Sugarrae aka Rae Hoffman

There Are No Damn Silver Spoons (or Defining and Achieving Success Online)

I did an interview recently with Lynn Terry, who is someone I’ve “known” for a long time on the Internet (and yes, have met in real life). Lynn is one of the most genuine people I’ve met on the net (she reminds me a lot of Christine Churchill) and she knows her shit and works hard. The chick makes good coin. Believe it.

I spent a few hours digging through some posts on her blog and came across a post she did called “The Lifestyle and Income of a Super Affiliate” and I thought it was kind of a neat peak into her life. Her readers know “she’s successful” but she was able to show a bit of what her success- Lynn Terry style success – looks like in that post.

I get a lot of email from people either asking for help or saying that I’ve helped them get further in making money online (and I’m glad for those emails the most) but I also see a lot of people mention having “fear” of me or folks who assume I’m this ranting, dominant force of nature in every aspect of my life.

People know I’m successful, they might get some insight into my personality from reading my tweets. But what does success – Sugarrae style success – look like?

To me success isn’t being a “baller” – it’s about living my life in a way that makes me happy and on my terms.

It’s being able to rent a cottage for a week to bring my friends and my children on vacation and being around at 2 p.m. in the afternoon to snap this photo (if for nothing other then proof that they actually *can* get along):

It’s about taking a girls weekend to Chicago with my friends and being able to kick back and relax with my girls, sight-see and destroy a T.G.I.F. bar supply:

It’s about being able to spend a random Thursday afternoon with my fiance sightseeing in Toronto:

It’s being *THIS FUCKING CLOSE* to Kid Rock:

It’s 11th row seats on the fifty yard line. It’s playing pool at 1 p.m. in the afternoon on a Wednesday. It’s throwing my best friend an amazing birthday party. It’s owning 31 pairs of jeans so I always – always – have a clean pair. My style of success has nothing to do with fancy cars, bling (okay, the Rolex, but that’s a long story) or keeping up with the Joneses.

For me, success “Sugarrae style” is all about being able to ENJOY my life, time with those I love and being able to share my success with those I care about. I’m a simple redneck girl who would still drink cheap beer and own a pick up truck even if I owned a billion dollar company.

And it is *so fucking possible* for you to have your own brand of success that I absolutely want to shake the shit out of you. Making money online – be it 1K a month or 40K a month or more – is possible. It’s doable. Anyone willing to put in the time and work can DO IT.

I’ve only discussed my personal life one prior time on my blog – in telling the story of how I entered Internet marketing. But, where did “Sugarrae” come from?

In Lynn’s post, she gave a bit if background on her situation B.I.M. (before Internet marketing):

“I’ve been there. I had a low-paying job, 6 of us lived in an 800 sq ft rented house, the car was always breaking down.

It was a struggle just to make a paycheck last the week. Those were tough times, to say the least.

Changed seemed impossible. When I did finally decide enough was enough… making that lifestyle change required dramatic measures.”

And I’ve been there. For folks who want to cite all the reasons they’ve been blocked from success, I’d like to say… grow a pair and take responsibility for your own life. Success does not require a silver spoon.

In my days B.I.M. even keeping my bare essential utilities on was a severe struggle. My ex-husband and I were a young married couple with two kids under three (my youngest son hadn’t been born yet), one of whom was severely multiply handicapped, living on one construction worker’s income in a state where construction wasn’t unionized and construction workers barely made more than cashiers in a retail store.

Going to the grocery store meant doing math for every item I put into my cart and sometimes being embarrassed when I didn’t “carry a one” and had to remove a few items from my bags when the cashier gave me the final total. A night on the town every two months was either dinner *or* a movie.

If my son needed a piece of therapy equipment not covered by his state granted insurance, then it meant we ate macaroni and cheese for two months to save up the 100 dollars needed to buy it. We lived paycheck to paycheck and most times, we needed less days between those paychecks. I “shouldn’t have” the success I do.

But like Lynn, I remember the day that I decided enough was enough. I was standing on my front porch. I looked around and went, “This is not what I want in life. This has to change.” That was when I decided to see if there was a way to make money online (until then, I had been running a non-profit website). And I decided that if there was a way, then I was going to make it happen – to quote myself – “even if someone were to tie a fucking anchor around my neck.”

And I did make it happen. I’ve been making all of my income online for a decade now.

And like Lynn (again), I rarely discuss actual figures online. And I agree wholeheartedly with Lynn’s reasoning as to why she doesn’t either:

“You’ll rarely ever see me talk dollar figures, or discuss my income. There’s a reason for that. Personally, I feel it’s irrelevant. The amount of money I need to maintain my ideal lifestyle may be completely different than your own goals.”

But you need proof to believe anyone – even a redneck chick with the odds stacked against her – can do this right?

I’ll give you a few examples.

A single post on Thesis built this deck and could have built three more as I’ve made almost 40,000 dollars in affiliate commissions from that post on Thesis (which is awesome, cause I love the theme). One post. It took me four hours to write. So, I made about 10,000 dollars an hour.

One affiliate program. Promoted on one blog. And it continues to earn.

And I promote *tons* of affiliate programs via multiple niche websites. And of course not all of them have that kind of ROI or that type of revenue. But when you take program after program after program and add them up… you get nice numbers.

Several weeks ago I was approached to buy a website I’d built several years ago. The website generated about 28,000 dollars a year. I paid 1400 dollars to develop the site (content, graphics, etc), did initial promotional work and walked away. All in all, I probably spent 60 hours of my life on this site. I sold the site for 79,000 dollars.

79,000-1,400/60 = 1,233 dollars per hour. That’s not even counting what the site earned during the years that I owned it.

And this isn’t the first time, nor will it be the last, that I’ve sold an affiliate site for that type of revenue. And then I build another one in another niche.

And none of this takes into account the revenue from either of my core companies (MFE and Outspoken). These are personal sites and personal revenue streams.

This post isn’t a brag. It’s meant to be another kick in the ass. Hopefully your ass. Decide what your brand of success looks like, grab a hold of that anchor you want to believe is around your neck and drag yourself to it.

This post originated at the Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

There Are No Damn Silver Spoons (or Defining and Achieving Success Online)

Creating a Small Niche Affiliate Site – Part 3

If you missed part one or part two of this [insert unknown number here] part series, you’ll likely want to go back and read through them first. For those of you that are already up to speed, it’s time to get back to work.

The writer I hired in part two got me back the four articles I requested fairly quickly. So I uploaded them into WordPress and then spent some time optimizing their on page SEO for the chosen terms (titles, meta description, headings, keywords in content, internal cross linking within content, sprinkled in a few outbound links to quality non-competing sites, creating GoCodes for the affiliate links, etc).

Next up was adding the images… since the writer linked to each product page as instructed, this was fairly easy though it does take a bit of time mainly because I’m not good with images and was working without a second monitor when I did this task. I kept each article, though a bit long at fifteen hundred words a piece, to one page as I don’t want link pop split between them and would prefer one stronger page. The time spent optimizing each article was also a bit extended due to the length and the numerous product images and affiliate links.

Time spent on individual task: 3 hours, 20 minutes (total for all four)

Total time spent: 10 hours, 25 minutes

Money spent on individual task: None

Total money spent: $310.69

Then I decided to do a bit of design alterations to Thesis. Note, I didn’t do anything that can’t be done through the awesome ass control panel Thesis now has (more on that in an upcoming post). I changed the navigation colors, background colors, link colors, text font, etc. I used a free color schemer to find some colors that went well together.

I also decided to change the layout a bit from what I originally did in part two. I changed it to a two column layout and removed the media box (ah well, I’ll use those pictures and links I created later). The reason was simply that the flagship content (above) looked much better in a two column format. And for now, that content is most important.

