To cut to the chase, think about the local small businesses in your area. I’m not talking about franchise businesses like Home Depot, Burger King and 7-11. I’m talking about that corner no-name ‘mom & pop’ store that sells cabinetry, the CPA office, or the town hardware store. The local townie businesses that have been around for at least a little while.

Think about any of the small businesses you’ve worked for the the past — especially the ones being run by baby boomers or older Gen-X’ers and have 25 employees or less. What’s one thing they all have in common?

For the purposes of this article — and in my observations — the answer to this question is that they have all fostered healthy businesses without any usage of the internet whatsoever, and they’re still doing so…successfully.

Crazy. Especially to an internet marketer, who works tirelessly and practically in vain with the daily grind of manufacturing backlinks, checking SERPs, cursing at what they see on page one, toiling over how they’ll get their next quality backlink, staying up until 2 AM writing their next article, or obsessing over getting a couple more Facebook fans by the next day.

As for the small businesses I’ve worked for, not only were they not running internet campaigns, but they were astounded to hear about “SEO” and never knew it even existed. But, they were making millions of dollars, and I wasn’t.

Succeeding Without A Website

For all of the examples I’ve been researching, most of these business have had no internet presence whatsoever. As for the small businesses I’ve worked for, there are two prime examples showing that you don’t need the internet at all to be successful.

The first example was a sports memorabilia company I once worked for, which was raking in about $15 million per year. I was hired into the company when it had a website that was just a “touch point” being used for the sake of “having a website.” There was no online strategy, no shopping cart, no AdWords, no email campaign nor an email list.

The second example: an ethics training company that had an “online brochure” for a website, devoid of branding or product positioning and was left un-updated since the late 90s. The site itself ranked for nothing — and it was halfway down on Google page 1 for the company’s own name. This company, during the final days I was there, was eventually sold for $25 million. It had only been in business since 1992, making it be only 15 years old when it was sold.

There were no “magic bullets” for either company — they had no high level contacts, they just did business the old fashioned way.

Time for that same question again: what do these two businesses have in common? Both of them did 100% of their business offline. They amassed clientele based on the same principles that your local docotor or dentist uses: local business directory listings, local print ads and most importantly, word-of-mouth referrals and repeat business.

I was starting to see some enlightenment here, and it upset me to think about how many years of my life had gone by where I had completely ignored the possibility of being a marketer who could very well strike it big by ignoring the internet. The worst part of it all is that it’s a simple, stupid, age-old method that most of us ignore because we are clouded by the fury of frantically writing articles and manufacturing backlinks all day.

Trying Out the “Offline” Approach

Since New Years 2012, I’ve been thinking about this concept and have been putting it to the test. I started an internet marketing and web design business in January, and have been promoting it entirely through old fashioned networking and local offline tactics. Here are my findings:

• I won’t kid anyone, I do really well with affiliate marketing and am making a full time living on it. However, I’m sick and tired of ‘running in the hamster wheel’ and I want out. What was once a fun profession has become a nightmarish struggle to maintain a consistent income every month on continually unpredictable search engines that have wild mood swings and determine your fate from one day to the next. Now — as a freelancer and consultant, the amount of money I can make with one 18 hour job pulls in half of what I make for the entire month of being a “headless chicken” internet marketer: writing meaningless, endless articles, reviews, getting backlinks and cursing SERPs for 15 hours a day. So, that’s working smarter, not harder — for less hours, less torment, and far more pay.
• Affiliate marketing, for the most part, is antisocial. You don’t speak with anyone, you don’t have any human contact. It’s almost like a sociological curse. When you’re doing business that forces you to interact with people, it yields a whole new level of interaction that no blog post, product review or Hubpages hub could ever provide. The conversion rate, in these cases, is drastically higher! Your personality, credibility and perceived knowledge can sell your service better than words on a screen ever will.
• The best way to start off is by leveraging the power of the people who already care about you: your friends and family. Surely, one of the 150+ people you’re friends with on Facebook has a contact that’s worth their weight in gold to you. Build up a nice Facebook Page for your offline business, create a great website for it, then carefully pitch it to your entire Facebook friend list and assure them that you won’t bombard them with your self-promotion again. Ask them to “fan” the page — any true friend or family member would gladly do it. There — now you’ve got several dozen fans in a very short amount of time…a healthy start. You may be surprised to see some private messages come in throughout the day. Rinse and repeat this on LinkedIn.
• Don’t be afraid to start off doing something free for someone — even if it’s your successful cousin, or giving a huge discount to your friend. It’s a stepping stone, and will result in you being promoted to some person you’ve never met, with proof of your talent. Pro-Bono jobs are known to bring in business through word-of-mouth, and that is what you need.
• Your clients are your “SERPs.” They “display” your service to their contacts…but in a way that’s comparable to a SERP that has only one listing on it: yours! If your friend personally recommends you to their friend, that friendly, personal advice is perhaps the most powerful suggestion with the highest success rate imaginable.
• Impress the hell out of your clients, go the extra mile and exceed their expectations. Your goal here should be their repeat business, which equates to ‘residual income.’ No backlink manufacturing or other psychotic, repetitive behavior needed :)
• It’s relatively easy to price your products or services against your local competitors. They’re far more “transparent” than your online competitors, who typically force potential customers to call or email them to find out their prices.
• Here’s one more good tidbit of info about local marketing: it’s very easy to do for free. Unlike throwing piles of cash at AdWords and competing with the “1%,” you can advertise for free in most local supermarkets, post offices, community centers or other places where eyeballs go. So, if you sell products that contractors and landscapers use, and you’ve noticed that your local pizza parlor is a place where those guys go every day for lunch, see if you can get a stack of your niche-targeted fliers into that building somehow. Or on their window. The difference between advertising online and advertising offline is that offline advertising costs way less (or is free) and has a chance of being seen somehow during any time of the day. Even if it didn’t convert to a sale and it served a sole purpose of getting one more human being to remember your business name, branding elements and service, it succeeded.

