“Look at the top affiliates– the ones who are actually making money versus the pretenders . What’s the difference between them? You’ll notice that they all work ultra hard, are ultra networked, and are ultra knowledgeable. The catch-22 is that if you’re a one man show, how can you possibly put in enough time to work, meet people, and learn at the same time?”

Read the entire post here: http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/07/01/how-to-avoid-obvious-failure-as-an-affiliate/

The problem is that there is still a lot of “spam” out there that people need to start controlling. You need to look at twitter as a way that you can mass email all of your followers at once. Knowing that most people follow tens if not hundreds of people, be selective on what you tweet. For me, I ask myself 2 very simple questions before I tweet:

1.
“Why is it that people follow me? Is it my good looks, personality, or my opinion on post-war baseball card collections? Probably not. They are most likely following me because of my knowledge as an SEO consultant, Advertising CEO, or something like that, so I am going to make sure that most my tweets are based around this premise.

2.
“Would I send this message that I am about to tweet out in an email form to everyone in my contact list? Would it have value to them or would I be wasting my time and start losing contacts?”

Stick to posting messages that are based off of why I am following you. Lets all fight to keep spam off the airways. I follow about 100 people, and I really wish it could be highly-valuable content whenever one of those people tweets.

##Danny DeMichele is the CEO of eVisibility.com##

”
I’m not always a fan of Guy Kawasaki’s work, but really enjoyed his post on the OPEN Forum - A Dozen Don’ts for Entrepreneurs. I thought I’d take a stab at replicating it with some of my biggest warnings for those in our field.
”

Full article here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-dozen-donts-for-seos

“One of the coolest things about FriendFeed is how you can see everything that’s happening on the site in real-time. Starting today, this is even more true with real-time search.

Just enter a search query as you always have, and see new results instantly stream in at the top of your screen in real-time. No need to constantly click refresh. It’s an extremely useful (not to mention mesmerizing) way to immediately see what people are saying about a particular topic. You can search across just your friends or all of FriendFeed, including imported services like blogs and Twitter accounts.
”
check it all out here: http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009/07/real-time-search-we-have-it-its-here.html

SEO Copywriting is one of those things that gets overlooked as important. Most companies are satisfied if it is a.) grammatically correct, b.) unique and will pass duplicate content filters and c.) there are sufficient keywords for Google to recognize both long and short tail keywords.

These 3 items are critically important, but what one should also remember is that when you get the placement, and someone ends up clicking on your page, you now need to sell them. The battle is not offer with placement.

Case in point, I recently had a client selling Loan Modifications. We got them some really good placement, but the content team they hired (offshore) was writing about topics of loan modification fraud, scams, why they are bad, etc. Probably not the best sales copy to get someone to sign up for services!

When hiring an SEO copywriting company, make sure they only hire on-shore staff that understands it is equally important to sell someone as it is to rank a website.

##Are we linked up yet? Visit my Profile: Danny DeMichele

I know, we all love Google. I am a HUGE Google lover. I think the issue we face now is too much dominance and while I think that Google is probably better than Bing as far as results go, I will never truly know until I jump in there and try it, without looking back, for 1 month. When you are so used to something, no matter how good other things are, it is hard to make a change. Not seeing the familiar Google layout will take some getting used to, but it is the only way I am ever going to really know if I like something else.

So there it is, as of this moment, I will not use Google until July 4, 2009 in which I will post my notes/feedback on Bing.

##ADDITION TO POST##

Just found this, thought it was interesting and in support of my argument. Techcrunch found that most people prefer the layout of Bing, however, they still wont switch. Goes to show, you are really going to have something substantial to move people away from the familiarity of Google.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/25/study-suggests-people-prefer-bings-design-to-googles-but-still-wont-switch/

Click here if you need an internet business start up consultant.

Being an SEO consultant, the one that annoys me most is search engines. With the success of Google, everyone is on the bandwagon of making a search engine and making everyone rich.

If you want to build a search engine, focus on RESULTS. Don’t worry about things that people don’t care about or need. Everytime I see a new search engine pop up on the radar, that tells me there are a whole bunch of investors who were sold a load of crap and are about to be very disapointed. There are image search engines out there, guess what, Google does it better. There are video searche engines out there, guess what, Google does it better. Bells and whistles are worthless. Google’s dominance is there for only one reason, their results.

You want to build a better search engine? Beat Google in results and visitors will come…it is that simple.

In my younger years, I would answer a clients phone call no matter what. In fact, I am often ridiculed by friends and family about a client I used to have where I did a 1 hour strategy session on Christmas.

The problem is that if you give them it once, they will always expect it. If you set the expectation by answering an email or phone on a night or weekend, they will not only expect it in the future, but they will get upset with you in future weeks if you do not do the same.

In the very beginning of a client relationship, you should have a meeting or phone call that outlines expectations from one another, including:

1. When they will be able to reach you.
2. When they should pay you (and how much they should pay you)
3. How long it could take for you to respond to a phone or email
4. If you will work nights and weekends, what is your rate?

Nothing will start off a relationship better than if the above are done in the very begining. Set the expectation and create your parameters. More importantly, no matter how much you want to respond to a client outside these parameters, dont. If you give once, they will expect it (rightfully so) in the future.

Big companies beware - people are talking bad or good about you regardless of if you plan on getting into the social media space. Look what recently happened to Domino’s Pizza. Their brand was severely damaged by rogue employees. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/business/media/16dominos.html

At least if you are active in a social marketing campaign, you will not only find these types of things quicker, but you are in a better position to react to the situation if you are already there.

Grow up big companies….it is time to accept and adopt using social as a brand builder, not a brand killer.

I had a conversation with some of my co-workers (@ecrunner, @CobraKai817, @imnotadoctor) about my view point and I will admit, I was stumped in some respects. As a result, I decided to open up my mind and try it out. In 3 hours of use, and of course, the install on my iPhone, all of my suspicions were true. I was obsessed with looking at updates, equally (or more so) than my email. I also find myself obsessed with gathering a following, for apparently no reason at all.  I was disappointed to see that most of the tweets are totally useless, a complete waste of my time to even process. I would say 85% is worthless and I just don’t need to see it, 15% actually meant something.

If you are following 50 people, and all 50 of them are tweeting 5 times a day, you have to scan and process 250 of these tweets. That is nuts! How on earth is this not a waste of time? By following them, you have given 50 people full permission to spam you whenever they want, about whatever they want.

Could you imagine if you were getting these in email format? If you were following someone you did not really know, but you were doing so because of their field of expertise, what if this person emailed you to let you know that they were going to bed? Wouldn’t that be a little creepy?

This is what sparked this post. Think before you tweet. There is so much garbage that people are posting that is totally useless information.  Before you tweet, think if you would take this same information and email blast it to all your contacts. Is the information that good?

I do believe twitter cab be truly useful but there must be twitter etiquette. Laws, if you will, that prevent people from posting useless garbage for all your followers to read.

I DONT need to know….
1. When you are leaving the office
2. That you are watching a Laker game
3. You just ate a hamburger
4. You are going to bed
5. THE LIST GOES ON.

What I do want to know about:
1. Something in the news
2. Something related to my field of expertise (or yours, which is why I am following you)
2. If you are in San Francisco, who knows, I may be there.
4. If there is a good band playing in SD
5. THIS LIST ALSO GOES ON.

People just need to think about the effect that their message has on their followers. If you have 300 followers, do really think they all need to know that you are about to go and have dinner with the family? I mean, come on, that takes an awfully large ego to twitter that.

Think before you Tweet.

Now, I am going to log off from my computer and watch TV, but before I do, I better let everyone know, logging on to twitter now….follow that.