Kasim Aslam is the CEO of Solutions 8. He is a widely recognized thought leader in the search marketing arena, due to his exceptional track record of delivering exceptional PPC results and driving business growth through innovative marketing strategies. Sol8 manages $70M a year in PPC ad spending for roughly 200 clients of all sizes, from publicly traded brands to startups.

Throughout his career, Kasim has demonstrated a unique ability to understand the ever-evolving search marketing landscape and leverage his insights into the Google ecosystem to drive high-impact paid media marketing initiatives that achieve high multiple returns on ad spend. He is also the host of the Perpetual Traffic Podcast.

We met at the Affiliate Meet Market in Berlin last year, where he delivered the opening keynote address.

Google Advertising Trends Covered

Which types of products and services are easiest to sell through PPC advertising

Which product and service categories are most profitable online right now

How much it costs to hire a top Google ad agency to run your PPC campaigns

How he decides what companies to accept in his incubator program

How to create PPC ads that convert and drive qualified traffic

The role of AI in PPC advertising and the switch to Performance Max campaigns

And much, much more

Contact me if you need help driving organic traffic with SEO. Subscribe to the Earned Media Podcast via email, on Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

In this Affiliate Marketing Roadmap for Brands episode of the Earned Media Podcast (subscribe), Anna Gita, CEO of MaxWeb, which is one of the fastest-growing affiliate networks, explains what affiliate programs are and how they work.

I heard Anna’s keynote at The Berlin Meet Market. She spoke about the future of the affiliate marketing industry, I was taken by her message that I immediately invited her to be a guest on the show. Content marketers who listened to my recent podcast with former Google Search Quality engineer Fili Wiese, I met him there too.

You can also listen to this podcast via Apple Podcasts or Spotify. The rest of this post is not so much an overview of my conversation with Anna, although it is somewhat informed by it. What follows are answers to frequently asked questions about affiliate marketing.

What’s the difference between Affiliate Marketing and Referral Marketing?

Anna Gita, CEO Max Web, delivering her keynote at the Affiliate Meet Market in Berlin.

While affiliate marketing and referral marketing are both performance-based marketing channels, affiliate marketers earn commissions for promoting products through tracking links, while referral marketers do not. Referral marketing is the acquisition of links from editorial content and influencers on social media.

Affiliate marketers earn money in two ways. First, they earn commissions for sending traffic to an advertiser’s landing or offer page, as long as the Earnings Per Click (EPC) exceeds the Cost Per Click (CPC). Second, they earn a Payout or commission if they traffic they send converts into a sale. Affiliate commissions are typically between 5-30%.

Referral marketing, on the other hand, is a type of word-of-mouth marketing that relies on digital PR, branded content, or individuals recommending a product or service to their friends and family. Much as Google Analytics defines referral traffic as the segment of traffic that arrives on a website through another source, such as a link on another domain.

Referral links can be acquired through press release distribution, media releases, product sampling, and other marketing tactics.

The main difference between affiliate and referral marketing is that affiliate marketing is focused on promoting products and services to earn commissions, while referral marketing is the collection of inbound links through unpaid activities.

How do I hire an affiliate marketer?

There are four main ways advertisers tend to source and hire affiliate marketers:

Join an affiliate network like MaxWeb: Affiliate networks are online marketplaces that connect merchants with affiliates. You can sign up as an advertiser and search for affiliate marketers interested in promoting your products.

Use a recruitment agency: Some agencies specialize in recruiting affiliates for advertisers, almost like hybrid employment/talent agencies. You can work with one of these agencies to find affiliates who fit your business well.

Attend industry events: Industry events, such as conferences and trade shows like Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas, Jan. 23-25, 2023, are great places to meet affiliates and build relationships with them. It is also a good idea to approach keynote speakers and podcasters who focus on affiliate marketing because they may be able to help or make suggestions.

Connect directly with affiliate marketers: If you know of specific affiliate marketers you think might be a good fit for your brand, create your affiliate program and contact them directly. But you need a way to generate tracking links to measure traffic and co...

