Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer, Google Search Quality Team, writing on the official Google blog, said, “We’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.”

Site speed has always had an impact on site popularity, of course. Internet users like – no, LOVE speed. Sites that load quickly and respond quickly simply do better on the Internet in general. But now Google has made site speed a part of the algorithm that determines the order in which sites are listed in search results.

The question that immediately comes to mind is:
How can I find out how “fast” my site responds to web requests?

Actually there are several free tools you can use to evaluate the speed of your site:

You’re an affiliate marketer. You live by words, and lots of them. You write articles, sales letters, blog posts, etc. Brevity isn’t your long suit!

Give you a 500-word minimum, and you’re all smiles. Give you a 140-character maximum, and you sure aren’t smiling. 140 characters? You’ve got to be kidding! What can one possibly say that would be of any value using only 140 characters?

Actually, that microscopic 140-character piece of Internet real estate can be more valuable than the acres of 400-500-word articles, blog posts, etc. You just have to learn how to take full advantage of each and every character.

3 Tips You Can Use!

Affiliate marketers sometimes lose sight of the fact that one of the biggest advantages of affiliate marketing is the close relationship we develop with our customers. Unlike nameless, faceless multinational mega corporations, we get to know our customers up close and personal.

As an affiliate marketer you are selling your products to a very specific group of people. These people share an interest or a concern that brings them to your particular niche market. You know who they are. It’s a relationship that can give you a marketing advantage.

Everybody has got one about almost everything; an opinion! You do, I do, we all do! And it’s only human nature for all of us to want others to ask for, listen to and place value on our opinions. Your customers have opinions about your product, your website, your pricing, how your products stacks up against your competitor’s product, etc.

And if you want to know what your customer’s opinions are, all you have to do is ask. People LOVE surveys. People RESPOND to surveys.

What You Can Learn from Customer Surveys

The information you can glean from customer surveys falls into two categories:

Tweet This!

It’s been a long time coming, but Twitter announced their advertising plan late afternoon on Monday, April 12th.

It’s a two-part roll out, starting with Promoted Tweets appearing during keyword searches, and then introducing Promoted Tweets into users tweet streams.

The ads will be matched by relevance, so if you tweet about coffee, a Starbucks ad will appear in the stream.

The coffee magnet is one of the early advertisers, along with Best Buy, Bravo and Virgin America.

Sometimes as an affiliate marketer, you can get so immersed in SEO (search engine optimization) that you completely forget about optimizing your website for your customers. That’s a problem.

Remember, search engines don’t buy products. It’s the human beings who visit your site that buy products. It’s true that you need SEO to get the search engines to provide potential customers with the option to click on your link and come to your site. However, once the visitor gets to your site, your job has just begun.

You can SEO to the max, but if a visitor gets to your website and doesn’t have a clue what you want him to do next, he’s out of there in a flash!

The number one rule of website design for an affiliate marketer is:

Customer Website Optimization

You can never assume that your website visitors will SEARCH for anything on your website. Build your website based on these two basic principles!