Arg, Warning, Self Promotional Post: !!!

I recently added affiliate software to my site which tracks sales through PayPal.

Join the affiliate program today and get a free $20 bonus credit.

More information in the extended entry...
Most of my sales are generated through PayPal, which has substantially lower costs than ClickBank. In addition to saving me money that also means that saves affiliates money too.

Good Deals with the New Affiliate Program:

• Triple Redundancy Sales Tracking - Session management, IP logging & cookies.

• Allows affiliates to send traffic to the home page or to a sales letter page.
• The affiliate software makes it easy for affiliates to use various banners, text links, or text ads.
• Since most of my ebook sales are through Paypal and since that payment option is on nearly every page of this site that means affiliates stand the greatest chance of getting commission for their sales. Also the triple redundant tracking makes it easier for affiliates to ensure they get credit for their sales.
• The new affiliate software does not use 302 redirects, so I do not need to worry about Google or Yahoo! penalizing my site by not properly following a 302 redirect.
• I am crediting all affiliate accounts with a $20 bonus credit.
• My affiliate software allows me to set result based compenasation levels. This helps me give added incentive and added reward to harder working affiliates. This also helps give better affiliates a benefit in the marketplace.
• The affiliate software also allows me to roll out pay per click advertising options. I have not yet turned this on but may do so eventually.
• The affiliate software allows two tiers. I have not yet turned this on but may do so eventually.
• Top affilates will get $40 per sale, which is over 50% of the sales price.

Bad Deals with the New Affiliate Program:

• New affiliates will be started out at $25 per sale, which is lower than the current program level. The affiliate payment amount goes up by $5 after each 5 ebook sales. Though after 15 affiliate sales affiliates make $40 per sale.

• The new affiliate program pays once a month, whereas ClickBank pays twice a month. My program will pay out quicker than ClickBank does though.
• I have set the minimum payout to $50. New affiliates that do self sales will not be able to profit from self sales until they sell at least 1 additional copy of the ebook.
• Currently my affiliate program requires PayPal accounts to receive payment.

When Can I Sign Up?
If you would like to join the new affiliate program you can do so today.

I am phasing out the old affiliate program and intend to have it fully phased out by March 5th.

If you are a current affiliate under the old program and have made multiple sales already please send me an email and I will see if I can start you off on a higher tier to credit you for your past sales.

I realize that changing affiliate programs sucks for affiliates (being an affiliate of many products myself), but I do not intend on doing it often. I appoligize for any inconveniences this change may cause.

If you have any questions, comments, or feedback please email me or post them below.

the employee blog
Google says shh to this blogger

Philosophers
condensed and abbridged for your pleasure...

People
oh lothesome me

Bandwidth
bandwidth limit exceeded at the 2005 bloggies site. some host looking for a hosted by link might have just struck gold? you gotta think thats a fairly strong site.

Cnet
NickW rants

Affiliates
a heated thread at threadwatch

SEO Blogs
we all say the same stuff... ;) Peter D has the scoop

Directories

• Danny Sullivan has a post about why they have lost some of their value

• NickW has a post about how bottom up classification systems are more valuable
• if you submit sites to a ton of directories you may find roboform saves you a few minutes

a dollar
actually a shocker, think its near its two month highs...goes off to quickly register many sites (using roboform) while the dollar has a better conversion rate

Google Scrapper:
Chris Ridings on Daniel Brandt's scrapper...
Daniel Brandt states:

If the scraping is done properly, it is not worth Google's trouble to find you. Our source code separates the "fetch" portion of program, which is done by curl or wget, from the searcher interface and parsing of the fetched results. If the fetching is done by a server on a different Class C address from the website that shows the scraped results, there is little that Google can do to find the IP address that is responsible for the actual fetch.

and Chris states:

Conveniently forgetting that his hack of an application forgets to change the useragent of the request from the curl/wget defaults. Thereby leaving the fetch machines' ip addresses sitting ducks in those query logs that Brandt believes last an eternity.

Cooperative Ad Network to Adopt NoFollow Tag?
members at the Digital Point forums think not...two quotes sum it up:
"would that not defeat the object of having the links if the search engines ignored them?"
and
"Exactly, who'd actually use the Co-Op for anything other than IBLs?"

