Whether you personally use Twitter or not, the way the internet is evolving means you should at a minimum be registering your blog’s name on Twitter and publishing a link to your posts there.   This is not only smart business and can leverage additional traffic, but it can also save you a lot of headaches in the future.  

If you are wondering why this is so important for someone who may not use Twitter, here are a few important reasons:

1. Generates Traffic – There are many people who rarely check their RSS feeds these days, but they will follow your website on Twitter.   I don’t know that Twitter will ever completely replace the RSS feed, but for many individuals it already has (myself included for the most part).   There are others who will retweet your updates and fetch you additional traffic as well.   By not offering your content on Twitter, you are losing exposure for your website/blog.  
2. Brand Recognition – It is reasonable for someone to believe that if they go to twitter.com/yourwebsitename that they will see your website.  If they don’t, they may have trouble finding your tweets. 
3. Prevents Impersonation – Because many people were late to the Twitter party, there are millions of accounts which are “parked” where someone saves the name with the intention of selling it at some point (there are already services setup where people can buy/sell Twitter accounts).  That is the best case scenario.   We are currently dealing with someone who has our Twitter account (that matches our domain name) and is impersonating that website with it.   We now have no control over the brand until we can get Twitter to turn the account over to us.

Those of course are the major reasons, but I’m sure there are plenty of other options.   If you haven’t already, go out and sign up for the corresponding account of each of your web properties to be sure you have control over your name and your followers have access to your content!   I currently manage 16 different Twitter accounts and use Seesmic Desktop (free desktop software) to easily manage them all!

Note: If you’d like to follow Slick Affiliate via Twitter, you can find our Twitter account here, and you can also follow my personal Twitter account here!

Have a keyword where you have one of the top search engine rankings for, only to have someone came out of nowhere to outrank you?  With few exceptions, websites don’t jump 5-10 spots overnight without some help, so I always get suspicious.   This happened to me recently, so I figured I’d share how to recognize why this happens and what you can do to prevent it!  

For those unfamiliar with black hat SEO techniques, “black hat” is a term commonly used to describe SEO techniques that aren’t allowed by Google or other search engines.  Common black hat techniques include hidden text or links (an example would be making words white while on a white background so they can’t be seen by readers, but search engines see them), misleading or repeated words, cloaked pages, deceptive redirects, doorway pages, etc. 

On the flip side, there are “white hat” SEO techniques which are approved or allowed techniques that are encouraged by search engines.  Examples include sitemaps, meta tags, and of course optimizing your websites structure (header tags in the right spots, breadcrumbs, etc.) so search engines can read your entire site and figure out what exactly your site is about. 

I am fortunate in that I’ve got a few different highly competitive keywords where my sites have top rankings in.   While doing my standard review of my rankings (at least bi-weekly) for these keywords, I noticed a website had come out of nowhere and was now ranked higher than my site!   

After my surprise subsided, I began researching this site (which is an established site, but never ranked very highly before) and noticed that the footer of their theme had some links for the three most prominent keywords within this niche.   Thing is, they were hidden using CSS, so they couldn’t be seen by human readers. 

This is the kind of thing that Google wants to avoid, so being the Google fanboy that I am, I went ahead and reported the spam to Google.   This is my third time doing this, but the first time the spam affected me directly.   The other two times I just discovered it on accident so I reported it.

I’ve always been a big fan of Unique Blog Designs work.  In fact, I’m such a big fan that I have been considering commissioning them to build a 100% custom theme for an important website/blog I am in the process of building.  It is a site that will probably define my online over the coming months/years, so I think doing so could be a great investment.

If you like their work, you may want to check out their 1 year anniversary contest they are running throughout the weekend.    All you have to do is leave a comment on their post to earn a point, then blog about the contest to get another 5 points.   The lucky winner will receive an iPod Touch and a free copy of their new Citrus theme, which is going to be released in the next couple of weeks ($99.00 value I believe).

One cool thing about internet marketing and advertising is that it is always growing, changing, and adapting based off advertisers needs and the latest technology.  If you follow new technology pretty closely, you might have noticed a new type of advertising which was specifically designed to attract your readers attention.   I, of course, am talking about non other than Peel Away Ads.   Though Peel Away Ads is not designed specifically for WordPress blogs, it works great on WordPress and you’ve probably seen many of the top bloggers using it on their blogs with great success.

