This might be old news to a lot of you, but there is a bit of buzz in the search marketing blogosphere about the end of “set it and forget it” pay-per-click marketing campaigns.

Now some of you PPC whipper-snappers might be wondering if you could ever just set up a PPC account and make money without any upkeep – but take it from old man Omdahl, the answer is yes. Back in the olden days (four years ago), we set up a Google account and after building it up, the thing just sat around and made money. We rarely touched it, and it seemed like if we did make changes, it hurt us more than it helped. So we set it and forgot about it…and counted the cash coming it.

I’m not going to lie to you - it ruled.

But I things started changing a couple years back. As time went on, we noticed the account was changing. Our return on the Google account we had “forgotten” about slowly diminished. Eventually, the money we were making off of the account became fairly insignificant, and other sites we promoted started surpassing it in income and ad placement.

The set it and forget it days were over. And we had to reconsider our approach…as did most PPC marketers. PPC could no longer be a passive activity…it took effort, time and knowledge.

These days, committing to a pay-per-click account is like committing to having a puppy. Pay-per-click accounts need regular attention, proper care, and an occasional bath.

Actually, after interacting with Google for a number of years, our PPC team is convinced that if a Google AdWords account is likened to a puppy, it should be compared to a slightly depressed, ADHD dachshund with a photographic memory that somehow produces cash. If the puppy existed, I have a feeling it would look like this:

I’m skurred.

Read more about the end of set and forget PPC from Lisa Barone over at the Bruce Clay Blog.

Posted by James Omdahl at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Question: Why Bother with Smaller PPC Search Engines?

Answer: I have no idea.

End of blog post.

Just kidding…actually, most people who do PPC always have a nagging feeling that they are missing out on some magical pile of free money that they could get from advertising on second tier search engines. Eventually, that nagging gets to us and we take the plunge and sink some bucks into trying out some of the beautiful losers of the search world.

I’m currently in that boat, as are some of our PPC folks here at InsureMe. I’m sad to report that my experience so far has been very similar to past experiences with second tier engines. From talking to other advertisers who have tried to scratch that second tier itch, it seems that there is a common pattern to how the second tier’s traffic comes in. I’m now referring to this experience as the “Second Tier Death Spiral” and it goes a little something like this:

1. You open an account, enter in a few keywords to see if working with the search engine is worth your while, and wait.
2. You check your stats and after a day or two, things look promising. You are turning a profit, albeit a small one, and you figure that putting some more time into your account will be worthwhile (even if working with the second tier company is a total pain in your backside).
3. You add more keywords using the best practices you have learned from your successes with Google and Yahoo!...you wait.
4. You check your stats after a couple of days and you are now hemorrhaging money…conversion has dropped wildly…you are suddenly upside-down.
5. You pull back bids, shut off keywords, and try to return your account to profitability.
6. You fail. Conversion continues to decline. You wonder where all this new garbage traffic is coming from.
7. You spend a month trying to get your deposit refunded from the search engine.

Sound familiar?

But you don’t have to take my word for it – our affiliate, my friend, and International Man of Mystery Magnus Wester forwarded me a link to a report from Marketing Experiments called Small PPC Search Engines Revisited. The report went out and tested various small search engines to see if they could get some positive returns. In the end, the report concludes:

While the performance of the small engines was disappointing overall, this testing provided a number of worthwhile insights. We were able to establish profitable campaigns for two of these companies, though the results were tenuous due to low volume.

Now I know that this conclusion doesn’t say “stay away from these bottomless pits of despair,” and like John Hasson points out in a past blog post, a lot of these second tier engines may do well in specific niches – but as I brought up last week, you really need to ask yourself if working on small engines is going to get you a better Return On Effort (ROE) than a Google are Yahoo account. Chances are, the answer is no.

So with all that said, here’s to the Second Tier Death Spiral, the Beautiful Losers of Search, and the fact that I know that by the end of the day, I will have opened another second tier search account.

