[UPDATE - I was contacted by CJ and they let me know that CJU tickets are non-transferable...so it looks like we cant help our affiliate on this one.]

We had an affiliate contact us wondering if we knew of anyone who needs to buy a ticket for CJU. I know the event is sold out (actually not totally sold out yet but close to it), so this is your chance to buy a ticket at regular price and help a fellow affiliate marketer out. Something came up and the affiliate can’t go, so if you want to take their place (and pay for the ticket) let us know.

You can email me at jomdahl (at) insureme (dot) com or just leave a comment.

Danny Sullivan points to a Financial Times article that talks about how the current issues in the US housing market are affecting one of the main revenue streams for the search engines. Surprisingly (or maybe not), 16% of internet advertising is done by financial services companies, and two of the top ten online advertisers are in the mortgage business (Countrywide and Low Rate Source).

Since I know a lot of the affiliates who generate insurance leads also work in the mortgage lead space, I was hoping some of you could give me some insight into any changes in mortgage affiliate programs you are seeing.

Are commissions going up? Down? Is there less traffic than there was a few months ago?

Share what you can; I think it would be interesting for everyone to hear the effects of this mortgage meltdown on the affiliate business.

I ran across this webpronews.com video on the SEOmoz blog and if you have any interest in paid links it’s a good one to watch…

Webpronews.com has a lot of good video interviews from the Search Engine Strategies conference; you can check them all out here.

Last year at the Blog Business Summit I was introduced to the concept of a mind map and I’ve been using mind maps ever since. (Big hat tip to Buzz Bruggerman for bringing his entire presentation in mind map form.)

What is a mind map? According to Wikipedia, a mind map is:

a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.

A mind map looks like this:

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After some research into the best converting affiliate sites that send traffic to InsureMe, and comparing to the sites I see on a daily basis that never really send any traffic to us, I realized there are some key differences between the good sites and the bad.

To share my observations, I’ve written up this list of 5 signs it might be time to up your game on your affiliate site. Here we go…

1. You might need to up your game on your affiliate site if your site is using one or more animated GIFs

Dancing bears, fluttering American flags, moving smiley faces…all conversion nightmares. If you are targeting a demographic that is over the age of 13, it might be a good idea to avoid any animated pictures on your site. You might think they are cute, but many people find them annoying at best and a sign of spam or con job at the worst.

Think of it this way. Let’s say you go to an insurance agent’s office and you want to buy insurance. You like the agent, you like his company, but for some unexplainable reason there is a bizarre person, dressed as a monkey, hitting himself over the head with a banana, over and over again standing right next to the insurance agent.

Will you be buying insurance from that agent?

I don’t think so.

I’ve got no stats to back this up, but if you’re a GIF offender I bet pulling animated GIFs from your site could raise your conversion substantially. If someone can prove me wrong I’ll buy you lunch.

2. You might need to up your game on your affiliate site if your images are pixilated and distorted from resizing

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After a week of talking about it, you might think I’m bummed about missing this year’s Search Engine Strategies conference. Up until quite recently I was actually feeling pretty alright about it.

That was, until I heard about the session called “Are Paid Links Evil?”

Now I am bummed.

After reading the Lisa Barone’s summary of the session I realize that I missed what amounts to an SEO conference perfect storm - Matt Cutts (from Google’s spam team), Michael Gray (Graywolf), Greg Boser (the feared Web Guerrilla), Todd Friesen (Oilman) and Todd Malicoat (Stuntdbl) all on one stage talking about paid links!

Needless to say, Matt’s views on paid links differed a bit from his fellow panelists.

I highly recommend reading all of Lisa’s post…but if you are too lazy busy, here’s some choice moments that Lisa described (they are not direct quotes):

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Wanted to say happy 29th birthday to affiliate stud Sam Harrelson…funnily enough exactly one day before my 29th year begins. August 1978 must have been a good time for affiliate folks to be born.

Make sure you head over to Sam’s blog and harass him about his proximity to 30 wish him a wonderful birthday.

Sam, were glad you were born.

Search Engine Land’s Alan Rimm-Kaufman wrote up an article with eight tips to improve you paid search copy. The tips include best practices for writing and testing of ad copy.