Affiliate Marketing: Time Best Spent Elsewhere

How much time do you spend in your affiliate marketing efforts? I’m going to assume the following things about you:

• You’re doing affiliate marketing by yourself.
• You manage multiple niches, multiple websites, own multiple domains, and multiple 3rd party accounts on sites like Hubpages, Squidoo, Wizzley and Blogspot.
• You also run several affiliate programs about products or product categories that you don’t care about, but are profitable, anyway.
• You run an affiliate program or two about a product you truly know *nothing* about,  but it pays off well…so, you do it anyway.
• You read more information and articles now than you ever did in school, because you have so much writing to do.
• You manage multiple email accounts, Twitter accounts and Facebook pages, and toil over how much of your day should be spent going through each one.
• You have a “fail-safe” plan in progress, so that when something gets axed by an algorithm like Google Panda, something else keeps you afloat.
• You waste a LOT of time per week scouring the internet, looking for your next backlink source.
• You waste a LOT of time obsessing over your competitors and how they are ranking in SERPs. Additionally, you waste even more time doing background checks on their websites, noting their every move and where they are getting their links from.
• You’ve come close to giving up hope after discrimination from Google Panda and other search engine changes that took everything you knew about SEO and promotion, and turned it on its head.
• You have considered getting into gray-hat at some point.

The problem with all of this is that it’s like babysitting 25 infants. It’s physically draining, and physically impossible to do — SUCCESSFULLY — for one human being. It’s not a valid business model, it’s an insane, maniacal cycle that must be performed every month to make sure that a somewhat predictable bottom line will come in.

Why? Because that’s what affiliate marketing has become, more so than ever, since last year.

Offline Isn’t For Everyone

I don’t want to be misleading: the whole “offline” method probably doesn’t apply to many people. It mostly applies to those who have a skill or talent that can be freelanced, such as a graphic designer, writer, landscaper, handyman, or even someone who wants to build an affiliate site for some other affiliate marketer. Or, someone who creates and sells hand-made products. Maybe even someone who buys products wholesale and sells them out of their basement.

The point of the matter is that an internet-free business model might very well be salvation from a life of mindless behavior that has become necessary to stay afloat in fields like affiliate marketing, which is slowly being discriminated against by search engine algorithms. It’s a life away from search engines themselves, which are becoming an “ad casino” for rich businesses who will always afford to outbid you.

Sometimes, the oldest and most basic methods are the most successful. Are you losing out by not leveraging the internet? Of course. However, what kind of income will a strong offline strategy with real clients (gasp!) and their word-of-mouth recommendations of your service bring in? How much money will your strategically priced offline product or service bring in for you, as opposed to the handful of peanuts that affiliate publishers like Amazon and eBay have been paying you for your hard work? You might be surprised.

Of all the millionaires and billionaires you’ve seen on TV (i.e., shows like “Shark Tank”) or read about, how many of them are affiliate marketers? Practically none. Actually, flat out “none.” Even the guys who were famous for being in the field like Shoemoney and John Chow don’t do it full time. They run service-based businesses, and they also attend a lot of networking events and muscle their way into endorsements.

Starting out “offline” is hard — but, is it really more difficult than creating a brand new website in the current day, and waiting for it to get ranked? There’s nothing to lose in trying. As for affiliate marketing, it’s a great side income. It’s a bad primary business. Any business whose fate is dictated by any external source is.

By mixing these two different business methods, you’re increasing your chances for success while maintaining a good backup plan, and that’s always a good idea.

For starters, do a search for the keyword term you wanted to rank for (or did, before Panda torched you). Here’s a list of what I’m seeing, as well as which glitches in the SEO matrix seemed to have happened:

1) The Keyword Saturator

We’ve all been warned for years that being hapless with your keyword density and keyword saturation will result in a Google Slap™, but some reverse-evolution, thanks to Google Panda, seemed to have made that be the contrary.

Go ahead — see how many page 1 results for 2-3 keyword terms show up with META titles stuffed tigher than a can of sardines with keywords that are repeated over and over. Then, notice how the SEO Guru™ followed up with a META description that continues where the title leaves off.

Bonus points for a crappy domain name, like buy-used-cars-sale.org (more dashes = more fun!)

(Above) I seriously did not Photoshop this!

2) The Bi-Curious Affilablog

Is is a blog? Is it an eBay affiliate store? I don’t know! Neither does Google. Just to be sure, though, the site got top of page 1.

What I call the “affilablog” is usually a self-hosted WordPress site that’s a strange mix of an MFA (that’s “made for AdSense” in case you’re not an old school internet marketer) site that has heavy text-filled pages of spun content with a mix of big box AdSense ads and an eBay Partner Network feed under each article.

It doesn’t know what it is. It’s kind of like a blog full of worthless synonym-saturated drivel with eBay feeds thrown into each page. One thing’s for sure, it has no value whatsoever for visitors, since the text is unintelligible nonsense. These kinds of sites are nearly dominating the bottom half of page 1 and all of page 2 in a few of my niches.

Evidently, it’s still pretty easy to snowball Google with some old fashioned article spinning, regardless of the fact that these sites probably have a bounce rate over 75% and no return visits.

Doesn’t matter to Google though — it was still worthy of page 1.

3) The Bad Backlinks Boost

Only backlinks from high authority sites that are relevant to your sites’ business category will get you the good rankings, right? WRONG.

Do a background check on your most disheveled competitors and you’ll see that many (in some cases, most) of their links come from garbage link directories — kind of like the ones you see advertised on the solicitation area of DigitalPoint Forums.

As for the rest, I’m seeing lots of backlinks from what I’ll forever call the “den of spam,” eZineAricles. You know, where people write articles called “How to buy used cars for sale on eBay” and write about genius tips like making sure that you have enough money, and looking at all the pictures before you buy a car online; concluding that the article was written by “car expert” {insert name here}, directing you to visit “buy-used-cars-sale.org” for more information.

4) The Text Sandwich

Now wait a second…I thought a new tweak to the Google algorithm spanked sites with too many ads above the fold? Then, why is there an article on page 1 for a major 3-word term with a skyscraper ad, a horizontal link ad, and an in-content, top-of-page AdSense box that’s SO big that the text to the right of it is as thin as a pen cap? (extra credit for yet another AdSense or other content network ad under the article, or simply, an eBay product feed).

I’m still seeing LOTS of MFA sites, and they didn’t seem to be taking a hit whatsoever. At least if they were filled with helpful content, I wouldn’t mind. But, when I see that they all have no “About Us” or “Contact Us” page and about 6-7 content pages total named similarly to “Buying a used car,” “Used car buying tips,” “How to buy a used car on eBay,” “eBay used Cars,” etc., I tend to get angry angrier at Google.

(Above) This used tires for sale site ranks at the top of used tires for sale Google, for "used tires for sale." PS: used tires for sale!!!