What can I say? I still believe in that magical pile of second tier free money…

[Image Credit - The Beautiful Losers logo is from the Beautiful Losers book.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don’t know how Scott Jangro finds the time, but he continues to delight the BUMPzee community with frequent upgrades to the site. Aside from some very nice aesthetic upgrades, the new features include:

Zeeing – it’s BUMPzee’s answer to Twitter, but hopefully it will be a little less annoying (no frequent cat location upadates, etc.)

Two new communities – BUMPzee now has the “How to Be Successful Online” and “Next Gen Marketing” communities. If you have a blog that fits into either of these categories, make sure you submit it for inclusion.

New homepages for the communities – the new homepages include a lot more information and links to various stories, the five most recent “Zees,” as well as other community information.

The ability to start your own community – this one is pretty neat, although currently it is only invite only. Hopefully in the coming months we will start seeing even more growth in this area.

If you still haven’t taken the time to stop into BUMPzee, please do. I know that it has become my favorite place to go for affiliate related news, tips, information and blog fodder.

So what are you waiting for? Go to BUMPzee now!

Posted by James Omdahl at 09:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling a little smacked-down today. You see, I didn’t sleep very well last night, and I wasn’t sure why until I got up and learned about this. Yes, another Ferrari Enzo has met an untimely death…and that gives James a restless sleep. (No need to comment…I am fully aware I am a nerd.)

So today, instead of waxing poetically about the state of the search industry (har), I’ve decided to pass you on to a site that both educates and entertains. I give you the Search Engine Smackdown.

Big ups to Search Engine Land for the point.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’ve heard various reports of Google testing different colors for their top AdWords banner, but never actually saw one of the tests myself, that is, until last week. It seems that for some reason our CFO Mike has been tagged for yellow AdWords ads, as seen in the screen capture below.

While I know that it won’t happen, I’d love to see Google publish the click-through results from the yellow ads. On one hand I think it could increase clicks because the yellow makes those listing really stand out. On the other hand I wonder if making the ads stand out cause people to avoid them.

Your thoughts?

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We’re in the process of putting together a number of how-to videos for our affiliate web site that will help our affiliates take advantage of some of the more advanced functionality our affiliate program offers (auto cobranding, PPC conversion tracking, etc.). In the midst of doing all that, I put together this…ahem…movie trailer to help get the word out about InsureMe.

I know it is pretty cheesy - hence the “InsureMe Cheeseball Productions” you see at the start – but I hope it will show people why some of the rockinest affiliates are working with us.

Please enjoy, give some BUMPzee bump-action, and forward it to the people you love…or something like that. Happy Friday.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I am listening to Affiliate Arbitrage – Winning Bets in Paid Search session at eComXpo right now, and something was brought up by Vinny Lingham that really resonated with me. Vinny, one of the more advanced affiliate marketers on the planet, pointed out that succeeding in the pay-per-click market is not really all about return on investment, but about return on effort (ROE).

In my experience in this business, the affiliates with an eye for ROE are the most successful. ROE is all about working smart – getting the projects done that will have the most meaningful impacts on your bottom line, and knowing how to spot and drop projects that will have little or no impact.

Examples of ROE Decisions

A good way to illustrate ROE is to look at some of the decisions that affiliates are faced with on a daily basis. Questions like:

Should I work on building a Google AdWords account that has a massive volume of clicks and high click charges or should I work with a smaller PPC company who has barely any traffic but low click charges? (Answer: The highest ROE would be with Google since they will give you access to the biggest audience.)

Should I spend four hours writing custom ads for my Yahoo PPC account or four hours writing custom ads for my Ask PPC account? (Answer: Writing Yahoo ads will provide a higher ROE since your Yahoo ads will reach more people than Ask.)

Is it better to spend a week developing a cool Flash based banner for my new affiliate web site, or should I make a static banner and spend time building quality landing pages? (Answer: Skip the Flash, which has a lower chance of increasing revenue for you, and focus on building a good landing pages, which should help you make more money.)

You get the point. We all have a limited amount of time in the day, so making the most of it by working smart can mean the difference between success and failure.