Basically what Peel Away Ads is designed to do is draw a readers attention to the top right corner of your blog, then when someone clicks on it, they are shown your advertisement.   I’m sure you can imagine the possibilities for this, ranging from promoting your affiliates to actually promoting internal pages of your website.   If you are an affiliate marketer and want to use this as a strategy on your landing pages, you could do that as well, even if you aren’t using WordPress!

Obviously there are a lot of reasons to love Peel Away Ads, but probably the best is the price!   Right now it only costs $37.00 and comes with a money back guarantee, making it a no-risk purchase.

In my last post, I introduced you to one of my new sites, Iowa Guide, which was built using WordPress.    I’ve found whether I’m making a simple affiliate landing page, a static website, a content management system, or of course a blog, that WordPress is usually the best way to go.   Between the themes and plugins available, it is pretty quick and easy to get a site up and running in little to no time.

Okay, so I told you I picked up the City Revolution theme and set off to work.   After about a week of writing off and on for the site, I noticed I had a LOT of content, most of which can be found on WordPress pages.   That was the easy part since it was a local GEO domain and I didn’t have to research much to create the content!

Once you’ve got your content in place, the next step is usually to monetize the website.   The first thing I did was research payout percentages on affiliates.   In the case of Iowa Guide, I knew that these travel companies compete pretty heavily for affiliates, so I decided to start there.  Between Priceline, Expedia, and Travelocity, I had three good choices, but I ended up going with Priceline because they were able to build a page directly into my website (sort of).  This way visitors would be able to browse for discount hotel rooms from what appeared to be within my site.  You can check out the Iowa Hotels page and probably not tell that it is actually hosted on Priceline’s servers, because it was built around my site’s layout, including my menu.

With Priceline, I was also able to get affiliate links for their airline and car rental services, but at this time these links will take readers over to their site to search.   Hopefully someday I can do the same for both airlines and car rentals.

Once that was done, I then spent some time looking for other affiliate opportunities and found companies such as Ticketmaster and StubHub for people looking for sporting events and concert tickets.

Once the site is setup, or at least looking respectable, you can then start your campaigns to make some sales.   The travel industry is an expensive one to compete in, but the payouts are huge if you find a good niche.   Currently I’m using PPC to generate additional traffic, then attempting to funnel it to a Hotels page which helps make the sale, then send readers to the hotel page that Priceline built.   I am also going to be adding a post or two each week to grow the sites presence in the search engines and remind Google that the site is active.

Since I can’t really share my niche sites with my readers, and I’ve covered most of the basic affiliate marketing strategies that I wanted to talk about, I figured instead why don’t I provide you with an actual example of a site I’ve been working on.  This of course is not a niche site, but instead an actual website I’ve developed.

While finishing my WordPress eBook over the past few weeks, I’ve also been throwing together a new informational/reference website named Iowa Guide, which is in the process of being monetized with affiliate marketing.

Probably the first thing you’ll notice when visiting the website is the incredible logo (courtesy of Mark) and the beautiful theme it uses (at least in my opinion).  Recently Brian Gardner released a new City Revolution theme which was designed specifically for these types of portal websites.   One of my favorite things about this theme is that it contains a drop-down menu for both the pages and the categories, which isn’t something you see very often.  It also does a great job of maximizing screen real estate, which is something I really appreciate.

Why I picked this domain? I am fortunate to own a number of GEO domain names in both the dot com and dot org extension.   As someone that is located in Iowa, I felt why not start with developing one from Iowa?  I already know my way around pretty well, and live near most of the states attractions and other things I’d want to write about.  Besides, now if I were to visit a restaurant, hotel, or other landmark and then write a review of it, that is a business expense!! 

For this particular domain, I was unable to obtain the dot com extension, but I’ve found that with Geography-based domain names, sometimes you have an advantage with dot org.   Dot org has developed a strong trust with internet users because it is traditionally used to house non-profit organizations.  With dot org, readers feel more trustful because org domains are typically informational and usually aren’t trying to sell you something.

In my next post, I’ll be talking about how I’m monetizing this domain name with affiliate marketing.