5) “How To Drink A Glass Of Water” Sites

Sites like eHow, About.com and other “How to drink a glass of water” sites have resorted to writing ridiculous, unhelpful drivel-filled articles with low word counts that get favored like a US governor’s son in a first-round job interview.

Google is married to eHow for reasons unknown, and the site is almost at Wikipedia status — that is, it has the “top of page 1″ cement boots for an unreasonable number of short and long-tail terms. eHow is basically a nicer looking version of another infamous SEO cheat, Mahalo.

(Above) Unfortunately, this page does exist. But, I refuse to give it a backlink, so you'll have to search for it yourself.

6) Big Brands With Garbage Websites

All that matters to Google is that 1) you’ve achieved Google’s algorithmic secret sauce by attaining “brand status,” 2) you spend a daily fortune on Google AdWords, and 3) you have an inexhaustible Google AdWords budget that has been proven over time by increasing your budget amount as the years go by in order to keep up with the Jones’.

Before we continue, I want to state that I’m not referring to manufacturer sites. If anything, I will always agree that manufacturers of a product should always get top priority. Like, Sony.com for a search for “Sony Bravia HDTV.” Or, Ford.com for “Ford trucks.”

What I’m referring to here are dealer & broker sites, price comparison sites, classified ad sites and other similar services that dropship products or charge for simple services. Sites that rank for terms like “{productname} for sale,” “buy {productname},” “used {productname},” “used {productname} for sale” “{productname} review” and other such terms.

Go ahead, search for a term you target for one of your micro niches that you remember being “big brand free” before Panda. I’d bet a dollar that positions 1 & 2 are big brands that are now permanently cemented there. It doesn’t matter if your niche is in a popular electronics category, or a lesser-known industrial machinery category — there’s undoubtedly a big, rich company now rejoicing over the good fortune that has been bestowed upon them by Google Panda. The kind that was given to them for doing nothing in the realm of content, SEO, backlinks, social buzz or anything else that we all know (or knew?) was important in the field of search marketing.

Don’t stop at SERPs, though. Check out these websites. Look at their design. Pay CLOSE attention to their content. I’ll bet you that at least 6 out of 10 example sites you research have never been significantly updated in years, or have no content whatsoever (or no content that’s even readable by search engines). I’ll also bet they have no presence on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or Google+.

Check their backlinks. Depending on how “nichy” your niche is, we could be talking about some kind of low-volume search product or super micro niche that used to be easy to hit page 1, position 1 for. I think you’ll find that many of these sites have little to no backlinks, and the ones they do have come from their own “sister sites” on the same server and IP address. At least, those are the kinds of backlinks my competitors have. Well, except for the one gray-hatter I discovered and reported last month.

I find that most of these companies who now dominate top of page 1 (where you used to be) are also spending mega bucks on AdWords. Coincidence? Hmm, get your tin foil hats on.

7) WTF

WTF encompasses every other stupid, ridiculous embarrassing thing that I see in a SERP that shouldn’t be there.

Here’s an example regarding a new web design service I launched a couple months ago, and am fighting to rank for. What pisses me off to no extent is that this particular guy’s site has been up for TWO MONTHS (and who knows how long before I’ve even noticed it) on the top of page 2 of Google for the term, looking like this:

…and still displaying a big insignia and hacker’s warning as a home page. Thanks for the helpful search results, Google. PS — screw you, and thanks for not even ranking me on page 50 for the term this guy is enjoying. You know, after all of the hard work I’ve done with backlinking and social networking for the past two months.

Thanks, Panda!

All we need now is a big “Mission Accomplished” banner with George Bush standing in front of it: Panda, in its own universe, has rooted out those evil content thieves, thin affiliates and SEO scammers.

Lately, I’ve gotten tired of taking it upon myself to report spam, cheaters, gray-hatters, keyword stuffers, link farms, and doorway pages to Google. After awhile, I’m going to start demanding a paycheck and 401k plan from them.

What does it mean for you in your fight to re-gain the rankings you deserve? I don’t really have an answer for that, but I do have a decent video you might want to watch. “If you can’t beat em, join em?” Perhaps:

One of the last DoFollow sites in existence — WordPress.com — certainly should be avoided for those looking to create an off-site blog for their brand or company. Why? Well, chew on this one for a second:

Note the stern warning: “Please use the Export feature to move your content to a more appropriate hosting service,” which is business talk for “Don’t let the screen door hit you in the ass on your way out — kthx.”

I logged in to see this notice on my WordPress.com blog, and was utterly shocked as it didn’t have a single affiliate link nor an ad posted anywhere. The blog itself had a few 400-word drivel-free articles that were personally written and had a lot of thought put into them, but each one did end off with a hyperlink to one of my sites (much like an eZineArticles article would).

The view of my blog having been seen as “part of a search engine marketing campaign” is subjective and obviously was deemed to be one by WordPress.com’s administrators. So, I suppose, any link pointing externally from a WordPress.com blog page would also be seen as “promotion;” and if that’s the signal, this is one risky basket to be putting your eggs in.

WordPress’ Stand On Self-Promotion

Check out WordPress.com’s TOS, and you’ll find this:

…the Content is not spam, is not machine- or randomly-generated, and does not contain unethical or unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites, or to further unlawful acts (such as phishing) or mislead recipients as to the source of the material (such as spoofing);

…and there you have it. This was news to me — the blog I had over on that site existed for about five years, but I didn’t really use it that much. I obviously did have a few well-aged DoFollow links from it, which are now gone since my entire account was terminated and all I get when I log in is that nice big red box warning. I did have the ability to export all of my work to raw HTML, which I wound up turning into articles on other sites I run.

WordPress.com — Not A Valid Backlink Strategy

The point of the matter: although WordPress.com has the huge allure of being one of the last DoFollow 3rd party blogging sites around, it can’t be used for promotion whatsoever. I spent some time looking through other WordPress.com blogs to find examples of self promotion that I could stick the admin’s faces, but they were pretty hard to find (although, some did exist).

Regardless, this goes back to the old adage — never put your confidence in something you don’t have ownership over. WordPress.com, to me, was just another backlink, but I’m surprised to see how many people pour their heart and soul into a WordPress.com blog.

There’s no doubt about it, WordPress.com is for those who don’t want to pay for a monthly hosting account, but there’s a huge price to pay — they have the full right to pull the plug on you. As my example shows, they’ll do it without notice. In a time of age where maintaining SERPs are like protecting your newborn children, taking such risks is purely ignorant.

