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!

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.

You can create the world’s best website, but if no one can find it, it’s useless. Welcome to the world of Search Engine Optimization. Far from an exact science, SEO is a must if you want visitors to find and purchase from your site. There are plenty of companies that are happy to lighten your wallet, while they promise top rankings in the Search Engines. Problem is, there are no quick-fixes to make that happen. Consider yourself warned!

So what do you do to ensure your site will be found? Read, read, and then read some more! There are thousands of books and publications out there that focus on this topic. There are hundreds of message boards and blogs that cover SEO in great detail. You have to keep current on SEO, because the search engines are constantly fine-tuning their algorithms. You may have been on Page 1 yesterday, but a little tweak on their end, and next thing you’re lost on Page 20!

Here are some of my favorite SEO forums:
Digital Point
SitePoint
Webmaster World
WebProWorld
SEO Chat

In addition, you should check out the following magazines:
Website Magazine
Search Marketing Standard Magazine
Revenue Magazine