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This week on the Affiliate Marketing Insider podcast Michael Jones, Chief Operating Officer for PepperJam. Discussion about ethics in the affiliate marketing industry based in part on the Affiliate Summit ethics panel discussion.


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In a nutshell - it is really quite complicated - an affiliate marketer transferring leads or personally identifiable information to its advertiser requires advance notice to a consumer and an effective 30 day opt-out option

Penalties? Up to $1,000 per violation (per each solicitation attempt)

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Google announced they are making some significant changes to Adwords. It’s hard to say how these changes could affect affiliates, but below two super affiliates weigh in with their concerns and speculations.

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I think it’s a good reminder for affiliates and makes some important points. Just some Monday morning food for thought. Have a couple bigger stories that are taking some time to research and write, so thought I’d share this quick one with you in the meantime.

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CPA WatchDog is a newly launched service that claims to identify, track, and prosecute affiliate fraud, recovering an affiliate network or merchant’s stolen assets whenever possible. Some of you may remember that I was a victim of affiliate fraud and identity theft. Heres how they stole money in my good name.

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There are many like me: scientists of the physics of Google. If you’re reading this, odds are you are one of us. Together we form the environment of the World Wide Web.

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Posted by rebeccaStories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

Three star links:

Royal Pingdom shares the best interview questions from Google and Microsoft (and they throw in a cheeky IKEA interview question, too). Warning: the questions are uber-geeky and pretty quantitative/logic-heavy.
Speaking of nerd alert, here’s the linear algebra behind search engines. Geez, my head hurt just typing that.
The O’Reilly Radar asks if linking to yourself is the future of the web. The post has two good recommendations for self-linkers, so be sure to check ‘em out.
Yahoo! Buzz has opened up, so now content from any publisher on the web can be "buzzed up."
The Scientific American highlights the problems with e-voting. Good information to have, especially with an extremely important election looming in the US.
What the frak?! 29% of Internet users have purchased from spam! I can’t believe anyone’s seriously stupid enough to–ooh, wait a second, a window just popped up on my screen telling me I’ve won a free iPod! Sweet! Hold on, I gotta input my credit card info to cover the shipping and handling…
Psychology Today dissects the creative personality trait. I don’t see "copious amounts of body odor" on the list. Hmm…
Not only is stress bad for your mind, it can harm your body, too! Stress: the silent killer. Find out more tonight at 10!

Four star links:

Sure, people poke fun at Rand’s coinage of the term "linkerati," but this chart proves that frequent social readers are more likely to link to/share viral content.

SEMI came up with 24 amusing ways for SEO detractors to prove their point. I like the "Use the same title tag for every page" tip. ReadWriteWeb has some good tips on how Technorati can become useful again.

Chris Brogan has 50 ideas on how to use Twitter for business.

Five star links:

Condomunity has a great article on the importance of crafting great headlines for your blog posts. Definitely check it out and start training your brain to come up with catchy titles and headlines that capture your readers’ attention and suck them in.

YOUmoz entries:

Even Kanye Can’t Make Twitter Mainstream. Ciaran talks about how Twitter seems to be struggling with becoming widely popular.
Why Google Hates Links. Moleskin contributes his first ever YOUmoz post and discusses how directories are a great addition to a website for link building purposes.
Social Media is People. Feedthebot talks about the motivation behind social media and reminds us that it’s more important and more valuable to have an interaction and a relationship with your audience than it is to build links.

Best of YOUmoz:
We had a lot of great YOUmoz entries this week! I’ll share the top 3:

Learning SEO: A List of SEO Audio. For his first YOUmoz post, Flying Monkeys shares a list of some great SEO interviews and tips that appeal to our aural learners. Way to think outside the box and offer up some nice audio resources!
Small Business SEO: Content Strategies. Rishil is at it again–this time he shares some questions to ask your client in order to come up with some content strategies for small businesses. He’s certainly building up an arsenal of valuable SEO posts–thanks, Rishil!
Google Refuses to Penalize Me for Keyword Stuffing. Darren Slatten shares an interesting experiment he conducted. Basically, he tried to spam the crap out of his SEOmoz profile in an attempt to drop it down from the #1 spot on a search for "world’s greatest seo." It didn’t work, but the case study is both amusing and quite valuable. Thanks for spamming us, Darren!

