Aaron Wall, the man behind the curtain at SEOBook, has updated one of his ultra helpful tools for your PPCers out there. The tool, called Bad Keyword and Number Stripper, will help you take those long keyword lists you pull from services like Wordtracker and scrub them for keywords and numbers that you don’t want included. As someone who has hand-scrubbed countless keyword lists, I highly recommend using an automated solution like Aaron’s.

Using the tool is pretty simple. First, make sure you have a keyword list. Second, go to the stripper tool’s site. Third, enter your keyword list into the “keyword list” section. Next, enter in keyword terms that you don’t want included in your list. This could include numbers, or off topic words (like “cattle insurance”), or swear words (like…well you know them). In our case, this could also mean trademarked terms that we don’t bid on like AARP, GEICO, Gerber, and GMAC. Once you have them all entered, you hit the “Clean Me Up, Scotty” button (nice touch) and viola! You have a clean keyword list.

Big ups to Aaron for providing this tool, and thanks to Danny Sullivan for pointing out the tool on the Daily Searchcast.

[Semi-related but unrelated note: Make sure you listen to yesterday’s Daily Searchcast – Matt Cutts co-hosts with Danny – pretty cool.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 09:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I think there is a general sense of Yahoo! distain in the InsureMe paid search department, and I have a feeling that we aren’t the only ones feeling a bit frustrated by big Y!. You see, after having to deal with the super fun (if your idea of fun is going to the dentist for a root canal) Panama update, our paid search team is still getting daily emails from Yahoo! telling them that a couple of our keywords are no longer acceptable. It’s not so much the fact that keywords are being dropped – it is more the idea of getting multiple emails on a daily basis telling us five of our tens of thousands of keywords are being removed. I mean, send a bulk email after you round up fifty words or something – anything less is just annoying.

But hey, we put up with these things because Yahoo has traffic…and traffic means money.

This is true, but after reading Apogee Weblog’s post, entitled Yahoo! has Nasty Sausage Ingredients, I think my disappointment in Yahoo! has reached a new level.

You see, Richard from Apogee did a little research into some of his client’s clicks that came from Yahoo! Search Marketing’s search PPC ads (not content match). The results were pretty scary. You see, he found between 9% to 46% of the traffic from Y!SM search was actually coming from parked domains. That’s right, parked domains – not exactly what I would consider “search” traffic. Here is the breakdown for his four clients:

Client A:
67% Yahoo! properties
9% parked domains

Client B:
60% Yahoo! properties
14% parked domains

Client C:
57% Yahoo! properties
31% parked domains

Client D:
41% Yahoo! properties
46% parked domains

Amazing, eh? I’m not really sure why Yahoo! would do this, except for the fact that they make more money by lumping garbage into the search category rather than content. The sad thing is, Yahoo! is already having enough trouble with their image in the search marketing community…and with all the time and money spent on Panama, you would think they would want to improve click quality for their advertisers. Doing so, and doing so publicly, would really help them stand out and build trust with advertisers. Beating Google isn’t going to happen by putting out a new ad platform like Panama, but providing advertisers with better-than-Google click quality would. Seems like short term greed has gotten in the way of long term success at Yahoo! once again.

To be fair, I am sure that Google is doing the same thing to advertisers…and we all know that contextual advertising on both platforms should be handled with great caution. But wouldn’t it be grand if we, as advertisers (and the reason these companies actually have money), could feel confident in the fact that “search” traffic is actually coming from search engines and “content” traffic is everything else? I don’t just think that would be grand, I think it is the right thing for the search engines to do.

Your thoughts?

[Quick Note: If the sausage reference threw you off, it has to do with the Sausage Manifesto – learn more about that here.]

[Also, thanks to the Cartoon Barry blog for pointing out this article.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An affiliate's job can be all consuming. When you love what you do like I do, it's not uncommon to get so super-focused that you loose all track of time, find yourself totally hyped up on caffeine, and eventually fall asleep at your computer in the middle of writing a sentence or coding text.

Indeed, many affiliates live, eat and breathe their jobs, often to the point of exhaustion. But if we want to stay truly productive, once in a while we need a mental reminder to rest, relax, take some time off and even sleep.

What's that, you say? Sleep? I don't need sleep!

