently visiting. For example, linguistic cues or sentiments ("enjoy," "don't like," "hiking," "gardening") may be drawn from a profile that reads, "I really enjoy hiking, especially long hikes when you can camp out for a few days. Indoor activities don’t interest me at all, and I really don’t like boring outdoor activities like gardening." Based on that data, ads can be served as appropriate.
Meanwhile, Related Entity gleans data from lists of friends, or groups to which a user belongs.
CEO Hussein Fazal of agency AdParlor observed none of the patents pursue business strategies that haven't already been tried, but the language-processing and pattern-recognizing algorithms may be key to their success. For its part, Google has not disclosed the structure of its algorithms.
AnnouncementsBlogger News and IssuesBlogger Template Design SeriesBlogger TemplatesCustom DomainsCustomize your Blogger TemplateFeeds and SyndicationFree Blogger TemplatesGeneralImages Icons and BadgesLabels Categories and TagsMonetize Your BlogReaders QuestionsResourcesSEO and Blog TrafficShowcaseToolsWeekly ReviewWidgets and Add-ons" allowscriptaccess="always" height="200" width="460"> "Blogumus" is an Flash based tag cloud widget which uses scripts converted from Roy Tanck's WP Cumulus plugin for Wordpress. I fell in love with Roy's original Cumulus plugin when I saw it, and simply had to learn how to convert this for use in Blogger powered blogs. The result is the widget you can see in action at the top of this post. Hover your mouse over the Flash object to see the animation begin. In this post, I'll explain how you can add Blogumus to your own Blogger layout with ease!
Think back to your last killer ad campaign. How many sign ups did you send to the back end company? Probably thousands… and you probably made several thousands of dollars in cash during the process. Seems like good money, but you received your money while the back end company is still cashing in on those users every day! You paid the cost to acquire that lead, why not keep them around a little longer? Here’s how…
Instead of Getting Paid Once for a Lead, Get Paid Several Times Over
STEP 1: Signup to Aweber… it’s only $20 a month and it will pay for itself in the long run!
Why do you need Aweber? Simply because it’s one of the best mailing and automated systems around! Through Aweber you will build an awesome mailing list to continually up sell to your site visitors, that will keep generating money for you forever! Don’t want to spend $20 a month, there are other free mailers and autoresponders around, but Aweber gets the job done for me.
STEP 2: Create a Site / Landing Page
Instead of direct linking to your ad campaign, you should have your own landing page or site. If you already have a landing page, perfect. Instead of pushing your site visitor off to your cpa landing page, have them submit their email address first. You can keep your current site or landing page in tact, just remove the links and add in a submission form.
STEP 3: The Process
- Promotion: You can promote your cpa offer the same way you always have, whether that be ppc, social networks or organic search.
- Building Your Landing Page: If you have a cpa offer that has a landing page that sells itself, you don’t need to write much on your site. You just need to list key points and get the user to submit their email.
- Email Process: Once the user hits your landing page, the goal is to get them to submit their email. In the chart above, I show my free landing page template which explains the key points on the offer. I would then have a subscribe form on that page which tell the user to submit their email to receive “Five Quick Weight Loss Tips“, or simply to ask the user to input their info to see if they are qualified. This form would be through Aweber. After the submission of the form, the user can then be passed on to the affiliate offer, which they originally came for. Through Aweber, this is a double-opt in process. If you have an alternative mailing solution, you can increase conversions by doing single opt in, and sending the user right to the offer after they submit their info.
Not only have you now engaged the user into a process, increasing the chance they will signup for your end offer, but you now have their email address on record. Once they receive that email from Aweber to confirm their info, you can follow up to them with other related offers, or setup an auto-responder to send them an email a few days later and ask if they requested their free trial.
The opportunities here are limitless and open to any niche market. Get creative and you may find some new ways to heavily increase your ROI. Don’t let your next big ad campaign only make you money once… but forever.
I’m Rae Hoffman an Internet Maketing and SEO consultant. You may also know me by my online nickname Sugarrae. I assume you’re on this page because you want to know about me or my SEO consulting services.
I’m the Principal of Sugarrae SEO Consulting and do various types of Internet marketing; search engine optimization, viral marketing, affiliate marketing, site auditing, link development road maps and tons of other little nooks and crannies of this business. I run various affiliate and content websites – ranging from those in highly competitive to those in niche areas. I am also the owner of MFE Interactive. I fell into this industry by accident, but I couldn’t imagine ever doing anything else. As the business name might suggest, I’m also for hire, though not for sale.
