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Affiliate Convention Delegate Breakdown

The upcoming affiliate marketing conference, Affiliate Convention has released a several charts giving a detailed breakdown of exactly who is attending Affiliate Convention, where they come from, what they do and the promotion techniques they use to do it. The charts give an interesting glimpse into the make-up of the affiliate marketing industry.

The Delegate Breakdown Page on the Affiliate Convention website shows that 60% of all people who have registered to attend the affiliate marketing conference, June 17-20 in Denver Colorado, are working affiliate marketers. 10% come from affiliate networks, 9% are affiliate managers, 8% work for agencies, and 6% are merchants. The remaining 6% are sponsors, media, organizers and guests.

Attendance appears to be spread fairly evenly among segments of the affiliate marketing industry. The largest vertical sector represented will be diet, health and beauty (9%), followed by dating and finance (both around 7%), business (6%) and travel (5%).

Primary promotion tactics and techniques are fairly evenly distributed among registered attendees with 20% saying search engine optimization is their primary means of promotion, 19% identifying pay per click advertising, 16% saying blogs are their main promotion vehicles and 14% suggesting they use social networking or viral marketing techniques.

Information gained from registered attendees confirms the choices made by organizers when selecting speakers. There will be several sessions with well known SEO and PPC experts on them, along with a session devoted to social network affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Convention runs June 17 – 20 at the Denver Convention Center. The conference is free for all affiliate marketers who can prove they are working with a major affiliate network. Admission is also free to all members of the popular AffSpot Affiliate Forums.

Tweet No Tears for Old Media Biases

Maureen Dowd landed an interview many tech writers would give their eye teeth for. Yesterday, Ms. Dowd, a regularly featured opinion columnist for the New York Times, published the results of an interview with Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone. Unfortunately she flubbed it, or perhaps more appropriately, her clearly biased approach to the medium produced a whale of a fail.

During the interview, Ms. Dowd seemed at times frustrated by the terse and sometimes smart-assed answers given by Williams and Stone. In other places, she seemed to miss their points on purpose. What was clear reading the interview was her fear of the future of her profession, a fear she misdirected towards the two Twitter founders. That fear was apparent from the first lines of her column which invoked the legendary British horror director Alfred Hitchcock,

“Alfred Hitchcock would have loved the Twitter headquarters here. Birds gathering everywhere, painted on the wall in flocks, perched on the coffee table, stitched on pillows and framed on the wall with a thought bubble asking employees to please tidy up after themselves.”

The mention was a droll nod to one of Hitchcock’s masterworks, “The Birds”, a horror film about a small town invaded by endless flocks of psychotic winged killers. Using the reference, she showed the depth of the siege mentality that has taken over the masters of traditional media as their revenues are overtaken by the emergence of new media and the increasing pace of defection among readers and advertisers.

Her premise for the interview revealed a bit more about her bias and a lot more about her attitude towards the newly empowered Tweetering class.

“I was here on a simple quest: curious to know if the inventors of Twitter were as annoying as their invention. (They’re not. They’re charming.)

I sat down with Biz Stone, 35, and Evan Williams, 37, and asked them to justify themselves.”

Twitter has taken mainstream America by storm over the past few days riding on a wave which has been building for almost six months. When the reigning queen of American mass market taste Oprah Winfrey made her first Tweet on TV earlier this week, the extraordinary mini-blog/instant messaging application received an endorsement that pushes even the most mediocre actor, writer or in this case, killer-app towards mega-stardom and success.

Ms. Dowd seems happier than an un-caged bird to try to lead a backlash against that success. Luckily, Evan Williams and Biz Stone were willing to show their own annoyance while answering her leading and sometimes silly questions.

“ME (Dowd): Is there any thought that doesn’t need to be published?
BIZ: The one I’m thinking right now.”

Ms. Dowd continued to push at Stone and Williams, even to the point of accusing them of attempting to destroy civilization,

“ME: Was there anything in your childhood that led you to want to destroy civilization as we know it?
BIZ: You mean enhance civilization, make it even better?”

Throughout the interview, Ms. Dowd continues to try to trip her subjects into saying something careless or stupid. Instead of trying to learn more about the technology and its applications, she tried to trivialize her subject and its inventors. What emerges amounts to a sad commentary that is more based in bias than the clarity her curiosity usually produces. Ironically, Twitter might actually be a saving grace for newspapers, at least for the the less profitable but far more accessible online versions.