Well, actually you do. Believe it or not, sleeping recharges your batteries, both mental and physical, and restores your energy so you can continue doing what you love doing (I hope!)—making a living as an affiliate.

Along those lines, I read an interesting post over at Bloglyne today on this particular subject—and there I saw a quote that caught my eye:

"Remember, we do not live to make money – we make money to live."

Though making money is fun—and can be addictive—it's easy to get so focused on financial success that we forget about our families, the fun things we used to do and, yes, sleep. So today I'm reminding you (and myself!): Take some time off, enjoy life and get plenty of rest. You might be amazed the good it'll do you!

Posted by Penny Hagerman at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This is in no way related to SEO, PPC or affiliate marketing. I just can’t think of anything worthwhile to write today.

Instead I will give you two things to look at. The first is a really smart post from Todd Malicoat about “new school” SEO – great stuff. The second is a video that depicts the Boston Tea Party in 16 seconds. And before we get a comment - yes, we know the video is awfully dumb. But sometimes dumb is a good way to start the weekend, no?

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A couple days back, Rand over at SEOmoz mentioned that he does not use the Google Sitemaps functionality in Google Webmaster Central, and that he thinks that most people don’t need to. It seems that that position was a bit controversial with some webmasters, while others wholeheartedly agreed. Read the whole post and the comments here.

For those of you who are totally lost, Google Sitemaps is a program that allows you to submit your web pages to Google for indexing. Google says this helps because:

Sitemaps helps speed up the discovery of your pages, which is an important first step in crawling and indexing your pages, but there are many other factors that influence the crawling/indexing processes. Sitemaps lets you tell us information about your pages (which ones you think are most important, how often the pages change), so you can have a voice in these subsequent steps.

So basically, it helps you control the crawling of your web pages. Sounds pretty good, no? Well, Rand says no. He points out that submitting a site map to Google will make it more difficult to find the pages in your site that don’t meet Google’s requirements for indexing. Also, he says that submitting through the Site Maps program leads to forcing not-so-hot content into Google…which might not be a good thing.

On the other side of the argument, Michael Gray says that he is a regular user of Google Site Maps, and he thinks there are plenty of benefits to submitting your site through the program.

Seems like the experts are all over the board on this one. Personally, I don’t use Site Maps, mainly because I feel like we are spidered adequately without it. I figure that if your site has good inbound links and an adequate internal linking structure, Google is going to find your pages.

But what do I know, eh?

What do you think? Are you using Google Site Maps?

Let us know in the comments.

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Just a quick post from me today – I was checking out the 5 Star Affiliate Programs blog today and ran across a post about a new keyword tool for search marketers looking for niches. The tool allows you to pull keywords from web sites and see thematically similar keywords. It also gives info on things like bid price and keyword trends. Using this info you may be able to find new niches to work.

The tool isn’t very polished, but it could certainly come in handy for working the “long-tail” terms.

Check out the tool site here, and make sure you watch the video to see it in action.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Now that Yahoo is becoming Google's stepchild, ad quality is increasingly important. If, like us, you've upgraded to the new platform and you're in the midst of sorting out the mess that's left, you may need help to get the most out of your campaigns.

Recently on its search marketing blog, Yahoo offered 5 best practices for making the most of your accounts. Try these tips to help improve your ads and start strategizing. (For more info, get explanations and the details here).

• Include keywords in your ad, and use the "insert keyword" feature
• Carefully determine keywords for your ad group.
• Use ad testing to learn which messages are performing best, based on click-through rate
• Use the excluded keyword feature to help optimize advanced match types, and
• Review current bids and set campaign budgets

After we upgraded our accounts, we couldn't believe some of the ads we saw representing our keywords; crazy stuff like dropped-off words and partial sentences. And I'm sure some of you have seen the same kinds of things.

What's the best way to deal with these problems? Take some time to go through your campaigns, one by one, and check out all your ads. Then follow these 5 best practices for optimum results. :)

Posted by Penny Hagerman at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Whenever I tell people about InsureMe’s affiliates and the financial success they are having, I often get the same comment – “Geeze, looks like I am in the wrong business.”

But are they really in the wrong business? Could anyone who wants to actually make it make it as an affiliate?

No way.

Successful affiliates are a rare breed, and for good reason. Successful affiliates are a lethal combination of a fantastic attitude, high intellect, and a relentless drive to be the best.

