I’m very excited to invite everyone in Affiliate Marketing and Digital Marketing industries to the Performance Marketing Expo which will be taking place September 27th-29th in Miami Beach! I have been asked to help promote the event and my company will also be sponsoring the event. You can check out their site here: http://bit.ly/crXyEI

They are looking for speakers, sponsors, exhibitors, and of course attendees. The sessions will be completely amazing and all the speakers will be hand selected from experts in the industry. There will be at least 30 bone-fide Super-Affiliates in attendance (they are flying in), plus hundreds of hungry and eager mid-level affiliates, so you are sure to meet some big whale affiliates and publishers. This event will be heavily oriented on networking, so bring all your business cards and get ready to do some business!

We have launched a social network for the event, which is already exploding with members, so come and do some business there:

http://bit.ly/bI5h4x

Thank you for being in the Linked Affiliate group! I hope you are able to come down to Florida and attend this great event with me!

Again here is their site where you can learn more: http://bit.ly/crXyEI

I recently conducted a round-table discussion at Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas. It was really great and I was very pleased with the turn-out.
Here is the content from my presentation:
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 actually 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 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.

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: www.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!

Adtech New York is always a great time, with lots of cool, innovative people to meet. Networking is a skill that should get better with time, and Adtech is a great place to practice your networking skills. But is conference networking something you do entirely for selfish purposes? I don’t thing it should be. When you go to a big internet marketing convention like Adtech, you should go to have a fun and meet business connection. Some people are more serious about getting business out of it and some people are more concerned with partying it up. I think you should land somewhere in the middle. I absolutely think everyone should go and take it serious and not slack in trying to meet people and exchange business cards. However, most of the business deals get done at the hotel bars. The parties and night clubs aren’t really that great, because a lot of times you don’t know that many people that actually make it there and it gets old really quick. You can sometimes find your self in an interesting discussion or 2 so I think the evening function have some potential.

ADtech is primarily a search engine and performance based marketing show. There are many “SEO companies” and affiliate networks that are vying for all the potential clients in attendance. I don’t even stop at SEO company booths because I already have SEO and PPC experience and don’t need their services. Sometimes it is interesting to hear their pitches and play along for a bit. Meeting people at the show is all what you put into it. If you aren’t afraid to just introduce yourself to someone standing next to you, you can really make some great contacts and even some friends. So make sure to go to this years Adtech NewYork, look for me..I’ll be there!

I have been attending Internet marketing and affiliate marketing conferences for years and I am always lets feeling that I wasn’t able to really maximize my time there. Which for me means learning new concepts and ideas, as well as networking with other people in the internet industry to conduct “business development”. I really see a huge need for a really awesome Internet Marketing and Affiliate Conference that blows all the others away. Most of the affiliate conferences current being held lack actual affiliates to large extent and are heavy on affiliate networks (due to the cost). I have been floating this idea around for some time now and 2008 appears to be the year we do this! Yes it will have an exhibition hall with sponsors like all the other (this pays the bills). Our conference will be extremely inexpensive if not free to all affiliates to encourage attendance. Would Affiliate Summit or Webmasterworld venture to do this? I think not. Our affiliate conference will focus primarily on seo, ppc, and affiliate methods of driving traffic. Lectures on content, linking, site building, rss, and other standard webmaster topics will be featured. Heavy focus will be on networking. We are planning to poll known super-affiliates and beginners as to what they would like the agenda to be. It looks like South Florida is a natural choice since Experience Advertising is based here, either Fort Lauderdale or South Beach. SoBe is cool because it has a lot of cool clubs and beautiful people. I will be tapping into our vast rollodex of affiliates to drive up attendence. Our conference will cater to affiliates first and foremost and not to networks. If you are interested in attending our affiliate conference you can contact me or if you have any suggestions on how to make our affiliate conference better than the rest, we are all ears! Have a great year and get out there and build some sites!