Let’s admit it. We aren’t all writers. And for a lot of us, the idea of sitting down and writing content for our websites is about as attractive a concept as working the rhino enclosure at the zoo… it is really smelly in there.
But we all need content for our sites, and if we aren’t outsourcing the content creation to writers more talented than ourselves, we are going to have to bite the bullet and write. But how do you create “great content” is the eyes of the search engines and visitors? What should the copy consist of? More importantly, how long should the content be?
Aaron to the Rescuse…
Thankfully, Aaron Wall (SEOBook) has taken the time to lay out some of his personal guidelines for creating content for good search rankings and conversion. In his post, Optimal Word Count & Web Page Copy Length, Aaron shares some overall copy considerations which include:
Conversion—its the golden pot at the end of the rainbow. Its that measurable quality we all strive for in
PPC. It lines our pockets when we get it right…and sometimes it just doesnt make sense.
Trying to get inside our customers heads isnt easy. What we think should convert often doesnt—and vice-versa—leaving us shaking our heads and wondering if theres a magic formula no one has clued us in on yet.
But trust me, there is no magic formula. A lot of factors culminate to determine conversion, and any one of them can spell a campaigns success or failure.
Of course, your goal should be to keep visitors from “bouncing,” or leaving your site on the first page so you can convert them to leads. But how can you increase conversions if you dont have a clue how to hold them there?
According to research, once visitors land on your site you have only a few seconds to convince them to stay. If you want to keep them there, it should be immediately obvious that theyre in the right place, you have what theyre looking for and they can trust you to deliver it to them safely.
How can they know this in such short order? When they see relevant content immediately available, glance at your “about us” section and contact information, find a search function where they can quickly find what they need, and are confronted with a strong marketing message that compels them to buy, youve hooked them in. But sometimes that isnt enough. Increasing conversion requires assessing your sites strengths and weaknesses, then making changes to everything from copy and design to linking and photography.
Last week there was a good amount of buzz surrounding Google’s algorithm change that would help eliminate Google Bombs in the search results. At the same time, many webmasters have seen fluctuations in our Google rankings, which gets us wondering, has the Google Bomb fix effected our rankings?
Matt Cutts, being the nice guy he is, took the time to analyze five webmasters’ sites to explain why their change in rankings had nothing to do with the Google Bomb algo change.
Sometimes, especially when you are fairly new to the affiliate business, you feel like you have bit off more than you can chew. And, like many work-from-home businesses, a majority of the people who become affiliates end up getting out of the business because they can’t make it work.
It can get a little depressing to think about, eh?
With that in mind, I want to share an inspiring affiliate success story with you from Revenue Magazine - the story of Jeremy Palmer. I saw Jeremy speak at the CJU conference this past year and I was very impressed with his knowledge, affiliate philosophy, and down-to-earth personality. Jeremy really seems to embody the story of most super-affiliates - got into the business somewhat by accident, went through some tough times, eventually made things work and had the work-ethic and network to remain successful long-term. Also, even though he sells e-books, he isn’t your average get-rich-quick huckster - which is refreshing.
So if you are feeling a little overwhelmed by the affiliate world today, why not take a few minutes and get inspired by Mr. Palmer’s story.
If you want to learn more about Jeremy, or if you want to buy any of the e-books mentioned in the article, you can check out his site QuitYourDayJob.com.
April, Eric, Mike and I returned from the Affiliate Summit last night pretty close to midnight. We had a great trip and I think it was well worth our while. Big thanks to everyone who took the time to stop by our booth and talk to us. Also, thanks to everyone who took part in the “how many pictures” contest at our booth. We did get a first and second place winner and they will be contacted soon letting them know they won.
Since people like lists, I though I would put one together about the Affiliate Summit. First I thought it would be a 10 Lessons Learned at Affiliate Summit list, but that didn’t really fit the content I wrote. Then I thought I could make a Top 10 Things to Know from Affiliate Summit, but that didn’t really fit well either.
Eventually I decided I would simply call this list…
Now this might not be a bad thing, but if you were counting on bidding the same way you used to in the old Yahoo platform and ranking for what you paid for– you may have a rude awakening come February 5th.
