Not only has Oprah and Dr. OZ decided to start suing advertisers who have been using their images on their sales pages as endorsements, the Attorney Generals of many states are now also filing civil lawsuits.

Oprah Winfrey Sues Acai Makers

Flogs (fake blogs) have been used heavily into duping people to fill out the many Acai, Colon Cleanse, Resveratrol offers that you can find on many CPA networks.

The FTC is forever cracking down on roage affiliate brands and watches the MLM industry very carefully but so far has not got involved with CPA Netwroks. That is set to change and expect more involvement from them in the future

Of course, if you have been playing by the rules like the majority of us then you have nothing to worry about but the FTC have screenshots from many months back as they were buiding their case so, if you have a fake blog up and are shocked reading this and take it down it may even be too late.

I welcome this move and it really is reciprocity in action. If you set out to decieve and rip people off then you must accept the consequences

Those are all very good uses, and benefit you as a web worker immensely. The only question I have as a visitor is, how do they benefit me? Yes, they help if I’m considering you as a prospective contractor for a job, but if I’m not, then the site quickly loses relevance. A blog should be doing work all the time, even when it isn’t speaking directly to your professional history and identity. Here’s how to make sure it is.

Keep ‘Em Coming

The best way to make sure a blog is doing work for you is to make sure that it will attract repeat visitors, even if those visitors aren’t currently interested in you professionally, since they may be at some later date. How do you get people to come back? Make sure they see your site as a growing, live resource.

Be a Research Assistant

The only way to do this is to make sure that you show them you can provide the information your visitors are looking for easier, quicker, and better than they can find it themselves. That doesn’t mean replicating Google search results. That means pre-searching, collecting, and annotating useful links and resources, and keeping them up to date. Case in point, if I’m looking for Twitter resources, I don’t go to Google, I go to TwiTip.com first.

Make link collections easy to find and clearly titled, possibly placing permalinks to relevant posts in your blog’s sidebar or header. Context and a human touch is especially important with these, since otherwise visitors will mistrust them as the products of automated web spiders and bots.

Humanize, Humanize, Humanize

That brings me to my next point, which is that you should make your blog as human as possible without being overly personal. I would avoid ads unless your blog is your primary source of income, or limit them to a very few which redirect to relevant sites to which you personally contribute or with which you’re involved.

The tone and content of your writing shouldn’t be too formal. The potential clients you want reading your blog probably spend a good chunk of their day reading formal business writing, press releases, etc., and your blog will fall off their radar if it comes across as too similar to those things. In the end, people are looking to connect with other people, not with dry instructional manuals.

Don’t Become a One-Trick Pony

Specialization is important. People respect specialists and look to them for solutions to pressing problems. That said, while there is nothing wrong with showing off your specialization on your blog, don’t make it the exclusive focus. You risk alienating everyone in your audience, and it will be especially hard to encourage repeat visits from casual readers.

It’s also important to show readers that you are not living inside a bubble. Web workers are prized for their ability to come up with non-linear solutions and adapt. That flexibility of mind will come across if you show a willingness to step outside your comfort zone once in a while and address different topics.

Get Beyond the “You” in Your Blog

Of course, since it represents you, it should primarily feature your content. That’s primarily, not exclusively. Having guest bloggers contribute content to your blog not only encourages an influx of readers who wouldn’t ordinarily find your site, but also provides a different take on who you are.

In soliciting guest posts, you present prospective clients with an example of your resourcefulness, and your ability to successfully network and make important connections in your chosen space. You also tell clients who you are by telling them who you associate with, something to keep in mind when selecting potential guest bloggers.

Some of these tips may be obvious, and others might not quite fit with what you have in mind, but at the very least, they should help you think more critically about how you represent yourself on the web, and that’s always a good thing.

I have already found the categories ranking in a few different places without any input from me so I figure what the hell.  I won’t lose anything and I’ll only learn something!  With that in mind, i’ve decided to create some unique text in each one describing the type of products within them.

To Do This is A Simple Cut and Paste Job

1. Go to “Categories” which you will find located under “Posts”.

2. Add in your desired description in the appropriate box.  Basic HTML markup will work, so you can make your text look all nice

3. Locate the file controlling your categories – most likely archive.php

4. Pop this code in wherever you want your description to turn up: -

<?php $description=category_description(); echo $description;  ?>

And You’re Done!

I’ve popped mine in after the post and gone through the category page titles using my SEO plugin and given them a quick optimise as well.  I think I’m going to try to make the description a nice robost 250 to 300 words.  I’ll be interested to see if I get any additional traffic from this.  I’ve already fiddled around and created thumbnails of each post image contained within the category so in theory it should be an attractive page for users.

As always, I’ll let y’all know how I get on!
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Twitter

Length of your Twitter Name

Basically the shorter the better but still try and get across your brand, your name or your product or what you do. Think about this you have 140 characters to type your tweet and while your name doesn’t matter too much on the tweet you send out, if you want people to re-tweet your message and your name is 15 characters (maximum it can be) then you just committed your tweets that you want to be re-tweeted (RT) to maximum size of 120 characters by time you factor in the RT, @ and the spaces between them. That’s not a lot of space to say what you want to say.

From what I have read on the Twitter Blog, Re-Tweets will soon be changing so you don’t use lots of your valuable 140 character space.

