InsureMe is a company that is committed to giving to charitable causes. Every year, we give 10% of our profits to charitable organizations and we recently were awarded the Champion of Hope Award by the Mile High United Way (the United Way’s top award). It is our company’s belief that when you give to others, you get much more in return than you give.

While there are hundreds of organizations out there who could use your donations, I want to point out an organization that we just started working with this week - Kiva.org. Here’s how Kiva describes what it does on its website:

Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can “sponsor a business” and help the worlds working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business youve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.

So basically the way it works is:

1. You pick a business to loan money to
2. Kiva transfers your funds to a local partner who gives the funds to the business
3. The partner then collects payments and provides updates to Kiva and you
4. The loan is paid back (Kiva loans have an amazingly low default rate…in many countries the rate is 0%) - and you can withdraw or re-loan the funds

A very cool concept…but I know that some of you might need a little extra push when it comes to giving, so here it is…

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Last week I pointed you to Matt McGee’s article about SEO don’ts in a post titled 20 SEO Landmines that Could Leave You All Blowed Up. This week, Matt returns with a list of 21 dos for search engine optimization.

Matt’s list covers various aspects of SEO, from the self-education side of things all the way to internal linking an URL structure. If you’re new to SEO or you are a veteran looking to make sure you have crossed your T’s and dotted your I’s, this is a worthwhile read.

If there is one thing that really stands out to me in this list its #6 -

Build a great web site. I’m sure you want to show up on the first page of the results. Ask yourself, “Is my site really one of the 10 best sites in the world on this topic?” Be honest. If it’s not, make it better.

This point is a reminder that the best way to get and keep rankings is to align your goals with those of the search engines. Search engines want their search results to be the best in the world. They want the ten most relevant sites in the world to show up on their first page. By creating the best site possible, you have a much better chance of ranking well and staying there than if you set out to outsmart the algorithm.

I think Seth Godin said it best in his post Building 43, when he is talking about web site optimization and the Google engineers who work in the super-secret Building 43 on the Google campus:

Betting against Building 43 doesn’t seem nearly as smart as betting on them.

So what’s your SEO strategy? Are you betting on yourself, betting on Building 43, or betting on both?

When I got out of college I found it strange to be working but not getting graded on the work that I did. I was always enjoyed the feedback I would get from professors - yes, I’m a nerd. What of it?

In the “real world” you don’t get grades all that often…and as an affiliate, the closest thing you get to a grade is your bank balance. And maybe your AdWords Quality Score.

If you miss grades like I do, I’ve got good news for you - there is a web site that will analyze your site and give you a grade and feedback on how to improve it. Megan over at our Insurance Agent Blog pointed me to the site called Website Grader. By entering your domain name and some keywords you get:

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Everybody knows that all new affiliate marketers have thousands of dollars in start up money to start their online business, right?

Actually, no. Most new affiliates are on a budget…sometimes a very strict budget. That’s why, back in May, Patrick Sexton of SEOish asked seven online marketing experts what they would do if they had a very restrictive budget to promote a site. The magnificent seven who answered this question were Aaron Wall, CK Chung, Lee Odden, Andy Beal, Andy Hagans, Todd Malicoat and Partick Sexton himself.

If you are a bootstrapped affiliate you should take the time to read the article, but for those of you looking for the Reader’s Digest version, here were some of the most popular suggestions:

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Just like love, SEO is a battlefield. A battlefield full of landmines. Newbies in the internet marketing field often walking onto the battlefield unaware that it’s a dangerous place, and often, they get blown up. God knows I’ve gotten blown up on occasion.

Avoiding SEO landmines is a matter of knowing what to look out for and what to avoid. The good news is that there are hundreds, if not thousands of SEO professionals out there who have made all the fatal online mistakes…and when we’re lucky, they share their war stories with us.

Yesterday Matt McGee shared some of the SEO lessons he has learned in his post SEO “Don’ts”: 20 Fatal Mistakes You Must Avoid to Succeed. The post addresses some of the most common mistakes, scams and oversights that lead to classic cases of SEO fatalities. Some of my favorites (and most common affiliate mistakes) are:

1. Dont reply to the SEO spam you get via e-mail.
6. Dont waste your time submitting your URL to search engines.
13. Dont ignore usability.
17. Dont plaster your link all over blog comments, guestbooks, etc.
18. Dont fret over keyword density.

Read the entire list here - it could save new marketers a lot of heartburn, and remind veterans of their classic SEO war stories.

I got an email from a fella named Rob the other day telling me about a new keyword research service called KeywordSpy. From the looks of the site, it seems like a pretty neat way to find out what keywords other sites are bidding on.

Using the free example you can access on the homepage I was able to type in the keyword “health insurance” and see a list of companies who are bidding on the term. Then from there you can click on a company name and get a list of the keywords they are using to drive traffic. Once you get the list, you can export the list into a text document or Excel for easy upload.