I spend an insane amount of time online. Some of it reading at the forums I used to moderate (and posting) at forums and on various social media sites and most of the rest working, Facebooking, Twittering and talking on messenger (also known as the Internet water cooler). If I’m offline more than eight hours at a time, you can bet I’m speaking at a conference, sitting on a Q&A panel or hanging out with friends in various locations.
If you wound up here after listening to my radio interview on Good Karma about hiring an SEO consultant, practice what I preach and check out what the search engines have on me if you want (you can also check out my LinkedIn profile):
– Google:
Sugarrae | Rae Hoffman
– Yahoo:
Sugarrae | Rae Hoffman
– Live Search:
Sugarrae | Rae Hoffman
This is actually the newest plugin added to Marketing Pilgrim. It allows me to set up simple text files with multiple ads in each. I then reference the text files anywhere in the blog template and the plugin will rotate between the ads found in the text file. Before using this plugin, I could only offer advertisers the option to manually switch out ad creatives every 2-4 weeks.
This should already be installed for your WordPress blog, but you may need to activate it. It’s secret? It aggregates information from all Akismet users–which means it will block you from a spammer, even if they’ve never commented on your site before. The only downside? Sometime it produces false-positives, resulting in legit comments heading to spam-jail.
If you like seeing the smiling faces of Pilgrim’s writers, you can thank Author Image. If you hate seeing the smiling faces of Pilgrim’s writers, you can blame Author Image. 
If you’d like to know more information about those that fill out your blog’s contact form–like, which keywords they entered on Google to get to your blog–then you’ll want to check out Best Contact Form.
We love to reward our readers when they leave a comment. With CommentLuv, every commenter automatically has their last blog post displayed below their comment on Marketing Pilgrim.
FeedFooter has so many great uses. On MP we use it to display ads at the bottom of every RSS feed item. On other blogs I use it to place copyright information and backlinks–to try and stop spammers from scraping the feed.
Have you ever seen a 40 character URL posted on a blog, stretch across into the sidebar. Looks ugly, doesn’t it? You won’t ever see that on MP, thanks to this plugin which forces word-wrapping.
Even with Akismet, MP would still suffer from around 100 bot comments each day. When I installed Math Comment Spam protection, the number of spam comments dropped to zero. Effectively, only humans can leave a comment on MP, because even robots aren’t smart enough to figure out 7+11. Bonus: this form of comment spam protection is much easier for human commenters than those hard to read captchas!
Here at Marketing Pilgrim, we inter-link our own posts heavily. Without this plugin, we’d have dozens of trackback/pingbacks from our own blog each day. This prevents them from showing up in our comments section.
Want to de-clutter your blog’s homepage and increase click-throughs to post pages at the same time? This handy plugin automatically creates a teaser of each post on the homepage, with a link through to the full post.
I love this plugin! Not only does it automatically redirect post URLs–handy for when you click “publish” only to realize your misspelled a word in the post slug–but it also has a 301 redirect manager. How hand is that? A few months back a large email newsletter link to this blog, but had a typo in the page name. Instead of that traffic hitting a 404 error page, I was able to redirect it to the correct destination! Oh, and you should already know the SEO benefits of using this plugin.
If you’ve read this far into this post, the chances are, we have other posts that you’d love too! With this plugin, I can automatically suggest other great posts–on the same topic–that you’ll likely love.
If you care about SEO, then you should care about the TITLE of your posts and pages. I don’t always use this on posts, but for our “pages” this plugin allows me to override the TITLE that is automatically generated.
How do you get your readers to leave comments? Add this plugin and you can reward your most vocal commenters with a non-nofollowed backlink to the site of their choice. Options allow you to reset the list every day, week, or month and you can also decide how many to show. A word of warning. While this does help to kick-start the comments on your site, you WILL attract more spammers–hoping to leave comments as “Viagra” and such. You’ll need to police your list, but the plugin also allows you to filter out those commenters that abuse this plugin.
Another recent find. Smart Ads lets me auto-insert ads before and after blog posts. OK, nothing new there. However, why I love it is that it allows me to insert the ads only after a certain number of days have past. For example, we have it set to only insert ads on posts older than 20 days. That way, regular readers are not inundated with ads, while we get to monetize our archives.
I wish more blogs had this plugin installed. As a publisher, I love this plugin because I can set the defaul to automatically subscribe a commenter to receive an alert when a new comment is added. This brings them back to the conversation–btw, they can un-check the box to opt-out. As a commenter, I love seeing this option–especially if I leave a comment and would love to know if the author replies to my question/comment.