Time spent on individual task: 30 minutes

Total time spent: 10 hours, 55 minutes

Money spent on individual task: None

Total money spent: $310.69

Next up I did one of the core “category keyword” pages. I put that in quotes because it is actually a “page” in WordPress, but it is set to target one of the core keyword categories that people search for. Let’s say my product is “widgets”. I created the “blue widgets” page. I only did one to see what Google’s initial “reaction” to it is before I spend time doing the others.

I wrote some intro text, showed five featured products and images all linked to their exact pages on the merchant’s site with masked affiliate links and then wrote some “outro” text at the bottom with links to all the affiliate merchants they can find more products at. These are thin content pages vs. my thick content feature pages mentioned above. We’ll see how Google treats this one before we go building out all of the rest in the same format.

Time spent on individual task: 30 minutes

Total time spent: 11 hours, 25 minutes

Money spent on individual task: None

Total money spent: $310.69

Next up I wrote a fairly thin index page. About 300 words, nothing fancy and a hard push to my four feature pages. I then threw up a robots.txt that blocked all the pages that weren’t ready. I went into the wordpress settings and released the site to spiders under the privacy options and then double checked to make sure my new robots.txt file was correctly in place. All looked good. So I verified the site with Google Webmaster Tools so that the re-crawl of the robots.txt might move a little faster (though the links obtained prior to this should handle that just fine).

Time spent on individual task: 35 minutes

Total time spent: 12 hours

Money spent on individual task: None

Total money spent: $310.69

So now we have about six pages available for the spiders to crawl and a few links aging. I’ll give Google a few days to index the site, see where the rankings stand in Raven and then decide my next steps. When I do, I’ll blog them. Until then, I will amuse myself with bloggers whining about how hard it is to make enough to pay a 300 dollar business licensing fee.

This post originated at the Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

Creating a Small Niche Affiliate Site – Part 3

Creating a Small Niche Affiliate Site – Part 2

Last week I mentioned the steps I’d taken so far in building a small niche affiliate site. I decided to do a bit more work on it this week, so I guess we’re now on to step two in the series. I’m building this site using tools/strategies that are available to anyone, on purpose.

With domain registration, hosting, installing WordPress, installing Thesis, creating affiliate relationships, keyword research, a general sitemap/URL structure and a range of site link to start the aging process out of the way, it’s time for the next steps.

Out of less than forty expected pages, I identified four keywords that I needed to do some cool [read - high quality] articles on in order to target said keywords. I went to one of the writers I work with on a regular basis and explained that I wanted four fifteen hundred word articles on each topic – and since they were commercial in nature – to limit where they found the products to talk about within the article to the five affiliate relationships I’d already created.

The writer is solely writing the content with a link to each product mentioned – I’ll pull pictures and link it up with affiliate links later. In my start-up days, I’d have written these articles myself, but at this point, it is cheaper for me to simply pay someone else to write them so I can focus on other things (AKA if *you* don’t have the cash to spend, write them yourself – time or money, the choice is yours).

Time spent on individual task: 15 minutes

Total time spent: 4 hours, 30 minutes

Money spent on individual task: $300.00

Total money spent: $310.69

Next up was taking care of some of the “boiler plate” pages. The very first being the Privacy Policy, some merchants and contextual advertising programs require it these days. I grabbed a privacy policy from one of my other sites and did a find and replace and threw it on the site. You could always find a privacy policy generator if you don’t have a prior one to pull from though.

Then I threw up a very short Contact page with the email address of the site and a note that we try to respond to all emails received within 48 hours to give the page a bit more text. But both of these pages will be blocked from the engines anyway.

I also added some intro text to the Other Sites page that will eventually become the home to about ten tightly – but horizontally themed – link partners.

Time spent on individual task: 10 minutes

Total time spent: 4 hours, 40 minutes

Money spent on individual task: None

Total money spent: $310.69

Next up was writing a function for Thesis to spit out a custom footer. You can find and copy this code (and tons of other code for custom Thesis mods) in my Thesis tutorials on this site.

Time spent on individual task: 5 minutes

Total time spent: 4 hours, 45 minutes

Money spent on individual task: None

Total money spent: $310.69

Now I needed to install a few WordPress plugins. I installed GoCodes to help track affiliate links and Permalink Redirect to avoid any potential issues of duplicate content being created through WordPress inadequacies and Scribe. Thesis does most of the rest of what I need.

Time spent on individual task: 15 minutes

Total time spent: 5 hours

Money spent on individual task: None

Total money spent: $310.69

Then I went to add some creatives from the merchants I am affiliated with to the Media Box in Thesis (where you can set it rotate through a series of linked images) and ran into a problem. It seems none of these merchants have designers that graduated from 1998 web design. Their creatives are probably some of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen – this was true of all five merchants.

So I had to think up a plan B.

I decided I’d grab pictures of what I thought were cool individual products – one from each merchant – to create a “Featured Product” rotation linking to the individual products. But that also ran into a snag because one merchant had watermarked all their photos – so I was down to four. Not a big deal though – at the moment, they’re more for graphics than anything else.

Time spent on individual task: 25 minutes (cause I suck with images)

Total time spent: 5 hours, 25 minutes

Money spent on individual task: None

Total money spent: $310.69

Next I decided to remember what it feels like to actually have to write content for an affiliate site’s link development efforts and wrote a 400 word article a friend had agreed to let me guest post on their very horizontally – and appropriately – themed blog. Nothing stellar, but it wasn’t complete crap either. I logged in as a guest author, uploaded and formatted the post, threw in a few pictures and links (including one to my newly wire-framed site) and hit publish in order to further fuel the aging and early link development process (go scrapers go!).

Time spent on individual task: 1 hour

Total time spent: 6 hours, 25 minutes

Money spent on individual task: None

Total money spent: $310.69

While I was in the writing mood, I threw together a 500 word article for an article site I know will pass some juice and traffic to the site and submitted it. It wasn’t riveting writing but it wasn’t complete drivel either (again, go scrapers go!).

Time spent on individual task: 40 minutes

Total time spent: 7 hours, 5 minutes

Money spent on individual task: None

Total money spent: $310.69

Another two and a half or so hours put in and I’m done for the moment. I’ll post again when the mood next hits me.

Edited to add:

See Creating a Small Niche Affiliate Site – Part 3.

This post originated at the Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

Creating a Small Niche Affiliate Site – Part 2

Creating a Small Niche Affiliate Site – Part 1

Not every site I personally build is in a big niche with goals to be the uber site of its industry. While all of the sites I make through MFE aim for that, every once in a while I get bored and spend some time creating a new small affiliate site in a small niche and do most of it myself to keep myself on my toes.

A few weeks ago while searching for something for myself personally, I stumbled across an industry which is mostly e-commerce dominated, but without a lot of truly skilled SEOs in the space (at least that I could see).

A quick look at some keyword research in Raven told me this arena of the web had quite a decent amount of traffic. A bit more searching told me it also had more than a handful of affiliate programs I could use to monetize a site and that there were a lovely herd of advertisers bidding on the keywords through Adwords (read, so I can also monetize with Adsense).

At that point, I decided to build a site for this niche as my newest small “anti boredom” project (when you start dealing with a lot of huge, branded sites, frankly, you miss “the game” and the “fully hands on” that smaller niches provide you with – or at least I do).

I have a lot of these types of sites going. I *like* still being on the front line. Sometimes they fail (usually because I get bored and stop working on them), sometimes they make a grand or two or three or more a month and I’ve sold several of them a few years down the line to merchants who would make much more money from them then I can for the high ten figures and low six figures range after making the monthly income for a few years.

With small niche sites, you really never know what you’re going to end up with. Guess we’ll have to wait and see with this one.

Time spent on individual task: 30 minutes

Total time spent: 30 minutes

Money spent on individual task: None (I already have a subscription to Raven)

Total money spent: None

So I bought awesomekeywordkeyword.com the other day and threw it up on one of my hosts with a unique IP.

