How Can Authorship Influence My Affiliate Revenue? Find Out In The Future Of Publishing! – Guest Post
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Mar 1, 2012
Murray Newlands conducted one of the earliest interviews with me back in 2009 (Beverly Mahone beat him to the punch lol) where we talked about my business blog titled Mitch’s Blog and this blog as well. He’s become one of the most talked about online personalities in the world while I’m still working on it. When he asked if he could do a guest post here I had to say yes. I hope you enjoy it & learn a lot.
Blogging has changed a lot from when it became popular in 2006. Even since 2009 when I interviewed Mitch Mitchell, the blogging world has undergone more than one remarkable metamorphosis. Bloggers need to stay up to date on not only SEO techniques, but also online marketing techniques and industry news. Blogs about blogging help with this, but I really think you should take a page out of the online poker industry’s playbook and watch interviews of industry experts.
Check out the video interview VigLink CEO Oliver Roup and I did for my Future of Publishing TV series, where we interviewed CEO of NetShelter Pirouz Nilforoush, CEO of HubPages Paul Edmonson, and Yulia Smirnova, SEO Manager for a major company:
In this video, Paul Edmonson talks about how Google has created an authorship system whereby one’s blog posts can be associated with their Google+ profile. Google’s search results now show the author’s picture next to his or her blog posts, and also the number of Google+ circles he or she is in. Readers see someone in many circles as being more credible; by means of tying in its social media site to its search results, Google has created advantages to authoring posts that wasn’t previously available to authors.
How does author’s credibility impact affiliate revenue?
Let’s say your site uses VigLink, an in-content link network that mainly uses affiliate links, though it also has some PPC links. Affiliate campaigns in newsletters are particularly effective because your regular readers already know you, so you have credibility amongst them and they see you as a trust agent. Plus, your newsletter readers are a more enthusiastic subset of your regular readers, so they trust you even more than regular readers.
However, you don’t necessarily have that credibility among someone that’s never heard of you before and is reading your site for the first time. Most sales will be made after converting these people to regular readers, but you’re losing money if you don’t also go after people who don’t yet regularly read your blog. Although these people don’t know you, they still click on affiliate links and make purchases, and they are more likely to buy things from people they trust and know than from people they don’t know.
By using Google+ to link your profiles together and give you credible authorship, you can establish yourself as a minor trust agent among people who haven’t heard of you before. This will make immediate affiliate sales using VigLink in-content links more likely, and it also makes converting them to a regular reader who will then buy products from you easier.
Find out more by watching the video.
This is a guest post by Murray Newlands. Murray and his company, Influence People, do blog relations and video marketing work for a variety of clients in the SoMa district of San Francisco.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell
Bad Comments/Spam The Same?
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Feb 28, 2012
A couple of weeks ago I had to do something I hadn’t thought about doing in a long while. I had to turn on the Akismet spam plugin once again after a major increase in the number of spam messages I was starting to get. I had hoped that the GASP Anti-Spambot plugin would have taken care of all of that, but it seems people have found their way around it.
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Even with both programs running, spam is at an all time high for me. It’s not unexpected as the ranking of this blog moves higher, and I don’t think it’s gotten to the level where it’s driving me as crazy as it does some of my friends, who often go to extreme measures trying to kill it, even turning off comments sometimes, which I don’t like as you know.
Part of the problem, of course, are what are considered “bad comments”. On my 1,200th post back in January I mentioned a conversation I had with Adrienne Smith and her contention that some comments aren’t worth keeping on your blog and that she just gets rid of them so that she can respond to everyone else and show a 100% response rate on her blog. What we both believe is that there are a number of people paid to post comments and have links going back to other sites, and most of these people are paid so little that it’s all in the numbers for them, not the quality of the comment.
This begs the question as to whether bad comments and spam are the same thing. It can be a volatile question to respond to because the kneejerk response is “yes”. And yet, I haven’t quite gotten to that point yet where I consider the two as symbiotic 100% of the time.
