The Dublin A4U roadshow comes to Dublin. This is the first time the A4U roadshow has come to Ireland so the expo is a great opportunity for irish affiliates to meet reps from Trade Doubler, Commission Junction, Linkshare, Affiliate Window, amongst others!

I can’t believe I’m only getting around to posting this now! Last Saturday I got a chance to go to the Irish Web Awards in the Radison SAS Royal Hotel in Dublin. I have to say it was a great night and a big thank you should go to Damien and the rest of the organisers for putting on an event which isn’t one of those typical back slapping award ceremonies but more for deserving sites which are actually used and appreciated by the online irish community. Below are just some of the pics from the night, check out awards.ie for further details:

Congratulations to all the winners.

Headline Sponsor – Realex Payments

The winners are:

Best Online Publication – sponsored by Maximise

• The Irish TImes

Best Radio Website – sponsored by IGOPeople

• Phantom

Best Podcaster – sponsored by 3 Ireland

• The Persuaders

Best Videocaster – Sponsored by Irish Mortgage Brokers

• Look and Taste

Best Sports Site – sponsored by ArgusCarHire.com

• RTE Sport

Best Music Site – sponsored by Poll Daddy

• Nialler9

Best Entertainment Website – sponsored by Radical

• Entertainment.ie

Best Arts Website – Sponsored by Brennan Sabatini

• Dance Ireland

Best Technology Site – Sponsored by BH Consulting

• Silicon Republic

Best New Web Application/Service – Sponsored by Red Cardinal

• Kildare Street

Most Innovative Website – Sponsored by iQ content

• Decisions for Heroes

Best Discussion forum – sponsored by KRO IT Solutions

• Boards

Best Government and Council Website

• IDA Ireland

Best Education and Third Level Website – sponsored by National Digital Research Centre

• Talk Irish

Best eCommerce / Services Website – sponsored by Cybercom

• Curious Wines

Most Beautiful Website in Ireland – Sponsored by Beaut.ie

• Organic Supermarket

Most Useful Website in Ireland – Sponsored by DoneDeal.ie

• RTE

Best Social Media Campaign – Sponsored by OnlineAdvertising.ie

• Count Me Out

Best Practice – Sponsored by Spinnakerpro.com

• Cars Ireland

An Suíomh Gaeilge is Fear – sponsored by Edgecast Media

• NOSMag

Most Accessible Website – Sponsored by Insure.ie

• Rose Project

Best Website in Ireland – Sponsored by Realex Payments

• RTE.ie

Reading the speaker list I picked up a little when I saw that the first two speakers were Affiliate Marketers. Before I get to the actual speakers I should say that this seminar was very americanised and I din’t think it would work well here in Ireland but it went down better than I thought. It was very much like that seminar scene in the film Yes Man!, there was a lot of high fiving and pats on the back. So to the speakers,  first up was @JamesSchramko from Australia.

James runs a site called Internet Marketing Speed.  He had a very entertaining presentation and engadged with the audience quite well. There was the usual story of working in the rat race and then he discovered affiliate marketing which allowed him to make more money and have the lifestyle he wanted and to work from home. I have to state that this was a free event so I wasn’t expecting many tips and truth be told I didn’t really get any. The event was more geared up as an intro to affiliate marketing for people who had never heard of it and to get you to sign up to their training courses obviously.  There was one thing I would fault James on and that was he recommended to an audience of mostly newbies to buy links! Now in very competitive niches sometimes you have to buy links but if you don’t do it right and get caught it can be a disaster and you could recieve a nasty penalty from Google that will kill your business.

The next speaker was basically a repeat of James, the only difference being that he is based in the U.K. but I have to admit I found his presentation more enjoyable probably due to his andecedotes. Simon Coulsons  story was that he used to work for BT, took redundancy and found himself writing ebooks about overseas property markets after he had invested in one. He began making a few sales and basically repeated the process and diversified until he had built up good revenue streams.

What I liked about Simon’s presentation was that he didn’t state he was making hundreds of thousands from each site. His stratgey seemed to be have loads of sites making maybe a thousand a month each and then repeat the process. Simon talked a lot about his hobby which was a Coldplay tribute band that had been quite successful and even played to audiences of 40,000 and I have to admit this was the feeling I got from both speakers, they were a tribute band. By this I mean, they were no Shoemoney or John Reece, and it was obvious from there presentation slides that they follow some of the same people I do in the affiliate marketing world.

The real question is, is there a market for them and their courses? I’m still on the fence for this, is their information really worth two grand? I mean you could find the same information online probably cheaper if not for free but in saying that how many other affiliate marketing “gurus” have taken the time to visit Ireland and pitched their courses?

At the end of it the highlight of the seminar for me was the chance to meet and talk ideas with some other affiliate marketers from Ireland such as Kevin O’Connor from internetmoney.ie . I enjoy when I get a chance to meet with people in person that I deal with online.

The first event I’ll be attending is the BTW (Blogger Twitter Whatever) event being organised by Jason Roe in the Clarion in Dublin on the 3rd Sept. There is capacity for 150 and at the time of writing this there are still a few places free. I think one of the trending topics of conversation will be the debate started by Niall Harbison of simplyzesty.com on whether bloggers and pr fit together.