I haven’t had too much time to really delve into the site but so far it looks promising. I figure it’s got to be pretty powerful for $89.95 a month. If you’re in the process of doing some keyword research, and you want to try something that is slightly more nefarious than WordTracker, KeywordSpy might be the tool for you.

UPDATE : Carsten Cumbrowski pointed out that KeywordSpy is a reseller of KeyCompete.com - so if you want the same thing for less money you can use KeyCompete. Read Carsten’s comparison of the two services here.

Whenever I’m at an affiliate conference it is fairly common that the affiliates I meet don’t have a business card. Not that this is totally surprising, since many affiliates are one man or one woman shows who tend to do most business online, not in person. Also, when it comes down to it, the actual process of designing and ordering business cards on our own can seem as foreign as Paris Hilton in a Kmart.

Come conference time, having a business card is a great way for an affiliate to increase the chances of getting connected to the right folks. When done right, a good business card will make you stand out from the other affiliates at the show. Luckily, the process of getting business cards online has become a lot easier in recent years, so you don’t have to rely on Kinkos to crank out cut-rate cards for you.

Two sites that I really dig for business cars are Moo and Street Cards.

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If you aren’t testing landing page variations for your PPC traffic, you could very well be leaving money on the table. Or at least that’s the idea behind landing page testing.

Anyone who has been in the online marketing space for more than a couple months knows that changes to your PPC landing pages can have a serious effect on your conversions - so optimizing your landing pages is key to your affiliate success. But how do you test a landing page?

Andrew Goodman (one of the best known PPC industry veterans) has done a nice write-up about some page testing that he is doing for a client using Google Website Optimizer. He discusses the methodology, assumptions, and elements he used to test 24 variations (YES 24!) of a single landing page simultaneously. While setting up a test might be time consuming, it could be a fantastic way to get your site’s conversions up and raise your profit margins.

Head on over and read the post for a little education and inspiration.

[One note: The Google Website Optimizer isn't SEO safe (it's basically a version of cloaking), so don't do it on a page you are working to optimize.]

I’d say if there is one skill in online marketing that I’d love to get better at, it would be link building. Most of my attempts to reach out and build links tend to end in a disastrous silence. In the last couple of months all of my requests for links from sites except for one or two has been ignored, and quite truthfully, that can be a little more than annoying. Maybe it’s because of our affiliate program, maybe it’s because I’m late to the link request game, or maybe it is just because I’m not offering money for the links. Either way, link building is hard…and it takes the right kind of people to be successful at it.

People like Eric Ward.

For those of you who don’t know Eric Ward, Eric is considered the godfather of link building. Some people even call him Link Moses. If there is one person in this world you would want to hire for a link building campaign, it would be Eric. Sadly, I’ve tried to contact him to enlist his help to develop links for InsureMe, but he never returned my email. I guess that’s what you get to do when you’re Moses.

Since I can’t hire him, I guess I can try to learn from him. Like today I learned what makes Eric so successful in the link building world by reading his column at Search Engine Land. Check it out if you want to do the same.

[Right before I posted this I realized this post ended up sounding like a pretty lame acceptance speech at the Oscars...my apologies in advance.]

Wow! I just noticed that the InsureMe Affiliate Blog has just reached its 500th post. Pretty amazing…especially since this blog started as a pretty basic experiment back in December of 2005.

I wanted to say a huge thanks to all of our regular readers and commenters who have made this blog fun, educational and successful. You don’t know how much your input, idea, and readership mean to me and everyone who has posted on this blog.

Also, I want to give a big thanks to the InsureMe management team…because not a lot of companies are open to using blogging in this capacity. There are a lot of reasons why a company would not want to make blogging a priority, but luckily InsureMe decided to focus on all of the reasons why we would.

I also wanted to extend a personal thanks to Scott Jangro, since a lot of our regular readers found us through his BUMPzee community. BUMPzee has certainly taken this blog to a level of exposure that we had a difficult time achieving on our own.

The point of this blog has always been to help affiliates succeed - those who work with InsureMe and those that don’t. I hope we’ve accomplished that goal in one way or another, but if we haven’t, give us the next 500 posts and I’m sure we will help you by then.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Google is getting a reputation for being cocky. Unfortunately, small marketers like you or I don’t really have the financial leverage to call Google on its cockiness, so we tend to accept it, bow our heads and continue to shell out cash to the Google juggernaut.

Luckily, there is one big company who has the guts to stand up to Google when it’s being, well, a bit of a jerk - that company is eBay.

