Here’s great news on a Facebook event I’m actually happy to hear about… because it comes from a true leader in the social media space – Mari Smith.

If you’ve been trying to get social media to work for your business, you know that Mari Smith provides some of the best guidance there is for making sense of it all.

And as entrepreneurs and small businesses owners, we are all interested in getting better at Facebook marketing and relationship marketing in a big way!

So, I’m VERY excited to tell you what’s in store for you on Tuesday January 31st. Mari’s going to be leading one of her informative, FREE webinars — The New Relationship Marketing – FREE Webinar Series! — on Facebook Marketing for 2012 — and you’re invited!

This will be a lively and informative webinar about how to grow a raving fanbase on the world’s #1 social network — Facebook.

With all the recent changes over at Facebook, sometimes it’s tough to stay ahead and use the world’s largest social network to guarantee consistent visibility, engagement and growth for your business. That’s why Mari’s offering this free webinar, to get you up to speed on Facebook Marketing right at the start of the year. It’s all about the best ways to develop your Fanbase audience so that they REALLY connect with you. And when they join in and respond, they’re ready to buy from you, too!

Register right away to save your seat on Mari’s first big Facebook event of 2012 before it fills up (because if her previous webinars are any indication, I really think the seats on this one will be overflowing too!) I’ve already signed up, so let’s both start this year off with a big boost to our Facebook marketing for 2012!

The New Relationship Marketing – FREE Webinar Series!

I hope to see you on the webinar!

Comments, questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment below!

Cheers,

Here’s an idea for making this Friday more fun and fruitful.

In addition to doing your own Christmas shopping online, give your Facebook friends and family good reasons to do likewise.

The screenshot below shows a Facebook status update about reading Ken Follett’s “Fall of Giants” on my iPad, and how Ed was enjoying his new Kindle Fire on a rainy afternoon.

That’s a strategy that you can use every day of the year to make extra coin.

Respect your Facebook friends by making recommendations relevant and of interest, i.e. stay on topic on your business profile, and don’t inundate close friends with updates about incredible web hosting deals on your personal profile.

As ever, personal endorsements need to be REAL and honest. Getting stumped by follow-up questions will wreck your credibility and future earnings potential.

It’s also a good idea to add a disclaimer such as “When you buy the book through my link Amazon pays me… about enough to send my mother a Christmas card”.

Happy Turkey Day and best wishes for a prosperous Black Friday!

Back at the end of October 2009, I came across a disturbing post about fake soldiers bilking unsuspecting lonely singles out of their hard-earned money.

Running an internet dating site, I felt it only right that I should share this post with my readers and warn them about the dangers of military dating scams.

Little did I know what a beneficial effect that one post would have on my site!

Next to the homepage, that is the most-visited post on the site – with 8.69% of the traffic over the course of a month going directly to that page.

I attribute that success to the continuing run of comments made since the day the post was published.

As of August 5th, there have been 768 comments made on that post and they keep coming in….

So rather than dying a slow death and disappearing into the depths of long-forgotten posts (on a blog that doesn’t get very much attention anymore), that post still ranks high for it’s original keywords – ‘military dating scams‘ (3rd), ‘fake soldiers’ (2nd) and ‘fake soldier scam’ (top 2 positions).

The reason the homepage also shows up in the search is because I added a link to the post from the homepage after it became so popular.

Granted, although I was never looking to rank for terms that included ‘dating scam’ on a site that promotes internet dating services, the point is to go with the flow and try your best to make conversions.

In this case, I added a link to a well-known and respected dating service that caters to military singles.

You can see the original post about military dating scams here.

Subscribers to the feed on my personal blog got a surprise message in their email — a business message I did not intend for them to receive and a message they probably did not care to receive.

And you know what THAT means… LOST subscribers.

So, what did I do wrong (THIS time)?

Well, I failed to set up my Feedburner feed to exclude posts from a particular category. When I posted to that category, the list on my Aweber account that uses the Blog Broadcast service, emailed that post to all the subscribers on the list.

Here’s an example.

If I don’t want NPT newsletter subscribers to receive posts that I make to my XOX (personal) category, that category must be removed from the Feedburner feed.

