There are multiple ways to reward your affiliates. This can be done by monetarily rewarding top performers, holding top performing affiliate contests, or rewarding exceptional lead generators with heightened commission rates. Regardless of your method you are most likely to pad your pockets in return as you watch an increased amount of leads flow in, all due to your newly motivated work force. Rewarding your affiliates does more for your affiliate marketing program besides making you feel like a nice person. It defines the affiliates who have the potential and will to work hard for your products. Another benefit of rewarding affiliates is that it builds communication and a more personal relationship with your top performers.
While you may have many different affiliates promoting the same products, no two affiliates are alike. Considering this, affiliates in most cases prefer to be rewarded in different ways. An average affiliate generating leads for products solely for a little side cash will probably be elated at the digital camera they earned for their over-the-top promotion of your product. The super-affiliate, on the other hand, that generates a large amount of traffic for your site as well as many, many other publishers would be more accustom to receiving a slightly larger commission rate than a Nintendo. With this, you are able to reward future lead generation potential than shelling out cash out of your pocket at the present time. This should be kept in mind if you run top performer contests by creating advertiser tiers so that “Joe the affiliate” is not competing with a super-affiliate, and a super-affiliate is not receiving a digital camera for devoting effort in promoting your products.
Regardless of how you decide to reward your affiliates, incentivizing your affiliate advertisers will help you to identify your top performers, build strong relationships, and bring you more leads.

Requirements include:

• At least 3 years experience in Website Development
• Ability to work in fast paced environment
• Experience with these languages / abilities
  • XHTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript
  • AJAX
  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • mod_rewrite
  • Cross-browser Testing
  • Windows XP / Vista / Server 2008

Bonus Skills:

• WAMP
• Database Architecture
• ASP.NET
• MS SQL
• ISAPI_Rewrite
• Client Training / Support
• Server Administration
• Server Migration
• Database Administration
• Network Administration
• Familiar with Windows 7, Hyper-V, Mac OSX

If you’re interested in this position, please submit a cover letter and your resume to hr [at] vizioninteractive.com.

Vizion Interactive is an equal-opportunity employer.

- Robert Rees, Cookies By Design »

One of the easiest forms of mass content generation is simply not often thought of, education. A great way to add multiple pages to your site is to add a glossary of commonly used industry and site-wide terms to an easily accessible site section. What better way to show potential customers that you care to help them understand your offerings than to provide a breadth of term definitions for their own knowledge? Gaining this trust with a potential client is what helps you convert at a higher rate as a confused site visitor is likely to soon leave your site, a real bounce-rate bummer.

On the other hand, as a search marketer, I know that presenting good faith efforts is usually not my first thought when adding site content. Most often I think, “What SEO benefit will I get by doing this”? The answer to that is, a ton! Placing a term glossary on-site will benefit you within the realm of internal-linking, increased pages, keyword targeting, etc., all leading up to one of our favorite words, rankings. Before you send your copywriter into a writing frenzy it is important that you create the glossary with SEO in mind. Each term you choose to define should be placed on its own page. This allows you an opportunity to structure your Title, Meta, headings and internal links around specific, targeted terms. Your terms should be based on your products, services, the all-encompassing theme or genre of your site which are also your most important targeted keywords. Take advantage of internal linking opportunities by providing a link within the copy anchored on the defined term and target the link to the related product or service offering on your site. Also inter-link within the term pages when possible. All of the term pages should also be linked from a main glossary page as well as within the sitemap of your site. Lastly, I shouldn’t have to remind you not to define terms in one sentence, ranking opportunities are on the line here folks so please write a decent paragraph to show visitors you want to help them and to give the engines enough keyword-rich copy to digest.

Taking advantage of a definition glossary allows you to build rank-worthy pages for several different terms which relate to your products or service offerings. This also allows you to pick up longer tail traffic for terms such as “targeted keyword + definition”. An additional benefit newly to your advantage is within the area of Google’s Define: feature for when potential site visitors exactly seek the definitions of terms you have found to be your most important keywords and for which you have now included in your glossary.
Ok, now you can dispatch the copywriters.

Need additional help with Search Engine Optimization?

