Lately I have found myself getting less willing to share knowledge, insights and tricks in the ppc space or even some of the cool stuff I have learned in the SEO space…and to that end, I feel like I have chosen to hide underground for quite some time. This is clear by the amount I wrote last year…this year I would like to turn a new leaf, but we’ll see what I feel like I can share vs not.

I like sharing, but I have to admit that I’m not going to share super edgy secrets or expose any awesome loopholes that I find unless I’m physically with somebody and we’re chatting over lunch or if somebody has me in their IM list…I help as many people as I can via IM.

That’s where the ‘code’ comes into play. Lot’s of people know the code, but it needs to be repeated again and again, especially with so many awesome conferences just around the corner:

DO NOT SHARE anything “secret” that you learn from somebody else over lunch, via IM or email or at ALL without their explicit permission.

Why am I calling this the Code of the Underground Marketer? Because these secrets are supposed to stay on the down low – in the ground – so they can be exploited as long as possible without having search engine employees, engineers, algorithms, spiders or contracted reviewers learn about it or know about it.

I have been fortunate enough to be able to communicate with some awesome link builders, ppc rockstars and more over the past few years. I shared some secrets and not others. Of the secrets I haven’t shared because of ‘the code’, few of them have been found out by the sites themselves or the search engines as of yet – only a handful have been exposed.

The code has a hidden side to it…if somebody shares something golden with you and you blast it to the world via Twitter, Facebook, blog or any other medium where dozens of people find out about it at once…you get black listed and hated on for quite some time. It’s rare and difficult to get back into the ‘inner circle’ so to speak.

I wish I could truly call myself part of the ‘inner circle’…but I am far from it. Perhaps I am at the fringe. Maybe not though. I still have to find out a ton of so-called secrets on my own through rapid/vast/expensive experimentation. Buy a link to one website, wait and see what happens to that site before getting a similar link to another website in my portfolio that is more important. I have had a few websites penalized and banned in the past few years and the exercise of removing the bad and learning more about the good has been purely fascinating…at the same time, if I were part of the ‘inner circle’ or the ‘underground marketer’ I probably could have avoided all of the stupid tests I did.

Part of my experimentation, and what I think the real underground marketer is doing too – maybe to a MUCH MUCH greater scale, is managing a nice portfolio of several websites, bank accounts, adsense accounts, ebay accounts, servers, hosts, other affiliate network accounts and more. In my mind, one of the only ways to discover some of the most powerful techniques being used today is through sheer intelligence and a world of experience that came through testing and learning the hard way. Most places don’t allow multiple accounts (except banks, they’re always willing to open accounts for you) so you get creative and use relative’s names and account information if you can.

The bottom line, or what I want to call the Code of the Underground Marketer, is definitely that of not sharing what others share with you…and not sharing everything you learn…and always be testing.

Good luck in 2010 and have a Happy New Year living the Code!

I can’t believe I haven’t posted anything since June…well, I guess I can believe it.

Here is a quick summary of what I have been up to:

1. Growing the affiliate marketing side of my personal income…and have been doing quite well with it. In fact, I have launched or am in the process of launching 12 more websites in my personal portfolio. I must admit that affiliate marketing is very time consuming but I have effectively replaced my income from the agency so it is a full-time passion right now. I do not take on any clients anymore and haven’t for quite some time because of the affiliate side of things. Yay!

2. Playing around a lot more with the SEO side of things. Several of my sites are now in the top 3 for several competitive phrases…believe it or not, I do NOT do any ppc on my affiliate sites yet – although I am successfully moving into that side of the income stream given that it is something I think I’m great at. As far as SEO goes, I started practicing it quite a while ago…3 or 4 years I think. My very first ‘ranking’ was for ‘Internet Marketing Professional’ and the plural version too…that’s what got me hooked. Lol!

3. I was also recruited in-house for a couple different companies…they made offers that I didn’t want to refuse. I love both companies and the people there – so I’m still going strong with one in the home based business space (super competitive, i love it!) and the other helped me make a lot of great connections plus jump started me into the scrum engineering process and gave me major insights into growing a company really fast. It was and is really cool to have some ‘in-house’ experience…now I really can see and understand the benefits of agency AND in-house arrangements.

