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Affiliate Ball will be taking place on Monday, August 19, 2013 in Philadelphia during Affiliate Summit East 2013.

This will be the official party for the Monday night of Affiliate Summit.

RSVP at AffiliateBall.com – there will be limited space.

Past Affiliate Balls have included appearances by Big Boi, Coolio, Doug E Fresh, Ice-T, Mix Master Mike, Nelly, and Rappers Delight (formerly Sugarhill Gang).

Announcements on the artists and venue will be made closer to the conference.

Sponsorships for Affiliate Ball are now available.

Check out the Affiliate Ball promo video for Philly.

The post Affiliate Ball at Affiliate Summit East 2013 appeared first on Affiliate Summit.

So you’d like to go to Affiliate Summit East 2013, but your boss is not sure that it is worth the investment?

Well, I’ve written up a quick summary you can share with the boss to point out how Affiliate Summit East 2013 is…

• The largest gathering of affiliate marketers in the world.
• A chance to connect with nearly 100 expert speakers and thousands of affiliate marketers.
• An opportunity to meet hundreds of companies as they exhibit across the 3 days of the conference.
• Located in Philadelphia, where they have non-stop domestic flights from nearly 100 different airports, and a hotel group rate of just $169 per night.

Download the letter I’ve written for you, fill in the blanks, and pass it on to your boss.

Also, here is a video to share with your management that gives a quick peek into what goes on at Affiliate Summit.

Video: Highlights from Affiliate Summit West 2013

The post Need Help Selling Your Boss on Affiliate Summit East 2013? appeared first on Affiliate Summit.

The Race to Affiliate Summit East 2013, a dailymile challenge where Affiliate Summit will donate $1 to benefit the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer in support of Affiliate Marketers Give Back team for each mile cycled, run, swam, or walked through the challenge, is going through 8/1/2013.

There are currently 60 folks involved in the challenge, and the top ten competitors have already accumulated 9,961 miles.

Overall, there have been 14,517 miles tallied by all of the participants, so it’s $14,517 raised (so far).

I am at #15 right now see my dailymile profile with 280 miles. It’s looking hard to get higher without putting in some cycling miles (I’ve been all running, hiking and walking), but I’m planning to add on miles every day this month without a break.

Here are the top ten affiliate marketing exercisers, as of May 15, 2013.

dailymile syncs with Garmin devices, Nike+ device and iPhone app, as well as a number of iPhone and Android clients.

You can also manually enter your cycling, swimming, running, and walking efforts.

In order to participate in dailymile activities, you will need to friend me on dailymile and I will invite you to the challenge.

Get more details at Race to Affiliate Summit East 2013.

Affiliate Summit East 2013 is taking place August 18-20, 2013 in Philadelphia.

The participant with the most total miles at the end of the challenge will receive a VIP Pass to Affiliate Summit West 2014. 2nd to 5th place finishers will each receive a Networking Plus Pass to Affiliate Summit West 2014, and 6th to 10th place finishers will each receive a Networking Pass to Affiliate Summit West 2014.

Please note that all information you provide as part of the contest is public and may be used by Affiliate Summit in our marketing efforts for this event.

The post Affiliate Summit East 2013 Has Raised $14,517 So Far to Fight Breast Cancer appeared first on Affiliate Summit.

Affiliate marketing legend Todd Farmer has joined the team here as the Affiliate Summit Ambassador.

Todd started his first internet company, Kowabunga! Marketing, in 1996, providing Affiliate Marketing Tracking & Management Software (MyAffiliateProgram), Outsourced Affiliate Program Management (Team Affiliate), Email Marketing Software (Extractor Pro, Optin Pro), and the Affiliate Network (Kolimbo).

After selling Kowabunga in 2005 and completing a 3 year employment agreement with the acquiring company, Todd started his new consulting and media firm, PerformStreet Media, where he helps companies leverage his years of experience growing his internet businesses, with high level, profitable internet marketing strategies and guidance.

Todd’s current projects include MyContentPro.com, AffiliateMarketingPlan.com, and a number of B2B projects dedicated to teaching internet marketers best practices and strategies in: Affiliate Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Email Marketing, Membership Sites, and Blogging for passion & profit.

In January 2011, Todd received the Affiliate Marketing Legend Pinnacle Award at Affiliate Summit West 2011.

You can hear Todd weekly on the Online Marketing Crock Pot podcast.

The post Todd Farmer Joins the Affiliate Summit Team appeared first on Affiliate Summit.