New events added to the Events Calendar:
No new events added this week.
Upcoming events:

Webdagene September 18-19 in Norway
Social Networking Conference at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel Kensington and Conference Center September 22-23 in London, UK
PPC Summit September 25-26 in Los Angeles, CA

New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

Ongoing SEO work for Modern Eco Homes in New York, NY
Digital marketing expert for Green Mountain Energy Company in Austin, TX
SEO manager for FXCM in New York, NY
SEO team lead for Blue Moon Works in Denver, CO

Featured companies:

United States/North America:

DragonSearch Marketing in New York, NY
EcommerceRecruiter.com in the US
Blue Moon Works in Denver, CO
Myers Media Group in San Diego, CA
SalesonlineWorld in San Francisco, CA
PG1 Search in Portland, OR

UK/Europe:

Searchlight Digital in Newport, Gwent, UK

Featured resumes:
Currently looking:

Katherine Watier in Maryland is an integrated marketing and communications professional with experience in SEO/SEM optimization, web 2.0 campaigns, web analytics, direct mail, email, public relations, and online marketing and media training.

Happily employed:

Paul Bradish (I’m not sure where he lives) is an Internet markter and SEO/SEM consultant who focuses on e-commerce. He currently works as president of IslandSupplements.com and MMAOverload.com.
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Posted by Jane CoplandMany of you have probably set your SEOmoz account settings such that when you comment on a blog post, we email you whenever someone adds a new comment. One thing we don’t do is include the contents of the new comment in the notification email. Why not? Because then you would have less reason to click through to see the comment in its natural habitat and you’d be less likely to reply. The same goes for SEOmoz private messages and replies to Q&A questions.

Some people really don’t like this. Having the message provided in the email is certainly the quickest solution, but it drastically reduces the chances of a person clicking through to a site. In a limited sense, this isn’t too much of a problem, but over time, this surely could result in a noticeable drop in traffic.

I’ve noticed more and more sites steering away from this model lately. Most recently, I have seen photo comments in Facebook notification emails containing the text of what the person wrote. Facebook notification emails already show the text of wall posts and private messages, but up until now, photo comments could only be seen on-site. To reply to any of these messages, one needs to visit Facebook, but people often don’t. Consider this recent conversation I had with a friend:

Jane: Ooh you have a message!
Stephen: Nah, from a mate I used to work with. Read it in Gmail already.
Jane: I always do that and forget to open it. Then I get all excited. "A message!" And I’ve already read it.
Stephen: You should write a book about your tragic life.

Ignoring how tragic it is that I get excited about Facebook messages, it’s true that I read messages in Gmail and, unless they warrant immediate attention, usually resolve to reply later. Later, I’ll go to Facebook and notice that I have a new message. However, upon going to the inbox, I’ll remember that I’ve already read it. Unless I need to reply, I’ll frequently delete it without opening it again. My not clicking through means that Facebook serves at least two less advertisements than it would have otherwise.

Adding the content of blog and photo comments to notification emails seems even more dangerous. If a person is simply interested in keeping up with a conversation and not adding to it themselves, they can easily read everything they need to in their email accounts.

We know what it’s like with sites like Facebook, too. I’ll think I’m just going over to reply to a message or look at a photo comment, and I get distracted. I go to the home page and look at the news feed. I click around. Not following a notification email kills a lot of potential ad views and actions for Facebook or for any site which gives out too much information over email. My eyeball-time is given to Gmail instead.

If this practice is popular enough that companies don’t want to get rid of it, would it be better to include only a snippet of the content? Perhaps a set number of words or a percentage of the text. After all, people are more likely to be interested in reading the rest of the message if they’re only presented with half of it:

Many other sites, including Twitter and LinkedIn, follow this model. I’m not sure about this tactic because it is so convenient to read things via email. This is especially true with Gmail or any email system that threads email messages. However, it just seems vaguely counter-intuitive.

Some have likened these emailed messages as being like the difference between ordering delivery and eating in the restaurant. I disagree, because you still pay for the meal if you have it delivered. In fact, in some places, you pay more. When I receive the message elsewhere, I don’t see any advertising (aside from Gmail’s!), so a website whose revenue comes from ads is essentially giving me my meal for free.

A far better analogy is that of RSS feeds: People who prefer to read articles and posts through feed readers could easily digest everything a site puts out without ever visiting the site for themselves. A similar argument regarding RSS is whether or not sites should provide the full text of their posts in RSS.

