Beyond Affiliate Marketing

It's not enough to be a great affiliate marketer. As the online equivalent of the wild west of the early 2000s becomes more and more colonised, affiliate marketers are feeling the pinch. Sites are being penalised or thrown off Google, PPC costs are through the roof and just try to promote something on social media without being reported for being a spammer!

It's time to move beyond affiliate marketing and build a business where you're in control of the income stream.

Affiliate marketers already have a huge piece of the puzzle in place. Maybe you just need a little nudge to take some action that could drastically improve your income and security.

There are a lot of business models where you can utilise your skills. Do some work for local businesses in your area. Heck make your own product. Just do something proactive before the previous waterfall of your affiliate income diminishes into a slow drizzle.

Read more here: http://ping.fm/Sb9vA

Facebook EdgeRank Explained

The likelihood of a status update, photo, video, etc showing up in your news feed depends on three things:

Your relationship with the person or page doing the sharing, the type of interaction or content shared and the recency of the shared content or interaction.

You can improve the visibility of your page's updates by encouraging interaction over a long term. The more people interact with your posts, the greater the likelihood that they and others will see them in the future.

See the rest here: http://ping.fm/5YMWV

Improve Your Internal Linking

Many people don't spend time linking their posts or pages together on the same website. Your visitors will appreciate a more interconnected website and the search engines sure will too!

Don't overdo it, but make sure when you write new posts to link them to old ones if appropriate.

Take some time right now to go through some of your older posts, particularly popular ones, and if you've explained anything better or explored it deeper, link to the newer article from the old.

You may even get some ideas for new posts by going through this process and realising you haven't covered some things very well. Or perhaps with time you have increased your understanding of concepts you talked about previously.

Read more: http://ping.fm/vZz9t

Personalised Search Engine Rankings

If you see that your site is ranking really highly for your search terms, before you tell all your friends how clever you are, you might want to read this article: http://ping.fm/pYxja - it could save you a lot of embarrassment!

How To Use The Meta Description

This is something that often trips people up. Either they stress over every tiny detail of it, or they completely ignore it.

The best way is to think of it like the advertising copy for your search engine listing. Keep it under 155 characters and make sure to write in a way that entices the searcher to click through to your website.

More best practices: http://ping.fm/zhSwV

Google's Search Plus Your World Masterstroke

A few days ago, Google announced the rollout of Search Plus Your World where private information on Google+ as well as other Google+ posts would be integrated into Google search for logged in users.

Good thing or bad thing? Lots of people are quite upset about it, which is fair enough. Unfortunately, it's a step Google had to take to remain competitive and even take ground off Facebook & Microsoft.

Think about it - if you were planning a trip to the beach, wouldn't you want to see your friends' recommendations? It's little things like that which could easily tip the fickle public's attention from Facebook to Google+.

Read more: http://ping.fm/rRt6M

Build Your Ranking Power

One of the best things you can do to build the online component of your business is to regularly write useful, well researched articles. Encourage people to share your articles, but don't be shy in promoting your work across the interwebs.

You'll have to do most of your work yourself, but if you stick with it, the rewards will pay off big time in the future. A powerful website allows you to easily rank well for new search terms. Then when anyone is doing research for their articles, they'll find what you've written and reference it. This in turn builds upon the strength your site already has and creates an endless strengthening spiral, allowing you to do whatever you want with your site. Maybe promote one (or more) of your products, sell a friends on a joint venture, promote as an affiliate, engage people with your brand, whatever is the goal of your online presence.

Read more here: http://ping.fm/T4Zhc

Time To Increase Your Blogging

The best way, hands down, to build your online market leadership is through blogging.

But for some reason, a lot of business owners would prefer to sleep on a bed of nails than write a blog.

A blog is just a collection of articles sorted chronologically that you add to on a regular basis. Weekly posting is best if you're just starting, but the more regularly you post, the better.