4. Thinking of all the people who are leaders and participators in the community. I can’t believe I ignored the urge to write so many times…but hundreds of you are still subscribed to my blog and I am honored to be in your company. There are so many genius people out there writing and sharing information freely! Don’t worry though, I have been lurking through over 100 blogs daily and 6 or 7 forums…I’m around, and appreciative of your work.

Other than that, I feel like it’s time for a vacation.

So, that’s what I have been up to! How about you? What have you been up to for the past few months?

• Quick Update: Affiliate Summit West and Ads on this blog
  Affiliate Summit West 2010 I’m stoked to be going to Affiliate Summit West this year! I’ll be getting in late Sunday night but I’ll be...

I am entering a master’s program at the Columbia University School of Journalism this August, and I’m taking the rest of the summer off to surf and move to Manhattan. I’ll still be hanging around semvironment-ville every so often, but things at the company have been changing, and James himself is taking semvironment in a little bit of a different direction, as he will shortly be explaining. Additionally, I’m pursuing some of my own work with my web design company more heavily, including the promotion of my new social gadgets and products sharing website www.Scordit.com, and my new site where you create your own quizzes and earn prizes at www.Quizzem.com. Of course, I’m also helping James Zolman with Click Walrus, which is a revenue and click attribution web analytics tool that is WAY AWESOME.

So good things are happening all around, and I’m excited for what’s to come for me at Columbia and with Scordit et. al., and also for a new era at semvironment. I’m sure I’ll make an appearance at the occasional web conference here and there (or more likely at the occasional punk rock show in NYC), so maybe I’ll see you there. Until then, goodnight and have a pleasant tomorrow!

[Note from James: I personally recommend Shane for his design skills, his website creation skills, his superior and engaging writing style and most of all his ability to educate and teach. If you ever attend a conference where Shane is presenting, you should attend his session and I kid you not, you will be blown away - he is literally the best presenter I have ever encountered...I have attended at least 50+ "big name"conference sessions. Shane's presentation and speaking skills blow all of that out of the water. Shane has been independent for quite a while - building up the projects he mentions above, building out his design portfolio a little more and wrapping up ambassador projects for semvironment. Shane is going to pursue his dreams - and I am honored to have played a tiny role in helping him along his way. We're going to miss him a lot!]

Well I happened to take a peek at James’s Halloween costume this year (you know, the big boss at semvironment?), and it looks like he’s got a surprise in store for Mr. Cutts. He’s going to be spamming everyone within 10 feet of him.

(This is a real costume people are selling)

Hopefully Matt & James don’t end up at the same party, or there might be trouble. Happy Halloween everybody!

Unluckily for PPC Whiz, while I was moving everything I own to Honolulu (although it’s not actually that much!), ads on my business printing website were running, and one of my ads got the following CTR:

Coincidentally, this CTR is .01% greater than PPC Whiz’s, meaning that I now have set the record! I can’t wait to spend my $50! You can pay me via paypal or personal check…

Shane is moving to Hawaii to pursue a Master’s Degree in New Media. We’re going to run a satellite office for him from there. If you’re in Hawaii, we would love to chat with you – or if you want to come out on ‘business’, we would be happy to meet with you for a short time so you can expense it out for the rest of your time…lol! w00t! He has been our news blogger so we haven’t been covering that as well for the past 10 days – he should be back up and running by the end of August/first part of September!

I (James) am currently posting this from San Diego, California but I’m flying out to meet a client in Tampa, Florida tomorrow evening. I was in San Francisco on Monday to meet with another fantastic, long-time client and I will post about our visit when I get back next week! I’m in San Diego for a family visit.

We’ll be back to business and blogging like normal by Monday or Tuesday next week! I might post a few news/informative posts by Friday night – but watch for a big, meaty guide we’re releasing next week!

The Link Builder simply tracks the websites and pages you link to and sends an email message to that website owner/administrator notifying them of your link.

Download the Link Builder for WordPress here

Then watch this video (update: haha – if you turn up your volume, you can hear a ‘darth vader’ breathing effect from my mic…sorry!) to learn how to configure and use the plugin:

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can read the readme.txt file for installation instructions here.