I’ve read some bad comments with a lot of grammatical errors and thought that it might be spam, but the comment was touching upon the subject matter so I follow the CommentLuv link back to its source and see the same type of writing on the blog. Suddenly that’s not a bad comment, just someone with lousy writing skills.
Is a bad comment a one-liner? Well, that’s up for grabs because I’ve been told by some people that on some of my posts I really don’t leave much for anyone to say if they agree with me on the topic. Frankly I buy that argument only half the time because I’ve always been able to comment on a blog with more than a one liner and make sure the author knows I read the post. But not everyone can do that so how does one judge that? I do judge those posts, and I eliminate a lot of them, just so you know, but not all of them.
What makes a bad comment is almost the same thing as what makes spam. Ergo, some highlights:
* Repeating the title of the post in the comment
* Repeating specific phrases from the content without adding anything new to it
* Writing something so generic that it applies to everything and nothing at the same time
* Writing a lot of nonsense and then popping my name in somehow; that’s pretty sneaky
* Trying to slip a link in that has nothing to do with the topic but everything to do with linking back to your site; isn’t CommentLuv enough for you?
* Writing one comment that looks passable, immediately followed by another comment that’s from the same IP address on the same post; what could you be thinking?
I think that’s enough to think about. Here’s the big question up for debate; do you think bad comments and spam are the same thing? The secondary question is what do you do about it?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell
3 More Things To Know About In Your WordPress Admin Area
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Feb 25, 2012
For some of you I hear the question now: “Why only 3 more things?” Because if you’ve followed this blog for awhile, or not, you’ll remember that I had my first post in September 2010 on 5 Areas You Should Know More About In Your WordPress Admin Area, followed a month later with 5 More Things To Know About Your WordPress Admin Area and finally 4 Things You Can Do With Your WordPress Blog You Might Not Know Already. Frankly, I think I’ve shared more about the admin area than almost anyone else except WordPress.
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So today I have 3 more things I’ve discovered that you might not know about or haven’t paid any attention to. I have to make sure I’m not copying myself either; let’s see what happens.
1. Did you know that when you’re addressing comments if you hover over a person’s link under their name on the left side that WordPress will bring you an image of their website or blog? That’s pretty neat and it might help you decide if you want to keep the comment or not, deciding that a site might not be one you want to help promote via CommentLuv or through the link to the side if it’s just a website.
2. Did you know that, if you’re running CommentLuv, you can remove the “luv”, if you will, while keeping the comment? I don’t do this often but there are times when I look at the link and decide “no, this thing looks dangerous”, especially in combination with the first tip I just gave you. Of course if you’re like me most of the time you might have decided the comment isn’t worth keeping either in which case just delete it all, but this is another option if the comment seems legit.
3. Did you know that you can install plugins directly from your WordPress menu instead of downloading and then uploading them? All you do is go to Plugins over there and slide down to Add New. Once there, you can type in the entire name of the plugin you want, or if you’re unsure just type in a few words and do a search, and most probably lots of choices will come up with a ranking system from 1 to 5 stars. Much easier and saves time as well.
That’s it. What, you wanted more? Maybe next time! lol
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell
What Could You Do In 36 Hours?
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Feb 20, 2012
There’s a show that comes on the Food Network that has captured my attention and, strangely enough, motivated me to a point where my production overall has increased in the two weeks since I discovered it.
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The show is called Restaurant Impossible, and what happens is this guy named Robert Irvine, a master chef, goes into a restaurant with a $10,000 budget and 36 hours and transforms restaurants so that they look good, the food tastes better, and hopefully the restaurant will start to turn a profit. He has help in re-designing the restaurant but everything else is on him, including changing the perceptions of the people who work in the restaurant, including the owners, which sometimes means bringing family members together to get things done and move forward in a positive direction.