Affiliate Summit East 2013 is taking place in Philadelphia, PA on August 18-20, 2013. There is a lot to do in Philadelphia before and after the conference, so we’ve created some guides for you.

Check out these boards we’ve created on the Affiliate Summit account on Pinterest on sightseeing, eating, drinking, and shopping in Philadelphia:

• Philadelphia Sightseeing
• Philadelphia Shopping
• Philadelphia Food & Drink

Get more details on Affiliate Summit East 2013.

The post Places to Eat, Drink, Shop, and Sightsee During Affiliate Summit East 2013 appeared first on Affiliate Summit.

Affiliate Summit East 2013 is taking place August 18-20, 2013 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

The agenda is jam-packed with dozens of breakout sessions with industry experts speaking on affiliate marketing, blogging, legal, mobile, search, social media, video, and more.

Keynote speakers will be Rae Hoffman, CEO of PushFire; Dr. Randal Pinkett, Founder, Chairman and CEO of BCT Partners and winner of TV’s The Apprentice; and Wil Reynolds, Founder of SEER Interactive.

But will the sessions be valuable for you?

Well, you don’t know what you don’t know.

Industry tips, resources and techniques are always changing.

More details at AffiliateSummit.com.

The post Check Out the Affiliate Summit East 2013 Agenda appeared first on Affiliate Summit.

Issue 22 of FeedFront Magazine is out, so we’re on to issue 22, and we need content.

The next issue of FeedFront will be coming out in August 2013 (that’s the issue that will be at Affiliate Summit East 2013), and we are accepting article proposals for that one through May 31.

If you are interested in writing an article, go to the FeedFront article proposal form to submit a one sentence summary on what you’d like to cover.

No ghost-written articles. We only want content from people writing from their personal industry experience.

If you have previously been accepted to write an article and either failed to meet the deadline or did not adhere to the editorial guidelines, please submit your article proposal elsewhere.

We take our deadlines and guidelines seriously.

Do not submit a complete article now – just a one sentence summary.

We will contact everybody who submitted a proposal to let them know whether their article ideas are accepted or denied.

The post We’re Looking for Writers for Issue 23 of FeedFront Magazine appeared first on Affiliate Summit.

Most people know that Facebook business has had its ups and downs in the past. For example, an up would be the amount of users they current have on their site is rising. A down would be that underwhelming IPO that kicked off a year ago. Again Facebook has been able to get its name in the headlines for a few different reasons.

Facebook Business Looks to Acquire Waze

It’s rumored that Facebook business is considering acquiring Waze for up to $1 billion.

Waze is a community map app based out of Israel. It works by having users edit and add different traffic patterns, locations of police cars, or accident spots, with the common goal of outsmarting traffic. This is not like one of those dating scams, this is the real deal and it’s becoming quite popular.

Seeing its popularity, Facebook eyes this as another start-up to acquire. In the past, Facebook business has acquired two other Israeli companies. It bought Snaptu in 2011 and Face.com in 2012. The price that is being negotiated for Waze is between $800 million and $1 billion. Is Facebook planning on adding some form of GPS integration into its website or maybe even its Facebook app? We’ll have to wait and see.

Failing Phone

Facebook released its “Facebook Phone” in April. The phone started out at $99 with the two-year agreement on AT&T, but has since dropped to $0.99.

This is not a good sign for Facebook business or HTC because when a phone price drops, it usually is not selling very well. And when the phone price drops by 99%, it probably isn’t selling at all. There have been reports from some AT&T store employees that say they haven’t sold even one of the new Facebook phones. Maybe this price cut will boost the sales? Either way, it will be an interesting few months for Facebook business.

The phone runs on a system that is alluring to the normal social media addict, but it is still a long way from being complete.

Windows 8 and Facebook

Facebook business has also made the news for its Windows 8 initiative.  Facebook has been communicating with Microsoft lately over the fact that there are many third party apps that are trying to lure in Facebook users. There have been 41 unofficial ‘Facebook’ apps that Facebook Inc has pointed out to Microsoft with hopes they will delete these fake Facebooks from the Windows Phone store.

With a letter sent to Microsoft, Facebook hopes action will be taken on this problem. Microsoft will be giving these unofficial apps a day to remove the app. If no action is taken, then Microsoft with manually remove the apps from the store.

Know any more Facebook news? Let us know in the comments below.

Despite the negative impact of Google's algorithm updates to many affiliate sites these past 3 years, many experts still believe that affiliate marketing will still be a very profitable online business model (well, I also do).

