It’s no secret that most likely everyone in your office has (at least) a Facebook account. You’ll find a handful of them who even have twitter accounts. The last two companies I have worked with have been (and still are) very vocal about having their employees retweet (RT:) things they wanted viral. I guess that’s cool. I mean if you’re comfortable becoming a non-paid billboard, then yeah, it is cool.

Far be it for me to tell you how to run your office, I won’t. But we all know that putting a carrot at the end of the stick makes people do more and work harder. Especially when it’s money at the end of the stick. So lets say you have a campaign that needs to go viral. You have a handful of uber-popular (facebook/twitter) profiles at your disposal and really want to motivate them.

Why not incentivize them to help make your message viral? Why not run a contest and see who drives the most traffic to your page/campaign. In our office we run these contests regularly. We have two levels of winners:

• 1st prize (generally $100) for most traffic directed to the page/campaign.
• 2nd prize (generally $50) for either longest (average) time on site or highest (average) page view.

It’s actually very simple and for the sake of this tutorial, I’m using Google Analytics. I am certain this can also be accomplished with Omniture and I think WebTrends but don’t quote me on that one.

Google will allow you to URL encode variables into your URL. Specific variables that they You need to follow their format as far as variables (see below) they even supply an online tool that will help automate this process Google Analytics URL Builder. But the end results are fantastic.

• Campaign Source (utm_source) – Required – Use utm_source to identify a search engine, newsletter name, or other source. Example: utm_source=facebook
• Campaign Medium (utm_medium) – Required – Use utm_medium to identify a medium such as email or cost-per- click.  Example: utm_medium=viral || utm_medium=ppc
• Campaign Term (utm_term) – NOT Required -  Used for paid search. Use utm_term to note the keywords for this ad.  Example: utm_term=Long+Island+News
• Campaign Content (utm_content) – NOT Required – Used for A/B testing and content-targeted ads. Use utm_content to differentiate ads or links that point to the same URL.  Examples: utm_content=logolink or utm_content=textlink
• Campaign Name (utm_campaign) – Required – Used for keyword analysis. If you notice from the screen shot (above), this is the variable that I use to track employee names/initials.

As I mentioned though, they have a fantastic tool:

Once you “Generate URL” (Step 3) the new URL is generated:

http://www.somewebsite.com/thatpage.php?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=viral&utm_campaign=joeg

This URL will now allow you to track all incoming traffic from each of your employees.

Viewing the traffic is easy:

• Log in to your Google Analytics account
• On the left side click Traffic Sources to expand the sub-menu.
• Select Campaigns from the list.

That’s it! Your information should be right there. Remember though, Google Analytics are not real time. I normally finalize my reports and numbers between 11am and 12am.

TIP: Click “Add to Dashboard” at the top of the page to add this to your dashboard.

Hope this was helpful to you and your campaigns are successful. Best of luck!

- Joe

It’s snowing, here in Long Island. It’s not amounting to much, but parents all over (this morning) were nagged by their children to see if school was closed? With the internet being second nature to people, one parent went on Google and typed in Long Island School Closings. They found our page, (clearly with a time and date stamp on it) from 12/21/2009 and saw that their school was in fact closed. She then proceeded to call all of her friends and neighbors, informing them that their school was closed.

By 10am, we received this letter:

Your web site today listed the XYZ Schools as a two hour delayed opening today (January 8, 2010) due to snow.For your information, the school district opened on time.  You listed many other schools as delayed opening or being closed.  They also opened on time.
I am going to recommend to our school superintendent that she have no contact with your paper any longer regarding school closings.  Maybe other parents in other school districts will take the same action based on your providing misinformation this morning.

This was a good learning lesson, in that we did not have one centralized place for “School Closings”. The writers published the story as an article. An easy fix for that was to create a new section named “/schoolclosings”.

Because I want to utilize the SERP position we had for that term,we created outbound links from the page, that Google knew of and directed it to our new page. We did our proper optimization (H1, H2, summary description) of the new page. We also changed the text on the page to read “No School Closings Reported for 1/8/2010″ – only below the link to our new page.

Sometime next week I will request that Google removes the old page from their index. It’s a very simple two-step process:

• Add a line to our robots.txt file ( Disallow: /2009/12/long-island-school-closings-and-delays/)
• Using the Google Webpage Removal Request Tool, request that they remove the outdated content.

Again, it was a very easy fix and a great exercise for everyone involved.

Really this is more of a mental note or a place to store this information, maybe someone will find this helpful? If you view the screen capture below, you’ll see the last article about Saudi Attitudes in Birmingham shows the publication name as gaurdian.co.uk. Meanwhile CNET News and Cult of Mac (blog) are shown using the publication names they’ve chosen.

It’s really a very simple process and one that shouldn’t take more than a few days to be corrected. Simply go  http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/request.py?contact_type=report_update and fill out the appropriate information. As with any request to Google, I highly encourage you to be logged in to your Google account.

This request should come from the contact person Google News had (originally) on file, or you can expect delays and questions.

This popped up for me today because I just reformatted our Google News Sitemap and resubmitted it. I used the full name of our publication and honestly never thought to look otherwise. It does make a difference and when I logged back into my Google Webmaster Tools I was surprised to find all those error messages, resulting from the sitemap I uploaded, yesterday. Your Google News sitemap publication name must match the name Google News shows.

