web-traffic-blog

Just launched their new Affiliate Marketing TV channel (serious). Some funny affiliate TV shows I’d like to see. Dog the Affiliate Fraud Hunter, America’s Funniest Affiliate Videos, Days of our Affiliate Lives, More… You can join the fun by adding your wacky affiliate TV show ideas below.

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I reported earlier this week the New York state Senate has voted to repeal Amazon Tax. Got an email from a former NY political staffer, turned affiliate with DETAILED instructions about what NY affiliates can do right now to try to push this repeal through or at least influence the outcome.

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Tuesday I broke the story about the fact that the New York Senate had Voted to Repeal the Amazon Tax. I was able to secure reprint rights from the National Retail Federation - so here is the full article.

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If you are a newbie affiliate or even a newer affiliate that just wants to learn some more new tricks of the trade, then you may want to join the 30 Day Challenge - it’s FREE! The pre-season videos so far give good tips about how to use 2.0 tools like Friendfeed, Twirl, Flock, Google Reader tricks and more.

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Due to the economy and gas prices, more parents will be shopping online. Many retailers are pushing hard to grab their share of school shopping and they are pushing earlier than ever. Ck merchant promos and try to cash in if you have a relevant site.

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Posted by randfishI’m getting to like this series (see #1 and #2). This week, I thought I’d talk about a tip that might cause mild concussions if you haven’t been doing it. That’s right, it’s the ultra-simple "research before you post" technique for bloggers.
The basic tenet goes something like this - if your blog has any reasonable quantity of link equity and ranking ability, chances are that every blog post has the opportunity to earn you ongoing search traffic. This search traffic is, oftentimes, even more valuable than your loyal readers, because they’ve expressed a specific interest in what your post covers. Thus, by default, your content is exceptionally on-topic (way to go!). The problem arises when you don’t take advantage of this fact by publishing before obeying the cardinal rule of SEO blogging - run keyword research on that post title!
Watch the process - it’s shockingly simple:
STEP 1: Come up with clever blog content, write a title and the blog post, throw in some graphics, and choose a category (all the things you usually do when writing for a blog).

STEP 2: Visit your favorite keyword traffic estimator tool - Google, Wordtracker, KW Discovery (sadly, to access Yahoo! & MSN’s keyword suggestion tools, you’ll need to login to your paid search account - though these are free to set up).

STEP 3: Choose the keyword or phrase most central to your blog post’s title and enter it into the keyword suggestion tool.

STEP 4: Take the results and modify your title intelligently. You might even consider adding the popular search terms that are returned to the post’s body content (just once or twice is all it takes).

STEP 5: Don’t go overboard or get carried away trying to insert keywords. Sometimes, there won’t be any good ones to use. Other times, the terms will be so broad and competitive that they’re not worth targeting (or you’ve already targeted 5 other posts to that same keyword - see cannibalization). But every time you hit a sweet spot, go for it.
Using this mind-numbingly simple and obvious tactic every time you publish requires a bit of discipline, but if you make it part of your blogging process, you’ll see incredibly positive results over time. Not only do you earn more search traffic, but that traffic will send more links, resulting in higher rankings and a snowball effect that will make your blog the envy of its niche.
Who knew blog post titles could be so valuable for SEO? Oh wait. We all did. That’s why this is such a "headsmacking" tip.
BTW - When I say it requires discipline, I’m serious. I probably do this on less than 10% of my posts, and regret it every time I think about it (kinda like when you forget to floss night after night - yikes).
p.s. For those of you on Wordpress, SEMvironment released a clever plug-in that lets you access the suggestions from the KW research tools I pointed to above right inside your editing panel. Thanks to James Zolman in the comments for the heads up!
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It’s fairly safe to say: 1) patent law is a mess, 2) patent law is in transition and 3) newer court rulings are reducing the rights of patent holders. But in a very provocative argument, based on recent cases, the PatentlyO law blog argues that new rules and tests imposed by courts (though not yet the US Supreme Court) could effectively eliminate software patents.
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The Virtual Earth Blog announced that they have released a bulk of new imagery to Virtual Earth and Live Maps. I am not going to list out all the new locations you can find the new satellite, ortho and bird’s eye imagery, but here are a few:
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Earlier this month, I reported that Google Maps was testing walking directions on a small subset of users. This morning, I noticed that Google Maps now is offering walking directions for all Google Maps users.

For example, conduct a search for 200 Madison Ave to 200 Lexington Ave and you will see the option to take “Walking” directions, as opposed to driving directions. Here is a picture:
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Last week, my friend Chris Bennett at 97th Floor and his brother Patrick at

Modern Blue launched a new analytics package called

BLVD Status that I am particularly excited about. I was one of the original pre-beta testers and was able to see this grow into a really powerful and helpful tool for anyone trying to better track their search & social media marketing efforts.

BLVD Status is an analytics program that has a live dashboard similar to something you would see in
Have a Mint but with really robust information like conversions, search engine rankings, outgoing link information and many more data points. BLVD Status presents a slick and clean user interface, but I am more excited about the actual data it provides you. With many analytics programs I have tested, it seems like you can’t get the data you are looking for without custom programming and tweaking.
Below, details about what features it currently includes, and what I would like
to see in future releases.
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