Time spent on individual task: 5 minutes

Total time spent: 35 minutes

Money spent on individual task: $10.69

Total money spent: $10.69

I spent some time installing WordPress (blocking the site from the engines while I was at it) and Thesis on my new domain – picking out my typical “default options” and set-up that I personally like to use. No design customizations were done aside from deciding general layout options and the like (such as setting it to have a static homepage).

Time spent on individual task: 1 hour

Total time spent: 1 hour, 35 minutes

Money spent on individual task: None (I own a developer’s license of Thesis)

Total money spent: $10.69

Next up was doing more in-depth keyword research in Raven, setting up the site and tracking of the keywords I’d be aiming for so I’d have a better idea of how I’d want to wire-frame the site (which means how I will want to set up categories, topics, URL structure, IA, etc).

Time spent on individual task: 1 hour

Total time spent: 2 hours, 35 minutes

Money spent on individual task: None

Total money spent: $10.69

I then went to Commission Junction and Shareasale and did some searches for affiliates within the topic. There were a dozen or so to choose from, but I signed up for two via CJ and three via Shareasale. I picked the programs ranking at the top within the niche – in my head, their ranks must mean they have good products that people want, so they seemed like safe bets without having to do a ton of research. I’ll get into figuring out who gets the most promotion and why later. Right now it is simply about making sure I have some programs, some datafeeds (even if I don’t end up needing them) and some creatives.

Time spent on individual task: 30 minutes

Total time spent: 3 hours, 5 minutes

Money spent on individual task: None

Total money spent: $10.69

Next up I grabbed the keyword research from Raven of the terms that I deemed to be important and printed them out. They’d be the basis for the wire-frame. I simply went into WordPress and started creating blank pages.

Ex: http://www.awesomekeywordkeyword.com/privacy/
Ex: http://www.awesomekeywordkeyword.com/about/
Ex: http://www.awesomekeywordkeyword.com/a-main-topic/
Ex: http://www.awesomekeywordkeyword.com/a-main-topic/sub-topic/

For now, I’m simply trying to get all the pages I think I need created – but I’m not putting any content on them – I’m simply creating the pages so I can in turn create navigation on the front end, figure out what needs to go where, write Thesis hooks later for specific sections as I develop the site and for various other reasons.

I’m only using pages within WordPress to develop the site – I’ve yet to decide if the site will have an actual blog or not. But I’m learning towards “not” but instead having an article section with a few core, strong linkbait pieces. Right now those are created as “Linkbait 1″ etc. Anything done for the wire-frame is subject to change, but for the most part, it will be how I currently envision the site.

Time spent on individual task: 1 hour

Total time spent: 4 hours, 5 minutes

Money spent on individual task: None

Total money spent: $10.69

Next I went to another site I own that happens to be in a related – though not directly competing – industry. I added a range of site link to my new site in a place that made sense targeting my main keyword. If I didn’t have a related site, I’d have used my contacts and networking to find someone who did and beg or plead for a link – whether it be range of site or even a single link (if their site is related, I would promise them the most awesome guest post once I launched the site).

Time spent on individual task: 10 minutes (lost the WP password)

Total time spent: 4 hours, 15 minutes

Money spent on individual task: None

Total money spent: $10.69

I’m stopping now for the moment. I’ll post again about it the next time I work on it a bit more.

Edited to add:

See Creating a Small Niche Affiliate Site – Part 2.
See Creating a Small Niche Affiliate Site – Part 3.

This post originated at the Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

Creating a Small Niche Affiliate Site – Part 1

The Clueless, but “Whitehat”, SEO

Almost three years ago I did a blog post as a response to Shari Thurow and a column she had written stating that Blackhats were worthless, shady criminals. In it she stated:

“Unfortunately, I have been an expert witness in legal cases involving SEO fraud. Clients were not fully informed about the SEO methodologies utilized to promote the site. One case in Europe involved the SEO firm stating (in writing) that they followed all of the terms and conditions set forth by the search engines.”

And I responded to that in my post – pointing out that hat color had nothing to do with talent and/or “bad” SEO:

Whoa there Shari. These are called crooks and criminals. Not blackhats. A blackhat is not defined as someone who lies to their clients or utilizes methodology without their knowledge and consent of a blackhat nature. Those are scumbag seo’s. And there are tons of them. There are plenty of talentless hacks charging companies shitloads of money for “pure whitehat” seo too.

Even further, there are talentless hacks being paid shitloads of money by clients in arenas where blackhat is rampant and they don’t even understand the techniques the competitors are using because they have no experience with them themselves, and not informing clients that it makes them a less effective seo for them. Some seo’s are shit seos and their fucking hat colors have nothing to do with it.

Unfortunately, what we do is complicated and we have as many snake oil salesman in our industry as lawyers do. Clients come to us most times because they *don’t* know SEO, so it can obviously be an uphill battle at times for them to find a good one.

Even Google isn’t much help in finding a truly talented SEO, stating:

“While SEOs can provide clients with valuable services, some unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to manipulate search engine results in unfair ways. Practices that violate our guidelines may result in a negative adjustment of your site’s presence in Google, or even the removal of your site from our index.”

If I knew nothing about SEO, then what I got from that paragraph is that I simply need an “ethical” SEO [read Whitehat as we all know Google was referring to Blackhats in that paragraph] and things should go smoothly.

But the problem is that Whitehat does not necessarily equal knowledgeable and talented. In fact, sometimes a Whitehat SEO can do a lot of damage to your site and/or your budget. Even though they are following “the rules” laid forth by Google, that doesn’t mean they have a clue about the technical side of things or the ability to read between the lines/talent on the marketing [read getting links] side of things.

I have a friend who does mostly local SEO that sent me a recorded conversation between themselves (a Whitehat SEO who we will call the Clued In SEO) and a local competitor (also a Whitehat SEO who we will call the Clueless SEO). After hearing it, I’d take my chances with a Blackhat over the Clueless SEO any day of the week. I actually feel bad after hearing it that companies are fooled by these kind of folks every day into believing they know what they’re doing – and paying them for it.

And frankly, after years of doing highly competitive, national level SEO, I think I forgot just how little you need to know to convince someone with no knowledge of our industry to hand over their hard earned cash to you. I almost felt slightly ashamed to have the same career title as the Clueless SEO.

As soon as I heard the recording, I asked my friend if it would be okay if I transcribed it. Partly because it is funny [due to the lack of knowledge someone claiming to be an SEO had] to those of us who do this for a living and partly because I think it is alarming this person is an SEO with multiple clients. This is the ignorance we must fight against to keep our industry’s pride.

No names will be mentioned in the transcript below. I don’t know the legalities of it and it isn’t worth figuring out to me.

The back story on why this conversation took place is that The Clued In SEO’s client claimed to have received a call from the Clueless SEO claiming that the Clued In SEO’s firm “wasn’t doing anything” for the client and that any and all ranks they had were a result of having originally used the Clueless SEO’s firm – almost a year ago. [shakes head]

The Clued In SEO decided to stand up for themselves and call the Clueless SEO to confront them on what they’d done.

