Last December, while speaking at an affiliate convention in LA, I had the opportunity to share a panel with Dush Ramachandran, the vice president of sales, marketing, and business development for ClickBank. We talked about some of the challenges facing his organization. One of those challenges is the fact that after years of success, many affiliates lose their excitement for ClickBank, often feeling that they need to “graduate” to more challenging platforms.
I did not get started as an affiliate marketer by promoting information products on Clickbank, but I’m pretty sure the vast majority of affiliates got started this way. Clickbank accepts almost anybody, and their system is the simplest and most straight forward there is. When you notice that many of the “guru” affiliates who are teaching everyone how to get rich online often promote Clickbank products, you can see how so many people become Clickbank affiliates.
The more experience and success you get, the more sophisticated your marketing becomes. Your need for more powerful tools, more intelligence data, and more control grows as your business grows.
While sophisticated affiliate networks like MediaTrust, NeverBlue, and Clickbooth all provide advanced tools that can help you run very complex campaigns, their barrier to entry is very high. CPA networks won’t accept you unless you are a proven and ethical marketer. They don’t have time for newbies. I believe CPA networks are where most experienced affiliates go once they learn the ropes on sites like ClickBank and Commission Junction.
But there is a new alternative for experienced affiliates. I was lucky enough to be invited to see it in person, and I can confidently say it is the next step in the evolution of affiliate marketing. It is the new and highly innovative network known as TrendRevenue.
The People Behind Trend Revenue Are The Reason It Is So Unique And Exciting!
I worked with many TrendRevenue members back in my glorious pharmacy days. We made a LOT of money, money we didn’t even think it was possible to make (I talked about it in more detail in this interview). In fact, back in the day, they flew me and my beautiful wife to Maui for a week with all expenses paid just to convince me to drop my current affiliate relationship and work with them. They did a great job persuading me, and I am really glad I made the switch.
I managed to get top rankings in Google not only for hot pharmaceutical products, but also for other industries like mortgages, and life insurance. They all paid decently, but only the pharmacy marketing made a huge amount of money. Now that I think about it, the real reason for this is blatantly obvious. Read the rest of this entry »
I am thoroughly excited to announce the merger of seven highly successful internet marketing experts’ companies including Search & Social, 10e20, and Brent Csutoras Inc, all colleagues of mine and great friends. The new company will be offering their services under the name of BlueGlass Interactive. With a unique set of internet marketing skills in one place, I am confident that the stage is set for their continued success.
BlueGlass Interactive brings together some of the most sophisticated minds in search engine optimization, content development, social media marketing, and much more. They are a team that is focused on creating infinitely scalable solutions for internet marketing services. When many companies find themselves stretching their human capital to enormous lengths, the partners behind BlueGlass are busy learning how to surpass the human limits of their available staff with custom software implementations that deliver results.
This is a company that is here to stay. Its members are an integral part of the internet marketing community. It was exciting to see what they were up to before they got together to form BlueGlass, but as a team, they may very well be unstoppable. You can expect to see some great work coming out of their doors!
It seems like every time I check up on blogs someone is decrying the bygone days of search engine optimization as if it has been dead for years. This strikes me as more than strange. Granted, many of the old black hat techniques are certainly no longer viable. Google continues to create better and better algorithms to stop search engine spammers from ruining the web, and because of continual failure, many old school SEOs (myself included ) have hung up those black hats and decided to pursue something else.
But here is the reality. SEO is thriving! I might even go so far as to say it is in its prime. A number of key factors have come together very recently to cause a dramatic uptick in demand for SEO services. Among them are the following:
Paid search is becoming more and more popular and very expensive as an advertising method
Google is no longer shunning most SEO as black hat. The company is embracing it with guides, videos, and search engineers who now act as SEO evangelists
The complexity of paid search is almost on par with SEO
Serious investors are getting involved in SEO
Paid search is becoming more and more popular and very expensive as an advertising method Read the rest of this entry »
On Friday, we organized the very first RankSense SEO webinar entitled Searching for Results. If you missed the webinar you can access a recording of the live event here…
During this inaugural webinar, Hamlet covered several key SEO topics including:
Solutions to Common SEO Problems
Creating successful content
How to attract successful traffic
How to use the “Brand Hijacker” technique to attract visitors
Gyutae from WinningTheWeb started an interesting discussion on Sphinn about SEO automation and the potential of SEO software programs like RankSense of helping (or hurting) the SEO community as they slowly begin to go mainstream.
By the way, Gyutae is managing our affiliate contest that is giving away more than $14,000 in prizes. Our goal is to register a good number of quality affiliates and of course, to increase the visibility of the RankSense product. Check it out and see if you want to join the conversation.
This blog is now 16 months old and you’ve probably noticed that I don’t run ads, push products or do any kind of affiliate promotions. Only recently did I timidly begin to promote my SEO software.Why? Well, until recently I didn’t feel like the quality experience I was hoping was there yet. Don’t get me wrong, I am very proud of the ideas, innovations and concepts that RankSense offers and also very proud of my development team–especially now that RankSense is finally at a place where I feel comfortable promoting the product. Read the rest of this entry »
You have probably heard about the two most important metrics for the success of a website: traffic and conversions. No one will dispute that the more traffic you receive, and the better that traffic converts, the more sales/profits you are going to make. Entire professions are dedicated to driving traffic to your website and to improving your landing pages’ conversion rates. The general wisdom is that these two important fields need to be treated separately. But in this post I am going to explain why the two are more tightly related than they initially seem.