If you think digital marketing for wineries is all about social media marketing, think again. While winery marketing for ecommerce certainly involves Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest, it's content marketing, search engine optimization, and backlinks that attract new customers and drives online conversions.

Contrary to popular belief, PPC and influencer marketing are more effective than social media too.

Let's face it, someone searching for wine is much more likely to be a buyer than someone perusing their social media newsfeed. When it comes to digital marketing for wineries, social media marketing is anything but failproof.

In this episode of the Earned Media Podcast, learn how a small, family-owned winery built a website that attracts more web traffic and drives more direct-to-consumer sales than even some major wineries, without spending a nickel on advertising.

If you'd like to find out how my content marketing agency can help you grow revenue through SEO, click here.

Digital Marketing Fine Wine DTC

This is an audio case study with my clients Ross and Jennifer Halleck, the owners of Halleck Vineyard, who have been using my Digital Pivot Framework to transition the majority of their wine sales from the more traditional retail shopping to direct to consumer ecommerce.

Halleck Vineyard is an award-winning boutique luxury winery characterized by higher-priced, and higher-quality wines made in smaller batches for the upscale market. With the exception of their white wines and Rose, bottles start at $50 each.

By contrast, mass market wines are lower in price and produced in larger quantities for a larger market. Mass market wines can be found in supermarkets. Luxury wines are rare. These varietals are made from specially cultivated grapes and may be aged for longer periods of time.

Luxury wines also come from more specific regions. Mass market wines might be labeled simply California, while used in luxury wines can be traced back to a single vineyard in the Russian River Valley or Sonoma Coast. The place wine comes from is used to generate demand and highlight scarcity.

There are hundreds of thousands of wine brands, of which fine wine is just a small fraction, competing for attention online. Using the Digital Pivot methodology I lay out in my new book, the Halleck Vineyard website achieved massive growth, from less than 500 to more than 20,000 visitors per month.

In 2022, Sonoma wine tasting room visits were up 331% over all of 2021. The Digital Pivot methodology is a sequential approach to digital marketing that prioritizes organic over paid media, social media, and earned media.

Sebastopol Wine Tasting room sales growth at Halleck Vineyard.

Digital Marketing for Wineries in Sonoma

Unlike Napa Valley, Sonoma County is home to more small wineries. The Halleck's original thought was that email marketing would be the key to increasing sales. But as email slips in its ability to drive transaction for luxury brands, I was able to demonstrate how owned media marketing is far better suited to fine wine marketing. In the wine industry, selling a brand is equivalent of telling the story behind it.

Fine wine marketing requires inbound demand generation. Outbound digital channels, like email marketing, work best when the marketers present offers that appear to deliver a greater value than the cost. In the case of fine wine, or any luxury product for that matter, overly generous offers have the potential to cheapen a brand.

To find out how Sonoma County Winery Halleck Vineyard increased their wine...

SEO for news websites is a critical component of reach and frequency. In this podcast, I spoke with ESPN.com director of SEO Louisa Frahm about best practices when it comes to SEO for headlines, how to build an effective program to support SEO for publishers, and what she’s learned about creating resources to support SEO for journalists.

Louisa has a long history leading SEO for news websites. Before she joined ESPN.com, she was director of SEO at the Los Angeles Times, so she has experience in SEO for newspapers as well, so she also has experience in online newsroom best practices.

Search engine optimization for news websites is the art and science of creating online news coverage that can be easily found through Google News and Google organic search. Given that 86% of Americans get their news online, learning to cover the news in way that not only informs readers, but which grows audiences and drives sustainable traffic from search engines has become a crucial skill for journalists.

I started doing SEO for news websites in 2002 when I founded iPressroom, which was the first online newsroom management service. I sold the company in 2011 and remain a shareholder. Today, I am a Los Angeles SEO consultant helping organizations use editorial content to build mindshare, market share, and drive commerce. I also help publishers get their sites indexed by Google News, so contact me if I you need help.

SEO for News Websites

According to Similarweb, ESPN.com is the 83rd highest-traffic website on the internet with nearly 580 million unique visitors a month who average 3.6 pages per visit and spend almost nine and a half minutes per session. 

