There are some who claim that social media is bringing about the demise of email. “Email,” ‘they’ say, “will soon become as obsolete as the Pony Express and the telegraph.” Can it be true?

Does this mean that all of your email marketing expertise will become obsolete?

There is one answer to both of these questions: a resounding no. Email isn’t dead .., in fact, it’s not even sick.

When we look at Generation Y (those born between the late 70’s and the 90’s) we have a demographic group that is knowledgeable about communications, media, and digital technologies. Are they abandoning email?

The Participatory Marketing Network reports than in a survey conducted by Pace University that while Generation Y spends a lot of time on social networks, they actually find email more essential.

When this study asked them what they would least like to give up for one week, “only nine percent said social networks! In fact, the media Gen Y apparently can’t live without was … (electronic) drum roll please … old-fashioned email and texting.”

However, that doesn’t mean you should continue with your email work and ignore the opportunities you might find through social media.

In an interesting article posted on the eMarketer website, the writer says, “Combining social media and e-mail marketing is a growing trend. More than four in 10 business executives said integrating the two tactics was one of their most important e-mail marketing initiatives for 2010.”

So if you need to make a choice between continuing your email campaigns and advertising through social media, we’ve got some advice. Follow this trend and do both.

Be sure to make use of the social media tools such as Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube AND fine tune your strategy so that you’re using social media to send people toward your sign up pages for your email lists.

Gen Y Would Abandon Social Networks Before Email or Texting

Integrating E-Mail and Social Media

As you’ve surely heard, Google has announced that its users are going to start seeing brand-new tweets, blog items, news articles and social networking updates in results for “certain topical searches.”

The operative words here are “for certain topical searches.” Real time results (feed boxes) do not appear for all topics.
For example: if you type “Tiger Woods” or “Global Warming” into the search box, a “real time feed box” is displayed in your results. But if you type “dog training” or “save relationship” into the search box, you don’t get a “real time feed box” in your results.
The real time search feature will manifest as a feed box in the middle of the search results page displayed in response to a user’s search. In this box new search topic related Twitter Tweets, FaceBook posts, website updates, RSS feeds, blog posts, forum posts, posts to discussion groups, etc appear in real time as the box scrolls up.
So, does this mean that Google’s new real time search feature will allow affiliate marketers to reach potential customers in real time?
So far, the answer is a resounding “maybe.”
On the other side of the search engine pond, Bing continues to explore how to rank the relevancy of social media posts such as Twitter tweets.
Inventor Spot reports that Bing is striving to understand how to get that right. A spokesperson for Bing said, “Instead of relying only on the number of followers, there are many variables that go into understanding how ‘credible’ a particular Twitter poster is, such as how often his/her tweets are being retweeted, and how many of his/her shared links are shared by others and post velocity.”
The relevancy standards that Bing is applying to Twitter, will also be applied to FaceBook posts, blog posts, etc.
As an affiliate, this means that you continue to be aggressive about social media. Keep going with your social network advertising efforts (Twitter, FaceBook, etc.), continue posting to your blog, continue posting to forums and continue your RSS feeds, etc.
Will they show up in the Google real time feedbox or in Bing’s results? Maybe they will, maybe they won’t.
Regardless, they’ll be no LESS effective either way.

Google Adds Live Updates to Results

Google’s Live Updates Will Be More Relevant Than Twitter?

Use Silo Structure and Latent Semantic Indexing to SEO Your Site

Complex Terms, Simple Idea

You want to create a site that will rank highly in search engines. You can start down the road to getting good rankings before putting a single thing on your site.

Build your site using silo structure. Silo structure is related to latent semantic indexing (LSI). Silo structure and LSI may sound complicated, but I use them mainly to give you a deeper understand of the following simple principle: Organize your site well with valuable content and the search engines will rank you highly.

That’s what the search engines have been saying all along.

On-Page Search Engine Optimization

Google recently announced that it plans to personalize everyone’s search results effective immediately. (Wondering how personalized search works? Check out Search Engine Land for a great overview.)
Essentially, this means that search results will be based on each individual user’s use history, rather than the relevance of websites to the search query.

Two recent articles about Behavioral Tracking, the monitoring of web surfing and TV watching habits in order to deliver more relevant ads to consumers through targeting, show that affiliate marketers in the U.S. might be able to capitalize on the ability to know more about consumers’ interests.
Marketers (especially affiliate marketers) are generally behind the idea of behavioral tracking. They know that targeting is the best way to achieve results in the marketing game.