Hopefully you’ve realized by now that highly successful Affiliates (like you, we hope) are utilizing a mix of minisites, landing pages, blogs, and all forms of social media.  Reaching out and not only using SEM and SEO to attract customers but engaging with those customers wherever they are.  What is it that we know that the Knoxville Police Department doesn’t yet?

Well, the Knoxville PD don’t “get it” today..  But I’d bet within a few days they will.  A blogger noticed a significant uptick in routine traffic stops in East Knoxville and blogged about it.  This was spotted by a blogger for KnoxNews.com who decided to email the Knoxville PD with a question.  The response is amazing in not only it’s condesention of those of us that understand the Internet…  But also in an obvious ploy to “nip this in the bud” instead of being open, honest, and engaging with the public in Knoxville.

Michael Silence of KnoxNews.com reports…  “I e-mailed KPD spokesman Darrell DeBusk and asked him to address Smith’s questions.

What I got back from DeBusk was a bit surprising: “We do not respond to blog postings. If we were to respond to blogs we would need to create a new position just to keep up with all of the comments. Legitimate questions posed to the department by our citizens will be answered. Responding to opinions and computer chatter will not change perceptions or opinions,” he wrote in an e-mail to me.”

Uhhhh..  What?!?!?  A LOCAL blogger (Helen Smith, a Knoxville forensic psychologist who blogs as Dr. Helen) makes a simple observation.  A reporter for a LOCAL (Knoxville Sentinal’s Michael Silence) asks a question derived from that posting to the LOCAL Knoxville PD.  And although it could be time consuming to respond to LOCAL questions posed, wouldn’t it be wiser to recognize that in being upfront, honest, and engaging with the LOCAL reporter may just take care of the hundreds of queries that will be arriving in the email box of the Knoxville PD over the next few days?  Let alone this post showed up on FARK, Twitter, and Facebook?

The lesson for Affiliate Marketers?  It is NEVER inappropriate to actively engage with your customers.  And let there be no doubt that anybody responding or inquiring of your Social Media accounts is highly likely to become a customer.  The upside is that by engaging with your customers you are strengthening ALL of your efforts.  And if you should decide to ignore or send flippant responses like the Knoxville Police Department?

You may end up on FARK…  Kinda like the entry for the Knoxville Police Department:

Police spokesman refuses to answer reporter’s question because it was originally asked in a blog. So we can accurately report: Knoxville police department does not deny it runs speed traps purely for revenue

New York started this whole mess…  Declaring a “Sales Tax Nexus” to include wherever an affiliate marketer was based out of.  Then Virginia, Mississippi, New Mexico, the Carolinas, etc.  all trying to pass laws declaring the same tired refrain.

Of course, there’s the ever shining example of Missouri which takes the position that no new law is necessary and that everybody owes no matter what.  It’s all becoming so serious, and so silly at the same time.

The most ridiculous example would be that a customer in Maine buys product from Amazon (in Washington State) which ships the product from Kansas, and the click thru was from an affiliate marketer in Missouri who hosts their website in Virginia.  Meaning that Sales Tax would be charged from Kansas, Missouri, and Virginia (and maybe Maine).  Oh, each city and county in those states most likely would want their share too.

Which can only mean one of two things.  Either State Legislatures know the ramifications of all of this and they just don’t care about anything but gaining a few cents in taxes (even though it will cost four to five times the tax amount in order to collect it).  Or, they’re not paying attention to the real world ramifications such moves will truly make.

In either case, I’m considering a proposal of my own…  U-Haul.  Sam Kinneson famously stated in his comedy routine that we should not give foreign aid to countries without food.  We should give U-Hauls.  “See this..  This is Sand, YOU CAN’T GROW FOOD IN SAND”!  Give em a U-Haul and point them somewhere that food can be grown.

In a whole “Freakanomics” sort of way this same scenario may end up being played out in the Affiliate Marketing Industry.  Some smart person in some State is gonna declare that affiliate marketers in their State don’t have to be responsible for affiliate marketing taxation from another State.  And then a whole lotta U-Hauls are gonna get loaded up and on the road.

Whichever State creates this “safe haven” for Affiliate Marketers is gonna win big.  Think of all the data centers, high speed Internet connections, thousands of entire families, and all the supporting merchants, suppliers, shippers, etc. that will flock to such a place.  It would become a sustainable economic boon that will leave some States economically devastated in the process.

All because some State Legislators didn’t have a clue just how unworkable, unfair, and economically unfeasible affiliate taxation via sales tax mechanisms truly are when there are so many taxing authorities and cross border transactions there truly are.

My conclusion?  Either get a U-Haul or lay out exactly how bad this is and get onto your State Legislators right now.

There has been much ado about the new FTC Rules/Guidelines for online marketing this week.  And I’m very suprised that few (if any) have been putting this together with the AdSense moves by the Google Affiliate Network, Quality Scores on the Ebay Partner Network, and the “buzz” around the industry about overall “Quality”.

But it does all make sense.  And it does all fit together.  And it’s not a “War on Affiliate Marketing”, nor is it “The End of Affiliate Marketing“.  It just isn’t.  It’s a maturing of an industry.  There is this thing called “The Business Cycle” for any industry and we are simply seeing it manifest itself.  That’s it.  That’s all.

No, I’m not ignoring it either.  And neither should you.  But this is predictable and you can use this to your advantage.  No matter what your niche, no matter what you sell, no matter how few or many sites you have.  This is opportunity and there is still time to prepare, plan, and execute in ways that will put you ahead of your competition.