Over 70% of the traffic on the ESPN.com news website is direct, and 21% of that traffic comes from organic search at 21%. After that is traffic social media at less than 4%, then email at over 3%. 

Interestingly enough, the top athlete names that are getting the most search results in organic traffic at ESPN.com are the tennis player Andy Murray first, followed by the combat fighter Connor McGregor, then combat fighter Patty Gimblett, and tennis player Rafael Nadal, which is curious because soccer, or baseball or basketball or football are bigger sports. Louisa explains why that is in this exclusive on SEO for News Websites.

SEO for Journalists

When Louisa started working with her analysts at ESPN to help reporters execute best Google News optimization practices, their objective was to make sure that every single team and every single sport was equally prioritized within her department’s workflow. 

Her team leads SEO for Journalist training programs, essentially teaching writers the right formula for SEO to support SEO in journalism. Reporters can rely on her department as a resource for the appropriate amount of care and guidance.  Her team is prepared to help journalists sort through the various aspects of each of the 4 types of SEO, which are on-page SEO (on-site SEO), off-page SEO (off-site SEO), technical SEO, and Local SEO

At a major news publisher like ESPN, journalists don’t have to worry about the simple stuff, like providing a publication date, making sure every page is reachable from at least one static text link, or adding structured data to their article pages. That kind of technical SEO Is done for the already. Louisa and I don’t talk much about Technical SEO in this podcast. We focus mostly on news SEO. But if you’re at a smaller publication or have a blog you want to get indexed on Google News, these technical SEO details matter too.

In the United States, ESPN.

Fili Wiese is a former Google Engineer and member of the search quality team. I spoke to him after his keynote at the Affiliate Meet Market in Berlin in October 2022.

Tech SEO Topics Covered:

Search engine optimization ecommerce marketing

How to tell Googlebot what to crawl and what to ignore

How to manage your crawl budget

How to retain backlink authority

How to read Google Search Console error reports

Importance of breadcrumbs and structured data

How to get Google to trust your canonical link recommendations

And much, much more.

Next up is an exclusive interview with ESPN SEO Director Louisa Frahm, so subscribe here. And don't miss the 2023 Affiliate Marketing Roadmap episode I recorded with MaxWeb CEO Anna Gita.

I did not write anything below the subhead in this blog post about content marketing outsourcing. The author is Jason Joseph, who writes for a service you can outsource writing to called Verblio, a service that ecommerce and B2B content marketing agencies outsource to. If you're wondering whether or not Verblio is legit, this podcast and the post below are a live test of their service.

Verblio VP Product Marketing Laura Smous

If you're looking for ways to scale your editorial marketing practice to meet your clients' needs, outsourcing to quality freelance writers is probably an ongoing pain point for you.

I like writing. But there's only one of me. So I can't realistically deliver the editorial packages my clients need without help. I use most of the online writer marketplaces fairly regularly. I've written about WriterAccess and ContentGrow in other posts. But Verblio was a new one I hadn't tried.

So after several months of testing the service, I invited Verblio's VP of Product Marketing Laura Smous, to be a guest on the Earned Media Podcast. I pulled a transcript of our interview and outsourced this blog post through their service with one caveat. Laura connected me with one of their customer success reps to ensure one of their best writers got this job.

Unlike the other online writer marketplaces, you can't select the writer you want to use on Verblio. Instead, you post the job with a brief, and someone writes the article on spec. And you don't have to buy it if you don't like it. So if you want to get a sense of their top level of service, listen to my interview with Laura and come back and read this post by Jason Joseph.

Depending on your sector and objectives, Verblio may or may not be suitable for you. But the entirely unedited post – with uncorrected mistakes – from Verblio started here and was delivered with the headline...

A Complete Guide to Using Verblio for Content Marketing

A content marketing strategy uses content creation to provide the audience with value. Organizations use emails, blogs, and videos to share content with customers and establish credibility. According to the Content Marketing Institute, the content marketing market will have a year-to-year growth rate of 15.73% between 2021 and 2025.

