It’s Friday Roundup time! Here are some great posts we have curated throughout the week.  Grab your coffee, sit back and enjoy!

Affiliate Marketing:

5 Tips to Boost Merchant Relationships:
5 tips to help ensure you are making the most out of your merchant partnerships.

Can Affiliate Programs Exist Alongside Paid Search?
If a merchant is running their own paid search campaigns, and also has an affiliate program, how can they ensure that the latter doesn’t cannibalize but compliment the other? Find out the answer on Geno Prussakov’s blog.

20 Online Influencer Outreach Tools to use in Affiliate Recruitment:
Great list of tools affiliates managers and social media managers can use for influencer outerach campaigns.

Content Marketing:

9 Elements of the Perfect Post:
You spend so much time coming up with post ideas, optimizing, editing, and promoting that you should make sure your posts are near perfect so your efforts don’t go to waste. Find out more in this article at Problogger.

The Importance of Ongoing Content Optimization:
Get answers and tips on how often you should optimize your site content.

Why Content Marketing Pwns Zombies, Bacon & Cats:
Great post about how to find the sweet spot when building content for links.

Email Marketing

5 Keys to a Successful Holiday Email Strategy:
Christmas is just over three months away! Start preparing your holiday email strategy with these great tips.

Boost Email Engagement with Social Sharing
There’s a good chance you’re using social media and email marketing to deliver and share brand-related content and messaging. Yet here’s the key question: have you combined the two? Shelly Kramer provides some great tips on why you should.

5 Tips for Monitoring Your Competition’s Email Program
As marketers work to ensure their emails arrive in and stand out in a crowded inbox, keeping an eye on their competition (and top-tier marketers) is a tactic that is becoming increasingly important. Find out more information in this detailed post by Return Path.

SEO:

Bing Hits all Time High for Search Share in August:
Yahoo is down once again while partner Bing has hit “an all time high” according to one analyst. Find out more in Search Engine Land’s post.

How to Build an Authority Strategy for Your Company:
Take advantage of these tips in getting Google’s rel=author tag implemented, and boost your authority.

How to Automate Link Building:
To win in the link building game in the post-penguin era, you must know how to become a link magnet and should start mastering link baiting. Find out more in this detailed post.

SEM:

3 Step Model for High Seasonality Forecasting:
Learn to better predict seasonality changes in your PPC campaign with this three step model.

Social Media:

6 Creative Ways to Spice up Your Facebook Cover Photo:
When your followers land on your page, the first thing they notice is your cover photo. Find out how you can capture attention with these 6 examples.

New B2B Public Relations are a Hybrid of Traditional and Social:
As social networks continue to explode, there’s been a lot of clamor about the death of traditional marketing techniques. Find out how traditional techniques can integrate well with your social marketing goals in this piece by Fast Company.

What is “safe” to Pin on my Pinterest Boards?
Copyright infringement concerns have lead to a lot of questions about what images are safe to pin on Pinterest. Eli Rose discusses the issue and provides some insight.