Better alternatives continue to be Blogger and Tumblr for 3rd party blogs; Blogger being NoFollow and Tumblr being DoFollow, but neither of which are content nazis like WordPress.com is. I’m continuing to use these two platforms for linkbuilding, as well as Hubpages and Squidoo for quality backlinks that come from articles I’ve written myself.

Pinterest has actually been around for quite awhile, but most started hearing about it after New Years 2012. The site offers user accounts that are forced to be connected to either a Facebook or Twitter account (that is, if you’ve gotten an invite from Pinterest or from one of its members), and has an attractive “Pinterest.com/keyword” account name structure.

We all know what comes next: a riotous, feverish rush to snatch up all of the good “Pinterest domains.” You know, /jewelry, /gold, /clothes, etc.

For squatters, it’s rather easy to register multiple accounts by simply creating multiple Twitter accounts on multiple email accounts, and sending yourself invites, since Pinterest users get unlimited ones to send out. According to Pinterest’s terms of service, there seems to be nothing stating that you can’t own more than one account.

I’m personally annoyed by cybersquatters, since most of them take no action at all with the accounts or domains they register, but there’s definitely a huge value for having multiple “quality name” accounts with social networks. Unlike Facebook, which disallows the registration of premium one-word Facebook Pages, Pinterest has no restrictions.

The possibility of finding a good one-keyword Pinterest account is already becoming difficult — do a type-in of a few high value keyword Pinterest account names and you’ll probably see a lot of dead accounts (squatters) or internet marketers who are already trying out their own viral marketing push.

Have you snagged an interesting Pinterest account name?

1) Ning Goes Premium

Formerly a site where you could create your own social network, Ning basically dominated the “free social network” niche. Ning decided to shut down their “free” service and make the whole thing be “premium” back in August 2011. With tons of growing free alternatives like Facebook Pages, WordPress’s “Buddypress” framework and other free social networking CMSs like Boonex Dolphin, the move was puzzling to say the least; virtually resulting in accounts being abandoned and Ning leaving the limelight.

2) Mister-Wong Goes Premium

I’m not sure what’s more ridiculous, Ning or Mister-Wong charging for usage…but I think I’ll choose this one. If you didn’t know, Mister-Wong was one of those “closet” social bookmarking sites that had a cult following, and it got its start in the mid 2000s when “social bookmarking” had become a household term. Today, the site no longer offers free accounts, but charges a monthly fee. For social bookmarking. Yeah, let me repeat that: you now have to pay a monthly fee to bookmark sites. LOL.

3) Faves.com Switches Gears, Goes “Coupon”

Popular social bookmarking site Faves.com offered a robust social bookmarking experience, similar to Diigo or Delicious. Now, it tore down its site, proclaiming that it will now be some sort of “coupon code search engine” that offers codes (ripe with their own injected affiliate links…oops, just made a prediction) based on the things you “Fave.”

4) Mixx.com Disappears, Re-Appears as Chime.in

Mixx.com was one of my favorite bookmarking sites of all time. It was kind of like a news site where you had a close-knit group of friends/followers who all shared articles, blog posts and other things that interested you. The site then shut down with no rhyme or reason (or explanation), and turned into a “splash page” eventually announcing the company’s acquisition — which usually results in a resounding “uh oh” by any website’s fan base — turning into “Chime.in,” a social network that forces you to integrate with either your Facebook or Twitter account. Kind of like what Pinterest does, except nobody knows or has heard of Chime.in, but is probably pissed that their Mixx.com account and backlinks are gone.

5) Ma.gnolia Dies & Gets Resurrected Over and Over

Another classic social bookmarking site, “Ma.gnolia,” is one that is remembered by old school social bookmarkers. Having one of the cleanest looking interfaces around, it was a top-notch bookmarking site that didn’t implement NoFollow links. It then disappeared, because Ma.gnolia lost almost all of its data in an embarrassing server incident and was unable to recover it (d’oh!) The site then displayed one “coming soon! For real, this time!!!1″ message after another for years, until the well-built brand name known as Ma.gnolia blew away in the minds of internet users like dust in the wind.

6) Sphinn.com Pulls the Plug, Abandons Community

Sphinn.com was synonymously known as the “social article sharing site for marketers.” There literally was nothing else like it, and we saw the work of the web’s best underground minds in internet marketing posting insightful articles to it. You were free to post your own, too, and if you were lucky, they’d get front page status (I had this happen twice in a few years of being a member there). The site was acquired by Marketing Land and immediately annihilated in one foul swoop – an entire community of hardcore writers and overall Sphinn fans were crudely abandoned. Now, it’s a marketing news site that you can’t contribute to. Welcome back to web 1.0. For nostalgic purposes, put on a Soundgarden CD, wear your wayfarers and check out the Sphinn museum.

7) Pinterest Injects Affiliate Links Into Pins

On February 8, online tech news site Mashable broke the hearts of “pinners” everywhere when they released a report about 2012′s biggest breakaway site, Pinterest, is actually injecting their own affiliate code into the links you pin and re-pin.  Thanks to the “Skimlinks” service, Pinterest is earning from your product pins. If you’re pinning with your own affiliate links, it’s over-writing that code with their own. Yikes — talk about a brazen way to rattle the cages of the internet marketing community. Oh well, their site, their rules. Repercussions not included.

8) Bumpzee.com Returns, As A Mashup

Remember Bumpzee? It was a social bookmarking site where you could “Bump Up” an article? Anyway, it’s yet another site that completely abandoned a massive audience by simply shutting the entire site down and displaying nothing but a logo. For years. After long periods of inactivity, the site re-emerged using the Sharist service — a “mashup” creator. You may have remembered mashups as a popular fad that died out in the mid 2000s, which basically created a mish-mosh of RSS feeds and other “borrowed” content from other sites, making one big mega site out of them. The fad was stomped after search engines started slapping them. So, yeah — Bumpzee fans, there’s your baby back.

9) Kirtsy Becomes…WTF?

Kirtsy, another semi-famous DoFollow social bookmarking site that was similar to Delicious, has recently re-emerged as a confusing home page of thumbnail images that point to random pictures and paragraphs that have no overall relation or theme. They’ve removed their user log-in area, and for that matter — there are no other actual pages on the site, either. Just thumbnails. Thumbnails that point to…caption/article thingies. I want my backlinks back.

