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.]
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:
An affiliates job can be all consuming. When you love what you do like I do, its 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.
Whats that, you say? Sleep? I dont 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.
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?
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:
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.
Now that Yahoo is becoming Googles stepchild, ad quality is increasingly important. If, like us, youve upgraded to the new platform and youre in the midst of sorting out the mess thats 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).
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.
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!
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).
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).
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? Googles 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:
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
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.”
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!
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.
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.
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 wasnt 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.
Whats the best way to do this? Well, some strategies include:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Congrats to Vinny Lingham and the incuBeta team for getting $3.7 million from HBD Venture Capital. I am excited to see what incuBeta can do with the extra money, as I am always impressed with the vision and multinational focus of the incuBeta crew.
Whenever I explain what an affiliate marketer is to friends and family I am often asked to describe what an average affiliate marketer is like. Usually, this leaves me at a bit of a loss since the affiliate marketing community tends to be fairly diverse. And these days the industry seems to be getting even more diverse (especially when it comes to gender, thank goodness).
I ran across this post at Shawn Collins’ affiliate blog that talks about a recent survey that tried to get a grip on who affiliate marketers really are. The survey was conducted with 1,500 UK affiliates and asked questions like gender, average income, employment status, and main method of marketing.
Since the actual survey is password protected (so uncool), I will point out a few of the more interesting stats and let you check Shawn’s post for more:
If you are reading this blog right now, you are likely on the hunt. A hunt for search marketing information.
But let’s admit it, reading blogs can get a little tiresome at times. What’s worse, reading blogs requires almost complete focus - meaning you can’t really do a whole lot of multitasking when reading. If you are like me, you feel like you want to learn stuff about search marketing, but do it through a more passive medium.
The Godfather of Search, Danny Sullivan, sits down every day and records a 30 - 40 minute rundown of all the hot things going on in search marketing. Danny can be a bit wacky at times…and the show is recorded over the phone (Danny lives in the UK)…but when it comes to getting a caught up with search, the Daily SearchCast can’t be beat.
I like to listen to it on my commute to work, or when I am at the gym (but I am pretty sure dorking-out on the SearchCast counteracts any exercise I am doing.)
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.
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.
Google just seems to be full of new and fun tools this week in the PPC world. As Penny mentioned in her 
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).
I was checking out 
Passion - it’s what makes living worthwhile. And based on a 
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 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.
Since our blog is less than reliable today, I figured I would put up some quick posts to link bait articles.
Whenever I explain what an affiliate marketer is to friends and family I am often asked to describe what an average affiliate marketer is like. Usually, this leaves me at a bit of a loss since the affiliate marketing community tends to be fairly diverse. And these days the industry seems to be getting even more diverse (especially when it comes to gender, thank goodness).
