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Cleaning up the Net, Social Media and Affiliate Marketing Strategies

The EcomExpo covered topics pertinent to all types of internet marketers. Among the most interesting presentations were those covering the use of social media, ways FTC enforcement will change the Internet experience, and the best ways to earn honest, long-term Internet success. These are not the run of the mill articles being churned up by your Google alerts. They are well worth the time and effort of even the most experienced Internet professionals.

To access these presentations you will need to log in or register here. Presentations are found at the aptly named Presentation Pavilion; you will need IE, Safari or Firefox to view.

Cleaning up the Net

“Dirty Little Secrets: Taking The Lid Off Affiliate Marketing And Assessing What Creates Value” is a panel discussion with question and answer session featuring experts in Internet marketing like Jay Weintraub, Steven Richter, Todd Malicoat, and John Reel. This discussion will open your eyes to the reason Internet success strategies must be long term. It is no longer simply an academic or philosophical question if marketers should take the long view rather than trying to make a quick buck. Now the FTC is getting involved. Remember that blog entry about the FTC striking back at scams? Well, Operation Shortchange is also going after black hat marketers. These are the people that get you to buy their stuff through trickery and deception. The concern is that these rules can affect those of us trying to make a legitimate living online. It is important we all understand these principles to avoid being pitched out with the scum when the FTC starts cleaning up!

How to Make Social Media Work

All we can say is Wow, Wow, Wow!!! Joe Pulizzi did an incredible job with his presentation, “Social Media Steroids: Spread Your Content, Grow Your Business.” He provided specific tips and examples to help us understand why and how social media helps to increase searchablilty and therefore marketability for websites. He stresses that content is king and if you do not have good content, all the social marketing in the world will do you no good. Take the time to watch this presentation and you will be completely rethinking your website’s strategy (as we are now)!

Affiliate Shops

The exhibit that piqued our interest the most was the presentation, “Create Dynamic Shopping With Unique Content And Generate Organic Growth And Profit Every day,” by Jessie Jones, taught us how to use the site where you can easily create an Internet store with multiple affiliate accounts. The site creates a script you can place anywhere on your existing website. We are on a free trial with this company now as part of our Affiliate Marketing Adventures project. We will be researching other similar sites over the next 30 days to see if we put our money in the right pocket. Popshop was exceptionally easy to use. Here is the page we created when trying it out. We could not believe how easy it was to set up using Mozilla’s free website editor, Kompozer.

Other presentations that we found useful were:

Drive More, Cost-effective Transactions Using RSS-Powered E-commerce, by Rok Hrastnik
How Your Personality And Twitter Can Help You Increase Traffic And Sales In Under 30 Days, by Rohit Bhargava

We were a little disappointed by “Leveraging The Power Of Search And Merchandising For Personalized Landing Page Optimization” by Juan Ribero. It may well have been an excellent presentation, but there were sound and technical issues that made the presentation difficult to follow. It’s too bad, we were very interested in what Juan had to say.