10) A1 Webmarks, Please Get A Web Designer.

Honorable mention: pioneer social bookmarking site A-1 Webmarks still has the ugliest website in the Milky Way Galaxy. Even 1995 is laughing at it.

1) “Set It and Forget It” Is Dead

If you have any intentions of sitting back and earning from a site that is constantly stagnant, you’re taking a major risk this year. We’re all guilty of this, and I personally have about 5 of these kinds of sites. They’ve been ranked well for years and I wouldn’t even know what else to add to them. However, this is now a dangerous way to live. We’re no longer in a day of age with “Google Dances” and SERP updates that happen once per quarter. Now, they happen once per day.

In fact, I can nearly guarantee you that your SERP rankings will not last much longer…that is, if they still exist at all.

While I can basically agree with algorithmic updates that punish “stagnant” sites, it also makes life miserable on affiliate marketers for the aforementioned reason: some websites simply are “done” or have hit a glass ceiling in terms of content, due to their niche. There are some topics that are finite, and the websites you’ve created for them are going to be a thorn in your side these days. However, that’s too bad — if you don’t update a page regularly, and it will lose rankings.

So, how do you keep up with managing multiple sites and hundreds of single-page promotions when you have to update ALL of them regularly and babysit ALL of them to make sure they’re still retaining their rankings on a search engine whose SERPs update every 24 hours?

The only resolve is to keep building backlinks, and that is by far the most unfavorable part of being an internet marketer — but I’m sure I didn’t have to tell you that ;)

2) Text-Heavy Sites Are Still Favored

I’m not sure if it’s just me, but when I got demolished by Google Panda, something else also happened. My websites that were basically “guides” or had lots of text — including Pixelrage.net — received gigantic boosts. Over a few days, one of my sites reported a 75% increase in visits, even though nothing significant was done to it. It was a text-heavy site. All of my other text-heavy sites were getting 25%+ boosts as well, while my affiliate storefronts were reporting a ‘red’ 60-75%.

I personally think that article writing (on your own site) is where it’s at. Google favors content, but it has to be good content. I hate that cliche phase that goes something like “provide good, helpful content” but I can’t escape it here, because I believe it really is true this time around.

3) Google Ignores Brand New Websites

Google, what’s gotten into you? You’ve changed, man. Just try launching a brand new website (as I recently did for a new local web design service) and see, first-hand, how hard it is to even show up as a blip on Google’s radar.

Try gradual link building. Write press releases. Start and professionally maintain a few social networking accounts, and encourage your friends to ‘Like’ them all. Keep adding content on the site’s blog. And guess what, you still won’t rank — not even on page 20.

As usual, Yahoo and Bing act as they should — within a couple days, I was at least on page 8-10 of both for a few relevant terms.

I truly feel sorry for any new business (that is, one that doesn’t have a venture capital firm handing them a few million for an AdWords budget) who is trying to get their business off the ground and ranking for at least a 4 or 5 word long-tail term. They simply won’t rank these days, and you’ll have to rely on off-line tactics and social networking almost entirely, unless you’re going for Yahoo/Bing rankings which still favor meager backlinks and keyword repetition.

4) Google Hates Affiliate Marketers

This isn’t my opinion, it’s the biggest topic wherever internet marketing is spoken of. The 2011 Google Panda algorithm targeted “thin affiliates,” and “content farms” and plagiarists. Its reiteration in January 2012 polished off an alarming number of affiliate storefronts (as in your eBay Partner Network site that ran 50 pages with eBay feeds and 150 words per page — hope you gave them a proper burial ceremony).

Things are getting far worse for affiliate marketers. Beyond the fact that Google executives (including the CEO himself) have made public statements about affiliate marketing being an “unnecessary step in the sales funnel” and other grossly disregarding comments to hard working people in the industry, Google is implementing new features in SERPs that are burying organic results further down: larger AdWords results with phone numbers, email subscription fields and “sitelinks,” or Google Shopping results with thumbnail images and Youtube video thumbnails.

Google is purposely making it hard on affiliates — especially “nobodies” like you and me, who aren’t listed on the stock exchange. You know, the people who promote products that we never see, package or ship. Oh well, it was a good run while it lasted.

AdWords is becoming Google. By that, I mean, the only way to truly make it on Google these days is to pay for it, and AdWords is only affordable to 6-figure companies (more so, 7-figure ones). That doesn’t include you and your product reviews…but you already knew that. Expect this trend to continue. Chatter from Google spokespeople have shown that Google firmly believes that the company that cannot afford to be on AdWords isn’t worthy of being listed whatsoever.

After all, Google’s prerogative dictates that they should simply promote the ‘source’ of those products (Amazon.com, eBay.com, BestBuy.com, Walmart.com) and not the pathways that lead to them (your “bestbooks.net” website, etc.). Perhaps all internet marketing efforts are now considered fluff, meaning that you better start changing your strategy and business objectives immediately, or you’ll wake up to a flat-lined Google Analytics chart and no lunch money.

5) “Portal Networks” Still Do Well

By “portal networks,” I’m talking about websites where you can create a “page” off of the site and promote your own content and articles: Squidoo, Hubpages and the like. These sites still do well, even with affiliate marketing. It’s because they’re big brands, with monumental amounts of backlinks, hundreds of thousands of nicely inter-linked pages and lots of new content being created daily by registered users.

Unlike creating a brand new website these days, creating a Squidoo lens or a Hubpages Hub results in your work getting indexed within the hour (or at least 24 hours), and getting ranked for something, even though it’s on page 3+ or so. This simply won’t happen for a brand new website on Google these days.

6) Long-Tail Is the New Short-Tail

Remember the days of targeting a long-tail keyword because it was more probable to rank for that term? Those days are quickly diminishing, thanks to the fact that there’s simply so much favoritism for big businesses and “product source” businesses who actually run the affiliate programs.

Most long-tail terms in 2012 are now well known by industries of all kinds. It’s because most (if not all) big businesses today have already employed internet marketing and social networking firms to find all of the relevant long-tail terms so that the company can throw down a nice AdWords budget into it.

Most of the time, these marketing companies don’t even do anything manually, they just run an automated paid service like DART which seek out and buys keywords based on their probability of success, running on a $X,XXX/day budget. How on earth can you compete with that? You can’t — you lose.