The truth is, most affiliate sites are hit by updates such as Panda and Penguin, not because of their site’s build/form/architecture or because they are just 3rd party sites. I believe that it’s mostly caused by the tactics many have used in the past that they have thought will be forever effective.

But if you're offering real value and great experiences to your visitors, I'm certain that it would be a different story. That's what both Google and users are after anyway. It's best to keep this principle in mind.

Anyway, I've been testing a lot of things these past few months, particularly in proving that building a steady growth in search traffic to an affiliate site is still very possible. 

I have this basic formula when it comes to search engine optimization, which I also believe will work efficiently on any type of website – and yes, even on affiliate sites.

The core concept of this formula is based around 2 basic SEO principles:

• Optimize the site for both users and search engines (basically means making it easier for users and search engines to access the site).
• Create signals to build trust, authority and more traffic/usage data.

So in this post, I’ll be using two affiliate sites as samples (a relationship advice blog and a gaming guide site). These sites are owned by friends that I’ve been helping out for several weeks now, and I’m really grateful that they allowed me to use their data for this study.

Both sites have shown tremendous improvements in terms of its organic search traffic since I started working on them:

Relationship advice blog (which had 765% increase in search traffic since I started working on it on the first week of January 2013)

Gaming guide site (which was only launched last March 4, 2013, is continuously getting solid search traffic since we’ve started – and now reaching almost 500 search visitors a day). 

Now let’s get to the part where I share the very replicable process we have come up that can easily generate search traffic to an affiliate website.

Step 1 – Build a Site First

You’ll definitely need to put up a site first. Both of the sites I’ve shared as examples above are built using the AffiloTheme and were also based on AffiloJetpack’s model.

Along with the process of building your affiliate site, make sure that you’ve also done keyword research, as it’s very important in building your site’s content strategy and site architecture.

Also, the great thing about using AffiloTheme for your affiliate sites is that it can easily help your sites become more search-friendly.

Another thing that you might want to consider is hiring a good copywriter who can continuously build content for your site. You can usually hire a freelance writer for $5 – $20 per article (depends on the length and depth of the content you need). 

Step 2 – Optimize Your Site & Its Key Pages

Once your site is up and running, it’s important to optimize it for both users and search engines. I have covered a few things that you can optimize on your site on my last post here on Affilorama.

Publish new content on a regular basis

Focus your content strategy on the keywords that your site will be targeting (based from your keyword research). Having new content on the site on a regular basis is a good signal that search engines can use to recrawl, index and re-rank your site’s inner pages.

Implement Authorship Markup

Authorship markup is a great trust indicator for both searchers and search crawlers. It will also prepare your site for the future, once Google start using AuthorRank as a ranking factor.

Another advantage of having authorship markup is that it increases your site’s search listing click-through rate. 

For more tips on this, you can check out AJ Kohn’s step-by-step guide on how to implement authorship markups. 

Basic and Advanced SEO for your affiliate site

There are ton of things that you can do to make it easier for search engines to access and understand your site’s pages. For basic on-site optimization techniques you can check out Affilorama’s free SEO lessons.

And you can also check out my extensive guide on advanced SEO tactics once you’re through with the basic optimizations. 

Step 3 – Build Strong & Appropriate Signals

Building signals – the right ones – is the other vital part of getting steady flow of search-driven traffic. There are so many types of signals that you can create for your site to be found by search engines and users. They could come in the form of links, brand mentions and/or social shares.

In this part, I have a few rules or set of metrics that we strictly follow. Since the main point of building signals is to build trust, to pass authority and to ensure that search engines will regularly see the constant changes happening on the site.

The main metrics we use to identify sites where we want to get signals from are:

• Have high domain authority (DA).
• High-traffic sites (which can be measured through Alexa Rank, Compete or SEMRush traffic price).
• Topical relevance of the site that we’ll be acquiring links from.

Signal building, in my opinion, is quite different with the link building that most of us have been accustomed to.

Because in building strong signals, you don’t need hundreds of unique root domains or sites linking back to yours. In this marketing practice, you’ll only need a few (like 3 – 5 strong domains or high traffic publications in your niche/industry) where you can continuously build signals from – that can send strong signals to search engines, and also send back qualified referred traffic to your site.

Finding high quality sites to build signals from

There are plenty of ways to find sites where you can get high quality links and signals from. Start with Google Search (you can also try this link prospecting method in making the process faster).