Once the change is done, you” receive an email confirmation from them. At that time you’ll also need to resubmit your News Sitemap.

Please note that this change will affect only new articles. Your old
information will continue to appear on articles already included in Google
News, and these articles will expire after the usual 30 days. We
appreciate your patience during this process.

Not sure what your listed publication name is? That’s easy, just use the site: operator (example: site:www.cnn.com), followed by your domain name, in Google News. The publication name is listed just below your title.

I bet you’re saying right now that nobody is as busy as you, right? That you just don’t have the time to read every email, when the sender sends it. I know that during the work day, I can barely fit in lunch let alone click on a link that you think I might like, find helpful, is porn or is sure signs of the next big affiliate/money making craze.  I personally do most of my responding between 8-10pm. This is the time the kids are in bed, I’m on my recliner and I have the time to read about what you think I should know or might find interesting.

If you’re a Twitter user you should be very familiar with seeing (redirect) links from bit.ly. Back in May of 2008 Twitter parted ways with tinyurl.com and introduced bit.ly to the community. In your “tweets”, twitter will automatically convert your link to a bit.ly (masked/redirect) link once your URI reaches 31 characters. If you have exactly 30 characters in your URI, the tweet will be delivered to your followers/list as you designed it, with your URI in tact. Once you reach character 31, truncation occurs and the URI gets trimmed to 27 visible characters and an ellipse (…)  30 total. For affiliate marketers trying to pass off their links, this is a dream.

Sure, it’s another redirect service that will mask your links. But there is soooo much more to it. For example, you can track if your links where clicked, how many times, if they went viral, etc.

How do I create an account with bit.ly?

Let’s start from their main page (of www.bit.ly), yes you do need to create an account. The service is free and registering requires you to enter your email address, a desired user name and password. You can also use the site without registering first, but then you will lose the ability to track and monitor your links.

Now take the URL you’d like to convert, copy and paste into the main input text field on the page.

It’s really self explanatory and I’ll leave it to you to play some more. What I really wanted to share was a technique on how to track if your link was opened.

Earlier this week I had to send a link out to a few V.I.P. people. I also wanted to re-distribute the link to my facebook  and twitter profiles. Because the landing page I was sending people to was not my page/URL and encoding some variables in the URL (for tracking) was not possible. So I recreated the redirect a total of five times, using bit.ly.

You may have noticed when you pressed the “Shorten” button that you were presented with a new area, that looked like this:

I created a “slug” that is rather easy to decipher “000rs-111209″ was it’s name. To me this told me that Roy Smith </fictitious name> received this link on 11/12/2009. Of course you can encrypt these links how ever you’d like. For this post, I wanted to keep it simple.

Within an hour of sending all the emails I was able to see that all five of my links were clicked on. Within that same hour I received one response/confirmation. It wasn’t until later that night that I had heard from three of the four remaining. I was able to start all of those conversations with “I see you read the article I sent you, what did you think”? It is a little presumptuous, but it gets the job done and even makes for good conversation when asked “how did you know?”

News Corp’s network consists of more than 110 national and suburban newspapers. The New York Post and the ever popular and extremely (organically) visible site, The Wall Street Journal. Not to mention News Corp. owns the Fox Corporation.

In the interview he claims that they will allow for the first paragraph to come up on the search engines. I’m assuming he’s talking about the meta description. Anything after that is subscription-based. This is something I’ve become familiar with as (New York) Newsday has recently implemented a similar strategy. Their subscription based model is to help subscriptions to either their weekly (at-home) delivery or the triple-play package (TV, Internet & Phone) by their parent company, Cablevision Systems Corporation (NYSE: CVC).

I think we will. But that’s when we’ll start charging. We do it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it’s not right to the ceiling. You can get the first paragraph of any story but if you’re not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com, you get a paragraph and a subscription form.

My favorite quote from his interview is “There are no news Websites or blog Websites anywhere in the world making any serious money, some may be breaking even or making a couple of million.” This just shows you the kind of man this is. Making a couple of millions sits right next to breaking even, in his eyes. I would think sites and papers like WSJ.com or NewYorkPost.com are doing much better than breaking even, but obviously my warped perspective must start above a couple of million.

You may have noticed over the past few weeks the activity on this site. You may have noticed that not all posts were related to Affiliate Marketing. I’ll be honest, I’ve really missed blogging, but I always had problems just posting about one topic (Affiliate Marketing). I’m not a full time Affiliate Marketer and it really made it rough to just post on that, topic.

So, I decided to start over. Well, kind of. I wanted to start with a face lift and put a new theme on the site. I was having a really rough time with a conflicting plugin and couldn’t figure out which one it was. Long story short I wound up messing up the database and losing some data. I figured rather than wrestle with it. Especially over data that was a year or so old; I started over.

I will continue to write and share my findings about Affiliate Marketing, but why limit it there? I will also post on topics including Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM) including PPC, Social Networking, Social Marketing and Buzz.

Sorry for the short post but I’m still trying to get this theme configured. I’m also going to rewrite the bit.ly post, from two weeks ago. It was chock full of stats and findings that I gathered.

- Joe