Internet Marketing Strategy

Have you ever searched for the latest gizmo on Google and seen a link to a relevant Amazon search page with the same Amazon Affiliate tag you saw the LAST time you were searching for a random gadget. Who the heck is googhydr-20? Is he some sort of super affiliate, raking in millions of dollars in commission revenue from the Amazon Affiliate program? Is it a bot made by Google that uses their own services to automatically generate links, and thus revenue, based on trending products? What could it be?

Well, to put it short, the Amazon Affiliate tag googhydr-20 is not owned by some sort of elite affiliate marketer, and it’s certainly not owned by Google. It actually belongs to Amazon itself. Whether they did it to effectively launder their own money (I doubt it) or to maintain control of how their brand is presented in paid search results (more likely, I think), I can’t tell you. But what I can tell you is that since the appearance of the infamous googhydr-20, Amazon has made it apparent that advertising direct affiliate links using PPC will warrant you no referrals for any sales made through those clicks, effectively discouraging anyone from purchasing PPC advertisement space directly linking to Amazon through their affiliate tag. (Which supports the second of my hypotheses.)

Anyways, fear no more, there is no super secret affiliate bot network that automatically generated Google AdWords campaigns with Amazon Affiliate links based on trending products; and if there was, they can’t make money any more.

So, sleep safe, and until next time, cheers!

Last time, in WordPress on Steroids Pt. 1, I expressed the important of accommodating users who were accessing your website via a mobile browser. Now, let’s make the experience better for all of your users.

WordPress Optimization

Optimizing your website now prepares you for an influx of traffic in the future, as well as just making things run smoother (not to mention faster) in general. Optimization is an ongoing process that never really stops, but you can do one thing immediately, and that is to start using caching.

DB Cache is a caching engine that stores database query results as opposed to html output, resulting in less space on the disk that is taken up for cache storage. Your visitors always get real information while keeping CPU use to a minimum.

Leveraging Scheduled Posts

Most blog authors use the scheduled post feature to pre-load content into WordPress to be displayed at a future date. Why not build reader anticipation and generate hype for posts you’ve already scheduled? Well, it’s easy, with this little snippet. You can place it anywhere in your template files, or create an HTML Widget and place it in there.

$show = 5;
$q = new WP_Query('post_status=future&order=DESC&showposts=' . $show);
if ($q->have_posts()) {
    echo "<ul>\r\n";
    while ($q->have_posts()) : $q->the_post();
        echo "<li>";
        the_title();
        echo "</li>\r\n";
    endwhile;
    echo "</ul>\r\n";
}

Expose ALL Content to Readers & Search Engines

It’s very common to see a “Most Popular Posts” or “Featured Posts” widget on a blog, and yes, they are effective. However, this draws the reader to a very specific point in your site’s workflow, and this point is at the very end of the user experience. Why not highlight all of your content equally? You can do so by showing off random posts from your archive in your sidebar, with the Random Posts Widget. Who knows? You might have more diamonds in the rough than you think, and you could get your user stuck in an infinite loop!

I’d like to re-address the topic of WordPress plugins. Last time, when I shared with you my must haves for deploying WordPress based websites, I touched on the fundamentals. What I’m going to show you today is how to make your WordPress website soar above your competitors!

First, I must stress how IMPORTANT it is to have a MOBILE ENABLED website. If your website cannot be read easily on a web capable phone or mobile internet device, your website is CRIPPLED! You’re in a 100 yard dash and you’re JOGGING! If you’re equipped and capable enough to make your own mobile theme, the more power to you, for those of you who don’t have a designer’s or coder’s bone in your body, you have several viable options:

• WPtouch is a hybrid WordPress theme/plugin. It allows you to pick and choose what content you want to display to mobile browsers, and based on your formatting, plops your data into a beautiful, easy-to-read, mobile WordPress theme.
• Mobify is more of a manual tool, you kind of have to know what you’re doing, or at least have someone who does at your disposal. It has a web editor that allows you to style your mobile them yourself. Just using the default style it has after choosing your content won’t cut it. You have to work some CSS magic.
• WordPress Mobile Edition will give your website an iPhone-like makeover. Not much room for customization here, but you can add more mobile user-agents via the settings page.

Now, this last little tidbit isn’t a plugin, but it definitely helps amp up your WordPress. Encouraging communication between yourself and your readers is an endless task, so give them more reason to respond to you by reversing the order of comments, displaying the newest comments on top, right below your post. It’s just a simple setting change, go to your Discussion Settings in the administration area, and choose to display newer comments at the top of each page.

Remember, the internet is always changing, and so are the ways we communicate on it. Show your readers you are informed AND HAVE AN OPINION about current events in your niche, and they will be drawn to speak to you.