The second event I’ll be attending is an opportunity to meet with Brad Fallon. Brad will be speaking at a free marketing seminar in Dublin, tickets can be aquired for free from http://www.ultimatemarketingseminar.eu/. Thanks to Kevin from InternetMoney.ie and Kieran from Searchbrat.com for reminding me of this event.

So if your at either of these events come up and say hello!

With the recent Google slap I decided against doing a review site. I had considered doing a voucher site before and had purchased some suitable domains for it, but after reading Lammo’s case for voucher sites and Doug Scott’s experiences of actually running them I decided against that too!

So finally I decided it’s coming to the end of the summer, think seasonal! So the next site/s I’ll be doing will be halloween themed specifically costume based. There are actually a couple of reasons for this, :

1. The interview between Mark Ling and Brian Johnson
2. I recently became friendly with Ronan O’Brien (@ronanob on twitter). Ronan is the owner of www.thecostumeshop.ie and they actually run their own affiliate program. Yeah, an affiliate program aimed at the irish market.

I think it’s a good idea to have a couple of seasonal based sites in your portfolio to compliment your regular affiliate income sites. So in the next couple of weeks I’ll be detailing progress on all these sites.

Lately I’ve been really interested in the psychology behind peoples searches and how they interact online. i.e. people that search for “buy blue widgets” are more likely to buy that people searching for “blue widget styles”. This area has a huge influence on what and how you should structure your content and manage your email marketing.

One of the best guys to listen to in this area is Frank Kern. Frank is a surfer dude but also a people person and you can tell he just “gets it” when it comes to influencing peoples emotions online. Hell, if you search for him online, you’ll get nothing but references about how people feel he’s their friend and what an all around nice guy he is.

If you do a little more digging you’ll find that Frank was once busted by the FTC for running an alleged pyramid scheme. Now in saying that, it doesnt make him a bad guy, think Frank Abagnale from Catch Me If You Can or any good grifter. They all have talents for reading or convincing people, they just mightnt have always used them for ethical purposes. He openly admits this and actually when you think about it he must have been succesful at marketing it as at the time he was making half a million a year.

The video above is what Frank released as a promo for his Mass Control program. The information he gives away is amazing. He discusses modalities, the persona we need to portray when selling online, developing story lines to interact and engage with potential customers. Now I’m not telling you to buy Franks products, just watch the video and if you think the info is good enough, make up your own mind.

Basically SponsoredTweets pays you per Tweet that is authorised by their advertiser. They calculate how much your tweet is worth based on your influence/follower count. So the lower your twitter following, the lower you get paid.

It has a real simple interface and is very easy to get setup on:

Check it out and start getting paid to tweet!

Like I said this is just a rumuor and there have been buy out rumours about Affiliate Window for years. If anybody can confirm let me know.

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So the big buzz for the past week is the anouncement on Perry Marshalls blog of a Google Slap to Affiliate review sites. So how did all this come about? Well Perry had received an email from Glenn Livingston which led to Perry publishing the following on his blog:

“I got word from several affiliate marketers that Google dropped the hammer today on affiliate review pages.   Many pages went from quality scores of 10 —> 1 overnight.

And these were NOT skinny sites, rather well build out, consistently updated blogs with good navigation above the fold, xml site maps, high click through, hyper-relevant keyword mapping, low bounce rates, long average time on page  … everything else Google loves.

When we analyzed which pages survived, and we take it in combination with other information, it seems pretty clear they’ve added code which screens for affiliate links on the landing pages.

At the moment it seems cloaking and PHP redirects are untouched, … but I can’t imagine these are far behind.  (I’m guessing they’re just avoiding this in order to decrease their server burden … takes some CPU cycles to visit every link on the page and evaluate for affiliate code)

I’d say it’s safe to conclude Google’s on the war path against affiliate review sites, and we should be advising clients towards a different business model… at minimum it seems necessary to avoid placing affiliate links on landing pages, but ideally, I think people need to move towards a deeper list building/relationship building strategy and/or a strong e-commerce model.Time to stop “building on sand”.”

So what does all this mean?

Well first off this only effects your google ads account, it hasn’t become part of googles search algorithum yet and it doesnt mean it will in the future. Low Quality scores in adwords, increases the price you pay for your ads so it does have a major effect on your income. I’ve checked my campaigns and I haven’t been hit yet but I do cloak my affiliate links, this doesnt mean I wont be hit in the future. I would definitely recommend cloaking your affiliate links in the mean time.

There are others who suggest  that it has nothing to do with naked affiliate links in your landing pages. Mark Ling from Affilorama suggests the slap is is more based on onpage optimisation:

The common theme that I’ve noticed has tended to be more to do with the on page optimization of the landing page. I’ve found that when I use Traffic Travis and run a page analysis on any keyword phrase that got slapped, I find that the page that it was directing traffic to received a B- or lower as the rating.

Below I’ve included an interview between Alex Goad and the man who brought this slap to everyones attention Dr. Glenn Livingston.

Have you been affected by the slap? Let me know in the comments.