Remember: Google likes big brands, so, brands will get favoritism even for long-tail terms these days, even though they don’t have to sit around for 8 hours building strategic keywords and pointing them back to their site. Google just waved a magic wand at them, and they got a nice, cemented position at the top of page 1. Your affiliate storefront will never receive “brand” status because it will never set off the proper signals that will help it achieve that status in Google’s algorithm. How on earth can you compete with that? You can’t — you lose.

7) Google Still Can’t Do Its Job Correctly

I really hope you’re all checking your websites’ rankings AND paying attention to who is competing with you, because there’s more garbage than ever in Google search results.

It’s ironic how perfectly helpful and actionable websites went bankrupt overnight with Google Panda, yet, the algorithm had no problem ranking garbage websites with spun content and meager amounts of low-quality backlinks on page 1 of results for important terms. Try it out yourself — spend 10 minutes today just searching for keywords you’ve tried to rank for, and count the number of crap sites and cheaters who have wound up on page 1.

So far, I’ve seen things like ‘three-keyword-domains.info’ appearing — looking past the terribly unorthodox two-dashed domain name, the site itself has spun content and a design that looks like it came from 15 years ago, I see 1-3 page sites written in poor English (I actually do WHOIS checks on these sites’ domains and they are typically from Asia) which spout nonsense about products and shill affiliate links, I see old websites run by big businesses in niche industries who never cared to upgrade their 1997 .ASP website (but yet they still enjoy Google page 1, position 1) regardless of the fact that their sites have NO content and are a navigational nightmare, I see blatant, ugly keyword stuffing in homepage titles and META descriptions that have gotten top-of-Google rankings…the list goes on and on.

Sometimes I become so obsessed with these bad results that I’m compelled to figure out WHY they are there. I do background checks on them — I look at where their backlinks are coming from (nearly 100% of the time, they’re from article sites and no-name web directories…COME ON GOOGLE, are you still stuck in 2004? Do your damn job correctly).

As I’ve mentioned recently, I found one of my competitors cheating their way to the top of Google by running a “web hosting” service for people in the industry and forcing them to point a keyword-loaded link back to their website. This effectively gave them Google 1/1 results for over a dozen major keywords – several of which were one-word keywords (kind of like “diamonds” or “cars”) and the remainder of which were high-converting long-tail terms.

Radical Ways That the Table Could Turn

We all want the good old days back, but they simply won’t unless something radical happens. We can only hope for the gradual demise of Google — a company that is already making headlines for shady practices in privacy, and grasping at straws by heavily promoting forcing and giving blatant favoritism to Google+ and other company-owned entities in its own search results.

It’s a company that is no longer focusing on search engine results, but search engine profit margins. It is actively pursuing the success of the 1%, because they feed into the success of AdWord’s bottom line which make Google shareholders happy.

What is the definition of a search engine, today? A service that provides relevant results to the end user? Or a service that provides profitable results to the search engine?

If the general population simply figured out how to change their browser’s home page to Bing, or stop using the damn adjective “Google” when describing the act of “looking something up,” this day would come closer.

Just think about when the “indestructible” IE started to lose steam and Firefox started heading uphill. I’m not sure about you, but when I talk to my non-internet marketer friends about Google and its menagerie of AdWords filth, they immediately come back with a “yeah! I did notice that, it’s all ads, and they all take you to something you weren’t expecting.” Hmm.

Another bright future would be the complete death of search engines. Imagine a time where you simply relied on social networks to find a product or service? Where search engines became today’s “link directories” — an ancient internet fixture that once worked, but is no longer relevant? A place where search wasn’t dominated by favoritism for those who could “pay their way” to the top, but sites that were truly good, helpful and gave people what they wanted without having to be a Fortune 500?

Surviving 2012 As An Affiliate Marketer

With all of the violent changes I’m seeing in affiliate marketing, I can honestly say that the best way to make it as an affiliate marketer in 2012 is if:

1. You put a lot of time and energy into actually having a clientele list: a big email list, a big Facebook Page with engaged visitors, etc. [Why? Because it doesn't rely on search engines!]
2. You rely a lot on big brand portal sites like Squidoo and Hubpages which get favoritism because of their size, backlinks and never-ending activity, or:
3. You tear down your affiliate storefronts and turn them into online guides of information about the products you’re trying to sell, and promote those products through a link or button instead of a product feed, which is going to get mauled by Google Panda.

Valid alternatives are to transform your business into something that doesn’t rely on the internet at all — something local, where you can become your town’s household name for whatever services you can provide.

Although I don’t believe in the 2012 apocalypse, I fully believe in the 2012 affiliate marketing apocalypse. I’m already packing my bags and getting ready to jump ship. Google has already made affiliate marketing become miserable, and it’s about to get a LOT worse.

If you’ve been keeping up with my posts lately, you’ve noticed a strong anti-Google sentiment, fear over being a full-time affiliate marketer in this wonderful new year, and overall gloom over what appears to be Google’s all-out tirade against affiliate marketing as we know it.

Anyway, one of my websites which predictably pulled in about $3,000 per month for years through eBay Partner Network has been almost entirely de-indexed, has lost 70% of its traffic and is earning somewhere around $200/month. This was due to the site being completely pulled from four distinct keyword terms, of which I ranked #1 for. As for my site itself, it has a little over 500 pages — each of which has around 200 words of personally-written copy that wasn’t spun, nor keyword saturated. Page titles are clear and concise, and not spammy.

Google Page 1, Position 1…For EVERYTHING.

I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing SERPs for the keywords I’ve lost, and am trying to make sense of why Google decided to give several of my competitors ‘top of page 1′ status after cutting my head off. It was right around that time when I noticed a disturbing trend. One company dominated about 10 different major converting keywords, ranging from premium to long-tail. Page 1, #1 organic for every single one, even the insanely competitive one-word keywords.

How is this possible? It can’t be possible that this just happened without something scummy. And boy, was I right.

Let me just explain this niche to you: say that we’re in a niche called “widgets,” where widgets is a very big, expensive item that sells constantly and is a huge part of industry. My competitor is achieving Google page 1, #1 for “widget, widgets, widgets for sale, widget sale, buy widgets, sell widgets, cheap widgets, best widgets, used widgets, new widgets” etc. etc. etc., even though they hadn’t had those results a month ago. When I say the list goes on and on, I mean, it goes on and ON and ON for the amount of #1 organic SERPs they have achieved. I’ve even noticed that they rank #1 AdWords as well as #1 and #2 Google page 1 organic for some of these terms, dominating the entire fold of the page.