***All comments in [brackets] are by ME and were not a part of the call.

Here is what happened…

(Clued in SEO speaks with the receptionist of the company [this firm has enough clients to have a receptionist? sigh... you'll understand why this saddens me by the end] who puts him through to the Clueless SEO)

Clueless SEO: Hello?
Clued In SEO: Hi. What’s your name?
Clueless SEO: *states name*
Clued In SEO: Hi *name*, my name is *states his name*. How you doing?
Clueless SEO: Good.
Clued In SEO: We just had a meeting with one our clients *says clients name* and he told us someone from *Clueless SEO’s company*, I’m not sure who, had called him and told him that our company had done zero work for him since we started with him last year. And I’m just calling to see if that’s something you guys said, or if he’s mistaken?
Clueless SEO: Well, I don’t think that really matters at this point.
Clued In SEO: Well it does matter. If a company is going to go around and slander our company. It does matter. To us obviously.
Clueless SEO: Listen, if you think you’re going to call and harass my company, I’m gonna tell you something. You didn’t do anything for him. If you wanna tell me one single thing you did for him him, I’ll be happy to tell him.
Clued In SEO: Ok, are you familiar with…
Clueless SEO: Look, he told us you rewrote 30% of our code.
Clued In SEO: Who told him that?
Clueless SEO: He told me you said you rewrote 30% of our code.
Clued In SEO: You know when clients try to talk geek speak, they tend to not accurately say what was actually said.
Clueless SEO: All I’m saying is that everything we did for the SEO for the website… we had him ranking on top. The reason he dropped down a little bit [when the client was with the Clueless firm] is because we changed it from *states old title tag* to *states the new title tag they had put in place*. Everything that has been done in there – we did. All I did was reiterate to him that I did not see anything from the SEO standpoint as far as optimization on the website that had been done.
Clued In SEO: Ok, do you consider…
Clueless SEO: I don’t know what you did, but, from a standpoint of SEO the pages and what you did to the sitemaps ain’t been working. There were pages that had been changed to pure HTML that we said had to be changed back to PHP.
Clued In SEO: For what SEO…
Clueless SEO: I don’t really know what you did. I don’t know what you charged him. I really could care less. That has nothing to do with me. Ok? I’m just telling you, he asked me about this… he asked me about the rankings… he asked me what was going on and I told him what I saw in the website. That I did not see any code at all changed.
Clued In SEO: You’re well aware that links are a big part of SEO, probably the biggest part of SEO, and that it’s not just code right?
Clueless SEO: *silence*
Clued In SEO: Are you familiar with…
Clueless SEO: I… I… We’ve been in business twelve years, ok?
Clued In SEO: Yeah, everyone has. Listen, are you familiar with external link development?
Clueless SEO: Ok, you know what? I’ve been doing this for a long time. I don’t need you to call me in this context. It’s not your client. This guy has been our client for ten years. Ok? I know him.
Clued In SEO: It’s not your client. He is our client. He’s been our client for almost a year and will continue to be until that year is up. I’m just correcting you.
Clueless SEO: I’m just telling you, he asked me a question and I told him what I saw. Ok? I don’t know what you did for him and I don’t care. I really don’t.
Clued In SEO: If you don’t know what we did for him… (Clueless tries to talk over him) Excuse me, Sir, if you don’t know what we did for him you probably shouldn’t say we did nothing for him if you don’t know what we did for him.
Clueless SEO: I never said that. I never… I never said that.
Clued In SEO: Ok so you didn’t tell him that we haven’t worked on his site since obtaining him as a client. So, he’s misspeaking?
Clueless SEO: *silence* From an SEO standpoint, as far as any type of code that has been changed on there, on the website itself, to help with the rankings, I see nothing that has been done, that is all I told him.

[Here's where it gets downright hysterical and sad, all at the same time...]

Clued In SEO: Did you look at the link growth? The links pointing to the site since we took him over and the growth of those links.
Clueless SEO: The links to what site?
Clued In SEO: To his site.
Clueless SEO: From where?
Clued In SEO: Are you familiar with link building? Inbound links? Is that anywhere in your SEO…
Clueless SEO: Inbound links are useless.

[blinks... is... is this guy serious?]

Clued In SEO: In… bound… *Clued In sounds like he is in a state of shock as he says this*
Clueless SEO: I mean anybody can read Google, inbound links are useless, especially if they weigh less than…
Clued In SEO: Do you know who Matt Cutts is?
Clueless SEO: I don’t know and I don’t care.
Clued In SEO: *laughs*
Clueless SEO: Read Google material.
Clued In SEO: From like 1993 or from 2010?
Clueless SEO: First of all, inbound links don’t mean anything. Only reciprocating links have weight.
Clued In SEO: Oh my god… I’m sorry man…
Clueless SEO: The only time it is going to have weight is if it weighs more than your website.

[I feel bad being called an SEO at this point]

Clued In SEO: False. You’re absolutely false. I’ve been to four SEO conferences in the last year. The best in the industry… Matt Cutts speaks at these. Matt Cutts is the head of Google Web Spam.
Clueless SEO: Ok, you know what? I’ve been to the SEO conferences, all the SEO stuff, about 99% of it is a bunch of BS.
Clued In SEO: Ok. *laughs*
Clueless SEO: We read directly from the uh… sources. Read Google. Google will tell you inbound links are useless. The only way a link works is if it weighs heavier than your website. And weighs substantially more, it can help your website. So, you’re telling me just linking out to a bunch of people and that will help? And just links going out to a bunch of people? I mean it has to be relative as well. The information has to be relative for that link to have weight.
Clued In SEO: Not relative. Relevant. The link has to be relevant.
Clueless SEO: Well, look…
Clued In SEO: And I’m saying inbound links. Not outbound links. Not from the website to others sites. I’m saying from other websites to your site.
Clueless SEO: Where are the inbound links coming from?
Clued In SEO: From other relative sites. Relevant. Dang it, you’re screwing me up now. Other relevant sites.
Clueless SEO: *laughs* Alright well listen…
Clued In SEO: Listen, I want a quote… so you’re saying inbound links don’t help in SEO?
Clueless SEO: I appreciate you calling…
Clued In SEO: *laughs* Alright man – good luck.
Clueless SEO: Like I said, I don’t know if you’re having an issue with the client. You can call him and speak to him.
Clued In SEO: I definitely will. I just think it’s poor business practice to go around telling people slanderous things about a company when you’re not even aware of what the company does. Like if you honestly had in front of you all the work we’ve done or not done and presented it to him and said “hey we can do better” then that would be…
Clueless SEO: Don’t call me. Show it to him. Tell him.
Clued In SEO: I’m calling to verify that was the case, that you said that, before I talk to him.
Clueless SEO: Call him and talk to him. I don’t care what you’ve done for him. You know, I’m not calling you to tell you anything, so don’t call us and tell me anything.
Clued In SEO: You can call me anytime.
Clueless SEO: I told him what I felt like I saw, okay?
Clued In SEO: When we got him almost a year ago, he was ranking number four and five on his keywords of interest. Today he ranks number one on almost every single keyword. We’ve got about twenty five keywords that we’re focused on. He ranks number one on almost all of them naturally and in the local box. Are you saying you’re responsible for that from when you had him last year?
Clueless SEO: Absolutely. He was ranking that way before you took him over.
Clued In SEO: We have screenshots and we have tracking systems that prove otherwise.
Clueless SEO: I’m not talking about that. He dropped a little when we changed the name of the site.
Clued In SEO: Ok, so you changed it and then you…
Clueless SEO: You even told him you did the redirect on it. You didn’t do the redirect on it.
Clued In SEO: A canonical redirect. Do you know what a canonical redirect is?
Clueless SEO: Well, look, I’m just saying…

[headdesk]

Clued In SEO: No, you don’t.
Clueless SEO: I just told him what I saw, ok?
Clued In SEO: Fair enough. I’m not trying to belittle you. I just find it very offensive that…
Clueless SEO: *laughs loudly* You won’t. Trust me. *laughs*
Clued In SEO: I know, you’re an SEO God. I’m sure.
Clueless SEO: But look, if you have any issues with anything that was done on the site, talk to him about it. That has nothing to do with me. You guys can discuss whatever you want. Okay? Have a nice day.
Clued In SEO: Thank you so much. Have a good day.

(Both hang up)

If you’re a small company who doesn’t understand SEO? Read about Small Business SEO and What to Look for in an SEO Firm before you hire anyone. Please. For your own sake and for ours so that firms like this have less of a chance to put a shadow on our industry as a whole.

Oh, and Matt? Maybe it’s time to redo those “how to hire an SEO” tips to be more clear that you’re not just looking for an “ethical” [read Whitehat] SEO… you’re looking for an SEO that actually knows what they’re doing [oh, and insult to injury? "Google Certified" is plastered all of the Clueless SEO firm's site - y'all should really update how Adwords certification can be displayed as well]. Because in my opinion a Whitehat who doesn’t have any clue what they’re doing can actually be the most dangerous SEO of all.