You’re not going to get very far by posting to your personal profile every half hour with your latest product or promotion without eventually annoying your friends. This is why the utilization of the Pages feature a great way to promote your brand and products because your fans are just that, fans of what you have to say. They are going out of their way to join your Page to stay attune to what you have to say as well as let their friends know of their interest in your company.

Utilizing Pages is crucial for those in eCommerce as well as large companies with franchise locations in multiple cities. For eCommerce applications, it is imperative that you create a post schedule to stay focused on posting new products or promotions on your Page. Link to the specific product page and don’t forget to include in your description applicable discounts if any apply. Taking it a step further, create contests and special promotions to keep your fans coming back. These posts help breed repeat customers and help provoke them to spread your message to their personal friend base. A compelling Facebook marketing strategy helps you to increase your reach from beyond your Page’s fan base to all of their many friends. In case you are wondering, the average Facebook user has 120 friends.

For large companies with several franchise locations the Pages strategy can be utilized within a local search perspective. Besides having an official company Page, each location should have a Page. This is an opportunity to increase brand visibility as well as an opportunity to think at a community level, literally. Locations should take advantage of Page promotion within print collateral as well as in-store. Potential visitors visit locations and based on appeal are likely to join the Page therefore announcing to all of their friends their interest. This is great word of mouth, social media style!
Taking full advantage of these free Facebook marketing strategies is paramount in this day and age. A quick look at your completion will likely tell you that they are already working on this front. Getting dirty with a little grassroots Facebook marketing alleviates your need for outlets such as Facebook paid advertising, leaving you with a larger marketing budget and an army of marketers.

Want more information on Social Media Marketing?

Brandy Eddings is a seasoned professional in search engine marketing, having managed over 10,000 Google Adwords and other paid search initiatives in her career. She will be joining the Vizion Interactive team as Client Service Manager, ensuring that all projects under her management are on task, on budget and on deadline.

Brandy is actually making her return to Vizion Interactive, after running her own Interactive marketing business for the past year.

“I really missed the Vizion Interactive environment”, says Mrs. Eddings. “The entire Vizion Team is a powerhouse in the industry, and I’m excited to be working with the best”.

Mark Jackson, President and CEO of Vizion Interactive says of Brandy, “she has the reputation of being one of the very best talents in the paid search arena. When you have the opportunity to add talent to your team, you add it. And, Brandy is a known commodity. While she was with our company previously, clients loved her. It’s great to have her back with Vizion”.

As well as contributing through her role of Client Service Manager, Brandy will be working with the iMarketingManager team, to further build out its capacity. Much more than a simple ranking report software, iMarketingManager is an analysis application to look under the hood at a multitude of variables that affect organic search engine rankings for our client’s websites, and those of their competitors. Future build-outs include paid search analysis and social media reporting.

About Brandy Eddings
Bringing years of experience in search engine marketing, project management and client relations, Brandy has obtained extensive knowledge of successful strategies for a broad range of diverse industries with a strong focus on localized targeted campaigns.  In addition to being a Google AdWords Certified Professional, Brandy has also completed official training from Google to be a Google AdWords Trainer.
Brandy is a married mother of two. In her free time she enjoys fishing, cars, creating cartoons and watching football.

About Vizion Interactive
Vizion Interactive, Inc. is a search engine optimization, search engine marketing, website design, Interactive marketing, and social media marketing agency dedicated to empowering clients to make informed decisions that deliver measurable results. Vizion Interactive’s headquarters are in Dallas, Texas with regional offices in Overland Park, Kansas and Clearwater Beach, Florida. You can follow Vizion on Twitter or become a Vizion Facebook Fan.

Because most website owners would be interested, I have compiled a comprehensive list of what appears to have changed in the new Google Caffeine and have made a list. Since Google Caffeine is still rather new, this list is certainly subject to change as we go, so I will do my best to keep it updated as appropriate.