I got a little note from Yahoo this morning telling me that starting February 5th, they are going to take into account a “quality score” when running ads.
This makes sense from a user’s point of view. When I read an ad, I want to click on something and go to a page that is relevant. From my point of view, (the one who has to now figure out how this new algorithm is going to work) it stinks!
What can we do…once one Yahoo headache is over, they find a good way of creating a new one!
Just wanted to give everyone a heads up of what’s going to begin February 5th. If you want to follow this link, it will explain in better detail how they are going to rank your ads and “other important things you need to know.”
If you advertise on Googles content network (as discussed in last weeks post), you know that sometimes your
ads show up on undesirable Web sites.
Why are some sites undesirable? Often its a question of site quality and material (”content,” for lack of a better word); other times its more that particular sites just arent appropriate for your target market. Either way, you dont want to waste your time and money in these areas when you could get much better return on ROI elsewhere.
Thats where site exclusion comes in handy. Googles site exclusion tool is simply a means of excluding your ads from certain Web sites where you dont want them displayed.
For example, our PPC team recently discovered that some of our home insurance ads were showing up on a Florida home insurance information site. Since these leads arent desirable for agents on our network right now, we cant make any money from them—and we certainly dont want to advertise in that area. By using the site exclusion tool, we were able to ban our ads from that site (and others like it) and limit our exposure to that particular market.
So how can you ban your ads from undesirable sites?
I don’t know about you, but I am starting to get really excited about the Affiliate Summit. This will be my first time going to and Affiliate Summit and I am hoping to get the chance to meet…well… anyone who wants to meet. From what I have heard, the Affiliate Summit is amazing for networking - and since building a bigger network was one of my resolutions for 2007, I am hoping you all can help me out.
But yesterday I realized that my chances of meeting up with some of you is slightly diminished because I work for a “merchant” (P.S. - I hate that term). I think that stinks, but after meeting a number of affiliate managers in my career, I totally understand why. By nature, I try to avoid pushy, annoying people - and sadly a lot of (short-lived) affiliate managers are both pushy and annoying. No good.
So that brings me to my promise…
If you meet up with me at the Affiliate Summit I promise I will not try to sell you on the InsureMe affiliate program unless you want me to.*
Seriously. It might sound cheesy, but I would much rather build a solid relationships with a person than hunt down and pester super-affiliates for three days. I just want to meet some of great people at the Summit. Hopefully you will be one of them. So if you want to meet up, drop me a line at jomdahl(at)insureme(dot)com or stop by the InsureMe booth (#214).
* A quick warning, I will be working at the InsureMe booth and things might be a bit more “salesy” in the expo hall - but don’t worry, I’m not much of a salesman anyway
Let me start this one off by saying that while I am a big proponent of linkbait, I can’t admit to ever having successfully produced any linkbait - so what I am sharing today comes from my research (read: reading blog posts) on the topic, not from hands-on experience. With that in mind, let’s do this…
The more I think about yesterday’s post on affiliates and linkbait, the more I think I am on to something. The way I look at it, linkbait is more about talent than about money…and since search marketing is being starting to be dominated by big marketing dollars (BusinessWeek just reported as such), affiliates need to rely on their talent to defeat the giant bank accounts of big advertisers. Real David and Goliath stuff, eh?
So you might ask, if linkbait is the key to a successful affiliate SEO strategy, how do we start cranking it out? Great question…and hopefully I can at least point you in the right direction to find some answers.
I dont know about you, but I have yet to achieve consistent success using Googles content advertising network.
About a year ago when I first started dabbling in PPC, I naively decided to give it a try—having absolutely no clue what I was doing. Once I figured out I needed to drastically lower my bids as compared to search, I did have short-term success.
At the time, I chalked it all up to good content (as any good writer would do); but when the bottom fell out several months later and I found myself deleting content bids entirely, I decided I really had no idea what the content network was all about, and I stopped trying altogether. Sound familiar?
Since that time, things have improved. I think Im getting the gist of it now, as are some of my fellow employees using content bidding. Maybe it really is about good content; maybe its about minimizing bids; but then again, maybe Google is just improving its site matching process and boosting conversions along with it. (I tend to believe the latter, but then again, who knows?)
