http://www.facebook.com/editnotes.php?import

For those of you who don’t know, showing up in the “highlights” section of facebook is based on user interaction.  Specifically “likes” and comments.  BlitzLocal has begun to do a lot of facebook promotion for our small business clients recently, and the highlights section of my news feed is now about 90% BlitzLocal related at any given time.  Although there are only like four our five people liking each item, plus a few comments.

I have over 900 friends and I find it interesting that only a few need to interact with an item in order for it to show up in my highlights.  The average facebook user has between 150-200 friends.  Does that mean its 4x as easy to game them as it is me?  Probably.

The problem right now is that the average facebook user doesn’t use the “like” feature correctly.  I mainly see it being used on statuses and wall posts which don’t show up in the highlight section, or because they are too lazy to comment.  The real power of the “like” feature is on posted items, notes, pictures, and people fanning pages or adding friends.

If Google were to include the social graph as a major ranking factor right now getting the top spot would be as easy as phishing accounts and auto-liking whatever your promoting.

Social Promotion is new and will no doubt change over the next few years but I think especially on a local level, where your data is much smaller, it will always be easier to game then the traditional search engine.

I think its important to realize that even if this continues it won’t be the end of affiliate marketing.  There are other sources of traffic, which you can continue to promote offers through but it could very well end affiliate marketing on search.  Might be worth diversifying your traffic sources.  Begin experimenting with facebook, media buys and such, if you haven’t already.

I think the next golden opportunity in SEM will be local search marketing.  Doing call tracking for dentists, laywers, and doctors in your area.   Local search is exploding and is a lot less competitive. While you might make less, the campaigns are more long term and require less work after the inital set up.

While his blog does include the typical “subscribe via RSS” that most blogs have the “subscribe via email” is more pronouced.  This is important.  His client base isn’t very web savvy.  A lot of them don’t understand the concept of RSS, or a blog for that matter.  90% of his feedburner subscribers are subscribed via email.

The main goal of the blog was to rank higher in search terms related to his field.  While his niche isn’t very competitive, he did not rank on the first page for any related keywords except his name, and even then he wasn’t the first result.  The domain for his blog became his highest volume keyword, “interiordesignbusiness.net” (the .com was taken but wasn’t in use).  I interlinked his blog and his website and the rest was up to him.  He began posting relevant content 2-3 times a week.  He promoted his blog through his E-Zine, and at all the conferences he spoke at, and in his email signature, encouraging everyone he met to visit his blog and subscribe via email.  Slowly it started paying off, and he began creeping up in the rankings.

He now holds the 1st position for interior design business and fred berns.  His blog has over 200 subscribers who frequently visit his site.  He often posts links to his products in blog posts and has increased online sales dramatically. Almost 75% of his blog traffic comes from search engines. Nearly all of the remaining 25% comes from email related domains (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail).

As the title says all it took was a blog and email to RSS.  Local search is exploding, and it is also in its infancy.  While its not vital for small businesses to have an online web presence it is a vastly untapped market with virtually no competition.  If you combine a blog with a little social network promotion and local search marketing, you can one-up your competition and grow your business exponentially.

It amazes me that someone would even use “What is your favorite sports team?” as a secret question.  Your favorite sports team is the same as a hundred thousand other people, not to mention there are only 5 – 10 truely popular sports teams for each sport.  If for some reason guessing these teams fails, a quick look at your facebook or myspace profile is sure to provide the answer.

Personal questions such as “Where were you born?” are only slightly better, and in my opinion still not good enough. A quick pipl search is quick to show a ton of relevant information about you, some of it costs money, but if someone wants your password bad enough its definantly worth the $9.99 for the background check that gives your mothers maiden name and place of birth.

My personal solution to this problem is to just treat my secret question as another password.  I may choose “What is your favorite sports team?” for my question but my answer to that question will have nothing to do with the question itself.  I just have a word, that I use for almost every secret question.  Whenever I forget my password, I just type that word in as my answer and wah-la.  The word has nothing to do with me personally, and I never use it for anything else.  Its not foolproof but its waaaay more secure than using personal information.

One thing that always amazed me about the affiliate marketing industry is that a lot of these affiliates make decent money without any coding or design knowledge at all.  I personally think everyone in the industry should make a point to learn at least the basics of web programming (HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, Javascript) and heres why…

You can use javascript to replace the value of the link after the page has been loaded.  This means that even if someone steals your landing page and changes the url to theirs, the javascript will change it back and if they view the source it will still read as theirs.  Heres some example code.

<script>
if(window.location.href.indexOf(‘google.com’) == -1)
{
window.location=’http://google.com’;
}
</script>

This checks to see if the page is hosted at google.com. If its not it redirects to google.com. The indexOf needs to be the base domain, so the redirect doesn’t fire on URLs with extra params and stuff.

<a id=”test” href=”http://lol.com”>test link</a>
<script>
if(document.getElementById(‘test’).href != ‘http://google.com’) {
document.getElementById(‘test’).href = ‘http://google.com’;
}
</script>

Checks the href value of your affiliate link. If its not your affiliate link then it changes it to your affiliate link. The script part must go BELOW the link itself or in onLoad in the body tag.

Ideas to expand on this:

1. If you go the link replacing route set the window.status on mouse over to the value of their link so when they view the page and mouseover, they still see their link, even though it actually links to yours.

2. Don’t replace links/redirect 100% of the time. Just replace them 1/2 or 1/3 the time. This way you basically just take a cut, and they have less of a chance of finding out. If your lucky they’ll still make a profit, and continue running the campaign. You’ll get tons of free clicks.

3. Encrypt the Javascript. You can use this to encrypt it:
Javascript Encoder
Encode it and put it in your page with some HTML comments above that say its for the image rollovers or something. Or actually encode your rollever JS with it and that way if the delete it they delete the rollover part too and stuff breaks.

4. Put the code multiple places in your site, so if they remove it once another still fires.