ROE Questions

Before you start working on your next PPC project, ask yourself the following questions to make sure you are working on a high ROE project:

• Is this project targeting a large enough audience to be worth the time invested?
• Are their larger audiences I can tap into with other projects?
• Do I see the amount of time being spent on this project paying for itself in financial returns?
• Will this project teach me something that will help me be more successful in the future?
• Are there other projects that could make a bigger impact for the same amount of effort?
• Am I avoiding a higher ROE project because it is the less enjoyable than my current project? If so, what can I do to make the higher ROE project enjoyable?
• If you were to pay someone to do this project, how much would you pay them? Would it be your most valuable project or would there be something you would pay more for?

Hopefully by asking yourself these questions you will be able to take an objective look at the work you are doing and find your highest ROE projects.

[UPDATE: Make sure you check out Vinny’s post on ROE for a detailed example of why making good ROE decisions is essential to your affiliate success.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Have you ever considered how your site visitors feel when they land on your homepage? Do they feel relaxed enough to cruise around, read your content and start the lead process—or does what they see make them immediately bounce?

Those first impressions have a lot to do with how long visitors stay on your site—and even more do do with conversion. According to Todd Follansbee, a user experience expert with Web Marketing Resources, anxiety is one of the biggest reasons visitors fail to convert.

You and I can relate to the truth in that, can't we? Let's face it, we're all surrounded by phishing scams, identity theft and viruses these days, and all those things make us uneasy when it comes to interacting online. But if you work to reduce anxiety on your site, Follansbee says you'll establish credibility and increase conversion considerably—putting money in your pocket in the process.

So what kinds of things make people nervous when they hit your site?

• Poor spelling, grammar and navigation. Being a copywriter, this is my personal pet peeve! There's nothing less professional than misspelled words or poor use of punctuation.
• No "Contact Us" link on the homepage. Why should they trust you if they can't even ask a question?
• Omitted information needed for product selection. Why would they complete the process if they can't find what they need to know?
• Lengthy, complex forms asking for unnecessary information. Only require essential information—nothing more, nothing less!
• Lack of a secure transaction server. They need reassurance that their personal information won't be floating around out in cyberspace somewhere.
• Terms and conditions that seem unethical or deceptive. If you claim it, follow through on it!
• Unexpected redirects outside your domain. This causes uncertainty about who they're really dealing with.

To reduce anxiety and make visitors feel more at home, thus aiding in conversion, Follansbee recommends:

• A professional-looking, clean site with clear messages and easy navigation. These contribute to positive user experience.
• A clear privacy policy statement that outlines how personal information will be used.
• Logos and links that lend credence and credibility to your site.
• Timely and relevant testimonials. This is one of the best ways to calm consumer fears.
• Claims that can be substantiated on your site—not empty promises.
• Full information disclosure. This can be accomplished by using hyperlinks to more detailed pages if you're concerned about keeping visitors on-track.
• Contact information with names, phone numbers and pictures.

Anxiety presents a serious issue for affiliate marketers. But as you start to change your site for the better, you should see conversion increase and bounce rates decrease—and that's what it's all about. :)

Posted by Penny Hagerman at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Searching around this morning it looks like a number of the affiliate/search marketing experts have put in their two cents about Google CPA ads’ potential to cripple affiliate networks. In general, a majority of people are skeptical that CPA ads will have much of an effect on the affiliate industry…but with that said, there are some people that see tougher times ahead for companies like Commission Junction, Linkshare, and the smaller CPA imitators out there.

Here are some of the posts I ran across this morning:

Scott Jangro's Take
Andy Beal's Take
Shoemoney's Take
Michael Arrington's Take
Wayne Porter's Take
Sam Harrelson's Take
Shawn Collins' Take
More Coverage at Techmeme

So what do you think? Are the networks in trouble?

Posted by James Omdahl at 09:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Exciting and/or scary news from the Google AdWords team - after years of speculation, Google is finally taking beta tester for cost-per-action (CPA) ads.

All of the test ads will be placed through AdSense and it sounds like both AdWords and AdSense advertisers will have a lot of control over the use and placement of CPA ads…which is good, since I could see a large amount of fraud cropping up with CPA based ads.

But wait a second…CPA is what the affiliate business is all about – what could Google be up to? Does this program signal Google’s entrance into the CPA, and therefore affiliate world? Is Google’s CPA program going to compete with the affiliate networks?