On our experiment, we’ve focused on finding high-traffic and high-DA publications that accept regular contributors. We chose 5 high quality sites where we can contribute content regularly to (so that we can build strong signals through them whenever we do changes/improvements on the site).

Basically, the main objective of getting signals from high-quality sites is to make certain that search engines will recrawl and recalculate the site’s overall search rankings every time we add new content or reoptimize some of its already existing pages (which I’ll be discussing next). 

Step 4 – Study Analytics Search Traffic Data & Optimize For Effective Long-Tails

For a new site, if you’ve followed everything mentioned above, then you’ll probably have a few useful data that you can extract from your Google Analytic’s search traffic data on your first 2 weeks.

Download the list of keywords sending traffic to your site from Google Analytics (in CSV format). Identify the keywords (especially the long-tail keywords) that have high-engagement rates. You can easily determine these keywords by looking closely on these 2 metrics:

• Average Visit Duration
• % New Visits

Segment and make a list of the keywords that have good engagement rates (have high time on page and have high percentage of new visitors).

Reoptimize the pages where these effective long-tail keywords are sending qualified and targeted traffic to. Here are the areas of the page(s) that you can optimize them for or areas where you can include your newly found long-tail keywords:

• Title tags
• Meta descriptions
• Internal links

The purpose of doing this kind of optimization is to achieve better search rankings for the search terms that are already sending your site good traffic (which can easily convert).

For more tips on using this method, you can read my comprehensive guide on increasing your search traffic using Google Analytics and basic on-site reoptimization.

Step 5 – Scale The Process

We’re continuously growing the search traffic of the 2 affiliate sites I’ve cited by simply being consistent in implementing Step 2 to Step 4.

• We’re constantly adding more new content on the site (on a weekly basis), so that we can target more keywords that will send traffic and potential leads to the site.
• The more we grow the number of inner pages on the site, the more we can get keyword data from their Analytics. This translates to more opportunities (effective long-tails) that we can uncover and target, by continuously reoptimizing the site.
• We are continuously building signals to the site as we grow its pages and along the reoptimization processes we implement. This allows search engines to see the continual changes happening on the sites, and thus impact the sites’ ranking ability.   

The entire process is not tedious and it’s so easy-to-replicate. We’ve even proven this to work in less than a month (and not just once).

If you have questions, feel free to leave a comment below. You can also follow me on Twitter @jasonacidre.   

Savvy advertisers are wasting no time catching the mobile marketing wave surging over American e-commerce. As the public takes to their mobile devices, so must advertisers follow — and never has the trend been more apparent. Almost three-quarters of American consumers now rely on location-based services from their smartphones, notes the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Nearly two-thirds of those smartphone owners press their mobile devices into service to shop online, states a 2012 survey from eDigitalResearch and Portaltech Reply.

In response to this increasingly mobile shopping style, retailers are pumping up mobile advertising budgets like never before. A full 85 percent of marketers say they plan to increase their mobile advertising budgets soon, according to reports from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and MediaVest.

“Mobile is driving a fundamental shift in consumer behavior and it’s having a material impact on all aspects of affiliate marketing,” Kristin Hall of Google Affiliate Network’s Publisher Development team recently told Small Business Trends. “Advertisers and publishers must redefine their marketing strategies to engage this constantly-connected consumer across all devices.”

Wondering about the best specific target for a mobile strategy? According to marketers like Hall, the hot spot for mobile opportunities in a T-Mobile 4G network lies with affiliate marketing, in which publishers are rewarded with a commission for helping promote a product, service, or site. The most valuable affiliate relationships today are with publishers whose sites are already optimized for mobile users.

Leveraging Affiliates

A recent Affiliate Management Days program looked at the reasons partnering with affiliates can strengthen your mobile marketing efforts:

• Reach audiences where your access is restricted.
• Have a loyal audience.
• Build trust and authority.
• See the bigger picture.
• Focus on niche topics.
• Allow experimentation without a heavy marketing spend.

Partnering with affiliates makes sense at the most basic level, advises Scott Allen at Marketing Land. “Publishers are a great source of information and knowledge when it comes to mobile commerce,” he wrote. “They will gladly tell advertisers what they need to do to be successful in mobile, because they want to earn commissions.”

Reduce the amount of trial and error with zealous data analysis. Hall cites big opportunities for affiliate marketers who want to understand and capitalize on mobile, data, and analytics. “There’s a real opportunity to apply insights from data along with using new ad formats to make the most out of the affiliate channel,” she said. “There are also opportunities for advertisers and affiliates to partner more closely to bring the influence of affiliates higher up the purchase funnel.”