Short URLs

Always deploy short URLs as they will save you space unless you happen to have an ultra short url already. Affiliate Window have an option to make URLs smaller so use it if your including a link to an AW merchant. I highly recommend bit.ly but remember and sign-up for a  free account with bit.ly as then you can track the clicks via a simple stats view they provide.

Brand your Twitter Page

Get an icon made that represents you, it could be just a photo of yourself, or if it’s a brand or product maybe your logo but something that says to people, this tweet is from so and so without having to read the name, it’s also handy if your like me and don’t always have time to read all tweets so you scan for the icon of friends, affiliates, merchants or networks you want to keep up to date with at that point.

You can also customise your background image, so make use of this feature. I use an iPhone to read and view my tweets, but I often find new people to follow via websites or blogs and the overall impression they give you when you visit the page can often be the decider if this person is the type you want to follow, same goes with filling in your name, URL and biography do it and do it fully, it helps people find you.

Multipliable Accounts

For some, running one account is already too much but if your serious about building up your Twitter presence with people following you that you want to do business with or even if your looking for a bit of social interaction then doing it from your companies Twitter account is not a great idea.

So my suggestion is that you have a company and a personal Twitter account, now you can take this a step further and have an account just about you for business and one for social / friends but personally I am currently of the opinion that I would rather do business with someone that has a social side to them and is not just trying to sell themselves 24/7. When I look at some of the American folk on Twitter it seems many are against saying anything social in what they see as a business channel for themselves and you know what that’s fine. Personally, I wouldn’t be turned on to “how great am I” or “check out this awesome service”  tweets all day long

Now one thing I think is under used by Merchants is having a Twitter account for customers and a Twitter account for Affiliates, indeed I would go so far as to say Merchants should have a Twitter account that’s public for customers and have a private one for sharing information with Affiliates and the reason I think it should be private is this gives them much greater freedom to get important information out to their Affiliates without giving the competition a lead and this is done by vetting who can see what your saying but that’s totally up to you and how private you feel your communications from the outside world need to be.

The ideal Merchant set-up in my books would be Customer based tweets, Affiliate based tweets and staff from the company with their own Twitter account and ideally one of the top dogs from the company on for real. Yes, that’s a pain to manage multi-accounts but honestly I think it’s best for getting your messages across to the right audience and there is a few tools/apps that let you do this.

Networks should also look at how they Twitter, do I really need you to feed your blog in to your main Twitter account? No I don’t, but do I want you to highlight important blog posts, fun blog posts, new merchants joining, that would be neat. I also would like to see some of the people behind the Networks using their own personal Twitter accounts, not company run ones. But themselves on Twitter talking to me about work and being social also. The dudes at Affiliate Future are pretty good at this and so are certain individuals at other networks, but if your on just selling your company, don’t bother!

Hash Tags

Hash tags (#) or pound tags as my American buddiess like to call them are a great way of following the buzz about something like an event. A recent example was #existemambbq what these allow you to do is see who is talking about the event, but you might not be following on Twitter. I used it to hook up with someone who I didn’t even know was going, so if you are attending an event, or got a new product launch or creating some buzz around something, get a hash tag on the end of your Tweets so it becomes easy to search for.

More to come

I will post more tips as I get them, I am not a Twitter expert (yet!) but I am constantly seeking out information, talking and meeting with people who have advice to share and slowly collecting the “what to do” and “what not to do” on the Twitter space, so while I am no expert I know a heck of a lot more than someone who has yet to try it.

I truly believe that Twitter should be a part of every business strategy and what you get from it and what it will do for you will be based on what you put in and the time you take to understand it, or just pay a Guru to do it for you because I am positive long term it will pay dividends, just think about the amount of companies that didn’t really see the point in the Internet, we laugh now but mid-90s it was consider a luxury to try this Internet thing.

Twitter, it’s here to stay and remember some people are listeners and not talkers on Twitter and that’s cool also, but I would rather you joined the party!

Follow me on Twitter @ClarkeDuncan.

Tags: Advice, Business, Tips, Twitter

Presently though most marketers I speak with are  going through a particularly bad patch, not only have a few sites been hit but as a double whammy some of their long term ppc has been given a quality score slap.

This double whammy makes it all the more important to avoid ‘the slap’ in the first place. Also slaps are recording as part of Google’s history for the account user. So after you have been slapped a few times it may be alsmost impossible to get into googles ‘good books’ again and you may well be better off setting up a new account.

I personally have been a bit lucky, but I have also been a bit careful as well. I double check my ads  before launching all campagins…its well worth it!

I mentioned this on Twitter and got back responses from people saying similar things

I think I also got a bit fed up with complaining about the same old things that don’t change and it doesn’t seem as much fun to write about the affiliate marketing industry anymore so I thought I should probably try to write more about what I’ve actually been doing.

I’ve chosen to take some work again from a couple of old web development clients which really keeps things interesting. Just working on the same things each day and not getting out the office is a bit dull at times so it’s always good to keep up with a few different businesses.

I’ve also started a couple of new sites in field that I’m really interested in but don’t yet know too much about – wine! I’ve always enjoyed an occasional glass but I’ve never known what I was drinking or why I liked it so I thought it was time to find out and develop some sites along the way. This led me to starting a site about White Wine and one about Red Wine.

I’ve been using WordPress and the Thesis theme for these sites. Thesis is more of a framework to build on than the usual style of designed theme but it makes all the updates easy and is a great starting point. Definitely Recommended