A Look Back at October

Well October 2007 is surely going down as one of my most manic ever! Social media, SEO, affiliate marketing and consultancy took over my life. I've still got loads of emails and Facebook messages to respond to - for that I'm sorry!!

I started the month by creating my "Guide to affiliate marketing" which was just a summary of my views of the industry and to act as a hub for my posts on the topic.

I then blogged about the new search marketing tool from Compete (I Interviewed one of their guys here). I still like it but have added other tools to my affiliate marketing armoury and then asked what affiliate marketing would be like in 5 years? I'm still of the view that the gold rush is over and we're now going through a phase of consolidation with a greater emphasis being placed on investing in technology and content.

I also called into question the lack of PR on some of DMOZ's pages and wondered if they had some pages triggering a Google spam-switch.

One of the things that I'm hot on at the moment is the addition of interactive content to webpages to not only convert traffic, but also keep visitors in their site longer to aid their Google rankings.

I also spent a Sunday morning on my PC fleshing out my social media presentation - I hope you found it useful.

There was a big debate about the impact of brand bidding and how you get into a closed brand bidding group - many ignored me at the A4U Expo because I brought the topic up - others were grateful!

I also used another tool to look at the range of keywords from a selection of mobile phone merchants and affiliates - I thought it was interesting!

Back on the social scene, I posted about the possible impact of social shopping - it didn't apparently excite others as much as it excited me!

I also made a post that was picked up by Search Engine Land and was acted upon by the Google Analytics team when I suggested some improvements to Google Analytics. Everyday I delve in there, I find more useful stuff - thanks!

There was also the interesting move by Google to monetise YouTube videos with embedded Adsense - good move!

I also created by guide to seo - which I hope some felt was useful and goes well with my view that social media should be / is influencing the Google SERPS.

The was also a post about trying to game the Google SERPS by running competitions just to get more PR - I still find it annoying that people would rather come up with a competition to get more page rank by saying that people that link to you could win a prize instead of actually writing good content and people willfully link to you! And I wasn't the only one with these views!