Don't just take the word of your favorite SEO blogger, learn to test ranking factors yourself. When discussion took place about first link priority last year, there was certainly some disagreement, and also mention of a few "exceptions" to the rules. My brain is wired to think of exceptions as things which can occur less frequently, or work-arounds that can be used to negate an otherwise common effect.

Prior Knowledge & Non-disclosure

Over the last few years a significant part of what I have written about on this blog has been about SEO - I try to be original, cutting-edge, providing a different perspective. I don't attend conferences, so what I wrote about isn't something I have overheard at the bar, told in confidence, heard from a speaker on stage or anything else. Recommending SEO products or courses is a little like tightrope walking - I don't join any program that suggests either in the sales materials or legalese that it might be proprietary - I know tons of people treat proprietary knowledge casually - rip off other marketers etc. I don't If information comes out in public that is from a notable source, and it has significant ramifications - thats worth blogging about, especially if I can offer perspective. There are people I trust as sources, or whose opinion I value, even when they challenge my own view of the SEO world, and one of those is Halfdeck who occasionally blogs at SEO 4 Fun - last blog post a year ago. Better to catch Halfdeck on Twitter. So I take stuff like this seriously...

Am I am crazy? This is why you should buy Launch Tree from someone else. Read on to find out why, and decide for yourself.

I have written a pitch for your Product Launch Formula dollars It is a little special, as I am doing stuff with WordPress noone else is currently doing

For old-time affiliate marketers this post might stir up some unpleasant memories, or unearth some golden nuggets. It is primarily intended for people less familiar with affiliate marketing, who might otherwise feel it is all plain sailing if you can get a few sales.

The security risks for your customers running viral tell-a-friend scripts and widgets. This post is a year overdue - I have held back the material and refrained from pointing the finger for that period of time, but there is something I have noticed:- If you don't kick up a big stink, possibly including names, any advice just gets swept under the carpet.

Think buying a custom premium WordPress SEO theme will give you perfect SEO? Think again... I don't think there is one "premium" WordPress Theme that doesn't claim to be perfect for SEO "out-of-the-box", so I thought I would bash some theme developer heads around and maybe knock some sense into them. They might achieve 50:50 of what could be expected of a true SEO theme (though I haven't seen the latest Semiologic Pro out in the wild), and potentially with the aid of 3rd party plugins currently available, they could reach 80:20. However most claim they don't need 3rd party plugins to achieve their eminence in WordPress SEO That doesn't leave WordPress SEO plugins off the hook, there isn't one plugin that gets beyond 60:40 or with some tweeking possibly 70:30, depending on what factors you feel are important, or are aware of. Awareness is certainly one of the problems...

Get inside information on how the sales process works with Strategic Profits and other top online businesses. I found it enlightening. Most of my readers know I am a fan and customer of Rich Schefren and the Strategic Profits team, and I have even had the opportunity to be a "fly on the wall" inside one of his exclusive customer mastermind sessions. Just imagine... Rich Schefren, MaryEllen Tribby (of Early To Rise), plus 6 or was it 7 of their most ardent customers, plus me. Serious people who were willing to pay a little more for direct feedback that could make significant improvements to their businesses or in some cases personal lives with more free time. I always realized that Strategic Profits used quite a sophisticated upsell process, but to be honest even I was shocked at the attention to detail they go to, and how well it works.

Clickbank Bonus Domination head-to-head with CB List Automator - 2 bonus delivery systems you have to consider. I now own 2 scripts from 2 different authors to handle automatic delivery of Clickbank bonuses - this is something I hope to be able to handle in a radically different manner in the future, but for now, this is something I want to be able to automate with something off-the-shelf. I paid for both of them If you have seen marketing "gurus" suggesting that you send them an email to get a bonus, or submit a support ticket, then they obviously haven't got their processes 100% sorted out. Historically bonus automation was only possible by parsing sales tickets or somehow scraping data from the Clickbank interface. These days Clickbank have an API which can push data to an end point, though I believe it can only handle a single end point, thus you may end up using lots of Clickbank accounts for different things.

Optin Accelerator is a massive security risk for your customers - rather than fix the security problems, the new version just adds fluff without addressing core issues. Anyone can make a mistake, release a product without considering all the possible ramifications, but to release Opt-in Accelerator again without major changes is irresponsible.

The Irresponsible Viral Tell-A-Friend Trio

So far there have been 3 such scripts I have written about, and there is a 4th "coming soon"

• My first coverage of Opt-in Accelerator
• Then there was Viral Optin Generator which may well have been a private label or resale rights product
• Viral Inviter is launching soon - last I saw of this script installed "out in the wild" it was a security risk
• There is another one I know about, TrafficXplode 2.0 which also features the same security risks

WordPress Sales & Affiliate Themes

I spent the better part of a week and a few hundred dollars ($300-$400) on various WordPress sales letter and affiliate themes - I came to the conclusion that they weren't something I would use.

• Some I would class as pretty but lacking substance (polite version of crap)
• Every single theme was designed around the concept that you run a single theme on your blog at a time
• They all suffered from what I regard as a horrible plague - theme option pages - if you need to set up lots of options after you have uploaded a theme, you have lost a sale, unless I can also import and export settings.
• The worst aspect of theme options pages is using them for the content that might appear on a page, because it is a nightmare to set up split testing, and when editing, you really want all the words on the page in front of you.

So I set about creating a solution for myself...

The emergence of Tweetmeme during the period I wasn't blogging was interesting - I spent a fair amount of time reading content on sites, and even clicked the tweet buttons occasionally.

This post has now been updated with an official response from Tweetmeme - the features have now been added to the development timeline.

The Tweetmeme site is a useful content source, but this article is mainly about the Tweetmeme buttons. Adding something to your blog, especially something that can encourage viral behavior and add social proof is highly beneficial, and doing it correctly, without asking for passwords offers huge advantages. Twitter is also a medium that is marketing content tollerant, as long as the people following you are marketers, unlike Digg, Reddit, and to a lesser extent Stumbleupon. Thus I have spent some time delving into the code and API for Tweetmeme and the existing WordPress plugin. It has just been updated, thus if you download the Tweetmeme plugin, it will be the latest version.

Important New Features

• Cleaned up cookie use a little, but it would be better if they set a cookie based on an action, rather than a display. The original RFC for cookies states that browser support for cookies should be a minimum of:-
  • 300 cookies in total
  • 20 cookies per domain
  • 4095 bytes per cookie
  To be perfectly honest, I don't want all those cookies, whether they are 1st party or 3rd party.
• Ability to brand the retweets with @andybeard etc, though you still get "via @tweetmeme" at the end
• The button is removed from excerpts using a filter on get_the_excerpt() - more on that to follow

However essential features of Tweetmeme and Tweetmeme Button are missing if it is going to be used by serious marketers.