What Is Amazon Spark (and Should You Bother)?

Staying on top of any emerging or growing social media trends is an absolute must for any successful Internet marketer. You need to know how to best utilize Instagram Stories to build your brand, for example, or how Facebook Live video can be immensely useful in reaching out to your audience on a much more authentic, genuine level.

Things don’t always work out, of course — does anyone still remember Ello? — but even if you don’t hurl yourself deep into these new channels, it pays to know about them in case they do take off… even if it’s just to squat on your preferred username or vanity URL. And it’s even more important when these new platforms are backed by some of the biggest names online.

A somewhat perplexing example of this is Amazon Spark. It was quietly announced to the world in summer 2017, but barely anyone has noticed. Everyone knows about Amazon Associates at this point, but not too many people know about the Amazon Influencer Program either. Maybe they’re still testing the waters before they want to gain more visibility. What this means, though, is that you can get in on the ground floor and get a head start on all the other influencers and Internet marketers out there.

Seemingly inspired by Instagram, Amazon Spark enables users to post stories, ideas and images to their feed. This can include informal polls too, and then users can “smile” the post (i.e., “like” it) and add comments. The key difference is that Spark is very much product-focused with direct product links for where people can go to buy the products mentioned. That seems like such a natural fit.

There’s a little bit of a Pinterest flair to this, because it is about product recommendations and it’s integrated with the Amazon review system, but the single column feed layout is more like the web-based Instagram. Amazon has been paying influencers to populate the platform with compelling content, but there does not appear to be any built-in monetization at this time.

That seems like a wasted opportunity, given how much more Amazon integration there is already, so why wouldn’t you link an influencer’s Spark profile with his/her Associates account for some product affiliate links? The hope is that this will be implemented at some point in the future.

Another big sticking point is that it’s actually quite difficult to find actual user profiles on Spark. Instead, the platform is much more product focused. You enter the product categories that interest you (kind of like following hashtags on Instagram) and your feed is then populated with relevant posts. You can’t actually search for specific users and, as far as I can tell, no vanity URLs have been issued. Instead, if you see someone that interests you show up in your feed, you can then click on their name to follow them. That again feels like a wasted opportunity.

Despite some negative initial experiences by people who have been using the platform, there is definitely a lot of upward potential here, especially if you’re already heavily invested in the Amazon ecosystem.

For starters, while the official page says that Spark can only be accessed through the Amazon mobile app on iOS and Android, it does seem to load in any web browser at amazon.com/spark too. That’s at least a step in the right direction.

And one of the potential drawbacks of Spark could also be one of its advantages. You need to be an Amazon Prime member to post anything on there and, in effect, to have a real Spark account. This limits your reach, to be sure, but it means that everyone on there has already self-identified as a frequent Amazon shopper (or at least frequent enough to warrant a Prime account). There are about 80 million people with Prime membership and that number continues to grow.

For now, it’s probably not worth your time to dedicate too much time, attention or resources to Amazon Spark. The platform is still in its infancy and there’s really no money to be made until they (hopefully) integrate it with the Associates program. However, you should definitely keep it on your radar, because with Amazon’s backing and solid infrastructure, Spark could prove to be the next big battleground for influencer marketing.

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2018 Affiliate Summit East Meet Market

The 2018 Affiliate Summit East opened in New York with the Meet Market. This is the place for affiliate marketers to find produce to make money online with. Over 5000 people flew in from all over the world to be at this event. Check out the video to see all the action.

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Here’s Why Your Links Not Increasing Your Rankings

SEO is about a lot of things especially building the right type of links to your site. Before it was as easy as building links from irrelevant websites which had no value or relevance however the focus has changed due to updates in search algorithms. With that said, I often get the question why linking building hasn’t been producing the results your looking for. I have put together a few reasons why your link building isn’t producing results and what you can do going forward to ensure quality and relevance. Let’s get started.

No Domain Authority

Some websites have been around longer than others and have built a reputation for providing value. This also means over the years their domain authority has increased so getting a link from these sites will be more valuable than others. If your building links then it’s important to focus on these websites and build a relationship with them. I believe many people don’t see a difference in their rankings because they simply don’t focus on authority links especially those which are relevant. You’ll read about relevance later however it’s important to make sure your links come from authority blogs so the value trickles down to your blog.

If you head over to OpenSiteExplorer.org or Ahrefs.com you can type in a domain URL and find out the authority of the domain. Focus on domains above 20+ and nothing below.

