Affiliate Summit West 2009
For anyone wondering, I’ll be heading to Affiliate Summit West in Vegas from 1/10-1/12. Last year’s Vegas show was great, and I’m looking forward to it once again.
The show is at the Rio, but I’ll be kicking it at Steve Wynn’s new hotel, Encore. I’m excited to see the new hotel since the Wynn has been my favorite Vegas hotel so far.
See you there?
Random Pictures Can Make Duplicate Content Look Authoritative (Philip Wilson Steer: The Black Hat)
In the affiliate days of old, you could take a data feed full of product descriptions and slap it up on the net, buy yourself a PR9 link and you were off to the races. Champagne for everyone. It was long tail before the phrase existed. Google got wise, and in addition to de-linearizing PR, they started doing very sophisticated duplicate content filtering.
The cliche term “Add Value” was born sometime thereafter, and augmenting commodity content has become an art form. The key is to add enough new and unique value so that you can have oodles of keyword rich content without tripping the duplicate filters. I’ve said ‘add value’ again and again at conferences, and I really mean it. I really mean add value to my wallet, that is, but if that means making an original site then so be it.
Bankruptcy May Turn Your Dollars into Dimes
I was just over at WebmasterWorld reading a thread discussing a WSJ article on how small ad networks are being threatened by the current economic downturn. There has been an explosion in small ad networks in the last few years, and some of them bound to be punished by the coming contraction, and we all know that recession and bankruptcies are coming.
More than 300 online-ad networks have cropped up over the past couple of years, making the business of brokering ads on the Web one of the most popular — and crowded — niches on the Internet.
Two such networks, Adzilla and JellyCloud, closed their doors this month, and more are certain to follow. Other more established networks such as Burst Media are publicly seeking buyers.