I was reminded of this when I ran across a blog post from Michael Gray (a.k.a. Grey Wolf) that really got me thinking about the successful affiliates I know. The post, titled Finding Your Inner Jerry McGuire, explains that if we really want to succeed, we need to work to be the best.

Here’s an excerpt:

…if you’re going to do something do it with gusto. if you’re going to be a filthy rotten low down no good dirty spammer, then by gosh do it right! Crank up your auto-gen bots and churn and burn through domains like Sherman burned through Georgia. if you’re going to go the content route spend the time build it right, do the research, stomp all over the person who holds the spot ahead of you. They have one page you have three, they have ten pages you have thirty, don’t settle for second. Don’t whine and complain that nobody pays attention or links to you. You want links, you want attention, stand up and do something hard, do something exceptional, do something amazing, do something note worthy, do something impossible to ignore, do anything other than being a crybaby.

If you’re out there trying to make it as an affiliate, but you’re having a hard time, read that quote at least ten times. Better yet, tape it to your desk. Even better, memorize it.

Don’t be a halfway affiliate and then get frustrated when things aren’t working out. Go all out. Don’t just build a site – build a great site. Don’t just read one book on PPC and get frustrated when PPC doesn’t work – read five books, and blogs, and listen to podcasts – immerse yourself in this stuff and really go full bore. Take risks. Try the things that other people tell you are crazy.

That’s what the super affiliates I know are doing. That’s why they are so successful at what they do. That’s what you need to do to be a great affiliate as well.

So are you ready to be a Jerry McGuire affiliate? Are you ready to show YOU the money?

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I found a blog polling application today, so I thought I would conduct a little poll. The question of the day – Second tier search platforms, are they garbage or are they complete garbage? Tell us what you think!

Ok, so that might not be totally fair. I have heard of people having success with second tier engines, but it usually pretty hit and miss. As I mentioned in a past blog post, at InsureMe we tend to focus on the big two (Google and Yahoo) since that's where the quality (and quantity) traffic is and that's where quality control is most refined (notice I didn’t say perfect).

With that in mind, one of our affiliate partners (John) was kind enough to post his personal successes (and failures) with various PPC platforms. A good list to check out before you jump into relationships with the smaller players. John also makes a good point that the second tier engines work differently for different verticals, so if you can afford to test them out for different products, you might want to.

Alright, happy Monday and have a great week of affiliatin’!

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Google just seems to be full of new and fun tools this week in the PPC world. As Penny mentioned in her article yesterday, they put in new quality score columns this week and are going to start with a new algorithm next week. And today we got email stating that they are going to allow us to pause and un-pause keywords. . I think they just want to keep us on our toes!

Now this pausing/un-pausing keyword tool might not get everyone as excited as I am, but it’s definitely going to be a time saver in the long run. If you guys run your PPC campaigns like we do then you know if a term has a high cost per conversion or no real conversion at all, then you delete it (after trying to fix the landing page and what not).

Well, we think the keywords that we start off with are pretty good keywords (we wouldn’t bid on them in the first place if we didn’t) so even when we delete a term we always keep them in a our script to do’s (Cassie talked about this last week), but some times you have to delete up to 50 terms in one Ad group and retyping all these out and recording them gets a little tiring. I feel like today Google read my mind.

Now we don’t have to delete the terms, we can just pause them and if we can ever really figure out what Google actually likes then we can turn them back on. Talk about a great Friday!

Now I may not be happy with Google next week when they change their algorithm and our Ads get messed up again- As for today I am happy as a clam with them (although I don’t think clams can actually be happy doing PPC…but does that really matter?)!

Happy Searching!

Posted by Brittany Heidtke at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some of our regular readers may have noticed the addition of the Bumpzee button to the InsureMe Affiliate Blog yesterday and I figure I should explain what it is and why I added it. (If you haven’t noticed it, it’s the green square at the end of each post).

As I posted last month, Bumpzee is an affiliate marketing community that is kind of a hybrid between Digg, Myspace, and MyBlogLog. In the last month the Bumpzee affiliate community has grown from one member to over 200 members. What’s really exciting is that the members of the community are a who’s-who of the affiliate marketing industry – so networking opportunities abound. But the site is not just a great place to network; it’s also a great place to catch up on the best affiliate news, tips and discussions.