The tip I found most interesting was “Bad copy hurts more than good copy helps.” Alan points out in his years of experience in paid search that:

theres significant benefit in fixing bad copy …, some benefit from improving decent copy …, but the additional benefit that accrues from perfect copy is often small.

If you believe what Alan is writing it could have a dramatic impact on the amount of time you spend on writing and rewriting ads that are performing decently, but not perfectly. If you think in terms of Return on Effort, it might become obvious that all that ad tweaking you’re doing to make the “perfect” ad may not be giving you as great of a return as, say, building a new site or new PPC account.

Another point of Alan’s I liked was:

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Day one of the Search Engine Strategies conference is over, and thanks to turbo-speed live bloggers like Barry Schwartz and the rest of the Search Engine Roundtable crew, you can get a pretty good idea of what went on the first day of the conference in and out of the sessions.

Barry has put together a pretty good round-up of SES posts which include summaries of the sessions. You can see them all here.

Also, and affiliate of ours pointed us to an August 16th article from Dan Theis called Proxy Hacking: How a Third Party Can Remove Your Site From Google SERPs. The article, timed very nicely to coincide with the SES San Jose conference, points out a major flaw in the way Google is indexing sites through proxy servers.

It seems that Dan and other SEO experts have been trying to get Google to fix this issue for over a year now, but to no avail, so Dan decided to take the issue public. I’m guessing this will be a hot topic during the conference…especially in sessions that feature Google engineers.

If you’re interested in learning about how some black hat SEO are using this hack to take out their competitors, I’d suggest giving it a read.

Just don’t use the hack against us, capiche?

Due to this weeks Search Engine Strategies conference I have a feeling it will be a slow week this week for search news. None the less, I will do my best to live vicariously though the bloggers who made the pilgrimage to San Jose this year and let you know of any noteworthy shenanigans I run across.

In the mean time, I’d like to point you over to Eric Ward’s linking column at Search Engine Land for a good piece on link building and the effects of overdoing it when it comes to building links. Check out the article called Aggressively Seeking Links: How Much is Too Much.

As someone who has gotten a little over zealous in his link building at one point, I highly recommend the post. By focusing on building links at a natural pace you may be able to save yourself the 6 month penalty we received for over aggressive link building…those were bad times

I’m not sure when Rand from SEOmoz decided to make his way to the Dark Side, but this week’s whiteboard Friday is decidedly red light saber.

Watch now as Rand teaches you how to mess with your enemy’s rankings by hijacking Wikipedia pages…

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Wow - I just had an eye opening experience. I was searching around in the InsureMe Google Analytics account this morning and started looking at the “non-paid” keyword report. What I found would have made Chris Anderson proud:

This is a graph of the total number of visits by search term that we received on www.InsureMe.com through natural search engine traffic. As you can see, this graph shows the classic “long tail” - while we have a handful of terms that bring a large amount of traffic, we have THOUSANDS of keywords that bring one or two visits to our site. Actually, to be exact, we received natural traffic to our site from 22,135 different keywords!

There is a lesson in all of this. You see, when I optimize InsureMe I am focusing on the big keywords like “auto insurance,” “health insurance,” “home insurance,” “health insurance quotes,” etc. But in the process, I’ve gotten ranked for literally thousands of other keywords…and many of those keywords sent traffic that converted!

So next time you get bummed out that your site isn’t ranking for those big money keywords you are shooting for, remember the opportunity of the long tail. While you are waiting to be #1 for those mega-terms, you could very well be profiting from hundreds or thousands of obscure terms that people are actually searching for!

[BONUS TIP: Use the non-paid keyword report to find search terms that you can use in your PPC accounts.]

I was holding off on this post until this issue became super annoying. It is now super annoying.

WHAT IS UP WITH THE “BURBURRY COAT REVIEW” SPAM ON COMMISSION JUNCTION?!

Every day I get between two and five publishers applying for our CJ program with single page, spam blog URLs like:

http://burberrycoatreview128.blogspot.com

or

http://burberrycoats456.blogspot.com

Needless to say, they get declined every time.

Who is doing this? Or more importantly, who is telling people to do it? Is this the result of some type of eBook suggestion? I’m hoping someone from the affiliate community knows about this so I can start sleeping again at night.