Accessibility

If you have a website then I recommend setting up Google Webmaster Tools to find out how accessible your website is. I’m not talking about for traffic because you can easily go to your URL to make sure there are NO server issues. I’m referring to accessibility as it refers to indexing, etc. If Google bots cannot access your website then they won’t be able to index your pages, links, sitemap.xml, etc. The backend of GWT will also give you a list of other issues like sitemap.xml, crawl and robots.txt.

The funny thing about rankings is that you can have everything else in order, but if your website can’t be accessed then it’ll stop it dead in the tracks.

Wrong Anchor Links

Above I discussed the importance of relevance and how they play a crucial role in rankings. Google over the years has made enormous tweaks to the way they evaluate a website. For example, relevance matters way more than it did in the early days of the search engine. This change was due to the way people search for products, information and services. People are more targeted and use long-tail keywords to find EXACTLY what they are looking for. Google understood this change and wanted to incorporate a system to improve user engagement.

First, they put more emphasis on long-tail and LSI (related) keywords within the title, description and body. Secondly, they have put enormous emphasis on the way people are building links these days. You have to build a mix of different links which include URL, long-tail, related and targeted. This shows a wide link profile and relates well to the search patterns of users.

What does this do for Google?

Simple, it helps them rank websites which have domain authority and provide value. However, it helps them organize the website information to better fit the search pattern of users. Keep in mind the job for search engines is to organize information so people can find it easily. They will continue to make tweaks so they can provide this to their users and continue to grow as a search engine.

What you can do is start implementing these changes and tracking how they make a difference going forward. Testing and tweaking is the way to get things done no matter what your niche.

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3 Professional Services You Should Consider Outsourcing

Have you ever wanted to learn how to create great looking online videos, membership sites, design professional looking e-books or PDF files, or even get into the world of branding and web design? If you’ve been active online with blogging or marketing, you’ve likely considered some of these methods for your own business or branding efforts, or maybe as a service, you can offer to others.

However, if you really want to be good at any of these, you are going to need to have a specialized skill set and training in these areas. As much as we would like to be a ‘Jack of All Trades‘, sometimes it isn’t worth it. The end result is usually wasted time and ending up with work that isn’t ask great or perfect, in comparison to if it was done by another professional.

To help better understand this process, while also considering your options for creating better content and simply looking better online, let’s look at some of the best outsourced and professional services you might want to start using today.

Professional Whiteboard and Video Creation Services

Something that many people wish they could accomplish or master the expertise of, is drawing. If you’ve ever watched a cartoon or read a comic book, and then tried to draw some art of your own, you’ve likely become disappointed with the end result.

Drawing in itself isn’t easy. Throw video production and animation into the mix, and this process can become even harder. Heck, I wouldn’t even know where to start if I wanted to draw a few sketches and bring my work to life — let alone use it for online video or to represent my brand.

However, just like everything else in the world, there are experts in this area that not only love what they do, but they also create some amazing work as well. From the team that created mysimpleshow, a platform that allows users to create whiteboard and explainer videos with their drag-and-drop platform comes simpleshow — a higher-level of work and video creation that comes with a completely ‘hands off’ approach.

In short, while other video creation tools and platforms allow a user to create a clipart and simplistic video of their own, simpleshow takes of custom work from clients around the world to create the best videos possible.

In addition to the traditional ‘whiteboard’ explainer videos that many of us are used to, simpleshow has expanded their professional work into a wider range of videos as well, which include hand-movement and clipart videos, kinetic videos with original drawings, and also premium videos that are built upon the needs of the end user or brand.

No matter what type of blog, business, or brand you currently have — video is now in demand more than ever before. If you want to make a great first impression with your audience, while also not spending countless hours on trying to learn how to create videos of your own, simpleshow is a great alternative.

Audio-to-Text Transcribing Services

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, you will likely have seen the massive increase in not just podcasting, but also audio content as well. With more sites relying on social media and curating their best content to send it out to as many platforms as possible, turning your best audio and podcasts into written text content and visuals is more important than ever.

However, if you think listing to your latest podcast or online video and trying to transcribe it word-for-word is going to save you money… you are wrong!

There are plenty of online solutions that not only make this process fast and painless but also very affordable as well. A perfect example of this can be seen at Rev.com. The cool thing about this solution, is that they offer not just audio to text transcription, but also captions and translations as well.