An interesting question - and I think the answer is yes. The economics are fairly simple. If Google charges a lower commission to merchants per action than the affiliate networks do (which isn’t hard to do since many networks charge steep commissions), and merchants share more revenue per action with affiliates through Google, I think many affiliates might be tempted to run CPA AdSense ads on their sites rather than CJ or Linkshare affiliate links.

Also, we all know that Google has traditionally had a love/hate relationship with affiliates…but I’m sure they realize how much money there is to be made in the affiliate space. So what if, and I’m getting a little tin-foil hatty here, Google started targeting affiliate sites for removal from AdWords and natural search, but magically, they wouldn’t target their CPA AdSense partners ads as an alternative? Google could, in effect, make it difficult and unprofitable for affiliates to do business with affiliate networks, and drive affiliates to becoming AdSense CPA partners.

**shivers**

Am I crazy for thinking this? Is this just Google-is-evil paranoia or is there something more to this? I’d love to hear the thoughts of the BUMPzee community, Scott, Barry, Shoe, Danny, Shawn, Jim and anyone else who has skin in the affiliate/search game. Feel free to leave a comment or post something about this on your own blog letting me know your thoughts.

And if you want to read a little more on the topic you can check out Barry’s post on Search Engine Land or read the AdWords blog post on the subject for a pretty in-depth explanation (but no mention of evil plans).

Oh yeah, if anyone gets into the beta and want to share their perception of the program, let me know.

Posted by James Omdahl at 05:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

EcomXpo, the “virtual tradeshow for ecommerce marketers” starts tomorrow and runs through Thursday. I’m not totally sold on the concept of a virtual tradeshow - just doesn’t really appeal to me – but then again I am not much for the online chat/Second Life thing. With that said, it sounds like some of the bigger names in affiliate marketing are taking part in some of the sessions, and the list of sessions is truly impressive. You can check out the full list here. I know I am going to try to tune in to some of sessions.

It also looks like a number of SEM companies, affiliate networks and search engines have signed up to sponsor the event and have virtual tradeshow booths. So if you have some questions for the exhibitors you should be able to contact them through live chat.

Registration is free, so there isn’t really anything to lose if you sign up. To register, hop over to the eComXpo site. Maybe I will virtually see you there…wow, that sounds geeky…

Posted by James Omdahl at 09:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

***RANT ALERT***

When it comes to 7Search, wrong.

I figured I would give 7Search a chance since I have heard some decent things about their traffic. So two days ago I decided to open an account. I went through the basic online setup, giving my contact info and credit card information. After that was done I was told that my account needed to be “verified” – whatever that means.

I waited for a day to be contacted by 7Search to be verified…since that is what the site implied. I figured I would get a call or email or something. But I got nothing.

The next day I decided to login to my account and see if I had been “verified.” Nope. But I could hit a button to get verified, so I did that. Thankfully, I was given convenient option of being verified through live chat, so I hit the chat button and waited. And then I waited…and waited some more. Ten minutes later I was still waiting for someone to respond to my chat request.

A bit frustrated, I decided to take the alternative contact route, which meant sending 7Search an email. And no, it wasn’t one of those pre-filled out, just hit “send” emails, I actually had to write an email asking to be “verified” (still not knowing what “verified” meant).

Now let’s pause for a second here. I want to pay this company money – actually, I already had to give them some money to get this far in the process. I already wasted ten minutes waiting for someone who never showed up to chat, and now I have to send an email to ask to be allowed to use their service? I mean, I’m not trying to sneak into the US Embassy in Jalalabad; I’m trying to use a second-tier search engine.

But the fun didn’t stop there my friends. More than 24 hours after I sent the email, I still had not heard back. There was no response to my request to start spending money with them. Not even an auto-response.

Out of desperation I called 7Search to ask for my account to be verified. Surprisingly, my call was answered quickly (I was starting to wonder if the entire office was on some multi-day ropes course adventure or something). After explaining my situation to the gentleman who answered, he apologized for the inconvenience and then asked me to hang up and wait for a call to verify my account.

Hang up and wait? Couldn’t I be transferred? At this point I felt like I was attempting to buy uranium from an ex-KGB officer, not opening a PPC account.