You don't have to be Shakespeare. But if you're an expert in your field it should be easy for you to write a post and publish it in under 90 minutes.

Do that once a week and you'll reap significant rewards.

See more here: http://ping.fm/V2Dcz

Top 3 Twitter Tips

1. Use a 3rd party application like hootsuite, echofon or tweetdeck

2. Engage in the conversation

3. Make full use of lists

Read more: http://ping.fm/g7QLF

When To Use Your Facebook Profile Or Page

The easy way to remember it is profiles are for friends, pages are for business.

For best enjoyment of your Facebook profile, keep to less than 230 friends. There's some sound social psychology behind that, but check out http://ping.fm/LqHJe for a full rundown.

Your page should be to communicate the doings of your business to your customers and prospects. Build the relationship on Facebook and move the conversation to your website.

How To Make A Facebook Page

If you own or run a business of any size or type, you need to have a Facebook Page. Your customers are all on Facebook, so meeting them where they're at requires you building and maintaining the Page.

It's really easy to setup and you don't even need a Facebook Profile.

Go to http://ping.fm/cptCL choose your business type and follow the prompts. You'll have to confirm your email address if you don't have a Facebook Profile, but otherwise it's a piece of cake.

Put in a profile picture and go through your settings to make sure they are how you want.

Finally, go to http://ping.fm/DFS86 and get a pretty url. Choose wisely because you can't change it once it's set.

Full instructions and recommended settings at http://ping.fm/uV1Or

Rich Snippets For Local Businesses

Rich snippets are structured markup that enhance search engines' understanding of your site. Things that are obvious to us, like a street address being related to the business name above and phone number below, aren't so obvious to the search engines.

They can usually figure it out, but why would you want them to when it's so easy to just tell them and get it right?

Get the code for doing your own business formatting at: http://ping.fm/oAYyz

If you run a restaurant, travel or hotel type business, rich snippets can really enhance the look of your search engine listing, with stars, pictures, reviews, etc. Other local business owners could potentially use rich snippets to display their best products within the search engine listing.

This is something that could really give you an edge over your competitors.

Start Building Your Online Presence

If you're new to the online space, it might all be a little overwhelming.

Here's how I would start if I was in your position: http://ping.fm/WN2r0

Stay Safe On Social Media

A lot of people are leaving themselves open to identity theft by carelessly giving out their information on social networking sites.

Don't post your phone number to Facebook Phone Number Events, only post the absolute minimum information online and be careful about giving away your current location in status updates.

For a deeper explanation of these and a number of other tips on keeping safe on social media, see: http://ping.fm/A4hzx

Inbound SEO Link Building

Most people don't get the success with SEO that they deserve simply because they underestimate how long it takes to do properly. A lot of work goes into it, day in, day out.

Most of that work revolves around building links to your site. I'm talking around 90% of SEO work is link building. Seriously.

The best way to get great quality links to your site is through guest posting.

After that you have squidoo and hubpages for some great communities. Really get involved and build a community there.

Next is the stronger article directories like Ezine Articles, iSnare & Buzzle. Pick one and build out a strong profile of great articles there, each linking back to your site in the resource box.

Finally, build links to your links, strengthening the whole network and creating an impenetrable moat around your rankings.

Go out and post some more links :)

See more here: http://seoperth.net.au/seo-link-building/

Thoughts on Search Engine Optimisation for 2012

2011 was the year that quality content really came to the forefront of search engine ranking. It also laid the groundwork for a huge year in 2012 for social media integration into SEO.

Going forward, I don't think you can have social without SEO and vice versa. Integration of both is key and I think you'll see a lot more tools for managing and tracking social media this year.

SEO is still vitally important for many businesses, but there is a huge shift happening in how it's being done. Predictably, the spam approach employed by many businesses is being discounted at an ever increasing rate.

Good SEO practices are more important than ever before. There are still plenty of loopholes, but they are quickly being closed.

Read more: http://ping.fm/tnIs8