With it only taking a few minutes of audio to create hundreds of transcribed words of text, this is often a no-brainer for anyone who is short on time and looking to create or schedule out a lot of content. Also, when you factor in that transcription prices are around $1 per minute, this is well worth the financial investment, over actually spending your own time on this process.

You can also view a list of other transcription services as well, which will allow you to take your best content and convert it into different languages to reach new audiences around the world.

Professional Content Writing Services

On the internet, content is everything. With more new sites going live daily, it’s no longer just about creating content, it’s also about knowing how to effectively promote it, rank in the search results and also to convert audiences into real revenue.

With all of this in mind, the content creation aspect in itself can take a lot of time, and kill your overall productivity. Content creation solutions like Textbroker, make the process of outsourcing content to reliable freelancers around the world a whole lot easier and cost effective. For businesses and brands that need a lot of content and don’t have the time to seek out the best writers and scheduling new content jobs, they also have a managed service as well.

No matter what option you decide to go with, know that ‘content creation’ in itself will only get you so far. To win the game of ranking high in the search results and getting real audiences to yourself, you need to understand and master the art of SEO and paid traffic. This often can’t be done if you are spending most of your time on simply creating content.

If you’ve already tried to outsource your content creation and failed to find a high-quality or reliable writer, you should definitely try a platform like Textbroker, which bases all of their work and qualified writers on a rating scale from the previous work. Also be sure to read up on the latest tips on how to find the best writers for your site content and what to look for when skimming through freelancer profiles.

Your Time is Worth More than Your Money

Everyone is always working and dreaming their whole life to try and get as much money as they can. However, the most valuable asset you have is time. It might not seem like it right now, but soon enough, we will all realize how true this is.

With this in mind, bloggers, brands, and entrepreneurs need to spend both their money and time wisely. Focus on where your time is best spent, and how you can use additional finances to get even further. If you know marketing and online advertising, it’s likely much more effective for you to focus on these areas than trying to learn how to create an online video or writing new content.

Be sure to run through each of the solutions mentioned above and see which might be a great compliment to your day to day operations and end goal.

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What Google AMP for Email Means for Email Marketing

It may surprise you to learn that the very first incarnation of my blog, if you want to call it that, didn’t even have a webpage. It had no monetization and zero graphics whatsoever. Oh, and it was distributed only via email. In fact, I didn’t even know of the word “blog” way back in 1999 and I referred to my humble online blurb as just an “email newsletter.”

Somewhere along the way, even though we continued to use email the entire time, the notion of maintaining a mailing list fell to the wayside, eventually favoring social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to better reach our audiences and distribute our content. However, you’ve likely noticed in recent years that email marketing has experienced a significant resurgence.

Maybe it’s because email, unlike today’s social networks, is not subject to same kind of heavy-handed algorithms that act as gatekeepers for what content is seen by what people. Make it through the spam filter and your message is generally shown in reverse chronological order, regardless of whether the end user receives that message in Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, or any number of email providers. And it doesn’t really matter what device they read it on either, whether that’s an Android phone, an iPad, a Windows laptop or even a Linux PC.

That appears to be changing.

Announced via the official Google blog by Gmail Product Manager Aakash Sahney, AMP for Email effectively translates or ports the same philosophy behind the AMP Project to the context of email. They say this is delivering the “power” of AMP to the email inbox.

As a quick refresher, AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It’s a project and standard by which web developers can adapt their webpages so that they are fully optimized for viewing on mobile devices. The idea is that the load time is cut down tremendously, stripping away superfluous elements to provide a much simpler, cleaner user experience.

Google has obviously been prioritizing webpages that adhere to AMP standards in the search engine results pages, because AMP-optimized pages presumably provide the best user experience on mobile. Many top publications utilize this technology and you’ll find that many WordPress themes do too.

With AMP for Email, the focus is less on providing the fastest loading user experience possible, but rather on elevating the user experience to make for email “experiences” that are “more engaging, interactive, and actionable.” This distinction is very important. The goal is to keep you within the silo of email without having to visit an external website, just like how Facebook tends to favor content that keeps you on Facebook.

Say, for example, that you want to send out a customer survey. Right now, you’d essentially include a link to your survey inside of your email message. You might make the email look nicer with some HTML and graphics and such, but the call to action would be to click on a button (or link) and be taken to some webpage to complete the survey.

