affiliate marketing blog  

As usual I’ve been looking at SEO while coding up some programatic goodies for AffSpot.  And the world is about to get very interesting indeed.  For example, the bruhaha over Google Realtime Results and Security.

In a USA Today Article Rae Hoffman expounds (quite accurately) that giving Twitter results in realtime could be a big security issue.    As well as a liability issue for Google.  These things not withstanding there is also a built in “Google Penalty” if your not on Twitter.  You see, twitter is feeding data directly to Google for realtime results.  Which is a good thing if your on Twitter…  And a bad thing if your not.  Here’s why.

If you do a search for “AffSpot” on Google we naturally hold the #1 position…  And if you give the page a few seconds out latest “tweets” show up as well.  Now, that’s a good thing.  AffSpot is a brand and we always want to be #1 for our own name.  And showing some of our “tweets” works to our advantage.

But let’s say your primary Affiliate Marketing site is focused on Classic Portraits..  And you hold #1 on Google for the phrase.  But one of your competitors is active on Twitter, has a number of followers, and “tweets” on a regular basis.  Now search for Classic Portraits and you’ll still show #1…  Until the realtime result shows up (which can take a few seconds)….  And your competitor has now pushed you down the page with a listing of their tweets!

And if that’s not enough to get you to Twittering…  Take a look at what Dell is doing..  6 million in sales from it decided to put an effort into selling via Twitter (ARTICLE HERE).  If you do the math that’s $100,000.00+ per Twitter account.  So even a little effort into Twitter can be a big boost for your affiliate marketing efforts.

Two morals to this story…  If your not active in the Social Web you should be…  Your SERPS could end up depending on it.  And the second moral of this story is that it’s important to establish not only your own personal accounts for your own personal use…  But accounts for your brands/sites as well.  And you need to keep up with them (hint, read our blog entries here, we talk about automation alot).