Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn Collins

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I recently sat down for a chat with Holly Preuss, Principal of Granular Solutions, and asked a bunch of questions about the state of search engine marketing.

Holly has been a leader in Internet marketing and technology for nearly a decade. She began her Internet career in 1998 at QVC managing QVC.com. In 1999, she joined Grey Advertising, first as a member of the KPE division, where she helped launch www.beauty.com and then with Grey Direct where she managed the online creative production team.

In 2001, Holly joined L’Oreal, where she led the launch of many of their beauty sites. In 2004, she moved to the Seattle area to work with Amazon.com’s business development team. Leveraging her broad base of experience in the online marketing arena, Holly then joined Barnes & Noble.com where she led their affiliate network, search engine marketing team and shopping comparison site relationships.

In 2006, Holly launched Granular Solutions and currently manages search for clients in the retail ecommerce world and for other more specialized businesses such as spas, multimedia production companies, as well as television program promotion sites.

I asked Holly the following questions…

1. What do you think about social tagging and the impact on SERPs (search engine results pages)?

2. Could you just give a ground level view of what social tagging is all about?
3. What are some of your strategies and tips for managing your reputation online?
4. Would you say that you try to control the first five results, maybe the first ten?
5. Do you have any thoughts on the recent announcement by the FTC about regulations around word of mouth marketing and how there should be disclosures if somebody is getting paid in any way?
6. What do you think about the difference between Search 2.0 versus traditional search, and whether or not that would be a threat to Google?
7. Do you have any favorite blogs that you generally go to or any resources you’d be willing to share?

You can read the transcript at http://www.affiliatetip.com/holly-preuss.pdf.

Audio of the interview was broadcast on the Affiliate Thing show. Download or stream it at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/affiliate-thing.

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