Thankfully, I was called back within five minutes by a kind customer service representative from 7Search. Moments later it was verified that, after two days, I am now a verified member of the secret 7Search cool kids club. YAY!

Now if you’ll do me favor, let’s all bow our heads and pray that 7Search’s traffic is better then their customer service - because if I have to cancel this account, I have a feeling it is going to be as easy as stealing a nuclear powered submarine from the British…and I haven’t done that since college.

[UPDATE! 3/16/2007 - I came into the office this morning with this email waiting for me...

Dear 7Search Advertiser,

Your account was automatically placed ON HOLD.

Please contact 7Search Customer Support to specify an appropriate time to call you at the billing phone number you provided (be sure to mention your time zone).

Thank you for being a valued 7Search Advertiser.

Sincerely,
7Search.com

So now I have to call them again to get my account back online. Sweet job 7Search]

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

MarektingSherpa has come out with Affiliate Marketing 2007 Special Report which is an interesting look into the minds of both affiliate marketers and the merchants who work with them. To get the full report head over to Shawn Collin’s blog and click the “download” link.

Some of the more interesting bits of information that I ran across in the report were:

• Affiliate marketing in general is a growing industry, and merchants are generally optimistic about the future growth of their programs.
• Some merchants still offer pay-per-click programs, and a couple even offer pay-per-impression offers. I’d love to know how those are working.
• Commission structure, quality of consumer offers and relationships with merchants are all very important to affiliate marketers. Surprisingly, full-time affiliates felt that a good merchant relationship was a lot less important the part-time affiliates.
• Merchants say that their biggest challenge is finding high quality affiliates…which makes us feel pretty blessed here at InsureMe :)
• Affiliates seem to be grasping Web 2.0 concepts faster than merchants – but merchants are looking to be more involved in blogging, videos, etc. in the coming year. The merchants that are using blogs and communities to communicate with affiliates are finding that it helps promote relationship building. (Amen)
• Only 21% of affiliates thought that merchants communicated with them often enough, but a majority found that when there was communication with merchants it was helpful.
• Affiliates who have been affiliates for three or more years make an average of $54,975 per year; affiliates with less experience make, on average, $34,612 per year.

Interesting information for sure. I appreciate the last bullet point a lot, since I think the tendency in the affiliate community is to talk about the MILLIONS that are being made by a few super affiliates and not talk about the average affiliate who is working hard to make a good wage online.

Make sure you check out the full report to see all 16 charts and get some insight from industry leaders.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Time and time again I run across affiliates who spend weeks putting together the perfect homepage for their site. They fuss over their top banner, the layout of the page, where they are going to place their affiliate links, etc. But once they have the homepage built, they call it a day and start promoting the heck out of their one page web site.

Now I’m not saying there is anything wrong with this approach. In fact, I have seen it work for affiliates in the past. But over the last year I have seen more and more of our top affiliates taking the time to build bigger, content rich, high-quality sites - and I have also watched them reap the rewards from doing this.

So today I figured I would give you a quick list of seven reasons why affiliates need to be creating sites with high-quality, focused landing pages. Here we go:

1. Focused consumers want focused web pages. If you clicked on an ad for a specific Canon digital camera, would you want end up on a page with a hundred digital cameras on it, or the Canon camera that you searched for? If people search for something specific, give them specifically what they want.
2. Specific landing pages keep visitors on track. The internet is full of distractions. I don’t know how many times I have gone to Yahoo to search for something and ended up clicking on a Yahoo News story and totally forgetting what I was looking for. Diverting or confusing your visitors with unrelated offers is bad…don’t forget that.
3. Google AdWords will love you for staying focused. As Google puts more weight on landing page quality in their ad serving algorithm, the advertisers with quality keyword specific landing pages will pay less to advertise and get more clicks.
4. Landing pages can reduce the number of clicks it takes to convert. By giving visitors exactly what they are looking for you can often remove one or two selections from your form or buying process. For example, if you were sending auto insurance traffic to your site, you would be able to use an InsureMe quote box that already has auto pre-populated…that means one less selection for your visitor and a higher chance of conversion.
5. Well written landing pages add credibility to your site. If your site shows knowledge and expertise in your field through your content, there is a better chance a visitor will trust the site and convert.
6. With more specific pages, you have a better chance of ranking for specific terms. Web pages that focus on specific keywords with good content will have a better chance of ranking in the natural results for profitable “torso” and “long tail” terms. This can be an added bonus for those of you creating landing pages primarily for PPC.
7. Content rich landing pages can differentiate your site. If a consumer is looking for a specific product or service and is comparing a number of different sites, chances are they will see a lot of sites that look virtually the same. By taking the time to add a decent amount of content to a page (>500 words) you can boost conversion rates by differentiating your site from other sites that spent less time on their landing pages.

