Affiliate marketing takes a good deal of time and attention to detail. So, staying organized is essential if you’re going to be successful.

If you’ve got a Mac, here’s a post on a few of the Getting Things Done type organizers available to you. I still prefer the web-based RememberTheMilk, however.

Like Mike, I’ve been using the alpha releases of OmniFocus for a while now and I was thisclose to taking advantage of their pre-sale deal to buy the application for $40. But wait. CulturedCode has thrown their hat into the ring with Things. Yet another stand-alone and pretty GTD app for Mac OS X? Maybe.

Web Worker Daily - Competition for Mac Task Management

With the trend of including video and images into search results spreading to all the major search engines, it’s more important than ever to optimize multimedia to assist in your search marketing results.

Search Engine Journal has a detailed post on optimizing video and images for search:

There’s more than one way to get organic search traffic. That’s the message that you should be hearing from your search engine (SEO) optimizer these days. With the advent of Universal Search, the traditional organic search result is getting pushed further and further down the page and this effect will only get more pronounced. You might also be failing to get any benefit from a whole range of highly targeted content on your site that isn’t being presented to the search engines in such a way that they can understand it and present it to searchers.

SearchEngineJournal - Niche SEO: Image & Video, Local Search & Social Media Optimization

PageRank is the all-important (or at least it was the all-important) ranking mechanism for bloggers and website owners. Having a high pagerank meant a life of relative ease and riches while having a low pagerank of 1 or 2 meant a life of shoveling coal in an unsafe mine. Or something like that.

Nevertheless, understanding pagerank has never been an easy endeavor, but this post lays out some nice fundamentals:

Put another way, the more links to a page, the more ‘votes’ it gets and the higher its PageRank. Adding more complexity to that idea, the votes are weighted by the PageRank of each linking page and tempered by the amount of links that referring page has.

As Si Fiskin expertly points out, there were some critical limitations to this early PageRank model. The final equation documented in the research paper includes adjustments to correct the limitations, as you will understand by reading this post. Let me warn you that this post gets quite mathematical. Brace yourself!

SEOmoz - Two Important Adjustments to the Early PageRank Model

Andrew Wee has some very wise advice for affiliates owning sites which may have trademark issues:

For content-based domain affiliates, taking note of your domain portfolio and potential copyright conflicts are an ongoing concern, especially if you’re planning to be in the game for the longterm.

This is a great post with lots of important points about copyrights and affiliate domains.

Andrew Wee - Affiliate Marketers, Your Domains And Lawyer Letters

Linda Buquet has coverage of E-LOAN’S closing of its affiliate program (just in time for the busiest time of the affiliate industry’s year):

Cyber Monday should be a good day for most affiliates, but E-LOAN affiliates just got some bad news. Did they cut commission right before the Holidays like some scrooge merchants did? Nope the mortgage crunch must have hit them hard - they are closing down their affiliate program and links will expire on Dec. 14th.

5 Star Affiliate Programs Blog - E-LOAN Closing Affiliate Program

Online marketing guru Jim Kukral says video is the new goldmine:

Video is wide-open. It’s like Google 5-years ago. Don’t believe me? Go to YouTube and search for any phrase, and do the same search in Google. I’ll do it for you.

I just searched for “debt”. That’s a HUGELY competitive term, right?

On YouTube, there are 5800 results for videos marked with “debt” in tags, titles and description. In Google, there are 185 MILLION results.

Which one do you think is going to be easier to climb to the top of?

Jim Kukral - Online Video Ads Mean Big Bucks For You

According to MarketingPilgrim,

iTunes is sweetening the deal for affiliates who promote their online gift certificates with 50% more commission. You can email, or buy and print a gift certificate in amounts from $10.00 to $200.00. They’re also throwing in a free iPod nano for the top performing affiliate.

Enjoy and happy holiday affiliate marketing!

MarketingPilgrim covers the latest dust-up in Facebook marketing… why you shouldn’t attempt to advertise alcoholic beverages on the social network:

Molson brewing company has pulled a promotion on Facebook after complaints that they promote binge drinking. They ran a photo contest targeting 19-24 year old college students.

MarketingPilgrim: Facebook Marketing Stunt Backfires

I joined Jeff Molander, Lee Gientke and Amanda Watlington for a fun discussion on yesterday’s Weekly Insight podcast:

• Of Facebook and Tu Tu’s: The Privacy Myth
• Google’s Wireless Plans
• IBM Declares Advertising Dead
• Jimmy Whales, Info-Filters & Re-Defining Search
• Exploring Vendor Relationship Management & "Relationships"

Of Facebook and Tu Tu’s: The Privacy Myth on the Weekly Insight

This isn’t an in depth report or work of astonishing research… but it is a fun animated explanation of the Google basics…

Business Interactive Features - Diagrams - Illustrations - Portfolio.com

Site owners and merchants should be concerned when duplicate content starts to negatively affect site rankings. 

The AMWSO blog has a great post outlining the issues and possible fixes for duplicate content in the context of affiliate marketing…

Many merchants who run affiliate programs make available content for their affiliates to use on affiliate sites. A common question / concern asked of AMWSO is if this content is being distributed to all affiliates, and multiple affiliates are using the content, will this incur a search engine penalty?  It’s a question asked of us both from the merchant perspective, as they redistribute content on their own pages, and also from the affiliate perspective, since the affiliates want to use that content.

Affiliate Marketing Blog by AMWSO: Duplicate Content Search Engine Penalties and Affiliate Marketing - Affiliate Marketing Blog

Super affiliate (and great guy) Zac Johnson puts down a great post on how to make money as an affiliate over the holidays…

Right now we are about to go full swing into the fun time of the year when people just love to start spending a ridiculous amount of money on anything! Here are some of the big dates coming up, that you should be preparing for and taking advantage of.

• November 23 - Black Friday
• November 26 - Cyber Monday
• December 20 - “When It Absolutely, Positively, Needs to Be There” Last Ship Date
• December 20-25 - Target Last Minute Shoppers
• December 26 - Post-Holiday Sales

Make Money with Super Affiliate Zac Johnson | Let the Reign Begin

Nice post of updates from major retailers regarding the potentially highly lucrative "Black Friday" shopping day.  If you’re a merchant affiliate, make sure you’re paying attention!

Amazon.com has started releasing information about their Black Friday 2007 deals and sales. And Wal Mart has sent me an email discussing their plans for Black Friday and I will let you know when their Black Friday ad will be released, as well as other sales accompanying deals on Black Friday.

Ramblings of an Affiliate Marketer » Blog Archive » Amazon.com Black Friday 2007 Ad - Walmart Black Friday & Cyber Monday 2007 Sales Update