Ever wonder how online retailers like ebates.com are able to offer consumers cash back on online purchases through their site? The answer is affiliate marketing, a direct marketing tactic that offers purchasing incentives to consumers.

So, what is affiliate marketing? It is a service that uses one highly trafficked Web site to drive traffic to another. Affiliate networks earn commissions by driving traffic to a business’ Web site. A good example is Amazon.com, which uses affiliate partners to display Amazon.com advertisements, therefore driving increased traffic to Amazon.com. (more…)

When recently evaluating a new business opportunity, we encountered a rather frustrating problem with Google’s Traffic Estimator. At Rise, we utilize the Traffic Estimator to help estimate total media spend for upcoming paid search campaigns and to analyze if opportunities will be profitable. We began noticing variances between the costs the Traffic Estimator was projecting and the actual costs once the campaign launched. It was concerning to us that the Traffic Estimator may not be the most accurate tool. (more…)

When the economy took a turn for the worst in Q4 of last year, I was faced with determining how to best manage the agency during the turbulent times. Instead of only relying on a qualitative strategy to ensure the agency remained strong, my main objective was to develop a measurable formula for success—a formula that would define the incoming revenue Rise Interactive could expect. (more…)

When building out your Web site, it is particularly important to be sure the code is correct and well-formed. As discussed in the Introduction to URLs blog post, correctly structured code ensures Web pages can be indexed properly by search engines, which is vital to ranking at the top of the natural results.  For this reason, it is imperative to ensure your code structure is correctly developed to compliment and improve your SEO campaign. (more…)

The Chicago Tribune recently reported on a Chicago landlord that filed suit against a tenant for tweeting one evening about her moldy apartment.

Horizon Reality claims that the tenant’s post, “who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks its okay” was “maliciously and wrongfully published” and the tenant allowed “the tweet to be spread throughout the world.” (more…)

Typically, the deeper a page is on your site, the more difficult it is for the search engine spiders to find and index the page.  The following example illustrates a URL that the engines would have a difficult time indexing: (more…)