Here are the steps to take:

1. Sign into WordPress
2. Go to “Categories”
3. Mouse over the name of the category you want to exclude and take note of the ID in the status bar as shown below. In this case, the ID is “381“.

   

4. Now log into your Google Feedburner account and click on “Edit Feed Details” for your feed.
5. Under “Original Feed Details” add ?cat=-318 (or whatever your cat ID happens to be) to your feed URL.

   

6. Now test your Feedburner Feed and you will that posts from the ‘offensive’ category no longer appear.

If you would like to remove 2 or more categories from a feed, simply add an ampersand before each category number ( @amp; ), i.e. http://netprofitstoday.com/blog?cat=-381@-642

Comments, questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment below!

Cheers,

This video about a merchant who ‘has a family to feed’ and ‘will go bankrupt’ getting wrongly banned on Google Adwords is so sad, it’s funny!

Comments?

With a quarter of search traffic coming from Bing and Yahoo!, if your blog isn’t optimized for bing, you’re missing out on lots of commissions!

So, what can you do to improve your Bing viewership?

1. Make sure the Bing spider is allowed to see your site in your robots.txt file
2. Check to see how many of your pages are indexed in Bing, by searching site:yourwebsite.com
3. Compare those returns against the numbers shown by Google.
4. Use Bing’s webmaster tools, to increase your visibility.
5. Use Microsoft AdCenter in addition to Google Adwords to generate traffic.

Yes, Google is great, but Bing will bring your extra traffic, so start paying attention to what they’re telling you!

Awhile back I posted “How to Add an Affiliate Link to a YouTube Video”, which used the LinkedTube service.

Fortunately, Jon, an NPT reader wised me up to an even better service – Viewbix.

Watch the video below to find out how the Viewbix service is a better option for affiliates and why LinkedTube is sometimes a little weird.

Do you have any suggestions for adding affiliate links to videos? Leave a comment below!

Cheers,

Good grief. What’s up with the Facebook Stalker app (and all the idiots that are promoting it)?

Folks, it’s just another way that scammers are getting you to give up your Facebook password.

Don’t fall for it!

First of all, if your Facebook security is good (no telephone numbers, addresses or real birth years), then you don’t need to worry about those who will steal your identity.

And if you have played fast and loose with your personal information get LifeLock identity theft protection!!!

Secondly, it’s easy enough to tell if you have a REAL stalker (and I’ve dealt with 2 of them over the years).

They don’t just lurk – they pursue you — relentlessly.

They send you every app in the book, send you loving messages and then express real frustration when you don’t respond. (Have you seen “The Resident“? Watch it.)

Dealing with Facebook stalkers is easy — defriend the creeps.

I have 2 Facebook accounts. One for family and REAL friends (those whom I’ve actually met, spent time with… love). The other is for people with whom I do business. Some folks are on both accounts… but never would I allow a stranger into my ‘friends and family’ account.

Back to the point, as far as an Stalker Trackers application on Facebook — there’s no such thing.
The original stalker app was removed from Facebook very quickly due to security issues. Don’t believe that others will be any different.

So, don’t fall for the bandwagon and promote it. In too many cases, it’s just a front for nefarious programmer/scammers to access your account.

I speak at multiple Internet marketing conferences each year like SMX and Affiliate Summit on the topic of SEO (I’ll be doing a full day SEO Training in New York this August). As a result, I’ve heard a lot of questions and seen a lot of “situations” involving search engine optimization. And while many of them I’ll gladly agree are open to debate and theory, there are a few SEO questions that come up regularly that make me want to beat my head into a wall.

Below are five common SEO myths that I wish would finally die:

#5: Meta keywords matter

The use of the meta keywords tag hasn’t mattered in regards to search engine rankings since almost the beginning of my career as an SEO over a decade ago. The meta keywords tag won’t harm you if it’s in your site header, but spending any effort to create them is a complete waste and has been for almost a decade, since the last search engine using them publicly announced abandoning them as a ranking factor. But the topic refused to die, causing Google to issue a public statement confirming once again that they don’t consider the meta keywords tag at all in 2009.

I think part of the reason this subject refuses to die is that the meta description tag still has limited use in Google. But the meta description tag isn’t used to determine where to rank you in the results. It’s used as the snippet for your site at times. So, it can be very useful in increasing your click through rates in the search engine result pages (SERPS) but it won’t help you get the rankings needed to be in front of users TO click on it.

