A Recap of Affiliate Summit East 2010 in New York City
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In this edition of the Affiliate Buzz audio newsletter James Martell, successful publisher, speaker and author talks with Arlene Martell as they recap their recent trip to Affiliate Summit East 2010 including some tips and tidbits they picked up from the various sessions they attended.
James and Arlene kick off sharing their adventures as they head off to Affiliate Summit on the Red Eye followed soon after by an amazing part hosted by Buy.At merchants.
Next they move right into the first morning of the event beginning with the Meat Market. Arlene shares this market was a great place to sit down and chat with visitors to their table prior to the ‘break out’ sessions that James and Arlene had an opportunity to take part in. You’ll hear more about their table at the meat market and the success they enjoyed helping other affiliates. Read the rest of this entry »
Should I Remove Widgets that Increase My Sites Load Time?
Matt Cutts: My rough answer is do what’s best for the user. That’s what’s first and foremost because that is what’s going to attract more users, more loyalty, more buzz, people linking to you, people talking about you, that’s the main thing you want to care about.
Whenever Google talked about using page speed or site speed as a relevant, possible signal in our scoring results a lot of people went too far in one direction. They thought, “Oh I have to get down my site speed. I have to take these two pieces of java script and I have to compress them together. It all needs to be in one file and everything has to be one single image load and it’s all got to be perfect.” That is good for user experience and it is important to pay attention to how fast your site loads and what the user experience is like but you don’t have to go overboard. Read the rest of this entry »
Affiliate Summit East 2010 Keynote – Jim Kukral
Affiliate Summit Co-founder Shawn Collins introduces best selling author Jim Kukral.
Is Google AdSense A Poor Second Cousin To Affiliate Programs?
I just got off a Skype call with a new affiliate who was just told by their affiliate manager that “there’s no money in Google AdSense”.
I guess it’s not surprising because Google’s AdSense program does compete directly with affiliate programs.
It also seems many feel that Google AdSense is the poor second cousin to affiliate programs. I would say that’s true for many but for others the Google AdSense program is much more like a rich old uncle. Read the rest of this entry »
How Can A Photographer’s Image Focused Site Gain PageRank?
Matt Cutts: That’s a fantastic question because Google really doesn’t understand the content of images yet. We’re getting better. We have Google Goggles that can take a picture of a landmark and recognize it as a landmark, but understanding in general what an image is, is one of the hardest problems in computer science.
The advice that I would give is look at ways you can incorporate data around the image. It could be within the meta information within the image. It can be the title. It can be the name of the image. I can be a paragraph of text around the image. It can even be characteristics of the webpage like the title of the webpage that has that image. So there are a lot of places to put text. Read the rest of this entry »
What is the Benefit of Using the Change of Address Tool in Google Webmaster Tools?
Matt Cutts: This is a really good question. Certainly you can leave the 301’s in place but there are a couple differences between the change of address for and 301 directs.
The first one and the biggest one is that the change of address form is at the site level. Whereas the 301 redirects are at the page level. So for example what if you move one directory to another directory? You can do a 301 on every page in that directory and we’d eventually learn to go to the pages in the new directory. But it can be hard to interpret whether that applies to the entire site or just to that specific directory. The change of address form very unambiguously says, “This site right here is moving to this site right here.” Read the rest of this entry »
Can A Purchased Domain’s History Affect Its Trust In Google?
Matt Cutts: Well Dave I think the answer to your question is yes. In general if you’ve had a domain for 7 months and you search for that domain, maybe even the exact url like www.example.com and it doesn’t show up in Google at all it might be safe to conclude that the site does have trust issues with Google.
Now maybe it’s a really esoteric country code, we’re having trouble finding links to it, but if you know of links pointing to the domain and we still don’t show it at all after seven months there might be something going on.
To help you figure it out let’s pretend to be a spammer. Okay, so now we’re black hats what are we going to do? We’re going to buy a domain. We’re going to use it up as much as we can until it’s totally burnt to the ground and no other search engine will trust it. Read the rest of this entry »
What Is the Best Way to Check Your Own Site for Keyword Rankings?
Matt Cutts: Okay, you’re going to get a little bit of a rant from me here. In one sense yes the band’s best answer is to do the search, scroll through, and see if you see yourself. That’s the short answer. The long answer is you really shouldn’t be doing that. That’s the wrong attitude to approach SEO. Take a different look at it.
Rather than concentrating on one specific trophy phrase or two specific trophy phrases, you should be thinking about the long tail and all the different phrases that can bring people to your website. And rather than checking how well do I rank for those, you should be looking at your server logs to see the phrases that people are already searching for and using to find your site. Read the rest of this entry »
User Generated Content – Keeping It Simple
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In this edition of the Affiliate Buzz audio newsletter James Martell, successful publisher, speaker and author talks with Arlene Martell as they discuss user generated content and how it can help your site grow naturally with minimal effort.
Arlene shares how her site has grown from a core website to thousands of pages primarily through her users. The site offers a warm environment for moms to come in and share their own stories with epilepsy, find support, and get answers to their questions.
Next James discusses different options available to webmasters who are interested in taking advantage of user generated content using free plug-ins and website content management systems such as SocialGo. Additionally James shares tips on promoting your forums and getting visitors talking and sharing information. Read the rest of this entry »
New York Locals Vinny O’hare And Deborah Carney (And Industry Veterans) Share Sightseeing Tips On Getting The Most Out Of Your Trip To Affiliate Summit East
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James Martell, president of Net Guides Publishing Inc., knows that attending industry events can literally propel your business to new heights because he’s experienced it first hand. Since attending his first event CJU back in 2002 he’s attended many dozens of events meeting up with affiliate managers and students of his trainings. James also knows that while you are in the city anyways you might as well taken some of the sites and sounds.
In this edition of Coffee Talk, James sits down with long time industry veterans and New York residents Vinny O’hare (www.VinnyfromBrooklyn.com) and Deborah Carney (www.LoxlyGallery.com) to discuss the Affiliate Summit East and how to get the most out of your trip to this world-class city. Read the rest of this entry »