Brent D. Payne, the Director of Search Engine Optimization for the Tribune Company has been one of those in the forefront of smart use of Twitter to draw readers to nearly 60 websites owned and operated by the Tribune Company. Similarly, Marshall Simmons, the SEO for Ms. Dowd’s employer, The New York Times, uses Twitter to push and promote stories from the NYTimes and associated newspapers.

Towards the end of the interview, Ms. Dowd remains unconvinced of any benefits she or her industry might derive from Twitter. That’s unfortunate and the state of traditional media might well be summed up by the last volley of question and answer between her and Biz Stone,

“ME: I would rather be tied up to stakes in the Kalahari Desert, have honey poured over me and red ants eat out my eyes than open a Twitter account. Is there anything you can say to change my mind?
BIZ: Well, when you do find yourself in that position, you’re gonna want Twitter. You might want to type out the message “Help.””

While we remain wary of a perceived decline in print journalism, we shed no tears for old media bias.

Dan Thies on SEO101, 5PM EDT Monday April 13

The legendary Dan Thies joins SEO101 hosts Ross Dunn and Eric Lander today at 5:00PM(EDT) on WebmasterRadio.FM.

Dan has been involved in search engine optimization and digital marketing for over a decade. He is one of the pioneers of the field and one of the true innovators. Ross and Eric will be discussing the enormous field of keyword research with Dan.

Join SEO101 on WebmasterRadio.FM each Monday at 5PM or download a podcast on-demand from the SEO101 archives or iTunes.

Search Marketing Reset

dyeing – the use of dye to change the color of something permanently
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

The practice of SEO is dyeing. It’s not dead, not by a long shot, however the meteoric advance of alternative marketing channels on the Internet has fundamentally altered the way SEOs are thinking about web marketing.

The Internet and the World Wide Web are different things. The ‘net is the super-conduit upon which the super-highway of the Web is built. In the very near future, the Web we’ve become used to using might well seem as arcane as an AOL disc, at least in the way we use it.

It all happened so quickly. A year ago while we were wondering what would happen to Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter were meeting the mainstream. Neither had become the behemoths both appear to be becoming but social media marketers were taking notes and making names. Today, Facebook and Twitter can, in some cases, drive more traffic to a page or site than Google does.

Social media is not the only new game in town. In fact, amongst serious digital marketing gurus, social media is starting to feel a bit old. Two trend-lines are worth watching in the coming months, both of which combine social media, search and, most importantly, content that the bulk of entertainment starved consumers want to consume.

The first involves getting and delivering information and entertainment, the second involves the devices we receive that information on. To say everything is about to change would be saying something trite and after the fact. We’re well into the midst of that change. Ask any print publisher, television producer or commercial actor. Given the economic conditions under which the old-media business model is breathing its last breathes, that change is happening in a most happenstance fashion.

In the not-so-distant past, information and entertainment used to be found, disseminated and written by professionals, that is, people paid to find, compile and write it to relatively high standards. The mechanisms for getting that content to the reading, listening and viewing audience were expensive and labor intensive, requiring vast sums of capital investment.

That capital was supplied by advertising and since each traditional medium reached a predominantly local audience, advertisers had good reasons to spend monies sustaining those professional operations. As long as there was a local reading, listening and viewing audience, the advertisers had good reason to spend their money. News might be regional, national or international in nature but at the end of the equation, all ads were targeted at the locals.

Today the predominant medium is by its very nature international in its scope and reach. The narrow local funnel that gave the traditional media a stranglehold on power is gone and with it went control of the advertising monies that sustained it. Now, virtually anyone can post information regardless of training, intention or veracity. Where few outlets reached a specific local audience, now hundreds or even thousands publish to those markets. Ad values have therefore declined as there are far more places advertise.
This phenomenon is most pronounced around television. The last few years have not been kind to television. Ad revenues plummeted while consumers are now spending as much time on the Internet as they are watching television. New programming is prohibitively expensive and advertising monies are no longer there to provide economic backfill. That’s why we have reality TV. It’s cheaper to produce and market than fantasy based sitcoms or dramas are. How TV programming is to be produced in the coming years remains an open question.

For digital content creators and distributors, the big problem with the picture is that online advertising makes far less money per ad than advertising in traditional media does. No amount of targeted advertising can make up for the seriousness of this shortfall and, because the Internet has fundamentally destroyed the funnel of locality, there are few options for the traditional media business model. That means there are now fewer professional content creators capable of compiling better than average information and entertainment options for consumers.