However, creating content is one of the challenges most businesses face. As such, companies rely on third-party companies for content creation. One of the marketplaces that clients can use is Verblio. Here is everything you need to know about Verblio from the VP, Laura Smous.

What is Verblio?

 Verblio is a content creation marketplace that connects clients with experienced freelance writers. Content marketing is a cost-effective way to get leads and grow your business. On Verblio, you can connect to the right type of content and get what you need. The platform helps agencies to create high-performing content. Customers can order product descriptions, website content, and press releases. Even though the content marketing space is competitive, Verblio remains among the leading. But what differentiates Verblio from the other marketplace sites?

Why Choose Verblio?

Wide Variety of Writers

You may think there are numerous options, but choosing the right platform will help your organization's success. Verblio is always looking for ways to improve. The writers play a vital part in the Verblio marketplace. It seeks to create a suitable platform for writers and customers. Even though AI is fast gaining popularity in content creation, it will not replace human writers. Verblio strives to balance AI and human writers to offer customers a better exper...

There's no fooling the search engines (read, Google). They've gotten too good at finding the best content for searchers, not the most tricked-up content marketing. That level of intelligent search challenges companies striving to reach potential customers by providing outstanding content.

How do you create content that Google will deem the best and rank in the top four positions? The obvious answer: As the expert in your field, you create articles to entertain, engage and educate your readers. But what if you're too busy building your company to create your owned media presence.

The second-best option is to find other experts in your field, who are not competitors, to write for you. Freelance writers offer the expertise and skill to create editorial content that catches Google's attention and engages readers to stay on your website.

Challenge of finding freelance writers

The idea of finding people with proven writing ability with expertise in your business sounds appealing. The question looms: How do you find these people? Of course, you always can find people who write, bring them aboard your staff, and teach them the expertise. But that takes time and resources as you add staff with salaries and benefits.

Freelance writers serve as another option as they often specialize by field or region, and you only pay for what they produce. Many also carry the benefit of having established a following among those interested in your business.

You also must convince freelance writers that you are looking for reputable editorial content, not the SEO-generating content marketing that many companies offer. Freelance writers work off their reputations. They won't want to damage that by producing sales content.

How do you find these writers? Do you scour trade publications? Search reputable media sites? Throw an ad out on a job board such as Upwork? All are possibilities, but likely to be hit and miss. And who can afford to miss?

Novel approach of ContentGrow

Recently, I had the good fortune to discover ContentGrow, a startup that connects companies with freelance writers all over the globe. I invited CEO Enricko Lukman to share some insights on a podcast.

ContentGrow features some 2,500 freelance journalists and writers, many based in East Asia and the United States, and has about 100 clients. Enricko and co-founder Leighton Cosseboom founded ContentGrow in 2015 after recognizing the difficulty companies had in connecting with qualified freelancers.

As freelance writers themselves, Enricko and Leighton initially worked within their network of freelance writers to create connections with their clients. As the company began to scale, they found the company's manual operation needed to automate to offer clients the best matches. They also find the need to continually grow their writer database as new clients demand new expertise. As an example, Enricko noted they recently had to search for freelance journalists working in South Africa.

Enricko was able to confirm my suspicion that companies that hired writers without expertise in their field ended up getting regurgitated material that only echoed the top writers in the field, rather than generating new content that adds to the conversation in the field. This type of content does not fool Google, nor does it engage interested customers.

It's no longer enough to publish good content. If you want to rank in slots 1 through 4 in a competitive market, you have to publish outstanding content to execute an effective growth marketing strategy.

Power of owned media marketing

If you're in content marketing services and you've never heard of the Writer Access content marketing marketplace this episode can help you make more money for yourself and your clients.

This is an exclusive interview with Writer Access CEO Byron White, who built an online marketplace that connects content marketers with freelance writers. It has star ratings, recommendations, writer portfolios and an escrow service for holding and releasing funds. Plus, they vet all their writers.

In this episode, we talk about overcoming the two biggest challengers DTC and B2B content marketing agencies face. If you're a content marketing specialist, this conversation will be familiar and useful. If you're looking for a content marketing agency near you, this will make you a smarter buyer of content marketing services.

