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jimmyw29 · by **jimmyw29** on Sun Nov 16, 2008 2:00 am

TAG AND PING for Affiliate Marketers

If you have been active in the Internet Marketing arena in the past few months you've
undoubtedly heard about Tag and Ping.

The term was introduced by marketers Sean Wu for his e-course, Tag and Ping, and due to
some spectacular promotion by established marketing gurus, quickly became a common-place
term.

Tag and Ping entered the Internet Marketing lexicon in May 2006

The theory, if you haven't purchased the course, is to use social bookmarking and tagging
sites to increase your site's Google PageRank. Sadly, soon after the course came out, nearly all
the social bookmarking sites introduced nofollow tags to their outgoing links, making the
PageRank angle less relevant.

However, it is still very possible, and very useful, to use some of the same techniques to bring targeted traffic to your website, and in the case of affiliate marketers, tag and ping can be effectively used to drive traffic that trickles in from the blogs of other marketers to your own affiliate page for the sale.

The goal of this report is to demonstrate how you can use the buzz generated by a big product
launch to generate affiliate sales even if you are a new marketer without a list or high-profile
website.

Getting Ready

A BLOG AND A PROFILE

To use this method of tag and ping, you're going to need a blog of your own (I use WordPress, but you can use a free Blogger account, or any other blogging platform too), and free accounts at Technorati, Flickr, and Furl .

If this is your first time using a Flickr account, add a bunch of family photos to your public gallery right away, since it takes a day or so to get approved for public viewing, and you'll want your pictures visible to the general public for this method to work. You should also know that to
keep your galleries public you need have more photos than computer generated graphics or screenshots in your account at all times. Thus a good supply of family photos or scenery photos is essential.

At Technorati, you'll want to create a profile for yourself with a photo or graphic to represent you (this makes your links stand out from the rest of the results for a tag search). Tag your profile with keywords related to the latest product launch. Remember that you can change your tags, photo and description whenever you want, so take advantage of that flexibility to make your profile specific the the product you're currently marketing.

Finally, get a Furl account and install the Furl Browser Button to make “furling” your pages easy.

Don't forget to store your passwords for these accounts where you can find them later, or you'll be no further ahead than you were when you started reading.

RESEARCH

Before any major product launch, you will see a rash of blog posts from well-known
marketers about the software or ebook. This is your cue to start doing some research about the
topic of the product. The gurus have gotten their free complimentary copies before the launch,
while you've got to start from scratch, so you've got some work to do.

Your first task is to do some tag searching at Technorati to find out what tags are being used to describe the product and the posts about it. You'll want to save a list of these terms either in a notebook or a text file for future reference.

Next, you'll want to do some research for your own blog posts on the subject. You'll want to pull together about ten short articles about your subject matter.

You can start with a simple Google search, but I'd recommend going further by using Technorati search, Del.icio.us, and Google's blog search to find information that's a little more
obscure about your subject.

If you can come up with a controversy about the product about to launch, or about the topic of the product, you can ride that to success as well.

Your goal will be to make your blog appear as the most prominent and interesting looking thing that appears in Technorati when someone clicks in from another blogger's tag links for topical keywords, so the number of posts you'll need to make and the length of time you'll need
to blog depends on the sort of competition and buzz being generated about the product.

For most terms, posting once or twice a day should be more than enough to keep you where you want to be.

Finally, make sure all your posts have your keywords linked to either your affiliate link or another sales page or name squeeze. I use ContextCash to link all my keywords, but you can do
it manually too.

GRAPHICS

Your second task is to prepare some graphics – they can be screenshots or ebook/report covers – that are eye catching to display on your blog and in Flickr.

Again, keeping in mind that your Technorati profile can be changed at whim, you might also want to consider creating a new topical graphic for your profile every time you decide to market a new product.

If the keywords you're targeting aren't likely subjects for photos, you'll probably only need one or two graphics. Most marketing subjects are pretty slow moving, while topics like “women”, “dating” and the like fly by faster than you can upload, so you'll need far more photos and graphics for a dating niche product than a marketing product.

Why Technorati is Important

Technorati is “a real-time search engine that keeps track of what's going on in the blogosphere

– the world of weblogs.” As of June 2006, Technorati indexes over 46 million blogs. What makes Technorati important for you is that

1. You can choose your own keywords and key phrases as tags for your page, so you can rank for any keyword you want to

2. Your rank for any keyword doesn't depend on a complex algorithm, but rather on how recently you posted an article with that keyword tagged. The newest posts get top billing, and the oldest eventually get shoved to page 2.

3. Because so many bloggers tag their posts with Technorati tags, Technorati often gets the number one search engine position for important keywords while those topics are frequently blogged about.