Like affiliate specific version of Digg, Bumpzee aggregates affiliate marketing related blog posts and allows Bumpzee community members to vote for their favorite stories by “bumping” them. If a story is bumped enough it has a chance to end up on the front page of the Bumpzee site, and in turn, the bumped blog post will get more exposure in the Bumpzee community.

Since I’m not too proud to ask for help (especially when it comes to getting more eyeballs on our blog), here’s what I’m going to ask you to do today. If you are an active InsureMe Affiliate Blog reader, and you would like to help support this blog beyond leaving comments (which are more appreciated than you can imagine), please take a minute and join the Bumpzee community by going here. (Of course, joining is free and should stay that for the foreseeable future).

Once you are signed up, you will be able to hit the “Bumpzee” button when enjoy one of our blog posts. By bumping posts, you help the Affiliate Blog get more exposure with other affiliate bloggers. By increasing exposure you’ll help us get more comments, more blog activity and, in general, help make this blog even better.

Beyond helping us, I think you will really enjoy being a part of Bumpzee, and I think you’ll get a lot of value out of being a part of the community. I use Bumpzee daily to find the most relevant affiliate search industry news, tips, and to get inspiration for blog posts.

So whaddaya say? Could you help us out and join Bumpzee today?

Thanks!

Posted by James Omdahl at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Working in PPC requires a lot of flexibility. Just when you think you have things figured out, one of the search
engines decides to switch things up, leaving you to experiment and find out just how the latest and greatest functionality performs on your own.

Well, guess what? Google's at it again. Following its new quality score implementation in August 2005 and subsequent improvements to its landing page algorithm last year, the big "G" is gearing up for two more changes:

1. The addition of an optional quality score column within ad groups that will help you track keyword quality levels, to take place late this week and
2. A change to the quality score algorithm that controls minimum keyword bids, to be implemented next week.

Google says it hopes these newest changes will "provide the highest quality ads to our users, while also providing you with the highest quality leads to maintain ROI."

How will this affect your accounts?

According to G, you may see either an increase or decrease in your minimum keyword bids. If this happens and your keywords become inactive for search, it recommends you choose more specific key terms—or edit your ads to make them more relevant to your keywords—rather than just raising minimum bids. Otherwise, it's all about tracking.

Here's to change (come on, smile! :) Let's just hope this time it's as beneficial as it sounds. To get the scoop straight from the horse's mouth, check out yesterday's Inside AdWords blog post here.

Posted by Penny Hagerman at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was checking out a post over at Keith’s Affiliate Marketing Blog that got me thinking…as affiliates, what traits make up the ideal affiliate valentine? No I’m not talking about valentines in a romantic sense – I mean from a business perspective. What makes you love an affiliate program?

As a company that runs an affiliate program of our own, we pride ourselves on trying to meet and exceed our affiliate’s needs. However, we always wonder if there is something else that we could be doing to get even more affiliate love.

So today I’m hoping we can get a little reader participation and affiliate input in the comments section of this post. I would love it if we could get some affiliates to share what they consider the most desirable traits of an ideal affiliate program.

Think about your favorite affiliate programs that you work with. What is it that makes that program so special? Is it the payout frequency and method of payment? Is it their payout structure? Do they have reporting features that make your life easier? Are there whistles and bells that your favorite affiliate program offers that no one else has?

Please take a second and let everyone know what you find to be your ideal affiliate valentine. If you do, we promise to love you for it!

Posted by James Omdahl at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

I’ve exchanged a couple of emails with Jason Calacanis regarding yesterday’s post and he denies that he is motivated by links.

Actually, in his own words, he could care less about links. When asked why he writes what he writes he said:

I just blog about what i'm interested in as honestly as i can...sometime people respond, sometimes they don't.. i really don't care.

So there you have it, folks.

Thanks to Jason for taking the time to respond.

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Passion – it’s what makes living worthwhile. And based on a blog post from the Five Star Affiliate blog’s Linda Buquet, it’s also what helps make super Affiliates successful.

But that conjecture makes you wonder how a company like InsureMe has successful affiliates if passion is really an important part of the equation? I mean, no one in their right mind gets excited about insurance, right?

Well, yes and no.