This post originated at the Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

The Clueless, but “Whitehat”, SEO

Organizing Link Development – Raven Tools Review

At every conference I’ve ever done a link development panel at, an attendee always asks during the Q and A, “What tools do you use for link development?” and my answer has always been the same, “I don’t use tools.”

I hate change and resist “new technology” as ironic as that may seem given what I do for a living…

That’s right. I’ve always been a spreadsheet girl doing things by hand. And after all, Raven is an agency tool, right? It produces all sorts of pretty reports that you can use to explain search engine optimization and ranking progress to clients. Outspoken Media is a fan and uses Raven Tools regularly. And I admit to never having logged into our account to play with it. Rhea and Dawn handle that aspect. I’m strategy and business development when it comes to Outspoken.

I’m an affiliate marketer at the core. And the only person who needs to know the progress of the MFE sites is me – and analytics and revenue keeps me aware of that progress.

But MFE has gotten bigger. Our listing of sites has expanded over the years and we have a ton of “cooks” in the kitchen when it comes to link development. It’s easy to send an email to one of my employees saying “hey, request these five links I found” and that email getting lost in the shuffle – with no one remembering to request those links or check to see if they’ve been obtained (or subsequently lost).

In short, I realized I had to cave. We needed a way to manage links that everyone in the office can access so that we can all keep up to speed with what is – and isn’t – being done in regards to link development for the sites. In the age of Google, links are money and any weakness in the organization of our link development campaigns ultimately means we’re losing money.

Since Outspoken was a Raven Tools user, I signed MFE up for an account (and subsequently have bugged Dawn at least ten million times to ask questions about how to use said account.) [waves to Dawn]

I don’t claim to have made use of even 40% of what Raven has to offer. My goal was link development organization, so this review will be limited to that aspect of their tool set.

However, what I can say is that I want to smack myself for taking this long to cave after seeing how much more organized this has made link development efforts and how many additional links – links we previously might have had slip through the cracks – are actually being developed as a result. That said, there are a few imrpovements I’d like to see made.

Review of the features in the “Links” drop down

Links Manager

The Links Manager, for me, is the most useful section of the “Links” drop down area. In it, you can add links you either want to request, have requested, are active (meaning the page is linking to you) or have been declined. You can find an entire webinar about this section below:

The Links Manager allows anyone in the company to search for new backlinks through either traditional methods or using Raven Tools (see the sections on “Site Finder” and “Backlink Explorer” below) and enter them into the Links Manager for all to see.

For me, this means I can find new links, add them to the Links Manager as “Queued” and my employees know this means they’ve yet to be contacted and can make an effort to do so. They can then change the status to “Requested” so the rest of us know not to do it again. Everyone is on the same page, can add links even if they don’t have time to request them at the moment and we can keep track of the links we have and have requested without asking each other through a string of emails.

It will even tell you which user in the account added or last edited the link so you know who to congratulate (or tell to get their butt in gear).

And it allows you to constantly monitor the links you have if you choose to do so.

You can also import links so that you can populate your Links Manager fairly easily when you create the website profile. You can upload links from a CSV or by finding links through Yahoo’s backlink search function.

The organization this section allows us to have is awesome, but the intuitiveness of it could use a tiny bit of work.

For instance, when we add a link through the Backlink Explorer, it automatically tags it as being “Queued.” But sometimes, the link is actually already there, and even with the “link monitoring” turned on, the system will not seem to update a “Queued” link to “Active” or show the anchor text of a link marked “Queued.” AKA, it seems not to monitor links in Que (or at least tell us what they’re finding).

Once I turn a Queued link (with the link already on the page) to Active, it finally updates the anchor text within a half hour. It should be monitoring all link statuses, except for Declined or Ignored in my opinion. Especially, if me asking them to monitor those links counts against the links I can monitor in my account.

Additionally, I’ve been unable to find a way to condense a Yahoo backlink import to only one link per unique domain (the way you can with the Backlink Explorer tool – see below). So when a site links to us from their blogroll, every single page with the link Yahoo finds gets imported. It makes quite a mess to clean up when you import hundreds or thousands of links. A “Group Domains” function within the import tool would make a lot of sense.

Hopefully someone at Raven ends up reading this post.

Contacts

We currently use a combination of private Delicious bookmarks and spreadsheets to keep contacts used for link development and marketing purposes organized. And while I’d hoped Raven might be able to fully replace that, it doesn’t appear that will be the case.

When you open up the “add contact” screen, you’ll find the ability to input a website address (or multiple website addresses) for the contact. Then the typical name, title, company, addresses, emails and phone information. You can also add their usernames on a variety of social networks, which is also kind of cool. After adding them, you can also see the number of links to your site they are associated with (but you’ll need to associate the contact with each of those links first from what I can see).

Now, while I can have a contact available across all the sites I have listed in a profile (which is good, because we sometimes have sites in the same wide verticals) what I can’t seem to do is remove a contact from only one site within a set of sites listed under the same profile.

This is annoying because… say we have Site A, B, C, D and E that are all part of the same extremely wide vertical… the same contact may be relevant to A, C, D and E, but not B while another contact may be relevant to site A, B, D, E but not C. So I either give them all separate profiles (and since I don’t see a CSV export option for contacts, that means entering the same contact into every single profile I need it for manually) or I am stuck with some contact clutter in certain sites because they are within a certain profile.

It also made me nervous that I couldn’t seem to download my contact list as a CSV. I don’t trust entering all my contacts into one place (Raven) and not being able to download that information regularly so I have a copy (or several) on my end (the entire Raven company could be kidnapped by a UFO for all I know). If I have to make my own spreadsheet copy anyway, why bother to enter the information into Raven and do the work twice?

Well, luckily, Raven listened when I requested that feature today through a DM on Twitter and now has a way for you to download your contacts into CSV form as of today (certainly speaks volumes of customer support as far as I’m concerned).

Additionally, I don’t have the ability to tag contacts to make searching for the right ones at the right times for the right things easier. For instance, we use a tag in delicious called “likes-tips” so that we know which sites are more than willing to accept news/story tips. When we do promotion, we log into delicious, pick the “person” (aka website) the tips need to go out about and then further refine that by choosing to see only those tagged with “likes-tips” within that “person.” This saves a lot of time.

Until Raven comes up with a tagging feature much like the one offered by delicious for their contacts section, I don’t have much use for their “Contacts” tab.

Site Finder

Click the site finder tab, pop in your favorite keyword and click “run” and then you’ll need to wait a few minutes for the report to generate. Once it has, you click “View” next to the report you’ve just run and a (probably long) list of domains that link to the websites ranked top ten for that keyword phrase in Google will pop up sorted by (what Raven deems) quality metrics:

We use a combination of ranking factors to determine how valuable a link from one of the returned domains would be to your site, including MajesticSEO’s ACRank and SEOmoz’s mozRank and Domain Authority.

It’s a pretty cool tool for showing you backlinks that several of your competitors may have been able to obtain that you’ve missed. Raven has a video that shows you how it works:

Just decide which sites are worth targeting for a link and click “add” to add them to the Links Manager. If there was a way to add one site to *multiple* sites within the same profile, that would be awesome. But as of yet, you can only use the “handy dandy add button” to add it to the links manager for the site you are viewing the report within.

The Site Finder tool is a decent way to find backlinks in your niche on a very broad scale. But I prefer the “Backlinks Explorer” tool to do it on a site by site (or even page by page) basis. Keep reading…

Backlinks Explorer

While the Site Finder can help you identify general sites linking to sites ranking within your industry, you know who your “real competitors” are.

For instance, say you own a site where Wikipedia ranks within the top ten for your core search phrase. That means a helluva lot of domains you have no shot in hell of getting links from are going to show up in the Site Finder tool. But, you know who your real commercial competitors are.

