About a year and a half ago I went to Jeremy Schoemaker’s house for a few days (aka Shoemoney, aka Shoe) because I heard rumors that the Shoemoney team was making tons of money from the affiliate marketing/arbitrage space. I wanted to learn first hand on how I could do the same.
[Ann Smarty](http://www.searchenginejournal.com/author/ann-smarty/) from [Search Engine Journal](http://www.searchenginejournal.com), recently wrote a great article reviewing all of the [SEO tools](http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-tools/7299/) out there. If you are an SEO or want to be one, I highly recommend checking it out.
High search engine rankings is something that many of us dream about and very few of us achieve. To obtain these rankings, in many cases you have to manipulate search results, but what if you could rank high naturally?
Sometimes a company can be marketed virally on social media platforms without actually hiring a social media marketer or putting together a social media campaign. Established brands which have a loyal grassroots following, either large or small, sometimes enjoy the benefit of that following establishing an online presence, whether in Facebook groups or Youtube Video channels.
I was just reading [Weird Asia News](http://www.weirdasianews.com) and noticed that they are having a [design contest](http://www.weirdasianews.com/2008/05/21/weird-asia-news-design-contest/). If you are a designer and are looking to win a PS3 I highly recommend checking it out. The contest seems like a fun thing to do and it would be interesting to see what type of designs people come up with do to the theme of the website.
[AffilatePrograms.com](http://www.affiliateprograms.com) just launched their new website. If you visited the site in the past, it pretty much looked like a directory with a forum. But now with their new design they have made a lot of improvements.
[Aaron Wall](http://www.seobook.com) wrote an interesting article the other day about the [value of a Google ranking](http://training.seobook.com/google-ranking-value). As we already know being number 1 on Google can drastically affect your business, but the question is, what is it worth? According to the data that AOL released a while back the number 10 listing gets 14x less clicks than the number 1 listing. And to go one step further, 89% of the clicks that users make when searching, happen to be on page 1.
I am not sure how many of you are into forums, but [Webmaster-Talk.com](http://www.webmaster-talk.com/) and Earners Forum have just merged to create a better community. Now users have access to an enhanced marketplace, informative articles, blogs, interviews, and valuable tools.
There has been a lot of new stuff been going around the SEO industry lately, so I thought I would do a quick blog post talking about the two things that were interesting for me:
Just out of curiosity, how many of you have attended a marketing conference in the past? Or to take it one step further has anyone attended a conference that purely revolves around social media?