I will tell you that some of our successful affiliates actually do have some experience in the insurance field – and being someone who once was an insurance agent – I can attest that there are people who are really and truly passionate about insurance. Remember, there are people who passionate about collecting hubcaps too.

What about the “others”?

Today I don’t want to write about the insurance lovers out there (God bless ‘em). I want to write about the rest of you. I want to write about the affiliates who have absolutely no passion for insurance and never plan on having a passion for it. Based on Linda post you’ve gotta wonder - is it possible to be successful as an affiliate in the insurance space without a passion for insurance?

You bet it is, but you still need to have a passion – just not for insurance. But first…

Why insurance?

Chances are, if you are sending companies insurance traffic, you are doing it because:

1. insurance affiliate programs have higher payouts than other programs
2. most insurance programs are lead generation, not sales related – so no one has to purchase anything before you get paid (read: easier)

These are two very good reasons to be involved in the insurance vertical, indeed. I mean, it has got to be a lot harder to get a person to purchase a pair of Nikes online than it is to get them to fill out a form, right? (Jangro, correct me on this if I’m wrong).

Back to the passion part…

So if you’re not passionate about insurance, it probably isn’t the best way to get into affiliate marketing, right?

Maybe not. But here’s a good story…

I was hanging with a couple of our affiliates out a Pub Con a couple years back. The conversation got to the topic of how they got their start in affiliate marketing. Astonishingly, both of them said that they were big RC car fans, and ended up building web sites around their passion for remote control cars. After that, they joined RC car affiliate programs and started to make a bit of money off their sites.

Eventually, both of the affiliates lost their passion for RC cars. And in both cases their passion for RC cars was replaced by a real passion for affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a passion too…

So I guess what I am trying to convey here is that when you are starting out as an affiliate, it is a good idea to start with a passion. Trying to get your search marketing juices flowing is a lot easier when you are having fun building a site that gets you excited. Chances are, if you start your affiliate adventure by promoting insurance, you might get burnt out pretty quickly and go back to your day job.

However, by promoting the activity/item/service you are passionate about through affiliate marketing, there is a chance that your passion will eventually become affiliate marketing itself. When that happens, it won’t be the activity/item/service that will stoke your passion, but the process and results will.

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Usually I try to stay clear of posting on search marketing drama, but today I want to make an exception. For those of you who are new to this business, you might not know that the small size and highly connected nature of the in the search marketing industry usually lends itself to fairly regular in-fighting. Frankly, it’s kinda like Springer but online and with a bunch of well-off computer geeks.

Please don’t think that these fight happen because search marketers are bad people, or because they suffer from a digital form of ‘roid rage. Truthfully, the drama in this industry is mainly all about one thing…links.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, starting controversy is one of many (and possibly easiest) ways to get links to pointed to your web site. And if you are picking fights to get links, you might as well do it with the people who: a) have blogs, and b) have a good amount of “link juice.” And ladies and gents, the most blogged and juiced industry out there is the online marketing community.

Last week, a familiar villain in the online community must have decided that he could use a few hundred more links, so he sat back and wrote a post that was bound to infuriate search marketers everywhere. The post was called Why people hate SEO and the author was none-other than Jason Calacains.

Now for those of you who don’t know of Calacanis, all you need to know is he is kind of a roving execu-brat who wonders around the internet world sharing extreme opinions and picking fights with folks to make sure his name gets onto blogs, newspapers, magazines, etc. (His background is in publishing, so he knows how to work the system).

Last week, Calacanis ticked off the entire SEO community by saying “90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil salesman “ (this was after saying the SEO was B.S. in December at the SES Chicago conference in a room packed full of SEOs). Calacanis pointed to this fantastically terrible video of an SEO selling his wares as proof…

(you gotta admit that this video is pretty funny…in a sad way)

Needless to say, this made the SEO community flip out, especially Danny Sullivan, who sat down and wrote up a massive post about how Jason is a fool.

Aside from Danny’s post, pretty much every other major SEO blog pointed a link to Jason’s post and gave Jason a piece of their mind…and in turn, gave Jason hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars of worth of links to his site. ShoeMoney, another infamous controversy-for-links master, does a good job of pointing out the success of Jason’s link baiting – giving the example of the 64 links Jason got in just 24 hours.