#4: You should submit to search engines

Tons of snake oil SEO companies still tout search engine submission as an offering. However, submitting to search engines through general “submit here” URLs is futile and useless. Providing that your site has a link or people visiting it, it will get found – and indexed – by the search engines. And if it doesn’t have links or visitors, then you’re not going to rank in the algorithms of 2011 anyway, so being indexed in the engine won’t make much of a difference.

The quickest way to get a new site indexed is to promote it, legitimately. Get it publicity and get it basic links and the search engines will find you. And once they do, the promotional efforts you’ve employed will actually help you rank as well. The exception to this rule, in my opinion, is if you have a large or “complicated” site and want to submit an XML Sitemap to Google through its Webmaster Tools section. However, don’t confuse this with search engine submission services submitting your site to “thirty engines” snake oil.

#3: Using the ‘nofollow’ tag on internal links helps you direct internal Pagerank

The nofollow attribute was originally created under the claim that it was a joint effort by the leading search engines of the day (in 2005) to help fight blog spam. The theory was that if easily spammable platforms like blogs employed the use of the nofollow tag, the value of the link to the spammer would be worthless. If blog spamming no longer worked as a “ranking technique” as a result, then the incentive to do it would be removed and spammers would attempt to move onto the next target.

Since then, the tag has “evolved” to be used to not transfer credit to paid links (a practice Google has been “at war” with for a long time) and for a short time, was a way to direct (or sculpt) internal Pagerank to the pages you thought were most important on your website. Even Google’s own Matt Cutts answered that the technique was “allowed” (though stressed they didn’t see the point in putting a lot of effort towards it) during a SMX panel we both spoke on in 2008.

However, it wasn’t long before industrious SEOs found ways to abuse sculpting forcing Google to change how they treated the tag on internal links and thus killing the ability to sculpt internal Pagerank with the nofollow tag.

#2: Toolbar Pagerank matters

First, let’s acknowledge that long gone are the days when Google’s algorithm was based primarily on Pagerank. Second, I’d like to be clear that there is a difference between the real, internal Pagerank of a website that Google uses as a part of its algorithm and the green pixels you’re shown in the Google Toolbar (referred to as TBPR – Toolbar Pagerank.)

Way back in the day, the higher your TBPR was, the more valuable Google considered your site and the more your outbound links were worth. So, webmasters who knew this decided to only target links from sites that had a TBPR of 4 or more. While the original “truth” behind that method has long since become fiction, it unfortunately is still a “strategy” employed or suggested by some people who call themselves SEOs. Currently, Toolbar Pagerank seems to have no direct correlation to higher rankings or higher link value, though it is suspected to have some correlation to higher indexing rates. Matt Cutts has been quoted stating that he himself would like to see Toolbar Pagerank go away (I suspect as he may realize it’s mere existence prolongs the death of the TBPR related SEO “strategies.” )

#1: Google hates affiliate websites

Google doesn’t hate affiliate websites. Google hates crap affiliate websites. If the affiliate site is thin or contains the same duplicated information as a thousand other websites that are affiliates of a merchant (think affiliate datafeed sites) with no differentiation to it, then yes, Google is likely looking for your “type” of sites to suffer in upcoming search engine updates. But if you can find a way to create a value add and make your affiliate website into an affiliate brand and promote it via legitimate methods within the Google guidelines, then you’re not a specific target and you likely don’t need to fear every update. If you’re in the former category, learn how to survive the affiliate evolution and make defensible websites Google not only doesn’t hate but ones they actually want to rank.

About the Author

Rae Hoffman-Dolan aka “Sugarrae” is an affiliate marketing veteran and provides (extremely) occasional SEO consulting services specializing in SEO audits and link building techniques. In addition to being the SVP of Marketing for Speedy Incorporation Service, she is also the author of the often controversial Sugarrae blog. You can connect with Rae via Twitter or via Facebook.

Now that the BubblePly service is no longer available, I had to find a new way to embed affiliate links in YouTube videos.

The following video shows you how to generate commissions by adding affiliate links to videos that are embedded on your blog using the LinkedTube service.

Do you know of other ways to do this? Please go ahead and share in the comments section below.

Cheers,