Affiliate Summit Indianapolis Meetup 09-28-11

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The September Affiliate Summit Indianapolis Meetup was held at Claddagh Irish Pub and was a terrific success! This was a restart of the group from a few months ago after I got some feedback that people were interested in trying it again.

Erika Crabtree and Haley Drummond from One Click Ventures were our speakers and came armed with great information as well as led us in some Q&A about their business, affiliate marketing, and SEO. Some of their brands you might recognize include Affordable Scarves and Handbag Heaven (affiliate program available on Shareasale). Here were some of the highlights of their presentation:

Conversion testing and Optimization

• “If you can test it, test it.”
• Figure out what metric you are trying to change (such as email sign ups, purchases, bounce rates) and find tools to help you measure and test.
• Use Google Analytics Event Tracking to track interactions with your site.
• A great low cost heat map tool is is http://www.feng-gui.com

Tips for Improving Your SEO

• Pat attention to URLs and Title Tags but do not keyword stuff. Get the keywords you want as close to the front of the URL as possible.
• A good tool for keyword search volume and competition is https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
• Focus on unique content.
• Make sure your content is visible to search engines including alt tags on images, not using flash, and transcripts for videos.
• Use natural link building techniques that start with building relationships.
• For guest posts, check out http://www.bloggerlinkup.com
• Rankings are important but not everything, especially in light of personalized search.

The table discussions then went everywhere from how/when to develop niche sites to differences between the affiliate networks to the recent addition of Google +1 in search results.

Thanks to Erika, Haley, Erich, Ashleigh, Tracy, Blake, Donna, Tony, Jeff, Lori, Jeremy H., Jeremy Z., and anyone else that I may have missed! We are in the planning stages for an even bigger Affiliate Summit Indianapolis Meetup next month and would love any feedback, speaker suggestions, etc.