The affiliate and CPA community tends to be very much incestuous when it comes to advice, bloggers and how-to-guides. Unfortunately, as some people pointed out in the article about the FTC & Clickbank many of the “experts” in the industry are just linking to themselves, promoting their own “push-button” traffic products.
What this usually means is that much of the advice out there is very much the same old stale methods that have been passed down for years. I’ve compiled a list of bloggers that aren’t in the “affiliate” game but are all about building traffic and return visitors.
This is important because with many of the changes in google, QUALITY content is more and more important than ever.
Here is a great list of bloggers that talk about traffic generation, SEO secrets and other techniques that do one thing: get you more visitors, generate traffic, bring people back and of course, make you money.
1) Growmap. Gail Gardner runs this small business blog, as she calls it. I’ve interviewed her for Small Business Technorati a few weeks ago, and she’s a fountain of information about everything. She is extremely useful to learn about what is out there, what people are talking about in small business. Don’t just paying attention to the “affiliate insiders” because many of them are just talking about only what they know, not what others are teaching. @Growmap
2) TrafficGenerationCafe with Ana Hoffman. Pretty amazing blogger with absolutely no connection whatsoever to the performance marketing industry, yet providing tools and techniques that our industry often charges for. I went through her blog after being introduced and found at least a dozen variants of some of the most expensive programs affiliate marketers use. @WebTrafficCafe
3) SEOSmarty by Ann Smarty. Think that you know who all the marketing experts are? Her tweets sometimes are tweeted as many times as some of the top publications in SEO, if not more. Why? Because she doesn’t actually write that much, but when she does it’s highly intelligent and innovative. @SEOSmarty
4) Kikolani with Kristi Hines. Self Described Geek has more information about what is going on out there than anyone else. She’s a regular for Search Engine Journal, Stay on Search and Famous Bloggers and spends it seems all her time reading other people’s blogs and then talking about what she learned. It’s a regular cornucopia of what the hell to pay attention to. @Kikolani
5) Just-Ask-Kim. Kimberly Castleberry has probably one of the best “how to start” guides about marketing I’ve ever seen. If you are looking to get into the marketing industry, especially affiliate marketing, this is an awesome place to start. @AskKim
What is interesting about this list, is that they are all women. In the affiliate and performance marketing industry we seem completely dominated by men (and obviously a lot of boys) and their opinions. One thing you will notice about all these people is that their alexa ranking is higher than most “gurus” in our industry, or at least on par with them. The reason they do well is that they are great at what they do, and they are most importantly innovative. Instead of attacking people, causing drama as is often seen in our industry, they are focusing on building businesses. I highly advise you taking a serious look at their blogs and you’ll learn more about marketing than you thought you would.