There really is an art to getting it right though, Im convinced about that. And Im determined to figure it all out—Google will not get the better of me!
Admit it. Being an affiliate can get a little lonely. You spend hours in front of your computer, creating websites, building PPC campaigns, trying to get links to your site…and you usually do it alone. But now you might not need to feel so alone after all.
One of the more visible affiliates experts out there, Scott Jangro, just created an impressive affiliate networking site called Bumpzee. The site lets you sign up, set up a profile, send messages to other Bumpzee contacts and manage those relationships. It also allows you to add your affiliate blog to the system and allows you to track and rate affiliate related stories a-la Digg.
While I am not a huge social networking site user, I am really excited about using Bumpzee. I see it as a way to build my network with other people in the search business and as a way to get more exposure for this blog and the InsureMe affiliate program.
For affiliates, I think it can be a great way to get in contact with other people in the industry that can help you learn and succeed. The one thing that is fairly consistent with the top individuals in the search and affiliate field is that they have a robust network of contacts and colleagues. I think there is something to that, and I think Bumpzee will be a great catalyst for network development in the affiliate world.
So if you have a couple minutes today, pop on over to Bumpzee and get signed up. Maybe your day won’t feel so lonely anymore…
That’s really what all the SEO stuff is all about, right? I mean, yes, there are on-page factors that you must optimize, and yes, your content must be decent…but if you know what you are doing you should have that all under control.
But links…that’s the hard part.
Let me be the first to admit that the thought of doing traditional link building (link begging, directory spamming, reciprocal linking, etc.) is about as attractive to me as a job with the department of sanitation’s port-a-potty division. This is partially because these types of link development schemes are going the way of the dinosaur, and partially because this stuff seems (and is) tedious…and tedium and James are rarely friends.
Last quarter, InsureMes CEO Tim McTavish, bet his employees that 90% of them wouldnt participate in InsureMe’s United Way charitable giving campaign. Much to Tim’s chagrin, we made it to 90%. This is a video of Tim paying the price for betting his full head of hair …
Giving to the less fortunate feels good. Giving the big boss man a mohawk feels even better. Happy Friday!
So if you are like me, taking on the new Yahoo search marketing platform was not only challenging, but painful. After talking to all the yahoo’s over at Yahoo for days on end (I think my record was 14 times in one day), I feel as though I can give some advice to those of you going through what I went though; and trust me I feel your pain.
First, when you log into your old Yahoo account (Overture), push the preview button! Don’t even think about upgrading until you have seen what Yahoo will do to your account. I think the hardest part of this preview is seeing how much Yahoo will mess up your account and realizing how much work you have ahead of you.
Matt Cutts has released a Google weather report (an announced change to the index or algorithm of Google) - and the search engine community is all abuzz. Overall the changes are generally cosmetic (toolbar and backlink updates). Still, it is always interesting to hear what is up at Google.
Here is a quick summary of the report:
The update is primarily a PageRank update and will also update data for link: and info: queries on Google.
All of the changes were already incorporated in their page scoring, so the effects on the rankings should be minimal.
There has been a change so that the site: operator will display regular results ahead of supplemental results. Matt also reminds people that supplemental results aren’t a bad thing and that the best way to get a page out of the supplemental results is by getting quality links to the supplemental page.
The freshness of supplemental results should continue to improve, since Google will be indexing those pages more often.
Google is pushing out data ever 1-2 days now, instead of every 3-4 weeks. This means we should see more variance in our rankings. I can attest that this is true, since I noticed that our rankings changes quite a bit on Sunday and Monday of this week.
So that is the report in a nutshell. Feel free to read the whole post here for all of Matt’s commentary.
I wanted to give everyone a heads-up that a few of us InsureMerians will be heading out the Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas on January 21st. We are hoping to get a chance to meet up with anyone who wants to meet with us while we are out there. If you want to get together, give me a call at 720-548-6190 or email me at jomdahl(at)insureme(dot)com.
The InsureMe posse will consist of Mike Sajdak (a.k.a. Big Bossman, a.k.a. CF Oh My Goodness), April Hartmeister (a.k.a. Apes), Eric Baliruno (a.k.a. The Man Who Cuts Checks) and James Omdahl (a.k.a. me).