Scamming Backlinks & Getting Away With Murder

I went to one of my favorite old websites from yesteryear — BacklinkWatch.com — and did a little research on this company’s domain name. It turns out they now have a little under *13,500 QUALITY BACKLINKS* with exact keyword anchor text pointing from tens of thousands of relevant, quality websites in our niche. However, almost every single one has the same anchor text – the same one-keyword term. HMM.

I visited about two dozen of the backlinking sites that BacklinkWatch displayed, and looked to find the link. It was at that point where I saw the scheme in its full glory.

This competitor set up a web hosting service where small, local businesses in our niche around the US could host their website with them. One of the requirements a line of forced text like “Hosted by {keywordterm}” where {keywordterm} was the big one that we all wanted to rank for in our industry. That term, of course, pointed back to their site. What a total bloody sham. I was floored that they weren’t banned from almighty Google, the almighty champion of truth and justice in the search world.

Google Thinks This Is Helpful, Quality Material?

Before I continue further, I spent a good 10 minutes going through this competitor’s website. They’re a simple classifieds website using a VERY old content management system, 1997-ish graphic design, no search engine friendly URLs, and **NOT A SINGLE SENTENCE** of text on any of their pages. Actually, the website has no text whatsoever, and search engines must be working entirely off of backlinks to even figure out what the hell this site is about.

Regardless, the company has a Facebook page with 50,000+ fans, their Facebook ad pops up on my Facebook wall almost every damn time I log in, they’re AdWords #1 for every keyword under the sun at all times of the day (in other words, they are most certainly a big business) and due to the scummy gray-hat tactic they’ve pulled, they’ve made it impossible for me to ever achieve Google page 1, #1 as I have had for the past four years. When you take my hard work, my money, and my livelihood through cheating, I’m not going to sit back and let it go.

Immediately, I visited Google’s spam report form. I reported the site for running a “web ring” of farmed links through the ruse of a web hosting service, which vaulted the company to page 1, position 1 for over 12 major industry keyword terms (and I sent Google the list of keywords).

This isn’t the first time I’ve ever done this — years ago, I once noticed another scummy site in this same industry who achieved tens of thousands of backlinks by creating his own iframe-based web ring. He owned over 25 domain names  in the industry with garbage doorway pages and inter-linked them all to one website, which in turn hit the top of Google page 1 and got cemented there. I reported it, and about three of four months later, noticed the site fell back around page 10 for the keywords it previously had page 1, position 1 rankings for.

While I like the fact that Google is most likely reading these spam reports and doing something about it, the major issue is that they have to be sent in the first place. Google obviously had no problem torching my affiliate site, which continues to have a bounce rate under 28%, an average 4-5 minute length of stay and a large number of return visitors AND visitors who search the internet for my exact domain name (which I’d assume is a major determinant of BEING A BRAND NAME).

To Add Insult to Injury

After this entire fiasco today, I couldn’t help but notice something else in SERPs, at the bottom of Google page 1 for a very competitive term. Another guy had registered something to the effect of “widgetsforsale.org” (where “widgets for sale” is in fact a very highly converting, highly valuable term to rank for) and the site was nothing but a one-page doorway pointing to another site. I reported that one, too :)

Algorithms like Google Panda were supposed to stop scum. Instead, they stop honest, hard working affiliates and let scum go through the cracks. If you want to take a conspiracy theorist’s stance, consider the monumental Google AdWords expenditures that this competitor has, and factor that in to the “how the hell is Google letting them cheat organics in such a blatant manner?” There are a lot of conspiracies over how Google gives behind-the-scenes “support” to big AdWords spenders, but I’ll let you chew on that one with a Google search. Actually, make it a Yahoo or Bing one.

Recently, I’ve completed a new website advertising my local-area internet marketing & design services, and plan to make 90% of my promotions be offline and hyper-local. The days of counting on search results are truly over. I have no faith in Google – it is a money hungry organization that is about as capable of doing a proper job as your local DMV or tax collector’s office. I can’t have faith in Yahoo or Bing — even though I find it to still be far more simple to rank in both, I don’t have much certainty as to their futures as search engines (especially Yahoo).

Even though the majority of my websites are still going strong, this massive blow I’ve recenetly suffered was more than enough of a warning to me. Affiliate storefronts had a good run — we’ll talk to our grandchildren about them, one day.

1) Google is against you.

Take the direct quote of Google’s Frederick Vallaeys in response to the work of affiliate marketers: it is “…just an unnecessary step in the sales funnel.” Google has taken numerous steps to show their extreme favoritism to brands, and their very apparent efforts to bury affiliate marketing efforts in search results.

Starting in 2010, the search engine launched “extended brand results” listing actual brand names as links at the top of SERPs. The “Vince” update of 2009 tied two search queries (i.e., a user searching for “hdtv” and then searching for “sony” meant that Sony would receive a “vote” for the term “hdtv”), giving household-name brands — already established and known for a certain product category — another feather in their cap. Later that year, brands received an additional bonus in AdWords, where “sitelinks” would appear under an ad, pushing down the remainder of the page further.

Summer of 2011 showed the most definitive all-out attack against affiliate marketing, with the “Google Panda” update — a change that subsequently ended numerous small business owners’ careers overnight by removing their websites for certain keyword results from Google’s index entirely, and replacing those positions with big brands.

Later in 2011 was the inception of Google+ and “+1,” a social sharing tool that gives heavy bonuses and favoritism to big brands, who already have thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of followers who are able to +1 a new blog post by the droves within immediate time periods. Most recently, January 2012 saw an algorithm update to combat “excessive ads above the fold” on a website. Guess who runs ads above a fold? Hint: not brands.

If you thought you could simply go by the old adage “if you can’t beat em, join em,” think again — your affiliate storefront will NEVER achieve “brand” status. The brand signals that exist within Google’s algorithm know of the links pointing outward toward online storefronts that package and ship the products you’re promoting, identifying you as a “middleman” and therefore an “…unnecessary step in the sales funnel,” as Mr. Vallaeys puts it.

Although you probably don’t need more convincing about Google’s extreme bias against affiliate marketers and toward big brand name corporations, a simple glance at your flat-lined Google Analytics charts have probably clued you in at some point that your reliance on eBay Partner Network and Amazon Associate-driven websites are about as effective as attempting to make a new resurrection of the Million Dollar Homepage.