• The new Google Caffeine’s search results URLs are different. Therefore, third party software analytics may be effected. For example, the search results pages now use # in the URL.
• Some people are reporting that Google Caffeine seems to improve Wikipedia results. Personally, I think it depends on the actual search query.
• Some .gov websites got lower rankings for core keywords. A search for “Barack Obama” shows a drastic change: I’m currently not seeing Whitehouse.gov in the top 10 search results on Google Caffeine, yet Whitehouse.gov is 4th for “Barack Obama” in Google.com currently.
• Some are reporting that Google Caffeine is giving more weight to domains with no hyphens in them. Personally, I am not seeing a large emphasis on non-hypenated keyword rich domain names, I’m seeing about the same number of hyphenated versus non-hyphenated domain names in the search results. I think the jury is still out on this one, some are even reporting that “hyphenate-keyword-domains doing exceptionally well- much better on a side-by-side comparison than on mainstream SERPs.
• Google Caffeine seems to like good site structure and/or fast loading websites for top results. I personally think this has been the case all along, that Google rewards websites with a good website structure and sites that are fast loading. I am not convinced (yet) that this is a big change for Google Caffeine.
• I have seen people commenting on the fact that Google Caffeine search results seem to be similar to “allinanchor” search results. I have tested this and I do not think this is the case.
• There are indications that certain filters and “penalties” (if that’s what you want to call them) have not been applied to Google Caffeine.
• Some are reporting the existance of a time stamp under the snippet just in front of the cache link that has been changing every hour. I have been unable to confirm this yet.
• There were initial reports that the Google Caffeine image search results were not that great at all. It appears that Google Caffeine is now using the full, real image search results. I tested this and compared the image results for several searches and they appear to be exactly the same.
• Google may be treating 301 Permanent Redirects differently than they did in the past. This may very well be the case, although I have yet to see any direct evidence of this.
• Search is moving into real-time, with more of an emphasis on real-time search results. Google may have dialed up too much focus on Twitter according to Andy Beal.
• It appears that Google Caffeine is favouring the “authority web sites” even more than before, making them “harder to beat” when it comes to very specific keyword phrases (or the long tail keywords).
• Google Caffeine is indexing more of the web. Upon initial tests, it appears that Google Caffeine is indexing a lot more web pages. This is really only based on a limited number of “site:domain.com” comparisons, I have yet to confirm this. This may be a result of adding more “real time web” to the mix, if Google Caffeine is truly indexing the real time web faster then there will be more web pages added to the index.

Some additional tools that are worth noting:

• Google Caffeine Bookmarklet: http://www.googletutor.com/2009/08/11/google-caffeine-bookmarklet/
• You can search at Google.com and see normal search results and then hit the bookmarklet to see the search results using Google Caffeine.

Compare Google Caffeine and the normal or “old version” of Google: http://www.comparecaffeine.com/

Must have skills:

• Experience using internet reporting tools such as Web Position, Web CEO, Internet Business Promoter, and Google Analytics.
• Advanced Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word skills
• Excellent communication skills, including writing skills and that ability to produce reports
• Experience using search engine webmaster reporting tools such as Yahoo! Site Explorer, and Google Webmaster Tools

Other skills:

• Excellent math and analytical skills
• Experience using Web Trends, Urchin, and website log file analysis tools are a plus
• Experience coding html and PHP are a plus
• Experience using WordPress, Movable Type, and other similar blogging platforms are a plus
• Graphics experience (creating charts, graphs, other graphics) is a plus

If you’re interested in this position, please submit a cover letter and your resume to hr [at] vizioninteractive.com.

Vizion Interactive is an equal-opportunity employer.

Vizion Interactive is seeking a skilled web designer with excellent front-end development expertise. This person should have a vast portfolio of successful web launches, and a resume that backs up your experience.

Experience with compliant design, W3C/Section 508 and very strong usability background is a must.

Requirements include:

• At least 2 years experience in Website Design & Development
• Must show current working portfolio
• Experience with search engine optimization / html optimization
• XHTML and CSS a must with current examples
• Thorough understanding of W3C Compliance and Section 508 Standards
• Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Windows, Mac OSX
• Ability to work in fast paced environment

Bonus Skills:

• Javascript, PHP
• Experience with WordPress
• Experience with Kentico CMS
• Audio & Video Production

If you’re interested in this position, please submit a cover letter and your resume to hr [at] vizioninteractive.com.

Vizion Interactive is an equal-opportunity employer.

Scott wrote a song for the occasion, called “Using WordPress as a CMS”. Check out the video, there’s a studio version of the song coming out soon:

Using Wordpress as a CMS from Charles Williams on Vimeo.