UPDATE: Reminder - you MUST remember to edit your config file! And this is not a 100% automated tool – it is designed to be personal while simplifying your link building efforts.

Other Plugins that are built for SEO/Link Building from WordPress

Internal Link Building by SEOROI – This looks like it’s an awesome tool although it didn’t work with our admin/theme/template for some reason…haven’t had a chance to look at it but it’s received rave reviews so we recommend giving it a shot yourself!

All In One SEO Pack – One of our favorites. You control title tags, descriptions and keywords for every post and page or you can let the pack update them automatically!

Two Excellent Guides To Optimizing Blogs

WordPress SEO – The Definitive Guide To High Rankings for Your Blog

The Blogger’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization – Aaron and Giovanna Wall of SEOBook.com fame wrote this awesome guide…a must read!

About the Programmer: The programmer that was our lead dev on this plugin is Simon. We own the copyrights, programming and design – but Simon is a fantastic resource and he is freakishly fast with WordPress dev stuff if you need him.

In essence, the deal that the two search engine giants have worked out is that when Yahoo! runs out of ads to serve, Google will supply the rest. This will help Yahoo! to deliver ads for some of the more long tail search queries.

So it looks like there’s going to be some investigation, deliberation, etc., into the antitrust implications, and we of the PPC community will just have to see what happens.

Yahoo! and Google both say that the deal with be good for competition. We’re hoping that the deal turns out to be good for us. In fact, when it all gets sorted out, we kind of hope for the following sort of anti-trusty, merger-ific mistake:

(Click to enlarge)

Oh yeah!

We know that’s probably not going to happen, but here’s to wishful thinking!

Note to people who are inclined to look at screen shots without reading the accompanying posts: The above screenshot is fake. We made it. This did not actually happen on a real Yahoo! search. Also, Ad #2 is very unoptimized, although we are thinking of testing it and see what kind of conversion rate we get…

Why would anybody put in hours like that?

I don’t know. It’s insane…but it’s inspiring at the same time.

I’m definitely not the first to do it in this industry and I won’t be the last…in fact, I would be willing to bet that a bunch of my competitive colleagues put in more hours than I do every week!

How is working 90+ hour work weeks inspiring?

What inspires me are the executives, founders, individuals, marketers, investors, competitors and others that I get the privilege of working with and for and against – you can tell they didn’t get where they are without a heck of a lot of hard work, some good fortune and determination. They all have a fantastic story to tell and I get to learn from them and I get to participate in their success in some way or another. I feel very lucky to play even a small part in helping others grow and succeed on the web.

I don’t always succeed…and my excuse is that it’s marketing so it’s always a risk. What I’m really doing is cataloging every failure and creating this arsenal of experience, education and knowledge that I can use in the future as a list of what not to do…then again, if a particular situation calls for it, a previous failure can get resurrected and be a huge success! Isn’t the world wide web fantastic that way?

The most inspiring part of the long hours is the opportunity I have to improve the future living situation of my family by helping others secure their future today. Employees, clients and my family have dreams…and I’m here to help in whatever way that I can.

Shane Snow received a bachelors degree in Business Management with an emphasis in Marketing from Brigham Young University-Idaho.

Prior to joining semvironment, Shane was a Small Business Web Marketing intern at ICSERV Inc, a national web design firm. He also interned as a graphic designer at PolicyTech, an international software company. After his various internship experiences, Shane opened up his own website design firm in collaboration with Gregory Hess. The firm, Brave Media LLC, has designed and developed informational and e-commerce websites for more than 25 businesses nationwide in the past year. He also operates a business and flyer printing website and a kissing advice website.

At the same time, Shane has been a columnist for Scroll Newspaper in Rexburg, Idaho, for the past two years.

Shane is excited to bring his varied experience in graphic design, website development, search engine marketing, and copy writing to semvironment as we launch our new E-commerce business unit.

On a personal note, Shane enjoys playing bass guitar in a band, is a master of Doctor Mario for the Nintendo 64, and is in denial that he’s probably too old to keep skateboarding.

Shane is getting married this May. Congrats Shane!