The first content marketing challenge is always finding good writers to scale an elite-level content marketing operation capable of outranking competitors by publishing large volumes of original, thought leadership grade content.

My second biggest content marketing challenge is securing writers who either have or are willing to take the time to acquire the subject matter expertise to write informed, useful, worthwhile content that advances the existing body of knowledge that is available online, instead of just rehashing what we all already know.

It’s hard enough to get people to a web page. But after they arrive, we’ve got seconds to keep them from leaving. If they're using Chrome and they leave our page in less than 10 seconds, Google knows that the search result they provided failed, because the uses repeats the same query.

So why would Google continue to recommend that page in their search results? The answer is, they wouldn't. It's not enough to rank. You've got to satisfy search intent, or you won't be able to maintain that ranking.

There’s nothing worse than going to a webpage and finding a bunch of useless B2B keyword stuffed content that’s been cribbed together from top ranking pages. So we can’t use articles about Stuff We All Know (S.W.A.K.). We’re looking to bring readers a unique point of view, not more of the same. Bring readers a unique point of view. It’s okay to be funny. But don’t be cliche. Be original, be informed and be gone.

In this podcast, you'll hear how content marketing consultants and agencies are scaling their written deliverables with Writer Access. And I also shared a case study that resulted in 225 percent revenue growth through an innovative ecommerce marketing program I led for a lifestyle brand.

Jake Swearingen, deputy editor at Business Insider has written for Consumer Reports, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, Wired, Slate and LA Weekly. 

In this exclusive interview we talk about Business Insider's meteoric rise to name brand status, media opportunities for coverage and the post-pandemic small business retail rebound.

Discussion Topics:

How New York Magazine determines if a story was successful

How many page views a successful Business Insider story gets

Number of stories Business Insider publishes per day

Smaller stories that Business Insider is interested in

What do PR agencies do when they pitch Business Insider successfully?

Does Business Insider run guest columns and how to get considered

How they decide what articles to make free versus premium

What lessons do you hope small businesses learned from the pandemic?

How should small businesses be using technology to thrive at a time when the landscape is increasingly dominated by big tech brands?

If you're a small business trying to get Business Insider's attention, or a public relations consultant looking for insights on how to pitch Business Insider, this exclusive interview with Jake Swearingen, which is being release on the Earned Media Podcast, is well worth a listen.

New York Times technology correspondent Cade Metz talks about his new book Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World, a nonfiction narrative about the tiny clan of artificial intelligence (AI) visionaries rapidly changing our world.

Cade is a technology correspondent covering artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality, and other emerging tech. Before that, he was a writer at Wired magazine.

He also defines AI, discusses its capabilities, the ethical challenges and dangers it poses, the risk of replacement, and how public relations and earned media is used to help lure research and development funding.

https://youtu.be/8eGZrm7rPk4

In this Earned Media Podcast episode:

02:52 What is surprising about Genius Makers?

03:47 Why Cade Metz wrote Genius Makers now.

04:52 What is artificial intelligence?

09:16 Neural network vs machine learning in AI.

10:12 What is artificial general intelligence (AGI)?

13:06 Why is the artificial general intelligence argument considered a religious argument?

15:25 Moore's law and AGI.

17:47 Is AI going to take knowledge workers’ jobs? 

21:30 Which jobs are safe from AI?

23:39 Public perception of AI: real or overblown?

26:07 Inside Google’s top secret defense contract, Project Maven.

27:45 What you need to know about killer robots.

29:54 How to regulate AI without killing innovation.

32:00 Does top-of-the-funnel data collection need to be regulated?

34:01 Companies positioned to reap the rewards of AI.

34:51 The US vs China AI arms race.

40:10 Can AI solve the fake news problem? 

43:36 Cade Metz reveals the news media outlets and voices that influence him and have earned his respect.

44:43 How machine-learned based social media engagement PR Impacts organizations developing AI.

48:22 Elon Musk and fears about AGI.

50:03 How Cade Metz wrote Genius Makers.

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