Oh yeah, we are also getting other one page Blogger spam applicants with URLs like:

http://superweightloss-graceh.blogspot.com

and

http://appleiphonereview123.blogspot

I know Blogger is a favorite place for spammers, but why are there SO many applicants lately? If you know the answer, PLEASE leave a comment.

Occasionally I’ll link to or write about something that is decidedly motivational in nature. A lot of times some readers find these things a bit annoying, mostly because motivational stuff is either a) easy to appreciate, agree with and promptly forget about, making reading it pointless or b) easy to discount as motivational fluff that won’t work in the real world.

But usually the real reason people cringe at motivational topics is because they challenge the work that we are doing on a day-to-day basis. They make you ask yourself questions you don’t want to ask.

Am I making the right decisions? Am I working hard enough on the right thing? Am I resting on my laurels waiting for Google/Yahoo!/my business partner to pull the rug out from under me? Am I OK with that?

All good questions to ask.

In Seth Godin’s post Is Good Enough Enough? Seth points out that, in this day and age, good enough is not good at all. Actually, he points out that instead of asking if your work is good enough you should be asking if your work:

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Before the advent of Yahoo!’s Panama interface setting pay-per-click (PPC) bids on Yahoo! was easy. All you needed to do was figure out how much you were willing to pay for a click and then set your bid at that level. Since the bidding model was based solely on bid price, you could tell exactly what position your ad would show up in.

The simplicity was wonderful, but those days are sadly over.

Once the Panama platform was rolled out, PPC marketers were forced to get a bit more cerebral with their bidding strategies. Luckily, most of us had gotten used to the mysterious black box ranking model of Google, so we came to into Panama prepared.

You see, setting bids as an affiliate is not just a matter of being profitable. Many affiliate programs also reward affiliates for number of sales made, or leads generated with higher commissions - so while maximizing profit, one could be reducing their total number of sales, and in turn, earning less in the long term because of potential performance incentives or rewards.

Finding the “sweet spot” where you are maximizing your sales and commissions can be tough. Luckily, Website Attraction has a good write up that discusses how to maximize both while keeping your head above water. So if you’re not totally sure if you have your bids set correctly make sure you check out the article, Calculating the Best Bid for Your PPC Keywords.

Since we’re all search marketers it is a good idea keep up on where this whole search thing is headed. Chances are the “edit box and 10 blue links” concept is not going to stay the standard way to search for stuff on the web for the long run. Actually, strictly algorithmically based searching might not last much longer either, and there are a lot of companies vying to be the next search giant.

Our queen bee of affiliating, April H., pointed me to this InformationWeek article titled The Ultimate Search Engine. It’s very informative and will help you understand some of the potential directions that the search industry will head over the coming years.

Never fear though, I’m sure that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft will gobble up any of these startups if they create the next killer search app. All so you won’t have to worry about opening another PPC account.

This could be really good news for those of us who feel like we are stuck on Google’s bad side when it comes to AdWords ad placement.

The Inside AdWords blog has announced that, in the next few weeks, they will be rolling out a new top ad placement formula which should help more advertisers qualify for placement on the AdWords ads that show across the top of the search results page.

According to Inside AdWords, the key change of the formula is that it will use maximum cost-per-click (CPC) along with Quality Score rather than actual CPC along with quality score to determine top ad placement. The logic behind the change is explained as such:

Actual CPC is determined, in part, by the bidding behavior of the advertisers below you. This means that your ad’s chance of being promoted to a top spot could be constrained by a factor you cannot influence. By considering your ad’s maximum CPC, a value you set, you will have more control over achieving top ad placement.

The blog also goes on to say:

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Yesterday afternoon I finally got around to adding the Sphinn voting button to the blog (you can learn more about Sphinn here). You’ll notice the little “Sphinn It” buttons at the end of each post next to the BUMPzee buttons. If you like one of the blog posts you find here, make sure you click the button so you can help the story get some visibility on Sphinn.

I’ll be interested to see what happens when one of our stories gets some Sphinn love, and I’m really interested to see how it compares to BUMPzee traffic.