Is the mostly positive user-experience of "delivery" messages a good one? I quite like reading my messages in the environment from which they were sent and I don’t view that extra clicks as a bother. What do you think is the correct balance between ease of use for site members and creating an environment where people are most likely to visit a site?Do you like this post? Yes No

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Posted by willcritchlowIn my opinion, anyone working in marketing should be reading Seth Godin’s blog. Seth is a new marketing expert and his brainstorms and thoughts regularly give me new ideas. I am in the middle of reading one of his books, Meatball Sundae. Its contents won’t surprise anyone who reads Seth’s blog; its premise is that mass market products are "meatballs" and the new marketing (in which he includes SEO) are "sundae toppings." Trying to add sundae toppings to meatballs results in a mess, and organisations need to be built from the ground up with new marketing built in.

We’ll get on in a second to situations where this isn’t exactly true, but the basic premise is certainly tempting:

Paypal wasn’t done by an established payment provider - it was a start-up
Ebay’s marketing looks nothing like Sotheby’s
Amazon apparently gets ~30x the traffic that Walmart’s website gets

There are a few situations where I would disagree with the conclusion that you always get a mess when you add new marketing to old businesses, particularly in SEO. Understanding the basics of SEO (not even linkbait, etc., but just keyword research and basic technical on-page SEO) can be enough to form a valuable sales channel for old-school businesses.

There are "meatball" businesses like Tesco (our largest supermarket in the UK), who has broadly understood SEO (although they have a long way to go in some areas, they are miles ahead of the competition) and who is now popping up as competitors across many many verticals.

I therefore think it can be possible to translate old-school success into SEO success with some creativity, and it is still possible to start up in traditional ways in many sectors and at least gather local search traffic through basic SEO techniques, even when the website is effectively an afterthought to the core business.

However…

It is an analogy that has great use for those of us who have to sell SEO and even more so for those of us who have to explain to over-enthusiastic prospects that SEO is not a magic switch we have under our desks marked "Google rankings."

Link building

What do you mean by link building? How do you do link building?

We know from Rand’s question and the enthusiasm for various linkbuilding tips that acquiring links is something many SEOs struggle with.

There are a variety of ways of ‘building’ links - some to be recommended and some definitely not:

Directory links and those that you get automatically just by asking / submitting
Asking for each link and "selling" to the individual webmasters
Link worthy content (and asking for links off the back of this)
Linkbait through social media / viral ideas
Spam
Buying links (through a network)
Buying links individually

These are all the ways normally discussed for getting links (OK, OK, I’m sure I’ve missed some that are technically different, but almost anything will actually fit into one of these categories).

But Meatball Sundae teaches us that there is another way:

Build your business in such a way that it acquires links

For most of us working on the agency / consulting side of SEO, it is hard to make business model changes (certainly fundamental ones) to our clients’ businesses, but if I were starting a new business, you can be sure this would be a priority of mine. Even in established businesses, it can pay to think like an entrepreneur when looking for ways of shaping the business for links.

Lessons we can apply

I am a big advocate of looking for ways that clients’ businesses can support link acquisition. For those of you at the expert seminar this week, this fits closely with Rand’s presentation on enterprise link building strategies. It became clear at the seminar that there are a lot of in-house SEOs who read SEOmoz, and for you guys (or agencies working with larger clients) I think a critical success factor will be exactly this.

In no particular order, here are a few ideas I have had on this subject (I’d love to see more in the comments):

Partnerships and content syndication and all other ideas from Rand’s presentation

Rand’s presentation at the expert seminar this week talked about this and a variety of other enterprise link-building tactics. I have tried to avoid re-using his ideas (apart from the unicorn link, below). All of his ideas belong in this list as well. If you weren’t there, they’ll all be out on video soon…

Releasing financial information in link-friendly ways

Obviously this is closely regulated, but within the confines of what you are allowed to do, consider carefully how financial information is released as there are many places that are guaranteed to cover it, so some basic linkworthiness and keyphrase research goes a long way.

Allies and internal partnerships

You will have a PR and marketing team. Making friends with them and getting them on your side means that your budget just effectively grew. Both advertising and publicity can attract links if done in the right way. The best advice I can give here is not to preach but rather to help them look good to their boss. Just like any networking interaction - think what you can do for them. Internal networking is no different.