One more thing: when you lose a major keyword ranking, get dropped backward by several pages on Google and see that you’ve been replaced by big brands — don’t hold a shred of hope about re-gaining that page 1, position 1-3 position ever again. Sophisticated algorithmic signals have already given your ‘affiliate’ labeled site a brand new pair of cement shoes.

If you don’t want to believe me, check out this example of how Google torches affiliates.

2. Google is AdWords.

You might remember Google, it was a search engine that displayed organic results under a couple paid ads. Before it became completely filled with AdWords ads within the fold, it was possible to compete in search rankings for long-tail terms to get your affiliate sites some search attention.

However, a full computer screen’s worth of most Google page 1 SERPs is now entirely infested with AdWords, complete with a yellow box featured ad, subsequent ads and sidebar ads.

These days, the cost of appearing anywhere within an eyeball’s view for even a long term AdWords keyword is entirely unaffordable to the at-home internet marketer – give or take a few clicks per day. Google is now a place for the 1% to throw around their $2,000+/day budget to fight each other in an unreasonably expensive environment for the fight to remain on top. Perhaps you’ve taken your measly budget and used it for things more important, like lunch.

Besides…who on Earth would even spend a dollar on AdWords for an affiliate storefront? As anyone knows, it is *impossible* to track true conversions for an affiliate storefront, since you’ll never know how a thing about which clicks to your site led to sales on eBay or Amazon’s end. Spending money on AdWords for an affiliate storefront is like buying Pick 6 Lotto tickets every week and hoping for something to happen. It’s just AdWords 101.

3) Google’s “shopping results” in SERPs have ended your business.

If you’ve searched for a product and saw a SERP featuring a horizontal thumbnail image bar of products from different retailers with prices, you’ve probably noticed your imminent doom. Another nail in the coffin of any affiliate storefront: shopping results exhibit extreme favoritism to online retailers lucky enough to have muscled their way into Google Shopping, in a price comparison war against each other that takes place far above your current ranking.

The fact about these shopping price comparisons in SERPs is that they are nearly eliminating your chances of ever appearing for the keywords that trigger them. Due to the fact that the first 1/4 to 1/3 of a SERP is mostly AdWords, followed by one of these shopping results snippets that contain eye-enticing thumbnail images that break up an otherwise texty SERP, there’s barely any reason for the user to scroll down to get into organic results at all.

Since you’re nothing more than a middleman posting links to an actual supplier, you’ll never be able to appear on shopping results. Worse yet, the clutter of AdWords and product comparisons is enough to push organic results on to page 2 of results. This, above all else, is contributing to the extinction of the affiliate storefront.

So, What Now?

The changes I’ve seen, especially on Google, have really put an extreme perspective on my own personal business plans. It’s no longer worth investing time, money or energy in an affiliate storefront because they’re becoming extinct. In fact, affiliate marketing in general should be regarded as a past-time rather than a full-time job.

We’re embarking on a Google search engine experience that is entirely suited toward Big Business, where big AdWords spenders rule. If you won’t [cant] compete due to the extreme budget needed to join the existing fray, you’re left behind to hope for the best in organic, which is no longer a valid strategy in 2012.

As for Yahoo and Bing, the potential selling of Yahoo as rumored last year should be enough to make you realize that your measly Yahoo rankings are also not to be counted on — their days are numbered if anything should ever happen to the search engine.

Become A Brand

This truly is the only way to stay alive these days: brands, as defined by search engines, are most likely websites that have real shopping carts and checkout systems. They supply products themselves, instead of shilling affiliate links to real storefronts. They have real company names, not “exact keyword domains.” They have Facebook and Twitter accounts with real followers who actually interact with and care about the products being sold. They get real backlinks — not garbage links that their own webmaster scrounges for, since no affiliate storefront will ever have a successful, ongoing natural link portfolio.

Think about something you can sell or provide, and think fast. These days, you never know when the next iteration of Google Panda will re-appear and torch your remaining search rankings. Use your existing affiliate sites as 301-redirect fodder to give your new sites a boost in rankings, and start branding away!

In case you hadn’t noticed — and don’t worry if you didn’t [given the fact that today's search engine algorithms have effectively killed off domain parking] — your Parked.com account is gone. Actually, so is their website. It’s nothing more than a blank white screen with a line of text that says “For questions regarding Parked.com, please contact PartnerSupport@Parked.com” — gee, thanks guys…don’t let the screen door hit your ass on the way out.

I suppose the most angering part about it is that there was NO notification whatsoever about Parked.com closing down. Not a 30 day notice, let alone a last minute one. I had an account manager at Parked.com, of whom never mentioned a word about this.

Let’s not forget the other two issues: 1) the earnings I still had queued up from domain parking revenue which Parked.com STOLE, and 2) about 4 years of invaluable domain parking data I had for almost 500 domain names, which is all gone.

I spent a couple hours going through my domains and forwarding them over to Voodoo.com (it’s a new parking service), which is pretty much all that any of us ex-Parked.com users can do at this point.

I’m so out of the domain parking realm that I can’t even list off any other services, to be honest. Well, except SEDO, but I was tired of getting $0.02/month for running a couple hundred domains with them. If you know of any good domain hosts, please list them below!

Nothing screams “unprofessional” more than using an official company email address like “mycompany@aol.com” or “mycompany@gmail.com”. Sadly, I’ve seen this practice many times in previous jobs I’d had with small businesses.

If you own a website that sells products or services and has a publicly visible email account for customer service and inquiries, you better damn sure get your own “myname@mycompany.com” email address. Not only does it make you look like a real company, but it will give you a small amount of clout with search engines.

There’s only one problem — and that’s for the at-home affiliate marketer who runs 15 affiliate websites and can’t imagine the monumental task involved in using 15 email accounts on a regular, weekly basis. However, there’s a way you can use Google Apps for Business to get the job done, so that a single email account can manage and send on behalf of all 15 sites. Sweet!

Rather than making this be an article on my blog, I decided to create a Squidoo lens on the topic, and this tutorial for managing multiple email addresses for multiple websites is all you’ll need to get this done (and with the power of Gmail, too!)

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to set up a free Google Apps for Business account for every single website you own. You’ll set a rule to allow your main business account to act on behalf of the other websites. You’ll then forward all emails from the other websites’ email accounts to your main business account, and your main business account will automatically respond ON BEHALF of the original account it was sent to. Nice :)

This article was taken from Pixelrage.net – Ramblings of an Internet Marketer