To take advantage of those benefits, Hall said affiliate managers must be willing to invest strongly (possibly even over-invest) in mobile traffic today, to ensure capturing the targeted audience they need as more conversions shift across multiple screens.

Get the Tech Right

Companies can’t afford to miss the mark on mobile technology. “A publisher application or publisher website designed for mobile commerce needs advertiser sites that are optimized for mobile,” Allen explained. “If consumers have a great experience on a publisher site only to click on a retailer site and be brought to a desktop site that doesn’t convert to a mobile device, then no one makes any money and the consumer leaves unsatisfied.”

In a field full of eager potential affiliates, companies should choose partnerships carefully to ensure their product messages aren’t grinding to a halt on dead-end links. Customers will abandon content they can’t easily navigate on their mobile devices — and the goalposts are constantly shifting. “Changes in technology can have a dramatic effect on your business, so stay up to date on all of the latest advances in technology,” cautioned Jay Neutron on Empowernetwork.com.

More Affiliate Opportunities

Consider these ideas from Affiliate Management Days for building fruitful affiliate partnerships that benefit both parties.

• Make trend discussions part of regular communications with affiliates.
• Include information in newsletters about hot subjects or trends.
• Don’t auto-approve affiliates.
• Create a calendar for affiliates about upcoming and seasonal trends.
• Ask affiliates to submit ideas on news and trends.
• Offer special incentives for strong ideas or performance.
• Run contests among affiliates to come up with ideas for quick campaigns based on trends or fads.

The successful mobile marketing campaign should not only boost sales from established customers, but also engage new markets. Each campaign should aim for its own concrete goals — like more social media likes, more social media fans, more social shares — or hard sales targets like increased sales or higher order values. With  specific goals in place and mobile tech issues tested and retested, the affiliate marketing pathway will swing open to a mobile market that’s ripe for the picking.

The Affiliate Summit East 2013, early bird pricing will be ending on May 17, 2013.

Starting on May 18, 2013, the rates to register for Affiliate Summit will be going up across the board:

• Networking Pass ($99 to $249)
• Networking Plus Pass ($279 to $549)
• VIP Pass ($879 to $1,249)
• All Access Pass ($1,870 to $2,249)

Register now to get the lowest rate. There are no exceptions after the deadline.

The keynote speakers will be Rae Hoffman, Dr. Randal Pinkett, and Wil Reynolds.

But that’s just a small sample of what’s happening – see the full agenda.

For a description of the available pass types see registration options for Affiliate Summit East 2013.

Limited Affiliate Summit East 2013 sponsorships, booths and Meet Market tables are still available.

Rooms at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown are available at an Affiliate Summit group rate of $169/night until July 19, 2013 or until the group block is sold-out, whichever comes first. After that, the hotel will charge the prevailing rate.

More details at Affiliate Summit East 2013 Travel.

Register now at AffiliateSummit.com.

After you register, be sure to join the Affiliate Summit East 2013 event page on Facebook to begin networking and stay up on news about the show.

The post Early Bird Rates for Affiliate Summit East 2013 End on May 17 appeared first on Affiliate Summit.

The Affiliate Summit East 2013, early bird pricing will be ending on May 17, 2013.

Starting on May 18, 2013, the rates to register for Affiliate Summit will be going up across the board:

• Networking Pass ($99 to $249)
• Networking Plus Pass ($279 to $549)
• VIP Pass ($879 to $1,249)
• All Access Pass ($1,870 to $2,249)

Register now to get the lowest rate. There are no exceptions after the deadline.

The keynote speakers will be Rae Hoffman, Dr. Randal Pinkett, and Wil Reynolds.

But that’s just a small sample of what’s happening – see the full agenda.

For a description of the available pass types see registration options for Affiliate Summit East 2013.

Limited Affiliate Summit East 2013 sponsorships, booths and Meet Market tables are still available.

Rooms at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown are available at an Affiliate Summit group rate of $169/night until July 19, 2013 or until the group block is sold-out, whichever comes first. After that, the hotel will charge the prevailing rate.

More details at Affiliate Summit East 2013 Travel.

Register now at AffiliateSummit.com.

After you register, be sure to join the Affiliate Summit East 2013 event page on Facebook to begin networking and stay up on news about the show.

The post Early Bird Rates for Affiliate Summit East 2013 End on May 17 appeared first on Affiliate Summit.