Taking the time to create many quality landing pages for your site seems to be the direction that most large affiliates are heading – and for good reason. Doing so helps boost your conversion and quality score in the short term, and helps future-proof your business in the long term.

[Thanks to Shoe for the inspiration on this one.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Duplicate content. It’s one of those things in life that we all hate but can’t avoid…like taxes, buses and bathing (joking).

But what is duplicate content? How does Google handle duplicate content? And can you really be penalized for it?

These are all good questions, and thanks to Rand at SEOmoz, we know have a slightly clearer idea of how Google identifies and handles duplicate content. Rand also goes through some of the more questions about duplicate content.

My big takeaways from this article were that everyone has problems with duplicate content (thanks to scraper sites), and that the major search engines are fairly sophisticated when it comes to identifying content and duplicate content. For example, Rand says that the search engines can identify the actual “content” section of a page and keep that separate from the structural HTML and the static navigational elements on a page.

Outside of duplicate content issues caused by others stealing your content, many sites end up creating their own duplicate content issues by having multiple, indexable landing/content pages with duplicate content on them. This can be especially problematic for affiliates who create multiple landing pages with different images but similar content. Remember – the search engines aren’t looking at the images on your site, they are just “reading” your content. If you are using the same text on multiple pages you could be shooting yourself in the foot. If you are doing this, it is best to identify these pages with a “noindex, nofollow” or “noidex, follow” meta tag.

Make sure you check out Rand’s full post and enjoy his illustrations of GoogleBot by going here.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s Friday, you’re an affiliate, and it is getting late in the day. Your fingers are sore from a week of web site designing, keyword bidding and frantic PPC account optimizing. You need a break…but you don’t want to feel like you are completely off task.

Well good news. I ran across Aaron Wall’s SEO plug-in for Firefox today and it looks to be a great way to a) analyze your competitor’s web sites and b) kill some time before five o’clock.

I’d go into detail here, but it looks like Barry Schwartz posted a video of the tool on YouTube, which you can check out below.

Take a second and download the plug-in here, and have fun checking out different web site’s SEO related info.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Being in the affiliate business means building web sites. And with the direction things are going lately, building a successful web site means building a decent looking site with a number of web pages. But as many of us know, building a nice site and managing a a lot of web pages can be a real bear.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The miracle factory that is the Intarweb has once again answered our prayer and given us content management systems (CMS). Thanks to the open source apostles of the web, there are many fantastic and affordable CMS systems available for use on your next affiliate site.

But why use a CMS system?

CMS systems have a number of advantages:

• Ability to quickly ramp up a web site
• Templates that are easy to switch and modify for a customized look
• Simple interfaces that make publishing a page almost as easy as saving it to Word
• Reduced coding time so you can spend more time promoting your site

When we are putting together PPC web sites here at InsureMe, we usually use a CMS system called Web Site Baker (WSB). WSB comes with a number of free templates you can use right out of the box, so you don’t even need to know how to code or design a site to have and attractive looking web presence. If you want to make a more customized site, you can do that with WSB as well…and after getting familiar with the interface, you should be able to crank out quality sites in record time.

This morning a couple of us spent some time sprucing up one of our Web Site Baker sites, and after a morning we ended up with this. Not too bad for a morning, eh? The beautiful thing is that most of our time was spent tweaking the template, but we didn’t have to build the foundations of the site on our own. In the end, I think a morning of work netted us an up-to-date looking web site that will covert well.