Going Back to the Source
Certainly you can do all sorts of things to your site to “improve” the likelihood that the visitor will stay around longer and perhaps take action eventually. But I think that too much effort and thought is put into driving traffic from as many sources and keywords as possible and in trying to optimize everything that can be optimized on a website. Yet little thought is put into something as obvious as trying to understand clearly what each visitor is expecting when they see your landing page.
Think about it. Visitors land on your website all the time, but the path of clicks they followed to get there, and their expectations once they arrive, are often completely different from visitor to visitor. One visitor may arrive after reading a favorable review of your services from a reputable blog site or online magazine. Another may arrive directly from your Google AdWords ad that promised a discount on purchases “today only.” This is what I call the visitor’sframe of mind. It is a very important concept for conversion: the source of your traffic preconditions your visitor to take (or not to take) action on your content.
A couple of months ago I found a really clever and easy way to build thousands of links to any site (with your choice of anchor text). In the spirit of sharing I try to promote in this blog, here it is…
PAD your link-building regimen
There are thousands of software developers that provide their solution as a software download (RankSense is one of those), but getting visibility for your solution is an uphill battle due to the large number of competing products in any software niche. One of the easiest ways to get a lot of visibility is to offer a free version of your product and syndicate it through free software download directories.
Now, there are thousands of such directories and submitting your software to each one manually is definitely a pain. Fortunately, there is already a solution for that. All of the software distribution sites support a standard syndication format for content similar to RSS. It’s called PAD (Portable Application Description). Essentially, it is an XML format with all the details about your software, your company, and so on. And most important of all for us marketers, it includes a space to provide our company/product URL and description. In most cases, both result in a link with the anchor text you specify.Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while—especially after following the contentious discussion in the comments of my last post. Rand Fishkin talks about why SEO firms should not guarantee rankings, and for the most part I agree with everything he says. But I am going to come down on the other side of the fence on this because it concerns a more profound issue that I feel most of us have been sweeping under the rug.
The problem is scammers who claim to be SEOs and who disrepute all of us with what they do. Wherever we draw the line between who is and who isn’t a “real SEO” is not important. There is no central authority or watchdog group that validates which SEO claims are true and which are false. But—and this is a big but—there is one way we can turn the tables. You guessed it: unlike scammers, we can guarantee our results.
There’s been an interesting debate on WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Roundtable, Sphinn, SitePoint and Search Engine Watch about Google’s recent block of popular rank-checking tools like WebPosition Gold and WebCEO. It appears that clients are very used to tracking their SEO consultants’ efforts and gauging their success by looking at the regular rankings report. But querying search engines is not the only way you can use to check rankings. Let me tell you a better way…
A better way to check search rankings
I definitely feel the pain of those that need to rely on tools that are constantly getting blocked by Google. But there is no need to get Google mad at you and block your IP. I learned early in life that there are always many different ways to achieve the same goals. You can get far more information about your rankings, for instance, directly from your traffic log files. You can determine all the keywords that you are ranking for, their relative positions, the number of visits each keyword is sending, and, with the IP address, you can also determine the physical locations where searchers are coming from. We’ve had this functionality built in to RankSense since we started developing it four years ago! Plus, you don’t need to query Google to get this information. (BTW, the new 2.0 version of RankSense is coming out, and the Discover Rankings tool can now detect conversions as well. That way, you’ll be ranking first for the keywords that actually bring in the money!)
There are many blogs about SEO. Many of them have done, and continue to do, a great job with traditional ideas. Unfortunately, knowing and doing what everybody else does is not a competitive advantage.
This blog is different. It’s about learning the most advanced SEO techniques, led by one of the industry’s up and coming SEO thinkers. Here you will find advanced search engine marketing tips and techniques that give you an edge over your competitors. The ideas are totally original: a fusion of Hamlet Batista’s own experience, research and careful experimentation, along with his readers’ questions, ideas, and thought-provoking input. Come along for the ride and explore, participate and push the limits of today’s SEO.
Last December, while speaking at an affiliate convention in LA, I had the opportunity to share a panel with Dush Ramachandran, the vice president of sales, marketing, and business development for ClickBank. We talked about some of the challenges facing his organization. One of those challenges is the fact that after years of success, many affiliates lose their excitement for ClickBank, often feeling that they need to “graduate” to more challenging platforms.
Posted by
Hamlet Batista 
I am thoroughly excited to announce the merger of seven highly successful internet marketing experts’ companies including 
) have hung up those black hats and decided to pursue 
You have probably heard about the two most important metrics for the success of a website: traffic and conversions. No one will dispute that the more traffic you receive, and the better that traffic converts, the more sales/profits you are going to make. Entire professions are dedicated to driving traffic to your website and to improving your landing pages’ conversion rates. The general wisdom is that these two important fields need to be treated separately. But in this post I am going to explain why the two are more tightly related than they initially seem.
I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while—especially after following the contentious discussion in the comments of my last post. Rand Fishkin talks about 
There’s been an interesting debate on 
"Advanced yet simple and strategic SEO" 78 pages full of useful insights and valuable tips
