LotusJump Blog

A few members of the LotusJump team got to go to Vegas for the Affiliate Summit West, which turned out to be a pretty awesome event. IMHO, one of the cooler stories to come out of it was a charity auction held by Jeremy Schoemaker (aka “Shoemoney”).

Leading up to the summit, Shoemoney offered to wear the t-shirt of the highest-bidding company, and donate the proceeds to charity. Since he’s “kind of a big deal” in the online community, he netted $5,200.00 for the winning bid. On his blog, Jeremy relates:

“The winning bidder, Train Signal, emailed me and said they had allocated $10,000.00 for this and would like to donate the full amount.

So at Affiliate Summit west I will present a check to the Affiliate Marketers Give Back, who’s chosen charity is Fighting Breast Cancer, on behalf of Train Signal for the amount of 10,000.00!!!!”

Well, during the “meet market” portion of the summit,  I got to meet Jeremy and snap a pic with the man and 10k t-shirt. Without further ado:

Pretty cool gesture on both Shoemoney and Train Signal’s part…it’s nice to see the big guys giving back!

We at LotusJump are pleased to announce that Google has finally updated its PageRank toolbar to register LotusJump.com at a PageRank of 4 (up from it’s “new website” status of zero!). The LotusJump blog has also improved to a PageRank of 3.

In case you’re wondering, PageRank is what Google uses to determine the importance of a web page. It’s one of the many factors used to decide which pages appear in search results and where.

Want to see the PageRank of your website? Try downloading and enabling PageRank with the Google Toolbar. To improve your PageRank, we’d suggest two general approaches:

1. Create content on your site that’s so good/informative that people will want to link to it naturally
2. Use LotusJump to find and build relevant backlinks to your website

These steps will help you improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and help you establish a successful online presence!

While we’re adding new SEO resources to LotusJump on a regular basis, we thought it would be cool to let the collective wisdom of our users improve the value of this tool. As such, we added a way for LotusJumpers to suggest SEO resources via a simple form within the application. Current users will notice the “Suggest A Resource” text link inside their accounts. We’ve already received some great stuff…keep it coming!

We’re excited to announce that we’ve added an awesome new feature to LotusJump for all it’s registered users…the Q&A task! Here’s a  little info taken from the How It Works page:

Q&A Tasks tasks - New!
Yahoo! Answers is a free service where people can ask and answer questions on virtually any subject. When someone on Yahoo! Answers asks a question that’s relevant to one of your targeted keywords, LotusJump will automatically create a task in your account to visit that page and share your knowledge. This gives you the opportunity to 1) establish yourself an an authority on a given subject and 2) direct people to other helpful resources, like your website (if applicable).

We’re pretty stoked about this feature…feel free to send us feedback via comment, email or Twitter!

Technorati Profile

If you haven’t noticed, you can now update the keywords you’re targeting directly from your LotusJump account! To find it in your account, click the “settings” link.

Keep in mind that SEO is a long term project. If you change your focus too often, you won’t get anywhere. However, there are some cases where you should consider changing them, like:

1. You’re ranking well on them already
2. The traffic they drive doesn’t convert well
3. They’re too broad or too darn competitive

Some really exciting LotusJump features are in development, we’ll let you in on some of them next Monday!