This isn’t the first time Jason has provoked a group with link juice for a load of links. I saw Jason do it at the Blogging Business Summit this year, where he stood up in front of some of the biggest bloggers in the world (and many of the smaller ones) and basically said if you can’t get thousands of visits per day to your blog, then you suck. Needless to say, Mr. Calacanis ended up with another deluge of incredible links from this stunt.

So what have we learned? Well, first off, Jason Calacanis has profited well from his bratty persona, and there is no doubt in my mind that he will continue to provoke people to get links and stay relevant. Second, if you want to get some links to your site, and you want to do it by ticking people off, you might want to target the SEO community…it’s there that you’ll get the most bang for your buck.

Of course, if you are a lover, not a fighter, you could always paint your URL on your body and go streaking through an SES keynote…but you didn’t hear that from me…

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Last Sunday millions of Americans watched as the Indianapolis Colts and Chicago Bears battled it out for the NFL championship. But the highlight for many wasn't actually the game—it was, instead, the notorious game-stopping commercials that kept us all riveted, eyes peeled on our TV sets.

The lengths to which advertisers will go to in order to get their products before the public eye during this highly-viewed sporting event just amaze me. And the cost associated with that advertising: Millions of dollars for one 30-second spot? Yikes! Those dollar signs followed by all those zeros are enough to make anyone hyperventilate.

But just as marketers for those big-name companies must watch their TV advertising budgets, so must those of us in online marketing watch ours.

What's the best way to do this? Well, some strategies include:

1. Setting specific start and end dates for our ads
2. Using geo-targeting to reach the right audience at the lowest possible cost
3. Setting manageable daily, weekly or monthly campaign expenditure levels
4. Strategically positioning ourselves in search engine results using positioning and bidding tools
5. Tracking results and cost per conversion using script tracking tools

I heartily recommend you make use of these budget-busters this year. Whether you're an affiliate or the owner of a large corporation, these kinds of tools can help you keep profits up and expenses down when it comes to online advertising—and next year you'll be watching the game knowing they're spending millions and you're not! :)

Posted by Penny Hagerman at 03:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Clean Up Your Act With Some Quick & Easy Organizational Tools!

I think we can all agree that PPC advertising can at times be a bit overwhelming. There really is no one way to do it or to know exactly what is going to happen the next day. I just want to help you organize yourself and your campaign on a daily basis.

We look at our results everyday, which helps stop immediate damage, but can be very time consuming. So here are two tools you can use called Script to do’s and A-B Testing to help make every day a little better.

Script to Do's help you make changes to your campaigns everyday to keep up with the changing times. Also by tracking what you do, you can see when the last time you changed an ad or reviewed a particular account was.

A-B Testing is for best practices. This way you can compare ads in the same ad group and find out what way gets the better click through rate. You only have 2 short sentences to sell someone…no pressure! This tool helps you track every time you want to compare something to see which ad is better. *Caution* - Just remember to only change one small variable at a time.

I realize you probably aren’t saying “oh my gosh, I can’t believe I never thought of this’, because I’m sure some similar idea came to your mind. I just want to make sure it gets put down on paper, or computer…it does help!

Posted by Cassie Carson at 02:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When you think content bids do the words garbage, junk, and worthless leads come to mind? Well my friend, I am here to persuade you the other way…at least when it comes to using Google’s content bid. Well, unless you have money to throw away then go ahead and crank up your Yahoo bid and see how much money you can lose in one day!

I’ve recently found that Google’s content bids, on terms that have longer tails or on terms that aren’t really getting that many impressions, convert really well. What I would suggest is starting off slow. Only do one ad campaign that you are having trouble with and adjust the content bid to something similar to what you have your search bid set to and see what happens. This should increase the amount of impressions you get and if it’s similar to whats going on with my accounts, it magically converts better than on search.

If at first you don’t succeed…try, try again! I feel like with everything having to do with PPC you have to constantly watch over your accounts and if the content bid doesn’t work on one ad campaign, it doesn’t mean it won’t work with another. That’s what’s going on with our campaigns at least; some terms convert like crazy on content and some terms are just not meant to be searched on the internet. It’s a lot of guess and check in the PPC world, but isn’t that what makes it fun?

I think many of you are skeptical of using content bids—and rightfully so…burn me once- shame on you, burn me twice- shame on me…but it is something that you may want to look into. I’m a believer!