Oh yeah, let’s not forget one of the greatest things about Web Site Baker. It is free! That’s right. As free as hippies in the 60’s.

So if you are getting ready to crank out that next affiliate site, why not try out Web Site Baker. You might love it, and it might save you a lot of time so you can start making some serious affili-bucks with your purdy new site.

[Another CMS system that one of our favorite affiliates Magnus recommends is ExpressionEngine. While I have no real exposure to the system, Magnus knows what he is talking about, so I suggest you check it out too.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

THE FOLLOWING IS A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

First off, if you are reading this, it is a small miracle. The company that hosts our blogs, Mosso, has been experiencing problems for over a week now – yes A WEEK. We have seen everything from slow page loading to the site being completely down. If moving our blogs to a different host wasn’t such a pain, I think we would be changing hosts ASAP.

I think that after our experience with Mosso, it is safe to say that hosting an affiliate web site with Mosso is a very, very bad idea. I couldn’t imagine how furious I would be if I was pointing PPC ads to a site that was hosted by Mosso right now. If we were hosting a highly trafficked PPC site on Mosso, I bet our losses would be in the hundreds if not thousands of dollars over the last week – and you can bet that Mosso wouldn’t be paying for your losses.

[The ironic thing is that while our sites are down, Mosso’s site is up and running like a champ. I wonder who hosts their site?]

But to keep this post from being a total flamefest, let’s make this into something productive shall we? Leave a comment and tell me what hosting companies you have worked with that you would recommend to other affiliates.

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

If you thought SEO was difficult now, you will be sad to know that things are only going to get more difficult…or will they? The introduction and proliferation of personalized search in Google will give users their own search results, but also make it impossible for SEOs to claim that they are ranking #1 for a particular keyword. But at the same time, having more than one #1 gives more web sites the opportunity to benefit from Google’s search traffic – which could be a awesome thing for savvy affiliate marketers.

In a recent (and very long) interview with Google’s Matt Cutts on the Out of My Gord blog, Matt makes some insightful statements regarding the impact of personalized search on the SEO community. Since the interview is crazy-long, I figured I’d pull some choice quotes to give you the jist:

When asked about personalization being the nail in the coffin for shady SEO tactics:

I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily the nail in the coffin, but it’s clearly a call to action, where there’s a fork in the road and people can think hard about whether they’re optimizing for users or whether they’re optimizing primarily for search engines. And the sort of people who have been doing “new” SEO, or whatever you want to call it, that’s social media optimization, link bait, things that are interesting to people and attract word of mouth and buzz, those sorts of sites naturally attract visitors, attract repeat visitors, attract back links, attract lots of discussion, those sorts of sites are going to benefit as the world goes forward. At the same time, if you do choose to go to the other fork, towards the black hat side of things, you know you’re going to be working harder and the return is going to be a little less. And so over time, I think, the balance of what to work on does shift toward working for the user, taking these white hat techniques and looking for the sites and changes you can implement that will be to the most benefit to your user.

On if highly competitive niches, like those that affiliates tend to operate in, will be harder to optimize with personalized search:

It is, however, also the case that in highly commercial or highly spammed areas, if you are able to return more relevant, more personalized results, it gets a little harder to optimize, because the obstacles are such that you’re trying to show up on a lot of different searches rather than just one set of search engine result pages

And so individual users are happier because they're getting more relevant search results and yet it's not a winner take all mentality for SEOs anymore. You can be the number one ranking set of results for your niche, whether it be a certain demographic or a certain locality, or something like that. And I think that's healthier overall, rather than having just a few people that are doing very well, you end up with a lot more SEO, and a lot more users who are happy and that's softens the effect quite a bit.

Interesting stuff, eh? From my point of view, I welcome the introduction of personal search, mainly because I am confidant of our web site, and the content that can be found in it. But if I was optimizing a fairly thin site that lacks substance and doesn’t add any real value, I would be a bit more worried.

I think the bigger question is if personalized search will make life better or make life worse for savvy affiliate marketers. I think it will make things better, but what do you think?

[Extra: Read up on why personalized search results might be relying on Google Bookmarks to personalize your searches.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The PPC team here at InsureMe spends a significant amount of time on A/B testing. And we're often amazed at the results. Often, the ads we predict will have the highest click-through rates don't—and those we don't expect to perform, do.