How consumers will watch TV or view other information is not in question. The positive trend line here is that consumers are increasingly turning to the Internet for access to entertainment. Firms like Netflix and Hulu are becoming defacto television broadcasters by replaying TV shows on demand. Similarly, daily newspapers are starved for revenues while their digital versions are now seeing more visitors than their print versions are seeing readers. Terrestrial radio is shrinking, in part because of corporate conglomeration and in part because of declining ad revenues. At the same time, online radio and podcast networks are starting to thrive.

The breakdown in profitability for mainstream content vehicles is being mirrored by a second consumer revolution, that of portability. Fifty years ago, computing devices stood in large rooms. This morning I am typing on my large but relatively compact laptop computer, the same one I am going to pack up and take to the office in an hour or so. If I get bored on the way to work, I can watch an American AM news show, listen to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation or tune in to WebmasterRadio.FM on my cell phone while in transit. While not nearly as profitable, information is more portable than ever.

With more consumers increasingly accessing media using portable devices, more media is being made for portable devices. If, as Canadian intellectual Marshall McLuhan postulated in 1964, the medium is the message, consumers of digital information will be overly stimulated by ever shrinking devices with content created specifically for those devices. A similar quote from McLuhan in 1967 suggested that going beyond message, each medium was also a massage in that the different devices we use to consume information create a sensual bond between medium and consumer. Think about the smell of an old book, the tactile feel of newsprint or the comforting click of the keyboard. Each medium makes its user feel something and that feeling has an effect on their understanding and comprehension of the content.

These changes might or might not be good for a democratic society built on the free flow of information. The pendulum swings both ways. In some cases, as with the 2008 presidential election, digital media can be used to inform and to misinform. It can be used to reach extraordinary numbers of people or abused to find and flog untruthful statements about an opponent. In the near future, it will be far harder for professional journalists to find employers able to pay them to gather and disseminate news. At the same time, it is far simpler for common people to post information to the masses on blogs, through Twitter or on video via YouTube.

Marketers need to be where the eyes are. The purpose to marketing is to pass messages to prospective consumers and where the consumers go, the marketers must follow. For the first time in modern advertising history, the dog is actually wagging the tail, not the other way around. So what does that mean for the practice of SEO? It means SEOs need to learn to use the emerging venues as marketing tools.

The transfer of user habits from the broadsheet of newsprint and the broadcast of terrestrial radio or television to the interest-cast of the Internet has been astounding from a socio-economic perspective. Everything about our society has changed because of the ways we ingest and interpret information. That change is far from over but we are far past any point of thinking about the ways media worked in the olden days. In my own decade long digital marketing career, this is the fourth epoch of amazing change. Change is good but the rapidity of change is daunting. For old-school marketers, such change is terrifying. For emerging digital marketers, such change is challenging but also a bit frightening. It will be most interesting to watch the outcome of this short era as eyeballs move from Google search results to social media and the newer digital versions of old-school media.

Martin Bowling Sentenced to Three Years for Computer Fraud

Search marketing wizard Martin Bowling was sentenced to three years in a West Virginia state prison for computer fraud after confessing his use of stolen credit card numbers for personal purchases. The items, which included cigars, works of art and movie tickets, were primarily purchased online.

According to a report in the Charleston Gazette, Bowling plead guilty to using stolen credit cards to spend approximately $4490 on cigars, posters, a home brew beer making kit, kitchen utensils and electronics, an Xbox, Victoria’s Secret merchandise, a hard drive, a Zune and a self-cleaning cat litter box.

Bowling was chief technical officer for Comar Inc., a manufacturer of medial and pharmaceutical supplies. He was aslo chief technical officer for the Cross Lanes WV search marketing firm, VEC3.

He is probably best known in the web marketing community as a conference speaker, writer, software developer and, ironically, as a reputation management specialist.

Bowling developed the Zi.ma website address shortening application which is extremely popular with Twitter users. (Zi.ma is now redirected to TinyURL.)  He was also very well known on Twitter with over 1300 followers. Very few people in the industry were aware of his legal problems and nobody knew the extent of them. Stunned coworkers also knew little to nothing about his trial or pending sentencing.

Court documents suggest that Bowling accessed the subscriber database of a company he used to work for, Woodcraft Magazine, in order to get the names and card numbers of at least five American Express cardholders. No mention was made of any breaches of customer security at Comar or VEC3.

When arrested in July 2007 while picking up movie tickets, Bowling made a full confession to police. He was tried in November 2008 and sentenced to three years in state prison on March 5, 2009. He is currently being held in West Virginia’s South Central Regional Jail awaiting transfer to a state prison.

Though sentenced to three years, Bowling, who has had no previous convictions, is likely to be eligible for parole within the next twelve months.