Testing out the NoFollow Tag:
White Hat Techniques are ethical whereas Black Hat Techniques are not <-- Alan Perkins talks rubbish.

While Reading Comics:
I read these comics so you don't have to

This is a bit of an off topic / personal type post. I guess many of them are that way now, but you have been warned ;)

My Brother...
was recently conned (by me) into creating a blog. I think everyone should have one. If for nothing else then at least for tracking your own thought process over time.

Creating Another Unoriginal Crap Site:
He originally wanted to create a site selling random junk he sold a bit of out of a catalog when he was a teenager.

Do What You are Interested In:
I wanted him to create a blog about something he knew about or was interested in to help introduce him to the web. My brother has HIV and since that is a somewhat important topic I figured that maybe he could do a blog about HIV.

I bought him a domain name and spent about $20 submitting his site to a few directories and off he went.

Being Personal:
I have actually been rather impressed with how frequently he has posted. Usually he just posts news as he finds it (which seems a bit dull to me), but occassionally he also posts exceptionally personal stuff - which is what makes a site real.

I do not think he has done much to promote his site, but randomly it ranks #3 on MSN Canada for HIV.

MSN Search Memory Lane:
It always feels good to see someone ranking well in MSN...it is a megacorp that is helping to spread your site and / or message. It reminds me of creating content by the keyword to submit to Zeal back when LookSmart was a primary feed to MSN. Back then it took less than a week to register a domain, host it, create, submit, and approve the content necissary to rank on the first page of MSN for almost any single word search query.

As an SEO Blogger You KNOW there are too many SEO Blogs When...
Your brother recently created a blog about search engines (as my brother did).

I could look at it and say "well he needs to do a bunch of learning" as many may look at this blog and say to me. I remember when I first made my other site about search engines and people emailed me nasty hate mail (I still get some, but for other reasons).

Who knows, he may be at the same spot I was a year and a half ago and may be far better off than I am in a year or two. I am interested to see what his level of commitment will be and what else he wants to learn and what other projects he will jump into.

The Secret Sauce:
The hidden secret of SEO for people new to the craft is that keyword density only really matters up until people are actually interested in reading your site.

You only need to figure out how to reach a few people in any industry. If Danny Sullivan likes your site then many in the search industry will too, by default.

It doesn't take much for a person to do well if they are honest, willing to work hard, interested in what they are doing, and learn quickly.

I look at my brother's posts and see that they are perhaps a bit rough (as are many of mine), but I also look and see that it looks like he is trying to find his voice and is trying to figure out how to sound like a person, which is something most sites do not do. Best of luck bro...

Moving:
So I moved hosts on my other site to Pair yesterday (lots of savvy webmasters have recommended them to me). While I was still uploading the site the DNS already propagated through to the new location. I had to learn how to play with some .htaccess fast ;)

Broken Links:
After I moved I checked my site using Xenu and found a ton of broken links I need to update. Some stuff doesn't make any sense, like the Virtual Library's contact us and registration pages no longer exist.

While on the Topic of Directories:
Free Christmas gifts...

I have been doing tons of directory submissions recently, and thus know many directory owners. The following directories are giving away listings to the first 3 people who leave a comment below. After you comment find your relevant categories and give me your info via email me at seobook [At} gmail dot com using "free directory submission" as the subject and I will submit your sites for you.*

• SevenSeek - John Scott's directory. He also has been thinking about eventually create a portal and search engine on that site.

• Web Atlas - Nandini Maheshwari's fairly new directory. I have been helping her build up some good link popularity, and Web Atlas provides mutliple deep links with each listing.
• Uncover the Net - Shawn Walter's somewhat new directory. I believe his directory has more pages in Google's cache than any other directory. He also recently create an affiliate program.
• Rubber Stamped - Peter Da Vanzo's brand spanking new directory. Peter is a bit of a link hound, so look for him to build some good link popularity on the quick.

* Please no lead generation, affiliate, pharmacy, porn, insurance, debt, or gambling type websites. If your website is making you thousands of dollars per day please do not submit via this offer. :)