If you were to concoct a similar scenario but designed with AMP for Email, the recipient could conceivably complete the survey from right inside his or her email inbox. In effect, the email message is no longer static; instead, it acts much more like a live webpage and is fully interactive. Google also mentions examples like submitting an RSVP to an event or scheduling an appointment.

The content of the email could also be updated even after you’ve already sent the message. “Live” elements could reside within the message so that the recipient effectively receives the most up-to-date information possible. This could be useful for news stories, travel updates, shipping progress, and so forth. You know how many bloggers include their latest posts in their email newsletters? Now the “newest” post could quite literally be the “newest” post on the live site.

Another example they highlight is the ability to browse through Pinterest and pin content, all without leaving your Gmail account either. And you can manage your email subscription preferences from right within the message too, or see the latest travel deals instead of getting information that’s 12 or more hours old.

This could prove to be a monumental game changer for email marketing, because it can drastically impact how you leverage the power of email marketing for your business. The possibilities are limitless, even if some people might think that AMP for Email is a terrible idea. Other people might say that email is due for some major evolution and this could be it.

What do you think? What are some of the more creative or practical applications for AMP for Email that you could see being implemented in your own email marketing campaigns? The spec is available through Github if you want to start experimenting.

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Dot Com Lunch At Ivan Ramen Slurp Shop

New York City is home to Ivan Ramen, one of the most famous ramen shops in the world. I first found out about Ivan from the Netflix series Chef’s Table. We swung by the Slurp Shop to try a bowl of Ivan’s world famous ramen.

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This Is How Long Before Your Blog Makes Money

A very common question asked by beginners and there are several ways to answer this question. It’s important to always research the answer so you get the right advice from the right people. I’ll admit that I haven’t had as much success as the big names in the business, but have worked with them closely to know what determines profits. With that said, we need to explore a few fundamental things to answer this question. Here’s what I’ll be discussing going forward:

• Value
• Products and Services
• Testing and Tweaking
• Networking

Let’s get started and your feedback will greatly be appreciated.

Value

You have to stand out compared to your competition so it’s important you provide value NOT found online. This is why I always like to start off by researching my competition looking for two things. First, what content resonates with readers within my niche? Secondly, how can I make my content better and include things which are missing like more depth, images and videos. Being able to answer these questions will allow me to create something of more value compared to my competitors. I believe value is what will attract readers to your blog and increase the chances of conversions.

Here are a few more things value can do for you:

• Build loyalty
• Social engagement
• Subscribers
• Credibility

Products and Services

Once you have the value within your content you’ll start attracting a solid following. This is where you can use your credibility to promote products close to you. You’ve noticed many top bloggers within the industry will use, reviews and earn commissions on products through their blog. They are able to do this because of the following and reputation they have earned with their readers. Their audience hang on to every word even when an authority blogger will promote a product. However, these bloggers do NOT jeopardize their reputation simply to earn a commission. For example,

They’ll only promote products they use themselves and which are worthy of using. They’ll never force people to buy products because they want to build a level of comfort. The point is through value and loyalty you can increase how fast your blog will start converting into profits.

Testing & Tweaking

I’m surprised at the amount of people who wait till last minute to try different things and lose valuable time in the process. For example, some bloggers wait a year to tweak things so they can increase conversions and this is a huge problem. It slows down the rate of success because you delay the actual optimization process. I’ve always stated, you need only 30-60 days to gather the initial data then can make tweaks to increase conversions. The sooner you can test and tweak the better for you because you’ll be able to capitalize on your knowledge. What do I mean? You’ll be able to put what you know into action.

Here’s something important to know:

Testing and tweaking should be done by everyone no matter what your niche or business. You should look for ways to improve your marketing because things will definitely work better than others.

Wrapping it up…

Times have changed and you have so many resources to help create momentum. I’ve read how some blogs are making $10,000+ in 12 months through hard work. Social media is a great way to build momentum quickly which others years back never had access to. I believe you can now start generating serious income in a shorter period of time however here are a few things to keep in mind:

• You CANNOT substitute hard work
• Always add value
• Build a relationship with your readers
• Network

Before I go…

I want to discuss the importance of networking. You have authority bloggers within your niche who are happy to accept guest posts. Even though this might NOT count as a link back as many people claim, it’s still awesome to generate traffic. You can drive enormous relevant traffic to your niche by guest blogging on authority blogs. This is why I recommend everyone to build relationships with authority bloggers. I’ve written extensively on this in my previous posts so do a quick search and you’ll find my content.

Good Luck…

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