This plugin was a life-saver during our re-design. It allowed us (Admins) to view the new WordPress theme, while every other blog reader saw the existing design. The next time you test a new theme, you can do so without risking your audience see the experiment!
You do back-up your blog, right?
If you ever expect–or even if you don’t–to get on the homepage of Digg, Slashdot or some other high-traffic web site, then you’ll be glad you had this plugin installed. In brief, it caches your pages so that they load faster–which is handy when Digg sends you hundreds of visitors a second. There are lots of features and only a couple of caveats. Once a month it doesn’t play nicely with my Math Comment Spam plugin–resulting in the question and answers not matching up. Also, if you make changes to your design, you’ll have to clear the cache, in order to see the changes.
When I first installed this plugin, even I was shocked at just how often it was being used by readers. If your readers find something interesting on your site, let them email it to a friend or co-worker–you might just get another loyal reader/subscriiber!
There are lots of “share this” plugins available. You know, the ones that allow your readers to submit a post to Digg or StumbleUpon. I’ve used this one for years, but it doesn’t matter which flavor you use, just use it!
OK, now your turn. Why not share the love by leaving a link to your favorite WordPress plugin? C’mon spill the beans on that one plugin you think gives your blog an advantage.
Looking for the perfect domain name? Use Dot-o-mator to create potential names, or use the Web 2.0 name generator for some random names. How it works: Enter some prefix words in the left box, and suffixes in the right box (Or choose one of the word lists below each field). Then click "Combine". Dot-o-mator will assemble every combination of the words into the results box; click "Check Availability" to see if any of them are available. If you find one you'd like to save, click on the name to add it to your scratchboard.
There is a max of 15 words in the prefix and suffix boxes (so as not to overwhelm the bulk lookup tool).
The following is a transcript of an interview conducted by Jeff Molander of Molander & Associates Inc., with affiliate marketing veteran, David Delisle (pictured left) which set out to answer this question. (Also a Get Elastic exclusive):
Advertisers seem increasingly weary of affiliates of all sizes, shapes and colors. Yet the black eye affiliate marketing has earned itself isn’t holding some advertisers back. There are a select few who are bucking the trend – aggressively investing in and expanding their affiliate marketing channel.
Facebook and Twitter have shuttered "several weeks of serious talks" in which Facebook tried buying the microblogging service for $500 million worth of its own stock.
The news was broken by Kara Swisher of All Things Digital. Rumors of Facebook's interest in Twitter first surfaced at the Web 2.0 Summit several weeks ago.
While the idea was dismissed by speculators at the time, it turns out Twitter and Facebook execs were just wrapping up discussions of a potential buyout. Talks were reportedly initiated by Facebook in mid-October.
According to Swisher, discussions dissolved after concerns about integration and related costs were left without a resolution. Twitter was also skeptical about the actual value of $500 million of Facebook stock, pointing to the social network's $5 billion valuation — which would value the offer at $150 million, decidedly too low — and demanding cash in lieu of stock.
At the Web 2.0 Summit, CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissed reports that Facebook is strapped for cash and may require VC funding. The company lost a co-founder in October — the type of news that always sparks speculation about the prospects of a once-promising startup.
Meanwhile, Twitter oscillates between traffic growth and financial stagnation. It racked up 343% in year-over-year audience growth, making it one of the fastest-growing social networks online.
But despite its popularity with both high-profile influencers and brands, the site has failed to monetize its business model. Last week it began toying with the idea of charging companies that use it for customer feedback or troubleshooting.
Twitter lost its chief architect, Blaine Cook, in late April. In June, Amazon's Jeff Bezos infused the site with much-needed cash to update its infrastructure.
Easily incorporate datafeeds into your Wordpress blogs…
Finally! Gone are the days of cumbersome flat file (text and spreadsheet datafeed) manipulation and sharing of 4th click revenues with datafeed services… Datafeedr has arrived. HURRAY! Can you tell that I’m excited about this?
Datafeedr by Stefan Everaet and Eric Busch is a slick new solution for Wordpress bloggers who want to easily incorporate merchant product datafeeds into their Wordpress blogs. You can check out the features and benefits here or watch a video on Stefan’s site that shows him installing a multiple-merchant, multiple network store on a new blog. Just the thought of not having to mess around with missing or sloppy datafeed categorization makes this a ‘must-see’.
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