So do I.

And I prefer to know who is linking to those sites (or pages ranking from larger sites) specifically. And that’s where Backlinks Explorer comes in.

Now, I’m a recent subscriber to Majestic SEO, which is an awesome link research service. And at Majestic, I can simply type in the single URL of the About.com page and get a full listing of folks linking to that page – and only that page. But, Majestic leaves a bit to be desired when it comes to usability and user interface [if you guys end up reading this, I have some suggestions].

But when you couple Majestic’s link information (Raven uses Majestic’s info for the Backlinks Explorer tool) with the interface and functionality at Raven Tools, you get one awesome link research tool.

I have a site that counts a single page on About.com as one of its competitors. Not even a full sub-domain – merely a page. But, being on a website as strong as About.com makes them a pretty fierce competitor. Luckily for us, our site offers more information than the About.com page does and makes it easy for us to convince folks linking to that About.com page to also link to our site (or in lieu of About.com’s when we’re lucky).

By using the Backlinks Explorer tool, I can pull the link information that Majestic offers on sites linking into that page and “file” them accordingly within my Raven Links Manager.

This morning I was able to run a report on that About.com page. It found five thousand links, which I was able to condense to about five hundred by using the “Group Domains” check box so that it only showed one link per domain that was linking to the About.com page.

Next I looked for .infos and people obviously doing scraper spam (easy to tell as the title of the page is the anchor text over and over) to narrow down the list (by clicking hide on all the undesireables) to sixty URLs that passed the “first glance” test. (Note, you cal also see “nofollowed” links at a glance and choose to remove those too if you’d like… me? I like traffic, regardless of the SEO value, so I leave them in unless they’re from a crappy site filtered out by the first items I filtered for.)

Once I had those sixty, I started to click the link in Raven to visit each site and see what/who/when/where and how our competitor’s link was. When it was a crap page or a link I felt we couldn’t replicate, I clicked “Hide”. When it was a link I felt we could get, I clicked “Add” to add it to the Links Manager (which auto adds the link with the status “Queued”). I was able to add about fourteen good links to the Links Manager Que.

My employees know to check into the Links Manager and to figure out an angle to contact any links in Que to attempt to get a link for our own site. They then set them to requested and we monitor the links to see if and when they are “active.”

All that work for fourteen *potential* links? Yep. When we talk about “pound the pavement” link building, this is it. And Raven’s interface – combined with the data from Majestic SEO – makes the process about as organized as it can be.

If you’d like to see a recent webinar that Raven did explaining the Backlink Explorer more in depth, you can do so below:

Website Directory

The Website Directory is just that. A listing of all the websites you have added into Raven via one method or another. Competitors (if you’ve listed them under the “Ranking” tab), sites added to the Links Manager, etc. You can see the number of links they have pointed to you, their ~~green pixel fairy dust~~ Pagerank and you can search through them via keyword.

Sounds so much less sexy after hearing about the Backlink Explorer, I know… but it is what it is.

My conclusions:

Bottom line, the next time someone asks me at a conference what tools I use, I’m going to end up giving Raven a shout out. I’m on the $99 dollar per month “Pro” plan (for MFE), but they have plans starting at as little as $19 dollars a month (the “Basic” plan) and I can easily see myself upgrading to the “Agency” plan at the cost of $249 per month soon.

For me, any money I spend in business usually comes not as a result of me asking “how much will this cost me?” but more as a result of me asking myself “how much is it going to cost me to go without this tool?”

For me – even without needing all of the fancy reporting tools they offer for agencies or half the other stuff they include in the subscription price – the answer was that not using the tool was going to “cost” more than it would cost to use it in employee time, my time and lost opportunities.

Don’t know if it’s worth the spend?

You can try Raven yourself for thirty days – FREE.

That’s what I did. And within three hours I was promptly signed up for a paid account.

This post originated at the Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

Organizing Link Development – Raven Tools Review

Why You Shouldn’t Steal Content

Edited to add:

Please note the edit at the bottom…

I’m on vacation in Wasaga Beach, ON… I’ve got a killer tan, a new tattoo and apparently, a new fan of our awesome content creation over at Outspoken Media. Namely, the folks at Blast Creative owned by Brenda Segna.

I forget how I stumbled upon it, but the Blast Creative Facebook page (click the social tab or look at the handy dandy screen shot I took for when it is undoubtedly deleted) completely ripped all the internet marketing service descriptions from the services section at Outspoken Media (and they weren’t the only ones – one gloriously smart company didn’t even remove our company name from the lifted content).

Ripped as in they simply replaced our company name with theirs without even an attempt to edit it otherwise.

Now, I know Lisa Barone is an amazing writer, but when you promote your company by telling folks that the CEO of said company is:

“…an award winning journalist with over 20 years experience. Brenda’s writing career as a freelance writer is what taught her to write with an amazing clarity. She is also a Webmaster and Search Engine Optimization Consultant who uses her talents as a Writer to help BLaST Creative address client needs from both business and text content perspectives.”

and then STEAL the content of another company – especially mine – to get clients, I kind of take issue with it. Developing a site comprised solely of technically unique content may be bad, but developing a site – or brand – with stolen content is much worse. Building a brand on someone else’s dime is fine – but building a brand on someone else’s work is a big mistake.

If you steal the wrong person’s content [waves] you could end up with huge branding issues – damaging your online reputation and costing you credibility with your customers or clients – if (and more likely when) they find out about it. Not only that, but copyright violations can indeed be deemed a felony offense with the right circumstances in play.

How to write [your own] quality content

First, learn what truly unique content is. Then subscribe to the feeds at Copyblogger and Outspoken Media. In my opinion, Brian and his crew, along with Lisa Barone (bias admitted, but I thought this prior to partnering with her – thus WHY I partnered with her) are two of the most knowledgeable voices in producing web content available to you. You’ll find posts like:

The thing to remember when writing online content, especially “service pages” or other content that essentially define your brand to potential clients, customers or the public at large is that you need to find your own voice. Without it, your content is doomed to merely be an imitation of someone else’s – even if you *didn’t* blatantly steal it.

What to do when your content is stolen

I could regurgitate some information here, but Lorelle did an extremely comprehensive post on it already, so why not simply let her explain it.

Edited to add:

Since this post went up, I have received countless emails from Blast Creative/Brenda Segna… first angry and knee jerk in reaction.

Then I finally received an apologetic one (several of them), admitting the mistake. They cited an intern as having lifted the content and while in the Internet world, that is almost “the dog ate my homework” for an excuse I believe Brenda “gets” that it was ultimately the responsibility of Blast Creative as a whole regardless of who did or didn’t lift the content. The stolen content has been removed.

I won’t delete the post as content theft is an important topic and one that should be addressed and I feel this post offers helpful advice to folks creating unique content and trying to protect their own. Additionally, Brenda cannot take back the multiple emails she sent trashing me to folks who retweeted the post in her first angry reaction to my post. But what I will do is remove their company name and that of their CEO from the post title and URL slug so that it won’t rank high up for their names.

This post originated at the Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

Why You Shouldn’t Steal Content

Some Sugarrae.com Updates

You may have noticed I haven’t been blogging much on Sugarrae.com in the last year or so. There have been several reasons for that and I’d like to address them before telling you that “I’m back” [resists urge to sing "I'm back in the saddle again..."] and getting back to semi-regular posting (I never have been one to post unless I actually have something to say)…

Why the blog has been “dead”…

Personal issues

The past eighteen months were rough ones for me on a personal level and unfortunately, I wasn’t working at all much for the last twelve months or so as a result – much less blogging on my site. I think “burn out” is the best way to describe it.

Luckily for me, I’d busted my ass for almost a decade prior, so I had a setup that allowed me to take some personal time without killing all that I’d built up over that time. I’ve never been one to get personal online, so I’m leaving it at that. But I’m happy to say that I’m in a great spot now and the time off was exactly what I needed to get all of my ducks back in a row.