How many times have you done a Google search and all you got back were “squeeze” pages touting some secret, hidden, amazing, astounding, killer way to make a bazillion dollars in the next week?  Or lose 100 pounds a day, or whatever?  Right, way too many.  Just bogus scams to pry money from your wallet for little or nothing in return.  Those are the targets of the current move to “Quality” and the reason the FTC is tightening their rules.  Those arn’t affiliate marketers.  They are the people that ruin good affiliate programs, destroy confidence in consumers, and siphon money out of the marketplace for real products, from real companies, who provide real value.

The days of simply throwing out a squeeze page, dumping a few thousand Craigslist ads per day, having software create a few million backlinks, and hard pitching for money are ending.  Well, in affiliate marketing it’s ending.  And that’s good.  It’s very good.  You all know just how hard and how much work it takes to build out a quality site, build real value, give your customers a reason to buy and visit often.  I’m just so tempted to remove “Quality” from my vocabulary and replace it with “Value”..  But that’s not descriptive enough.  I think it’s “Quality Value” that describes it best.

Remember the “Building an Affiliate Marketing Powerhouse” from a couple weeks ago?  That was about “Methods and Mechanics”.  An overview of building a quantity of local focused niche affiliate websites where you could provide Quality Value for specific local niches in a profitable way.  And you do need to know how it’s done.  How the methods and mechanics work.  But that’s not all.  You have to learn how to build in “Quality Value” for your site visitors/customers.

People want what they want and when they want it.  Your job is to help your site visitors and customers along this path.  To help them discover what they want and to help them get what they want when they want it…  FROM YOU!

What a weekend!  After the “breather” day on Friday I took the weekend off.  Hey, being an Affiliate Marketer doesn’t mean you have no life!  But today..  Well, today is a big day.  We start deploying our network of minisites for real.  To recap what we’ve done so far (and why you need to go read parts 1-4 if you havn’t already).

Day One – Research – Did the Math and figured out how many sites (25) to make a living (theorhetically).

Day Two – Research – Niches and Keywords.  Learned how to find localities, keywords, and offers.

Day Three – Planning – CMS Tools, Domain Names, Plugins, Virtualmin, the mechanics of managing sites.

Day Four – Rollout – Built first site draft, tested CMS, wrote copy, did 1 site to get the hang of it.

Which brings us to today..  Day Five…

First things first today.  Rollout site one for real.  I took that dedicated server, used Virtualmin to “light up” a domain, loaded WebsiteBaker and the plugins I’m going to use.  Rewrote the content to match the locality, dropped in the important keywords in a NATURAL way (i.e. If your in the Dallas Ft.Worth Metroplex, etc.).  Brought the site live with my affiliate links in as creative a way as possible.  Oh, almost forgot (and this is important)..  I added rel=nofollow to all my affiliate links.  Check out the SEO section on the AffSpot Forum for details.  But it’s important.

I also brought site two online as well.  I wouldn’t have, but I needed two of the sites up right away.  Remember using OpenX Advertising Server to serve banners?  Well, when I built the site graphics (really, I outsourced that) I had banners made for every site.  So I’m going to server my own advertisements back and forth in my network of eyeglasses local minisites.  So I needed two sites up to get OpenX ready to go and two banners being served.  Enough said.

So, first site rolled out.  Now to promote the site.  Some people are going to say I’ve gone “blackhat”.  I don’t think so.  I think I’m being an intelligent marketer.  Here’s what I did and why I did it.  I built a Twitter account for the entire network of minisites and it’s named something similar to USAGlasses (no, that’s not the real name).  I plan on using the RSS function of WebsiteBaker to push all sitenews to that account automatically.  So when a promotion happens, I update the site and the site will “tweet”.

Second thing I did is to make sure I have glasses@DOMAINNAME.COM live for each site and tied the email list builder script (just a form page inside of WebsiteBaker) use that email address to communicate with prospects/customers.  All those email addresses go to my own central email box.

Third thing I did was I built several “feeder” webpages.  I used Hubspot, Squidoo, WetPaint, etc. with the general category of designer/discount/glasses/eyeglasses (whatever was reasonable and available) and posted ORIGINAL content at each.  Where the ability to read RSS was available (i.e. Squidoo and others) I made a piece of it read all the “tweets” that come in from any site updates.  I wrote a good article, and built a list pointing to my two sites that are live.  As each new site comes live I’ll add them to these link lists too. Not all of them on any single site.  Just a few so that there are no more than four links per site.  And then I have a link to two of the other “free” pages as well.

And I pointed all these pages at each other as well.  I wrote ORIGINAL content for each of them.  so there is new/different and useful information on each one.  THIS IS CRUCIAL!  We’re using minisites, so by creating these “free” pages we’re reaching out to potential customers.  You can’t copy/paste this material.  Every page must be original and helpful.

Then with my regular twitter, Facebook, delicious, Stumble, etc. accounts I bookmarked the two sites and the “free” pages I built.  In other words, I “primed the pump”.  Oh, I use pingomatic on every one of them too.

And MOST importantly…  I added the two sites to Google, Bing, and Yahoo local.  These are locality based minisites, So the Dallas site is noted as Dallas, LA as LA, etc.  We’re going local in a big way so we’ve got to do it right.  I have an 800# that I’m using on all the sites, and that’s the number I put on the local listing.  The reason is easy, I want to let people call.  I’m not going to get 25 phone numbers.  And in the “About Us/Contact Us page I always make a point to point out the 800# where you can Call Free even if your in XXXX (a city that ISN’T a local call but in the Metro Area).

Now it’s as simple as “Shampoo, Rinse, Repeat”…  I’m doing one additional site per day til they’re all up and running.  Updating each site at least once a week with useful information.  Only after every site is built and promoted do I even bother checking statistics.  Building traffic can take a little time and I don’t want to obsess on it..  Yet.

Want to talk more about the minisite network?  Just click the “Discussion” link below and we’ll chat about it at the AffSpot Forums.