Affiliate marketing is as simple as matching up someone's need with a solution.

Yet it seems very few people understand this very basic way of looking at it.

What many of us publishers do is build a website that focuses on a subject, but still at a general level. For example, motorcycles. They write about motorcycles in general, and then pepper their pages with a variety of affiliate program links ranging from motorcycle helmets, to motorcycle magazines, to motorcycle insurance, and the list goes on.

But to their dismay, the click through rate is very low, and the conversions are about non-existent. So they give up on affiliate marketing and opt for Google AdSense.

Over the years of running a website, it's not uncommon to have restructured the folders, moved files around, or even renamed files and folders. When you do you will break inbound links from other websites who had linked to those URLs.

That in turn causes you to lose page rank.

That's what has happened to me while running Interment.net. Over the 13+ years of publishing that site, it has grown huge. And in order to manage it in a sane and sensible way, I've had to redesign the directory structure and filenaming conventions, and of course, broke many inbound links and lost incoming PR value.

Considering that Facebook boasts more than 500 million active users (I'm not sure how they define active), is it more effective to have a Facebook page than an RSS feed?

The scenario is this...

1. You have a blog, and you're trying to build your subscriber base.


2. Your blog has an RSS feed, and on your blog is a "Subscribe to Our Feed" form where users can have new posts delivered to them via e-mail.


3. You're having trouble getting enough people to subscribe.

There are already several articles out there with tips on how to optimize your images and pages for Google Image Search, but just how good is that traffic?

As it stands now, several of my websites get a lot of traffic from Google Image Search, and in some cases even more traffic than Google Web Search. It seems that people love to search for images.

So if someone searched for images of beagles, and it eventually landed them on a website about beagles, would that website benefit in any way from that visitor?

One thing I learned when working for HNC Software several years ago is that you'll never get ahead with more management.

That is, the more time you spend doing something, the less you're going to come out ahead.

Some of the blogs I created proved to be failures simply because they required a lot of work to maintain. If I was to put a dollar figure on the amount of time I spent finding material to write, and then actually writing the content, I was spending an awful lot of money, and earning little of it back.

So I'm just going to say what other marketers don't want to say out loud. Facebook is better than Twitter.

That is, if you want to conduct a social media campaign, and use it to refer traffic to your website, Facebook is far more superior.

Google Analytics for my largest website (Interment.net) says that in the last 30 day period (Jul 2 to Aug 1), referrals from Facebook versus Twitter were as follows...

This past Friday and Saturday I took a drive out to Laughlin, NV. Another business trip.

I met a beef jerky business out there and had drinks with the guy who owns it. He wants to buy advertising on my beef jerky review blog.

So it all worked out. I brought my wife and I had a good time there in Laughlin, while I managed to have a business meeting and earn some new advertising business.