Technical issues

The blog has been in some dire shape on the back end for quite some time. I think the old adage is “the cobbler’s children have no shoes.” What little time I had spent working in the last eighteen months had to be spent on my various companies… which meant I had no time to fix the issues the blog was having (it would randomly delete comments, posts… and every WordPress update was a nightmare).

After bitching about it for the zillionth time, my friend Zane skyped me that he would be glad to help out with the technical issues. Since I’m back at it full time again now, I had the time to clean up the content issues on the blog and make the changes I wanted made on the front end while he cleaned up the technical issues. (Thanks again Zane!)

Changes in the blog

Comments are gone

Yep, and they ain’t coming back either. Sorry. For many of the same reasons Michael cited, I’ve killed all comments on the blog and closed commenting on all posts – past and future. The sheer volume of comments I had to dig through (if I didn’t check for two weeks, I’d come back to thousands of comments in moderation) made maintaining this blog an absolute hell I dreaded every time I logged into the admin panel. It was either allow comments and never blog, or blog semi-regularly and kill comments. I chose the latter.

Dead weight deletions

Some posts that I felt provided no real value are now gone. Most of the posts remain, but you might find a few of the categories no longer exist (either due to the posts within them being deleted or restructuring of where blog posts “live”). Additionally, I believe I made my point to the girls of Zaaz, so that post has been removed and their exact match domains have since been redirected. The WordPress plugin section has also been deleted. My attempt to offer up some free plugins brought me ten times the grief I’d ever expected and I’m over it.

General site changes

Aside from that, I made some general changes and updates to the sidebars etc. as certain items (like the YouTube videos) were killing the page load times. The tabs up at the top have also been changed up a bit. My about page has been updated as well. I doubt any of the other changes (if I’m missing any) are noticeable enough to mention.

Updates on what I’m up to

MFE Interactive

The last few years have been great ones for MFE Interactive. We’ve built some quality affiliate sites, have created a few awesome affiliate brands (we showcase a small selection of them on our website) and the natural next step is creating more. We moved into a new office recently, I have an awesome staff and they are all dedicated to MFE and seeing it grow… so I look forward to what the next twelve months holds.

Outspoken Media

If you’ve been under a rock for the last eighteen months, then you may not know that I started an Internet marketing firm with Lisa Barone and Rhea Drsydale (I never made an official announcement about it on the Sugarrae blog until now). It’s been an amazing eighteen months for the company and it continues to grow at a wildfire pace and I’m armed with a match and some kerosene to make sure that trend continues.

I blog there ~~when Lisa makes me~~ occasionally, so if you want additional content from me (like this link building interview I did), in addition to what I will be blogging here, I’d suggest subscribing to the Outspoken feed.

Sugarrae

I continue to make personal affiliate sites in addition to all the “corporate punk” stuff above and the Sugarrae blog will once again be seeing some posts on a semi-regular basis (I’ll never blog daily folks…) so if you’ve missed me blogging here, you can look forward to new reviews, new information and new rants.

Cheers.

This post originated at the Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

Some Sugarrae.com Updates

Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda Had Success with Affiliate Marketing

Over two and a half years ago I wrote what I consider to be one of my best posts ever about affiliate marketing called how to survive the affiliate evolution. And while it basically outlined my entire business plan at the time – and still remains a good plan today – I’ve often bitched that 99% of folks that read it and raved about the information laid out within the post never actually acted on it.

But I did.

And I’m going to show you what *you* could have done had you gotten off your ass, given up the SEO fame game bullshit and actually worked hard and followed through on my advice.

A few months before I wrote that post, I bought a domain with the intention of building a site about all things BlackBerry. That domain was BBGeeks.com. It was a brand new domain, had no age, no backlinks and was an absolute blank slate.

Here’s a quarter, call someone who cares

Now before anyone whines about how I have a company with employees and about how it is so much easier for me to build websites than the average person, I’d like to take the opportunity to call bullshit on that excuse. While I do indeed have a company that specializes in developing affiliate brands and affiliate websites, we own numerous sites. My employees and myself are spread out between them. The amount of effort it took to create and market this site could have indeed been accomplished by one person, working diligently. Save the excuses for someone who doesn’t know that they’re just that – excuses.

Creating the site

I took every piece of my site creation advice from my affiliate evolution post into account when we created the site.

Start buying brandable and not keyword laden domains. If you can include a keyword, great, but branding is important and neccessary.

I bought what I felt was a brandable domain name in BBGeeks.com. We bought BlackBerryGeeks.com as well, but we didn’t want to build on it in case there were ever trademark issues with RIM. But we wanted to make sure a competitor couldn’t grab it later in the game and piggyback on the brand we intended to build.

Learn what unique content really is and start creating it…

We created in-depth overviews of service providers and of hosted BlackBerry exchange service providers. We started doing reviews of BlackBerry software after actually downloading and testing every single one we reviewed. We started blogging three times a week even though we knew we didn’t have any readers – but we blogged as if we did.

Give your site the ability to create a dialogue instead of a monologue.

We created the ability for our readers and users to leave reviews on all the companies and software we did write-ups about. We also had the traditional ability to leave comments on blog posts. We sent emails to family and friends asking them to review any of the companies they had experience with to give the reviews a kick-start.

What I’ve found over the last year or two is that design matters.

I contracted a website designer to create what I felt was a kick ass “look” for the site when we initially created it. It cost a little bit of cash, but I felt the end result and the need to be taken seriously by larger tech sites was worth the upfront investment.

Plan for expansion before you need to.

While we obviously made the BBGeeks site to be niche, we picked up a few other niche and general smartphone related domains that we figured we could develop later if the BBGeeks site was successful from a branding, traffic *and* revenue standpoint.

Differentiate yourself and add value. Let’s get one thing straight. Google doesn’t hate affiliate sites. Google hates shit affiliate sites.

Initially, our POD was our overviews of the cellular service providers (instead of the industry standard, which was to review the phones) and our overviews of the exchange hosting companies from a BlackBerry specific standpoint. Those were our “technical” point of differences.

As time went on, we realized (what we felt were) our two biggest competitors in the space were both targeting very different markets. One targeted the uber BlackBerry tech enthusiast the other targeted IT guys that worked extensively with BlackBerry. Both segments were basically advanced BlackBerry users. We realized one very large market – the newbie or casual user – wasn’t really being *focused* on. So we decided we would fill that hole. We decided that would be our “branding” point of difference.

Monetizing the site

In my original article, I mentioned the importance of having multiple revenue streams when you build a website. Affiliate marketing will always be the “core” for me, but having as many “income baskets” as I can is important to me.

Having multiple affiliate programs for not only different types of items (widget covers as well as blue widgets) that make sense for the core topic, but also having different suppliers for blue widgets themselves.

We have no less than 20 affiliate partnerships – including a few white-label and co-branding partners – for BBGeeks.com. Additionally, for each “type” of item we have affiliate relationships for, we have multiple merchants we can refer to for each. This not only allows us to refer our users to the best deal, but it also allows us to protect ourselves against any one merchant going under or merchant abuse.

Sell advertising.

We work with an ad network that sells our advertising space to big name companies that want to get access to our millions of impressions per month. We also sell advertising via contextual advertising channels.

Start creating methods to contact users without them having to visit your site.

We have an RSS subscriber base in the five figures range and a opt-in mailing list that is about triple the size of our RSS subscriber count.

Consider becoming a merchant if your site is successful enough that the reward for the effort is there.

While we have no interest in becoming a merchant, we were able to strike up a white-label partnership that allowed us to partner with one, under our own brand, which allowed us to create the BBGeeks store.

Now, if you have a great site and have a strategy to monetize that site, you’ll need to get it traffic in order to go through the effort to put those monetization strategies in place (and have the leverage to get the bigger deals).