4. With Technorati links on many pro marketer's blogs, you have a chance to glean some of the traffic they've done half the work of pre-selling to, if those users click on a tagged link.
Your job, then, is to make your links and information on Technorati the most visually
appealing and most interesting looking places to click to.

Technorati Tagging

There are only two things you need to do to get listed in Technorati's results. First, you need to include special keyword tags in your page. You can do this manually in any blog page by adding code to your blog posts like this:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/[tag]" rel="tag">[tag]</a>
where [tag] is your keyword.

Key phrases with spaces in between the words are most often entered with plus signs in place
of the spaces, so if you see “tag and ping” on Technorati, you should have tag+and+ping
inside
your anchor tag.

There are some great plugins for WordPress that help you to create Technorati tags more
easily. My personal favorite is Bunny's Technorati Tags. Once installed, your posting admin
page will include a space for you to list tags, separated by spaces, which the plugin will convert
into Technorati tags and place into your post wherever you've put the bunny code into your
template.

If you've added a photo or graphic to your profile it will appear beside your post, drawing attention to your listing

Next, you'll have to set your blog up to automatically ping Technorati after you post.
WordPress' default ping service will do this automatically. If you use a different blogging
platform, you can either add the following url to your ping list:
rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping or enter your URL at: http://technorati.com/ping/.

Once Technorati visits your site, you should see your latest post appear as one of the first sites
on the tag page for the keywords and phrases you tagged in your blog post.

Monitor the Technorati tag page for your best performing keywords a few times during the
day to see how quickly sites are being added on top of yours. Optimally, you always want to
have a post in the top three results. Having several results on the first page can bring in great
results too.

Flickr Photo Tagging

While you're still on the Technorati site, take a look at the results page for any tag. You'll
notice that above the main results, a row of thumbnail photos is shown – presumably containing
graphics that are related to the term.

Flickr photos on top of Technorati results give you another chance to promote your site

Those images come from Flickr, and are tagged by their posters in the same way that blog
posts are tagged with keywords.

Technorati crops images rather than compressing them to make their image
squares. Keep your words away from the edges.

So, here's where you'll use the graphic representing your main keywords. Hopefully, the

Flickr account you recently created and populated with regular photos has been approved for
public viewing, and now what's left is for you to add a graphic.

I like using things like ebook covers and representative graphics depending on the keyword
and the market I'm targeting. The more appealing the graphic is to the market, the more often it
will be clicked.

Your initial graphic can be as large as you want, but when you create it you should know that
in Technorati, the top and bottom of the image will be cut off, so if you've got text that you want
read in your image, you should keep it away from the upper and lower edges.

You can tag your image with an unlimited number of tags, so go wild and use all the
keywords and phrases you've found in your research to tag the image. For each search of that tag
in Technorati, your image will appear at the top of the page, as long as six or more other photos
haven't been uploaded with the same tag more recently.

Flickr allows HTML in the description field. Use that area to create a direct link to your sales or landing
page.

Once the user gets to Flickr to see your full size image, you need to make it a one-click step to
go directly to your landing or sales page.

Fortunately, Flickr allows some HTML text inside their description field, so all you need to
do is create an enticing headline and link it with an anchor tag:

<a href=”http://www.surfthemind.com/?p=204.>
Before you buy the book, get free information on tag and ping here.
</a>

You can also use a link cloaking url to track links from Technorati and Flickr. For example, if
you were to use a GoTryThis link, you could send people to your post and simultaneously embed
the affiliate link to the product, to double your chances of getting the commission when the
individual purchases.

Time to Furl

Finally, Furling your blog posts with the same keywords again will help add your sites to the
last section of Technorati's tag search results page.

This section of links is at the very bottom of the Technorati page, below a block of sponsors,
so it's not likely to bring a lot of visitors, but it's still worth the three seconds of time it takes to
click the Furl button on your browser's toolbar and add your tags.

You can also get traffic directly from Furl (and other social bookmarking sites), but that's a
topic for a different report.

Let's just say that for even more results, sign up for as many other social bookmarking sites as
you wish and bookmark your pages, your blog posts, and your bookmark lists from other
bookmarking sites, ad nauseum.

Now You're The King of Technorati

If you've followed the instructions in this report, you should now have your site or info listed
on four places on the Technorati tag page for your search terms:

.
The main results list
.
The Flickr photo strip at the top of the page
.
The Who's Blogging About sidebar
.
The Furl links section at the bottom of the page
While this should not be your only method of traffic generation for affiliate sales, you will
glean some very targeted and motivated buyers … most of whom were prepared for the sale in
advance by your competitors.

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