Newly Improved :: WebmasterRadio.FM

2009 has been an interesting and expansive year for WebmasterRadio.FM/.  As regular visitors and listeners have noticed, the website looks and acts differently today than it did last week.  We’ve made a number of changes in the past eight weeks.  As one can imagine, making changes in a network as large as WebmasterRadio.FM is a complex and difficult undertaking.

We are proud of WebmasterRadio.FM’s accomplishments and each of the shows running on the network. WebmasterRadio.FM is among the largest online radio and podcast networks in the world. With over 15,000 historic files in our archives and nearly 25 hours of fresh content added each week, WebmasterRadio.FM is the voice of the online advertising and B2B industries. This year we want to push further.
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Mobile Presence Debuts on WebmasterRadio.FM

Mobile Presence, a show dedicated to mobile search, advertising and hand-held computing makes its debut today on WebmasterRadio.FM.

Hosted by three of the most respected thought leaders in mobile search and advertising, Cindy Krum, Jordan Kasteler and Kim Dushinski, Mobile Presence takes a rounded and expert look at one of the fastest growing segments in online and digital marketing.

Listeners will learn how to design web documents for mobile and how to best deploy advertising for mobile computing devices. For webmasters, designers and advertisers, learning how to use the mobile Internet is becoming increasingly important. Mobile ad-spend is increasing year over year with an anticipated surge in 2009 and 2010.

“We will focus on mobile SEO and development, and also cover SMS and mobile email strategies,” said Cindy Krum of RankMobile.com. “Mobile Presence will look at how mobile fits into the marketing mix. Mobile isn’t meant to stand on its own, so we will discuss how it can be most effectively integrated into your existing marketing campaigns.”

Highly interactive and informative, Mobile Presence debuts on Wednesday February 18, 2009 at 1:00pm Eastern (10am Pacific) and will be heard weekly at that time.

Google Yahoo and Microsoft Agree on Canonical Link Element

Arguably the most important SEO initiative announced at SMX West last week came from Google’s chief quality czar, Matt Cutts, who outlined a new Canonical link element which will tell search engines which version of a page a webmaster wants indexed. Designed to delete duplicate content from the search engine indexes, the new relational element allows search spiders to determine which pages to index and which pages to gloss over without adding duplications of pages to their indexes. The element has been accepted by the three major search engines, each of which has pledged support for it.

For example, image a content management system that automatically names pages with numbers or appends tracking or session IDs to a URL string. A URL leading to a page about something nice like Rupert the Bear might read: http://www.yoursite.com/specific-page.html?sid=yucky85448633572/. A good SEO would rather that URL be phrased in a far cleaner and clearer way: http://www.yoursite.com/rupert-bear.html/.

The element looks like this;
<link rel=”canonical” value=“http://www.YOURSITE.com/correct-page.html”/>, and is coded in place of the 301 redirect formerly used to steer spiders to the correct version of a specific page.

Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have all published information on how to implement the relational link element in the HEAD section of your website. A note of caution; the Canonical link element is domain specific and will not pass juice between different domains though it will within a sub-domain structure.

Also, Joost de Valk (happy birthday Joost) has written several WordPress, Magento and Drupal plug-ins for the Canonical link element.

Searchonomics – Dealing with a Depression

About a year ago, several search marketing commentators, myself included, suggested that the (worsening) economic conditions would pose less a problem for the search marketing sector than other sectors and might, in fact, provoke greater redirection of ad-spend towards search.

At the time, the assumption was simple to make. Every business needs to advertise, especially when business is slightly down. Since search marketing provides inexpensive yet highly effective and traceable advertising options, clients should be beating paths to the doors of search and Internet marketing companies.

In most respects, the assumption has held true. While we read of major layoffs in the traditional advertising sector almost every day now, relatively few layoffs have occurred in the search engine marketing sector. Many SEO, PPC and SEM shops are busier than ever. In one extremely important respect however, what feels like a safe assumption is in reality somewhat shaky.
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The Original SEO 101, only on WebmasterRadio.FM

Revamped, retooled and ready to take you back to school, the “Original SEO 101″ re-debuts on the WebmasterRadio.FM network, Monday February 2 at 5pmET, 2pmPT.

Hosted by Ross Dunn (CEO, StepForth Search Marketing) and Jennifer Evans Laycock (Editor, Search Engine Guide), the Original SEO 101 will offer opinion, ideas, controversy and an education you’ll never forget.

Tune into the relaunch of the Original SEO 101 exclusively on WebmasterRadio.FM –> Monday February 2 at 5pmET, 2pmPT.

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