We obviously didn’t start out selling advertising (because we didn’t have the impressions) or with a larger affiliate deals (because we didn’t have the traffic to obtain them). But, we knew they were all plausible avenues and had their contact information ready for the second we had the traffic numbers to do so.

Getting the traffic

All of the above is useless without eyeballs. You can have the best site and the best monetization strategy, but unless you are able to effectively promote it, all you have is a “could have been.” You need to start off with the basics… good site structure, good keyword research and good on-page SEO. After that, it’s all about site promotion.

Learn how to develop site traffic without the search engines… Understand social media optimization and personalized search as seperate entities, as well as the effect that social media optimization has on SEO…

I’ve already discussed how successful our guerrilla marketing tactics have been with Twitter. The subsequent traffic we’ve been able to develop as a result of it speaks for itself. We’ve used contests, humor, linkbait pieces spread virally through social channels and more successfully. And our efforts towards non-search focused traffic and branding has – as expected – actually helped our search engine ranks in the long run.

Learn to market a site through more “traditional online channels”.

We’ve used press releases, we’ve created what is now one of the top BlackBerry podcasts on iTunes (yes, we’re aware of the irony) and have done numerous “media intros” to ensure the “tech press” knows about our site. Keep in mind, we never “asked” them for anything… we just wanted to let them know we existed and welcome any feedback they might have. Kind of like shaking hands at a cocktail mixer.

There is still a place for the tried and true methods of link development providing you update your execution and strategy in relation to them to keep up with the current times.

Don’t think for a second we ignored the traditional “pounding the pavement” for links. While our core focus when obtaining any link was usually “will this get us traffic?” we made sure that the links we did get had as much “value” as we could as far as anchor text and other inbound link factors went whenever possible. If we didn’t have the content to get a link from a site we wanted one from, we created it. And we made sure “it” was killer enough to get us the link.

When we did our post on free BlackBerry games we didn’t just throw a bunch of links on the page. We downloaded each game, played with it, picked what we felt were some of the best, listed the rest in categories with short descriptions and organized it in a way we hoped would make it easy for people to use. It took over a week to create. And we still keep the list updated and maintained regularly. But the end result is the most trafficked page on the site, both via search engines and referring sites. It was a lot of effort, but it was a lot of reward.

That, not blog comment bullshit, is *real* link development folks.

Developing relationships within your niche can be vital.

We reached out to all the larger BlackBerry themed sites when we started out. Some ignored us, but most were very friendly. We made friends, did guest posts, helped cross promote each others contests and sites when possible (and when it made sense). While we compete, we compete on a mature level. We’re glad for the relationships we’ve developed. And now that we are a “larger BlackBerry themed site” ourselves, we try to give back to the new generation of “up and comers” within the niche when we can.

The end results

We’re proud of what we’ve been able to build BBGeeks.com into. Nothing is more awesome than having a complete stranger on a plane recommend the site to me when they see me playing with my BlackBerry or having Dave Naylor tell me how much his wife loves our site over a pint at a conference.

In the approximately two and a half years that BBGeeks.com has been live, we’ve managed to develop over 100,000 backlinks to the site. Yes Virginia, you can compete without buying links. We’ve got over 25,000 Twitter followers who actually engage with us on a regular basis. Our RSS and mailing list subscribers reach well into the five figures and our podcast has a subscriber base in the four figures.

People searching for our brand (“bbgeeks”) and variations of our brand (bb geeks”, etc) reach into the high four figures each month (they like us, they really really like us!) and I think those brand searches are some of the search terms I love seeing the most in our analytics each month.

While we are quantified with Quantcast, we don’t have the code on every page of the site for various reasons. That said, even quantcast figures show you that they know about nearly 500,000 unique visitors per month and our traffic keeps climbing, because we keep working hard to be a valuable resource:

As far as revenue goes, I’m not going to give specific numbers. Much like I said during Outspoken Media’s first annual report, it’s frankly none of your damn business. But what I will tell you is that the annual net revenue you could have made with the site would have put you in the top 15% of annual household incomes. I bet that kinda makes you wish you’d have gotten off your ass and built a site in a niche you could love with a quality you could be proud of, eh?

Comments are closed on this post. I don’t want to hear a bunch of comments. In the words of Nike, “Just Do It.”

This post originated at the Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda Had Success with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Datafeeds and Duplicate Content

The other day I posed a question on Twitter; “If you could learn more about one aspect of affiliate marketing, what would it be?” and a large portion of the responses I got back as a result were about using affiliate datafeeds. Even more specifically, several of them revolved around datafeed usage and duplicate content in regards to SEO.

I’ve used (and still use) a lot of datafeeds in the construction of my affiliate sites and have learned quite a bit in regards to using them over the years. Hopefully, I’ll be able to pass along some of what I’ve learned to help a few Twitterkin out.

Information for Merchants

The first and foremost rule merchants need to follow to protect themselves is that you should never, EVER give your affiliates an exact copy of the datafeed you use on your own site. While Google does their best to figure out who is the original owner of duplicate content when they find it, bottom line is that a lot of it comes down to site age and strength.

What that means is that the older and stronger (in regards to quality links) a site is, the better the chance it has of winning out as the “original source” of the content, and as a result, being the page to appear in the search results when that content is deemed the most relevant for the users query.

Top affiliates have been at this game a long time and as a result, many have aged, strong sites. If you give them an exact copy of your own feed, you could end up knocking your own site out of the search results for your terms.

Does that mean you shouldn’t offer a datafeed to your affiliates?

HELL NO!

Datafeeds are a valuable tool for affiliates, and one you should be offering if you have a large inventory of products. The key is to provide affiliates with a datafeed without potentially harming your own rankings. And that means creating a separate, rewritten datafeed for your affiliates to use with rewritten product descriptions.

And no, you don’t need to create a separate feed for EACH affiliate. You simply need two versions of your feed. One for you (the merchant) and one for all of your affiliates to use. They’ll find some tips on dealing with their own potential duplicate content issues with other affiliates below.

And while I have the attention of a few merchants, here are some additional tips on creating happy, profitable affiliates.

Information for Affiliates

Now, you’ll have to respect that I can’t give you EVERY tip I’ve learned over the years about using datafeeds… a girl has to keep some form of a competitive edge. But I can share a few things with you and folks can feel free to leave more tips in the comments below if they’d like.

Accept that the feed isn’t “plug and play” when it comes to SEO

Using an affiliate datafeed acts as a solid foundation of content for your individual product pages and is not “your content” if you want to do well with SEO (and aren’t the “strongest” affiliate site using the feed). You’re going to need to create additional fields in the datafeed and fill it with unique content.

That content can be additional information about the product or uses of the product, additional information that describes the product or anything else you can dream up. But you need to value add to make the content “technically unique” AS WELL AS “conceptually unique“.

Switch things up

Don’t display things in the same order that they appear in the feed. If there are 8 different fields describing the product, switch up the order in which they appear from the feed or randomize how they appear from the feed if you have the programming skills to do so (we’re talking height, width and depth type fields here and not placing the height above the description).

Change up the image names

I don’t ever leave the images on the merchant’s server. I always download the images to my own site (and size them properly, if they aren’t already) and give them new naming conventions. It helps separate you from every other affiliate site out there using the same feed.

Change up the affiliate links

Even ignoring the duplicity of the datafeed, you should be running your affiliate links through redirects in a blocked folder for your own tracking purposes.

Add value

Every time I say this phrase in regards to affiliate marketing, a Googler gets their wings. But you need to add some additional value to the feed if you want your site to pass a hand review (even if you’re not in a competitive – aka “watched” field, you never know if your competitors agree with me or not).

This might be giving visitors the ability to leave reviews, this might be giving users the ability to compare prices between different merchants, this might be a lot of things. But differentiation on a true scale, in addition to the technical differentiation listed above will put you a long way ahead of your competitors that are too lazy to do so.

This post originated at the Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

Affiliate Datafeeds and Duplicate Content