As I said, it all has to be done in 36 hours, which includes teaching the cooks how to prepare both new meals and improve on what they’re already creating, training the waitstaff on new menus and proper customer service, teaching owners how to assess their expenses and revenue, and many other things. It’s never easy but always amazing, and Irvine has such great energy that it makes you feel like you’ve been slacking your entire life.
Something I come across often is hearing people tell me they don’t have any time to blog, or to write, or to market, or to do… well, you name it. True, all of us have to give something up every once in awhile because we only have so many hours in the day and we need to eat and sleep. But what do we do with our time when we’re awake and ready to go?
I’ve been pretty productive over the last couple of weeks. I’ve written tons of articles, and I’ve been working on editing my second book and moving along nicely, though part of me thinks I should be moving faster. The thing is that I have produced more in the time I have, and that’s important to me. I’m not someone that believes necessarily in having a blogging schedule, but I do believe that having a schedule helps us all get things done, and that I’ve also been doing. It’s my bet that Irvine follows a set schedule for how he turns around these restaurants.
How productive can you be in the next 36 hours? How about the next 100 hours? What does the little clip below do for you?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell
Participating In Social Media Takes Courage
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Feb 15, 2012
A few days ago, I had a post that also had a video where I ranted about MLM schemes. I can’t remember if I mentioned in the video that what prompted the rant was something that happened on LinkedIn or not, but that was the genesis for everything.
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One of the strangest things that came out of all of that mess, which continued until late yesterday afternoon when I finally decided my participation in the “conversation” had to end, is that the overwhelming majority of people who agreed with me wrote me privately rather than put their disgust out in the public like I did. As Sheriff Bart said in Blazing Saddles, “I’m quickly becoming an underground success in this town”. I got as many supporting messages in private as the guy who started the post got on the post itself; it did and didn’t help me, as you can imagine.
I’ve stated on this blog before that one of the gutsiest things a person can do online is court controversy, whether you started it or got yourself in the middle of it. Social media can be dangerous as much as it can be fun. This weekend another friend of mine posted something on his Facebook page that I kind of took exception to, so I commented on it. He said he had a right to express his beliefs, and I agreed with that while also saying if you have the guts to put out a belief like that in public you have to have the guts to take criticism for it from people who don’t agree with your position. I never heard back on that one.
How many reminders do people need before they realize that free speech really isn’t free? If people want to rant about things without giving others the opportunity to comment, set up a blog, don’t accept comments, and get on with your bad selves. 
Unless you’re a big name once people realize they can’t leave comments they probably won’t come back, but you probably don’t care at that point. As Seth Godin seems to feel, sometimes getting your point out is more important to you than getting feedback. I find that sort of thing incredibly useless and selfish (I refuse to visit his blog or read links people share on Twitter), but to each his own.
Here’s my overall point. If you’re always afraid you’re going to create controversy, you’ll never be a good blogger. Controversy can pop up in the strangest places on the strangest topics. There is no safe topic, from babies to puppies to chocolate cake to the Muppets to weather. There’s always the possibility someone might not like what you said or how you said it. I once wrote a positive post where I mentioned my dad’s history and suddenly I was being attacked for talking about my dad being in the military. Didn’t see it coming, but I didn’t back down either, though eventually I had to block the guy because he became a major league troll; strange indeed.
Blogging isn’t for the faint of heart. If you’re skittish your blog will be unreadable. Being flexible enough to see someone else’s point of view, even to the point where you sometimes might change your mind, doesn’t mean you don’t get to express yourself in your own way. Deciding not to change your mind and sticking up for your point of view, while trying to do it in a nice way, doesn’t mean you’re not flexible. Sometimes you have to adopt the position that my wife learned from Jack Canfieldone night: “What other people think of you is their problem.”
So, who’s ready to start blogging?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell
I'm Just Sharing is where I share my thoughts on internet marketing, writing, blogging and many other things. You never know what I'll be posting on. So keep coming back, read, enjoy, and buy something! ;)