Posted by Brittany Heidtke at 02:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don’t know about you, but I’m not exactly a web designer. Far from it actually. And I would guess that a majority of affiliate marketers aren’t either. However, that doesn’t stop many of us from sitting down and attempting to create our own web sites…often with disastrous results.

In the three years I have been in this business I have seen some of the most awful web sites imaginable – but I can’t really blame people. Designing a good looking web site is hard, and is usually best left to a pro, but I know everyone can’t afford to outsource. So we try our best, and hope things come out alright.

If you are currently in the process of putting together a site, and you are in the sweet-spot between crying and dropping your computer off an overpass, take a second and read through 8 Web Design Tactics to Help You When You’re Stuck from SEOmoz. The article is written by Matt Inman who is behind the very lovely SEOmoz site, so he knows what he is talking about.

Matt gives these eight tactics for getting your design back on track:

1. Design from the inside out – don’t start by designing the header, focus on the inside of the page and work your way out
2. Sketch something – sketch your ideas before you start banging away on your computer
3. Seek inspiration offline – check out real life products for design inspiration. Maybe your next site would kick tail if it looked like a Cap’n Crunch box (you never know)
4. Learn to let go – if something isn’t working or doesn’t look good, trash it and move on
5. Step away from the computer – make sure you take some breaks and let your design sit for a while. This will help you look at it more objectively.
6. Be absorbent – find designs you like and mimic (I didn’t say copy) them
7. Don’t be a one-hit-wonder – try new things and don’t get into a design rut. This means you affiliate guy whose sites have looked the same since 2000.
8. Seek input from others – find people you trust and ask them what they think. Use this tip sparingly.

Make sure you peep the full post over at SEOmoz.

Also, congrats to Rand at SEOmoz on his recent creative proposal and engagement. Way to go!

Posted by James Omdahl at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since our blog is less than reliable today, I figured I would put up some quick posts to link bait articles.

The first article is a good intro and guide to link baiting. As Todd Malicoat said “If you can’t figure things out with Andy’s guide to linkbaiting, then you’re probably not gonna catch on.” So check out Andy’s guide here and see if you can figure it out.

Also, make sure you check out this article from the O.G. linker Eric Ward titled The Links That Can’t Be Baited. Eric makes a good point on how there is a difference between links generated from link baiting and those that come from good old fashioned link-begging. It sounds like the smart money is on combining baiting and begging to get the maximum result.

Finally, if you are getting serious about link baiting, brush up on your headline writing by reading 10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas that Work. This Copyblogger article has to be the most referenced link bait article - even though it doesn’t mention link bait once.

So that’s the three. Enjoy the reading and happy baiting.

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hey Affiliate Blog readers. Just wanted to let you know that this blog might be going up and down for the next day or so. It turns out that our host, Mosso, has been having issues that have led to a couple days of server outages. Word is their whole team is working to fix the problem…and if you are reading this it looks like they have things working for now.

Sorry about the inconvenience. It seems that no matter what hosting company you use you are going to have days like this.

To make things up to you, here is a picture of me and one of my co-workers Jeb all dressed up in our finest Scandinavian pop-group outfits. And yes, the green thing is indeed a man cocoon.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have said it before and I will say it again – links are REALLY important in the world of SEO. And until yesterday, you never really had a very good way to accurately tell how many links Google indexed for your web site. Sure, you could try to use the “link:” operator - but the links list that was shown was incomplete, so it was pretty much useless.

But now Google has released new link reporting tools under its Webmaster Central service. Once you have logged in and verified that you are the owner of your site, you will be able to:

• View a fairly complete list of the external links Google has indexed from your site
• View a list of the internal links Google has found on your site
• See what pages you have external links pointing to
• See a “last found” date for your links so you can see the last time that link was indexed
• Download a list of links from an entire web site

Overall, this is a pretty cool addition to Webmaster Central, and it is thoughtful (not sure if that is the right word) of Google to make this data only accessible to the site owner. If anything, it will give me one less reason to go to Yahoo! for link data. Yay!

To get a detailed rundown of the new link tools, and some commentary on the pluses and minuses of the tools from the Godfather Danny Sullivan, check out the Search Engine Land post on the topic here.

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)