A quick recap for those of you who missed the headlines:

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The BUMPzee affiliate community is a-buzz with talk of two class action lawsuits against Commission Junction for, in the words of AffiliateFairPlay.com:

breach of contract, negligence and unfair business practices on CJ/BF’s part by allowing adware affiliates to operate within their Network

Since everyone is chiming in, I’ll give my quick two cents…

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It’s not Christmas, but Google Claus is dropping a present to all AdWords advertisers - their new Content Performance Report. Advertisers received and email from the AdWords team that explained the reports like this:

The Placement Performance report provides site-by-site performance metrics — including clicks, impressions, cost, and conversion data — for domains or URLs in the content network where your ads have appeared. The report also provides a new level of transparency for traffic you accrued from sites in our network that are participating in the AdSense for domains program. Currently, AdSense for domains statistics are collectively reported, but we are working to give you site-by-site level statistics soon.

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For those of you still reeling from last week’s AdWords quality score algorithm change, UK affiliate marketer Kieron has the post for you. In the post called Google AdWords Landing Pages - how to build a page that won’t get banned, with examples, Kieron explains what you should do to make quality score compliant landing pages (or more accurately, web sites) for your AdWords ads.

When it comes down to it, Kieron suggests that the affiliate landing page is a dying breed and that quality, content rich web sites are what Google is looking for. I know that’s not really news in itself, but the fact that the AdWords algorithm seems to be getting better at detecting pages and sites with quality content and those without is certainly new.

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[Is it me or is this week the week of bad news blog posts? What the heck!]

If you logged into your Google AdWords account this morning you may have been surprised to see a number of your keywords have been given much lower quality scores and much higher minimum bids. The reason is a “minor update” (as Search Engine Roundtables Barry puts it) to the AdWords quality score.

We’ve already heard from a couple of our affiliates that they have been hit by the latest update - and from the looks of the posts over at WebmasterWorld it seems that they are not alone.

The comment in the Webmaster World forum that got me the most was from pexcornel who said:

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As if our indexing problems with Google weren’t enough to worry about, from the looks of things, Yahoo! has decided to mix things up with a fairly substantial algorithm change.

From what I have been reading, early in the update there were a couple versions of the algorithm showing, with one being overrun by spam sites and one showing decent, yet decidedly different results from the last algorithm. Now it seems like the higher quality results are showing and things are starting to get consistent across datacenters.

I’ve got to admit, I liked the old algorithm better - mainly because we ranked a lot better with it. Interestingly, in the insurance vertical I am seeing a lot of sites that are appearing high in the rankings that have come out of nowhere.

I’ll be sitting tight and seeing how everything settles on this one. Hopefully good old www.InsureMe.com will work its way back up…but if not, well, guess we just have to wait for the next update (trying to keep the “glass half full” on this one).

Yesterday my boss Mike asked if I had heard about LinkShare acquiring Traffic Strategies.com, a PPC affiliate. I hadn’t, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t think much of it. That is, until I read Adam Viener’s post on the topic.

Adam points out that this transaction could be a harbinger of things to come in the affiliate space. As many people close to the affiliate business would attest, major networks are facing some serious threats to their long term survival (CPA networks like Azoogle, in-house affiliate programs like the one eBay just started up, etc.). By acquiring affiliate companies the networks can “lock in” the skills, talent, and profits that come from a successful affiliate venture.

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Ok, note to self - don’t mess with the Google.

After yesterday’s post on Google indexing a competitor’s site incorrectly, I came into work and saw this:

That’s right - InsureMe has been indexed incorrectly! OUCH!

From what we can tell from the cache date, Googlebot hit our site right in the middle of some late night database issues and the end result was Google getting served an error page.

Needless to say, it’s a bit embarrassing.

[Bonus link: There is an awesome story in the New York Times that talks Google's search team. Definitely worth a read.]

I ran across this search result this morning, and it really cracked me up:

I removed the company name because they are a competitor, but I have a pretty good feeling this is a problem on Google’s part, not theirs. It is nice to see that Google is feeling remorseful about the mistake.

If you’re wondering, the funny title tag doesn’t seem to be hurting them in the rankings, and I’m sure the glitch will be fixed soon.

I’ve found that one the common traits between all successful affiliates is creativity. Whether it is the creativity to find an untapped niche, promote a one-of-a-kind offer, or create an kooky online video that helps sell a product - creativity is a common gene in the affiliate DNA.

Kirsty McCubbin proves this point with her poetic blog post Ode To CJ - A Tale Of Affiliate Betrayal *Sob*! It seems that Kristy had a $4300 charge back by Commission Junction because a merchant went out of business. Needless to say this irked Kirsty just a bit. After some unfulfilled promises of restitution, Kirsty decided to take out her frustrations through poetic therapy.

Read the poem here to see classic verses such as:

With golden tounge dids’t they woo,
Yet all their promises turned to poo.

Fantastic!