From what I have heard, the Affiliate Summit is a great event and a great place for affiliate marketers to meet up and keep up with the latest and greatest trends in online marketing.
Also, we are pretty excited because we will have a booth in the Expo hall at the Affiliate Summit this year. Please make sure you stop by and check it out. We just designed the booth and it looks pretty darn cool.
Our affiliate manager April has been asking me to write this post for a while, so I figured today was as good a day as any.
One of the most common questions we get from affiliates is “who can I hire to do search engine optimization (SEO) for me?” This is a great question, since there are relatively few people out there who can take the time to learn about the art/science that is SEO. Like any field, SEO is something a person has to have a passion for in order to be successful. So if you don’t have the passion, outsourcing seems like the right thing to do.
Unfortunately, the SEO landscape is a dangerous one. While there are many people out there who know what they are doing, there are many, many more that don’t. For that reason, we don’t recommend anyone to do SEO for our affiliates. Sorry, I admit we are partially just covering our backsides on this one, but the truth is, you just never know who will be able to optimize your site.
Still, that doesn’t mean that you can’t hire an awesome SEO, it just means that we aren’t going to tell you who that awesome SEO is (although I will give you a list of some of the more respected SEOs at the end of this post). So in an attempt to avoid being totally unhelpful, I figured I would give you some things to consider when trying to hire an SEO. Here they are…
One of the questions that we get a lot from affiliates is “what is a good place to do pay-per-click (PPC) advertising that isn’t Google, Yahoo or MSN?” It’s a great question - surely there has to be some untapped alternatives to the big three, right? Well, I hate to say it, but in my experience, not really.
When writing for this blog I almost always leave out any discussion of advertising on second-tier search engines (search engines that are not the big three) - and I do this intentionally. While I admit that I have heard one or two positive comments about most of the second-tier engines, I usually hear horror stories. In my opinion (aside from a rare exception), the traffic coming from second-tier search engines tends to be pretty awful.
But why is that?
Well, I though about it for a while and here are some of the reasons that I can think of:
For a long time I tried to laugh off click fraud (nervous laughter actually). I used to regard click fraud as the cost of doing business in the PPC world. Then, I would try to rationalize that click fraud was a small problem that was being handled by the search engines to the best of their ability.
Over time though, I started to get the impression that Google and Yahoo might not be trying as hard as they need to clear up the problem. This became abundantly clear when we received refunds for “bad clicks” from Google that amounted to well under 1% of our total ad spend - even when the most conservative analysts figure click fraud is well above that number.
If you are a PPC advertiser, you are guaranteed to have had at least one memorable run-in with smack-you-in-the-face, super-obvious click fraud. For me, it was the addition of a new partner on Yahoo’s content network that led to an extra $2,000 of clicks in a twenty-four hour period. When I reported it, Yahoo! basically said “stuff happens” and did nothing about it. In the end, InsureMe had to eat the $2,000 and write it off as a lesson learned. (Lesson well learned - don’t trust Yahoo’s content partners).
As the money spent on PPC has increased dramatically over the years, so to have the number of unhappy/suspicious advertisers. Discontent is growing and it seems that we might be getting closer to the tipping point of PPC advertiser’s collective frustration with click fraud and the search engines denial of the problem. A leader in the crusade to get search engines more engaged in fighting click fraud is Jefferey Rohrs who, in a “Jerry McGuire moment,” wrote “The Sausage Manifesto.” (Get the .pdf version here).
If youre back at work after a long winter break (nap?) and trying to get back in the swing of things, youre not alone. As youve probably read in Jamess posts here on the blog, we were off work here at InsureMe for days on end during the holidays, and Denver has been covered in snow for more than two weeks now (with more to come this Friday).
After spending all that extra time over the holidays sleeping, eating and visiting with family and friends, Im sure were all in the same boat: groggy, bloated and wondering if well ever be able to gear back up to full productivity. I dont know about you, but I feel like my brain is still on vacation!
