Web publishing clients often ask us to help them find the best way to convert old documents and presentations into content for their websites. Many of them have lots of content pertaining to their niche but it’s trapped in MS Word documents or Powerpoint or some other proprietary format.

Of course we go around the block with them as they try to publish those files directly to their site, or worse yet, they try to use the built in converter in MS Office – YUCK. Once we clean that mess up we have to manually convert them to PDF or Flash (for presentations) then publish them as embedded links.

Now we have new solutions to work with and recommend. About a year ago we stumbled onto a great document converting, hosting, and embedding service and wanted to share it with you.

I want to recommend to you one of the best way to convert, host, and embed documents into your website. As you may know a large part of our expertise is focused on SEO and website promotion. With that in mind we always try to recommend solutions that take the promotion of your website into consideration. That way you can climb the SERPS (search results) as quickly as possible without spending too much money to do it.

With that said I want to recommend a free web2 enhanced document service called Scribd. (scribd.com)
You can sign up for a free account there and use scribd for several critical services to enhance your website and your sites search authority.

Scribd gives you a free way to convert word docs into pdf presentations. In fact it will convert word, pdf, powerpoint, etc into embedded presentations that you can embed right into your website or wordpress blog — the same way you embed videos. Not only does it provide the conversion and embeds, but it also provides you with hosting for the document on their website that provides links back to your website. (This is perhaps the greatest benefit of all because scribd is a very high ranking website, if you have links on it to your site it will help your site gain authority and rank very quickly.)

Hope this tip helps. Drop us a line and let us know where you use it.

The thick and thin of affiliate marketing often comes down to a trade-off between work and worry.

Work: The work and time it takes to build good authority sites with high visitor value and long lasting serps positioning.

versus…

Worry: The stress over when those quickly ranked machine gun affiliate traps, slick redirects and frame pages will get nerfed or even flagged as spam.

Whether you’re designing an affiliate internet marketing plan from scratch, or if you already have affiliates sites deployed, you always need more testing and feedback to monitor your conversion-path effectiveness. The most common ways to adjust are spinning and split testing pre- and post-click components like ad copy, anchor phrases, and landing page copy. But if you operate networks of thin affiliate sites you are very limited in how effective your spin-post-test cycles can be since the goal is direct injection into the sale channel from the initial search click.

Thin affiliate sites have minimal original copy and limited visitor value. It’s tough to bring them up the serps and get these kinds of pages organically ranked. No kidding right? No not really. The cause-effect relationship between value and organic ranking is made more difficult by the constant adjustment required to address ever changing search algorithms and ever increasing human-assisted page ranking.

But thin sites have one huge advantage; deployment speed. While everyone else is hoeing away on their content, trust relationships, and logical link building, the thin affiliate farmer has already grown a huge 100 acre co-op and by shear scale has socially self-promoted their sites into the top 10 or 20.

Unfair? Unethical? Slimy? Maybe so, but that’s not the point of this post. Let’s get back to main idea: The choice that YOU as a web developer and marketer have to make when planning your deployment strategy for a certain niche or product line.

You may find my attitude callous but honestly I don’t waste much time thinking about which way to go. I want to do what works best for my clients. The real choice depends on the market. Let me explain.

When you approach a campaign that is affiliate based you are faced with strong competitive challenges from other affiliates and also from the product/service originator. Competing affiliates create market buzz but that buzz quickly turns into noise once everyone breaks into the game — or if you are late to the party and there is already strong brand and social exposure working against you.

Competition from the brand is also a serious challenge — especially these days, when SEO consultants are everywhere (ahem). It is no secret that many companies are collapsing their affiliate programs and putting the resources into brand and buzz building and dabbling in social link promotion.

So before you flex your affiliate site creative muscle, consider a balance of thick and thin affiliate properties. Sure, thin sites can help you achieve faster conversions, but high quality pages build real link equity and will help you survive in the long run…and isn’t this all about the long run?

Talk soon;

Dwayne

When you operate an Internet based business, all the world is your customer. The problem for most web-based businesses is reaching out to the world and getting your offer seen in a raging sea of competition, crowd noise, and surfer confusion. It’s critical to your survival to provide the best product or service, but it’s equally important to get the message out to potential customers.

No matter how good your lead generation, in-house marketing or list building efforts are, the key to adding zeros to bottom end of your bottom line comes from adding new buyers. New customers are the foundation of our entire future marketing effort. So it follows that the acquisition of new customers is the master key to your business success or failure.

It’s common for internet businesses to get stuck in a SEM or SEO sales channel and marketing strategy that leaves them in a narrowly focused competition pool. Here they fight it out with other trapped marketers vying for a share of a fixed volume of daily searches. Each competitor has their list of keywords and live or die over how many sales they can win from the daily available inbound search volume.

So how do we fish new buyers out of this stagnant pool of traffic? We reach outside of our fixed list of keywords. But not just any new keywords will do. We must find keywords that are returning traffic at levels we can pull fish, er potential customers out of.

Search Suggestion Tools

There are several ways to learn what people are searching for and to new build keyword silos to bring them into our network. We’ll go into content creation and keyword farming in later articles. Today we want to focus on a great way to find the missing link between what we think our market is about and what the public thinks it is about.

How do we do that? And what does it cost?

Search Engine Suggestion is the answer and it’s completely free

Here we go to the various online tools (overt and covert) to gain intelligence on what Search Intent Anticipation (SIA factor) suggestions engines are returning for your base keywords. The idea is to reach out beyond your own ideas of what your market is interested in and to see what real human traffic is looking for. Very often, this simple process will break you out of a marketing rut by opening new sales channels you can work on — to market them or even develop new products.

Please note that since most major search engines have refocus on monetized search, their main interest is in delivering quality search results. A big component of result quality is to anticipate and drill the surfer down to where they need to be when they started the search session. So the concept is to anticipate the surfer’s needs and deliver the best suggestions to fill in the blanks created by the surfer’s gap of imagination, laziness, or lack of keyword or typing skills, etc…

Also note that since the engines really want to monetize you they are always balancing Visitor Value (VV factor) with accurate anticipation. Even if they don’t admit it, there will always be heavy algorithmic gravitational pull towards commerce-specific results. You can be assured that commerce will play a factor because profitable search engines survive by driving traffic to monetized search.

A shocking but simple rule: If there is high search volume there will always  be monetized search.

Why is that? Because anything that has a high volume of search will create a focus and concentration of human interest that will in turn lure Internet marketers into the game. Internet Marketers love the crowd because as P.T. Barnum claimed there is a sucker in every crowd.

So even on innocent subjects and strongly academic search terms, human interest generates the search volume and the search volume generates marketing interest, which in turns ignites search activity (remember that Internet marketers have to constantly study the subject to steal content to power their content-centric internet marketing information product marketing efforts).

But I digress… What we want to focus on is the margin created between human interest and marketing interest. Why? Because in that gap are seething pools of fish for you to drop a baited line into. And one of the best tools to discover the gap and create whole new channels you can exploit for free is search suggestion.

Google for example now has search suggestion based on absolute metrics. Just hit their main search site for real time search suggestions. Type in a few letters of your key phrase and the suggestions are instantly delivered to you. As a bonus they also throw in the number of indexed page results. Yahoo, has been providing these for a long time and they still work great. MSN Live and Ask.com are also helpful, but their anticipation-suggestion engine is very strongly weighted to commerce results. This makes sense considering their market positioning and struggle for share.

It’s easy and free to add new life to your web marketing by using the free tools provided by the search engines. So go for it! And happy fishing.