That's why A/B testing is so important to start with. By changing variables and closely monitoring the results, we find what works for each particular ad group—and it's not always the same from one ad group to another. But the more we learn, the more successful our PPC efforts...and that makes it all worthwhile.

It never ceases to amaze me what draws consumers' attention and compels them to click on an ad. Sometimes it's all about the wording, other times it's the total message. Regardless, making our ads stand out by being different from our competitors' seems to please both the search engines and the searcher.

In performing ad testing, I've learned a few things I thought might help those of you who are new to the concept, so I'd like to share them with you now. If you've experimented on your own and found ways to help your ads perform better, we'd love it if you'd share, too!

Here's what seems to work for us:

• Figure out what makes you different from your competitors, and use it to your advantage. Highlight your business's unique qualities, testing different language, word sequences, text line order and anything else you can think of.
• Test one thing at a time. If you try to do more, your conclusions may not be accurate because you won't know which factor caused your results to change. It's best to limit yourself to two or three ads for easier, less complicated tracking.
• Make it routine. Ad testing should never be considered a one-time effort. The more you do it, the better you'll get at it! We have a set time we experiment and examine results every week, but you may want to do it more or less often. Once you gain a more thorough understanding of what works best, you'll save yourself the time and money you spent learning in the first place.
• Isolate high-performing keywords. Since these are the terms that make you big money, it makes sense to concentrate your efforts on refining these ad groups to make them even more profitable. Doing so also helps you determine whether or not your ads' performance is truly based on these keywords and isn't being influenced by other terms in the same ad groups.
• Follow up—and follow up again! Though strong performance history definitely helps, as other factors change so may your results. So check and recheck the ads you test, and make changes as appropriate.

There you have it, the novice's guide to A/B testing. :) Good luck in your own testing efforts!

Posted by Penny Hagerman at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Every Monday morning I take a few minutes to check the rank of www.insureme.com on various search engines. I also use the SEOpen tool to do a backlink check on InsureMe to see the number of links that are being shown by Google, Yahoo and MSN. While Google and Yahoo’s link counts are usually fairly steady, with occasional index update, MSN is all over the place.

Here is a little visual representation of the last three months of MSN backlink counts using “link:www.insureme.com” as the search:

It seems to me that this could explain all of the volatility in MSN’s search results. I mean a swing from 339 links, to 9,631 links and then back to 351 in a three week period has got to totally flip out MSN’s results. I wonder what the heck is going on.

Does anyone else watch their MSN backlinks? Are you seeing similar shifts in link count or is it just me?

Posted by James Omdahl at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Pop-quiz hot shots – true or false – Only 0.02% of Google Clicks are Invalid

Well, Google says the answer is true – and they are feeling pretty confidant that their AdWords anti-fraud countermeasures are working quite well. Based on a post at the Inside AdWords blog, Google says that an external audit showed that 10% of AdWords’ clicks are invalid – but after filtering out the clicks that advertisers aren’t charged for, advertisers only experience a 0.02% invalid-chargeable click rate.

I am a little skeptical about this one…mainly because the 0.02% represents the invalid clicks they found through investigations of click fraud that was initiated by advertisers. As we all know, most advertisers write off fraudulent clicks on Google as a cost of doing business, so I think a lot more than 0.02% of charged clicks are invalid.

Also, while many clicks are not “invalid” to Google, they may still be very low quality and generally worthless to advertisers. More specifically, I am thinking about the clicks that come through the content network. (And if they are anything like Yahoo!, on the search network too.)

On the proactive end of things, MarketingPilgrim reports Google will start to allow advertisers specify IP addresses to block from seeing their ads. Google will also be rolling out a number of tools that will hopefully provide a bit more transparency when it comes to invalid clicks. I applaud Google for realizing that being transparent in this area is a good thing, and hopefully they will work closely with advertisers to improve their fraud detection and prevention.

But back to that 0.02%...am I being overly paranoid? Do you believe that only 0.02% of the clicks you are being charged for are invalid? Let me know, I’m curious to hear your thoughts…