But as James also mentioned in a recent post, its never more important to get things cranking in your PPC accounts than in Q1 because this is the time when we can all see the fruits of our labor (so to speak). Fresh from their own holiday vacations, consumers are back online too—and ready to shop their insurance!
I wanted to point you to an interesting an technical) post over on Willliam Slawski’s blog, SEO by the Sea. William, God bless him, is both intelligent and patient enough to analyze Google patent applications, understand them (an achievement in itself) and share his findings with the rest of the world.
His recent post, Phrase Based Information Retrieval and Spam Detection, explains a recent patent application from Google that looks at controlling keyword stuffing and other blatant types of search engine spam through identification of related phrases. The post is very in-depth, and over my head at times, but the main point seems to be this:
From the foregoing, the number of the related phrases present in a given document will be known. A normal, non-spam document will generally have a relatively limited number of related phrases, typically on the order of between 8 and 20, depending on the document collection. By contrast, a spam document will have an excessive number of related phrases, for example on the order of between 100 and 1000 related phrases. Thus, the present invention takes advantage of this discovery by identifying as spam documents those documents that have a statistically significant deviation in the number of related phrases relative to an expected number of related phrases for documents in the document collection.
The way I see it, this is just another tool that Google can use to locate scraped and auto-generated spam pages. In the end, tools like this will make it more and more difficult for low-quality spam pages to slip through Google’s filters and rank well. This, in my opinion, is a good thing for web searchers and for search professionals like you and me.
BONUS: For another interesting read from SEO by the Sea, make sure you look at his Google Ad Configurations, Quality Scores, and Ad Types post. The post goes into some detail about the complexities behind the Google ad serving algorithm. Amazing stuff.
It seems that Mother Nature really didn’t want us working for the last couple of weeks. We had two blizzards that really snarled traffic here in the Denver area, and so InsureMe ended up having an unprecedented four snow days in the last couple of weeks. I am happy to say that the roads are finally passable (at least the major ones) and I think most of us made it out pretty much unscathed (I wish I could say the same for my car!)
The weather, combined with scheduled holidays, and vacations, has really made the last coupe weeks fairly unproductive for me. If you sent me an email and haven’t heard back yet, sorry about that. I hope to get replies to you by afternoon.
I hope everyone had a good holiday season and, if you are like me, you are ready to get back to work. And let me tell you, there is no better time to get back to work than right now. Traditionally, January is the best month for insurance leads, so hopefully in the next couple of days you will really start to see the money roll in.
I am going to start scanning around to see what is hot in the affiliate marketing space. If you have any hot topics you want me to post about, make sure you leave a comment.
Looking forward to another fun and profitable year with you in 2007!
Let’s admit it. We aren’t all writers. And for a lot of us, the idea of sitting down and writing content for our websites is about as attractive a concept as working the rhino enclosure at the zoo… it is really smelly in there.
Last week there was a good amount of buzz surrounding Google’s algorithm change that would help eliminate 
Affiliating ain’t easy.
Let me start this one off by saying that while I am a big proponent of linkbait, I can’t admit to ever having successfully produced any linkbait - so what I am sharing today comes from my research (read: reading blog posts) on the topic, not from hands-on experience. With that in mind, let’s do this…
Admit it. Being an affiliate can get a little lonely. You spend hours in front of your computer, creating websites, building PPC campaigns, trying to get links to your site…and you usually do it alone. But now you might not need to feel so alone after all.
Links. Links. Links.
Matt Cutts has released a Google weather report (an announced change to the index or algorithm of Google) - and the search engine community is all abuzz. Overall the changes are generally cosmetic (toolbar and backlink updates). Still, it is always interesting to hear what is up at Google.
I wanted to give everyone a heads-up that a few of us InsureMerians will be heading out the 
One of the questions that we get a lot from affiliates is “what is a good place to do pay-per-click (PPC) advertising that isn’t Google, Yahoo or MSN?” It’s a great question - surely there has to be some untapped alternatives to the big three, right? Well, I hate to say it, but in my experience, not really.
For a long time I tried to laugh off click fraud (nervous laughter actually). I used to regard click fraud as the cost of doing business in the PPC world. Then, I would try to rationalize that click fraud was a small problem that was being handled by the search engines to the best of their ability.
