I’ll be in NYC next week for the Search Engine Strategies conference.. If you’ve never been to a Search Engine Strategies event in New York City, this is a “must-attend”. The industry converges for a week of spirited discussion, high-level learning and attendees leave with actionable battle plans to go forward with for their companies.

So why would an affiliate be interested in a conference about SEO? Honestly, if you’re not using SEO to promote your campaigns, you’re leaving easy money on the table. Personally, I’ve never been a big fan of PPC.

Most affiliates would consider that statement to be sacreligious, but I just don’t agree. Sure, you can ramp up a campaign in a matter of minutes, and drive traffic to your site (or even directly to the merchant’s site), but there’s a cost involved. You’re now worried about ROI, ad budgets, daily spending limits, Google’s quality score, and a number of other things. If you decide to go on vacation, you’re going to have to remotely manage your PPC campaigns, or shut them down and stop all sources of profit!

With SEO, you’re definitely going to spend more time setting things up, and you have to be patient, because jumping to the top of the search results doesn’t happen overnight. But when it does (and it will), life will be great! The affiliate commissions will start rolling in, and you can just sit back and count your $$. Want to go on a cruise and leave the laptop back home? No problem! That’s the beauty of SEO, you just set it and forget it. Sure, you can spend time tweaking your landing pages to improve your rankings, but it’s not as “labor intensive” as PPC is.

So what do I hope to learn at SES NY? How to continue improving my search engine rankings.. The search engines are constantly tweaking their algorithms, and it’s hard to keep up with them. MSN rolled out their Live service last October, and something changed in their algo. The net effect - I lost about 50 1st-page rankings! To this day, I’ve been unable to get those pages ranked highly again. Yahoo is odd, with some pages ranking great, and others totally lost.. And Google is a total mystery. For a search engine that supposedly cares so much about the quality and integrity of their index, it sure doesn’t show. The sites that constantly rank highly are the ones that buy a HUGE amount of links from other sites. Strange, I thought Google was taking a hard line on sites that bought and sold links. Apparently not so much!

If only Ask would become the Search Engine of choice, I could retire today. I guess whatever I’m doing resonates with them, as I rank #1 for a TON of my targeted keywords.

If you’re going to be at SES next week, drop me an e-mail and let’s meet up!

If you’re serious about taking your business to the next level, then you should consider attending the Elite Retreat in San Francisco this April. This is a serious seminar, with a serious price tag: $4,950!

But where else can you get some one-on-one time with the who’s who of the Internet marketing world? The Elite Retreat brings together Jeremy Schoemaker, Neil Patel, Aaron Wall, Andy Liu and Brian Clark together for two days of intense training that will take your Internet business to the next level. There will also be a special keynote by Guy Kawasaki.

I’m sure everyone would love to the go to Elite Retreat but very few people can afford that kind of entry fee. Not only that, but they’re capping attendance at 35 - And it’s already half sold out!

Lucky for you, John Chow and Rocket Profit have teamed up to offer one lucky winner a free ticket to the Elite Retreat! All you have to do is choose an offer from Rocket Profit, and explain in a blog post how you would market it. (PPC, SEO, E-mail, Social Media, etc) After making the post, you send an e-mail to John Chow with the URL or your post, so he can check it out. On February 8th, him and Shoemoney will sort through the entries and pick a winner. That person will receive a $4,950 ticket to the Elite Retreat, compliments of Rocket Profit. Good luck!

Edit: John is offering up another ticket to Elite Retreat!

Google is prohibiting newly registered domain names from participating in the Google for Domain Names program, severely hampering the practice of domain tasting. They would block all domains if they are less then five days old. This new policy change by Google could stop all Domain Tasting in its tracks! The new policy will go into effect before the end of February.

What is Domain Tasting?

Domain tasting is the practice of registrants using the five-day grace period (AGP) at the beginning of a domain registration to test the marketability of a domain name. What the domain taster does is register millions of domains and place Google Adsense for Domains on them, then drop the domains after the AGP expires and start all over again.

According to Jay Westerdal at Domain Tools, one Google domain taster was generating as much as $3 million dollars a month from the practice (and that was after Google’s cut)..

Oversee.net and other companies have been using this practice for years and it will have a direct impact on them. The gravy train of free money might be coming to a halt very fast. This policy change at Google should be announced to the channel partners soon and it will have a huge echoing impact on the Industry.

Good riddance! I’m sure I’m not the only one who has tried to register a domain name for legitimate purposes, only to find out that it’s already taken by a parking company. Google has been making some policy changes recently that’s upset webmasters all over the world (drastically reducing the referral bonuses, changing the Adsense clickable area, etc), but I think this is a change for the positive. What do you think?

Many people are running away from CPC because the payout is getting lower and lower. If you are using Google Adsense, you’ve noticed that the payout is REALLY low (sometimes just a few cents per click). It’s not easy to find high payout ads these days. ShoppingAds is a hybrid product that serves both CPA (cost per action) ads provided by eBay and CPC (cost per click) ads provided by their shopping comparison engine partners. They’re promising payouts averaging 20 cents/click.

If you have a website or blog, this is a great way to easily monetize your website.. ShoppingAds makes the process very easy - You just pick a keyword, select an ad format (letterboard, horizontal, vertical), and choose your colors. They’ll give you a piece of JavaScript code that you just embed onto your website, and you’re done! If you can setup an AdSense block, you can setup ShoppingAds.

In an effort to boost membership, they’re rumored to be offering a free $25 credit just for signing up. So what are you waiting for? Sign up now, and see how it works out for you..

Many webmasters are unsure whether they should advertise their website with SEO (search engine optimization) or PPC (pay per click advertising).

Actually, most commercial websites work best if you use both SEO and PPC. The exact mix depends on your goals.

Pay per click advertising (PPC)

Advantages:

• You get instant results. If you advertise your website through PPC, then you will get traffic now and not several months later.
• PPC ads are perfect for time limited offers such as holiday sales.
• You can stop PPC ads at any time.
• PPC ads make it easy to test different keywords and landing pages.
• PPC ads also work with websites that are not very well designed and wouldn’t get good search engine rankings.
• PPC ads allow you to bid on a large amount of keywords, including misspellings and other keyword variations that you cannot put on your web pages.

Disadvantages:

• PPC advertising can become very expensive if you bid on the wrong keywords or if you don’t calculate the maximum bid price correctly.
• Click fraud can be a problem. Not all clickers are potential customers.

If you advertise your website with PPC ads then you should use a ROI tracking tool to make sure that you don’t waste your money.

Search engine optimization (SEO):

Advantages:

• Traffic through organic search engine results is almost free if the up-front work has been done.
• After optimizing your website you can use your money for different things and the optimized site will still run.
• A larger number of visitors and search result clickers is not a problem.
• Search engine optimization delivers long term results that don’t require permanent financial input.

Disadvantages:

• SEO can be relatively time-consuming up-front.
• SEO can require a redesign of your web pages to make your website search engine friendly. However, this usually also results in a better user experience.

Search engine optimization delivers lasting results and it costs considerably less in the long term. However, you must make sure that you optimize your website correctly, if your want to get high search engine rankings.

Pay per click advertising and search engine optimization both contribute to the success of your website. If you use both wisely, you can get many new visitors and customers without spending a fortune. See the recommended resources below for PPC and SEO software tips.