Use your homepage

If you create linkworthy content and you have a big brand, then you don’t need social media to begin the process of spreading it. If your homepage gets tens of thousands of visitors a day, then hitting your own homepage can be as good as hitting the Digg homepage (remember that your content is going to be a lot more relevant to your average visitor than the average Digg visitor). Integrate your linkbait into your business.

Use your email list

We’ve been talking about this one quite a lot at Distilled HQ and maybe it’ll be the subject of its own post sometime soon, but the power of building (what Seth calls) a permission-based relationship with people whereby they not only subscribe to your special offer newsletter but also want to hear when you launch new pieces of linkbait is hard to overstate. Think this is crazy and no-one would ever do that? Consider viral ideas like 10 reasons it would rule to date a unicorn. I think a lot of the people that appealed to would love an email when the next one in the series is released.

This is not an exhaustive list (and hasn’t even really covered the ways your business can be linkworthy in itself), so I’d love to see your ideas and thoughts in the comments…

Quick note to say thanks to everyone whose hard work went into the expert seminar this week. I got a lot out of the sessions and the networking and it was especially good to put faces to avatars when meeting so many people I’ve spoken to online but never met before.Do you like this post? Yes No

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Posted by Sarah Bird, EsquireMay It Please the Mozzers,

In November 2007 I blogged about a wacky lawsuit involving the movie/book/TV phenomena called "The Secret" and an SEO, Dan Hollings. Several months have gone by and both parties have been busy.

Background Summary

The Secret (and all the international conglomerations and people that have a finger in ownership of The Secret) sued Hollings for trademark infringement and violations of his alleged duty of loyalty. The Secret’s Complaint accuses him of profiting off The Secret’s trademarks by selling his own merchandise under the brand, cutting unauthorized side-deals with vendors of authentic merchandise, and generally using his SEO knowledge for personal gain.

Hollings denies all the allegations against him in his answer to the complaint.

It is worth noting that Hollings and The Secret had been engaged in a dispute about money before The Secret filed suit. Hollings had informally accused The Secret of withholding compensation that he was owed. It is possible, although improvable, that The Secret proactively filed a suit against Hollings to pressure him to drop his informal complaints about unpaid compensation.

If that was its intention, it didn’t work. Hollings filed a lawsuit against The Secret in May 2007.

Hollings’ Allegations Against The Secret

Hollings filed a lawsuit against The Secret in May 2007 alleging that he was supposed to be paid 10% of gross revenue from the web-based marketing campaign. The parties did not have a signed contract. However, Hollings claims to have an email written from Rhonda Byrne, one of the key people in The Secret conglomeration, promising to pay him:
US$8,000.00 per month to broadcast plus a share of 10% of gross margins of all revenues from The Secret website. The revenues you will receive from this, in fact, will exceed the Nine Network’s revenues as they have 10% of Prime Time’s net profits, which will come after your share.
Hollings claims he never received his 10% share of "gross margins of all revenues" (whatever that means), an amount that he believes is over three million dollars. Hollings also alleges that The Secret sent "numerous communications" assuring him that his portion of the gross margin would be forthcoming and instructing  him to set up an LLC to receive the large sums of money.

Concluding Thoughts: Beware Pay-Per-Performance Contracts

It goes without saying that I don’t know who is telling the truth in this matter. However, I do know that both parties are spending a fortune on legal fees. There have been extensive jurisdiction and discovery disputes. Is The Secret trying to outspend Hollings? Did Hollings get greedy? I don’t know. But I do know the lawyers are doing quite well.

I’ve written before about the dangers involved in commissions-based or pay-per-performance contracts. There is tremendous potential for gain, but also tremendous risk. If you decide to take the plunge, make certain you have a solid written and signed contract. If the SEM in this case had a signed contract, he might not be in his current unenviable situation. Remember to get it in a signed writing!

There haven’t been any rulings in the case yet about whether Hollings owed a duty of loyalty to The Secret by virtue of his relationship with the company. Generally, an SEO/M probably isn’t an agent or fiduciary of his or her client. However, it is possible for an SEO/M to become an agent with special duties of loyalty depending on the nature of the relationship and the agreement between the parties.

To avoid unintentionally having a duty of loyalty to a client, expressly state in your contracts that you are an independent contractor, not the client’s fiduciary or agent. Clarifying your relationship with clients helps them understand that you can work with their competitors and have no legal obligation to further their interests to the exclusion of others.

Best Regards,
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