Speaking of BUMPzee, has traffic to that site been slowing down lately? I see far less traffic coming from it than what we did in the past.

Of course, it could just be that my writing has stunk as of late.

Andrew Goodman’s Page Zero Media holds a special place in my heart. Out of all of the “PPC masters” out there that produce e-books about pay-per-click marketing, I see Andrew Goodman as the most knowledgeable and respectable of the bunch. So when Andrew’s company Page Zero Media puts out a new eBook on anything, I have no problem recommending it.

For those of you who are trying to figure out that beautiful beast called Yahoo! Search Marketing, you’re in luck. Page Zero’s Mona Elesseily has just released a new eBook called Mastering Panama: A Special Report on Yahoo!’s New Search Marketing Platform. While I haven’t read it myself, if it is anything like Page Zero’s past eBooks, this one is worth the $89.

I’d bet both new PPC marketers and veterans could learn a thing or two from Mona’s in-depth look at maximizing your results from Yahoo! Search Marketing. And if you’re an affiliate who only uses AdWords, you are missing out on some serious bucks from the #2 search engine.

While I’m recommending things I might as well plug Andrew’s AdWords Handbook. This was my first eBook on PPC and it helped me greatly. Andrew keeps the book up to date, so you don’t have to worry about buying a bunch of stale info.

I’m sure our PPC mavens here at InsureMe will be picking up a copy of the Yahoo! book soon enough. If I get some feedback, I’ll let you know!

For many affiliate marketers, writing copy for a website can be a stress inducing, humbling and inexplicably frustrating experience. Back in my early days at InsureMe, when I first started working on optimizing the InsureMe website, I found myself in the position of writing a number of keyword optimized articles for the InsureMe website.

Not surprisingly, the articles stunk.

Writing takes skill, practice and a good working knowledge of those grammatical rules that you and I missed because we were too busy zoning out in class or making junior high black market chewing gum sales (a terribly profitable venture for me). Luckily, since that time InsureMe has stocked up on copywriters. These people have both the knowledge and passion to turn our thoughts and ideas into compelling copy. By hiring copywriters, the company gave me the opportunity to stop writing landing pages and spare myself a lot of public embarrassment.

Understandably, as a small, medium, or even large affiliate you might not have the funds or resources to shell out for a copywriting professional. By default, you end up being your own copywriter - many times with disastrous results.

Like it or not though, a website that has no text on it is not going to do a very good job of selling stuff. So, with this grim reality in mind, affiliates usually take up the challenge and write text for their sites. In the process, many affiliates find themselves guilty of some of the most basic grammatical errors which make them look, for a lack of a better term, dumb.

Never fear, the Copyblogger blog has created a list for grammatically challenged folks like you and me to avoid such writing faux pas. The list, kindly titled 5 Common Mistakes That Make You Look Dumb, explains five grammatical errors that tend to baffle the copy challenged. The top five list explains:

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Barry Schwartz reported some promising news he found via WebmasterWorld - it sound like Google might start making it easier for AdWords advertisers to opt out of the much hated AdSense for Domains product.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, AdSense for Domains is a program that places AdWords advertiser’s ads on parked domains, using the domain name as an indicator for the type of ads to show. The problem is, there hasn’t been any good way to opt out of the program, and many advertisers have a large percentage of their clicks that come from AdSense for Domains. This would be fine, except the quality of traffic that comes from these domains tends to be much lower than normal search traffic or even content match ads.

If Google really does make opting out of AdSense for Domains easier, they will be doing a good thing for their reputation and for advertiser relations. Let’s hope the solution comes sooner rather than later. In the meantime, AdWordsAdvisor2 recommends using the site exclusion features in AdWords, and if that doesn’t work to write to support for help.

I don’t think I’m going to be sparking any major revelations for you when I say that Google might not be the biggest fan of affiliate marketing. I mean, sure, they make a lot of money off of affiliates who do PPC, but that rarely stops them from harassing the heck out of affiliates. It seems when your site gets tagged as affiliate by the big GOOG, your chances of success go down drastically. Luckily, there are some tactics to help you fight back - and one of the most straightforward is hiding your affiliate links.

Yes, it might be a bit underhanded, but as Everett Sizemore points out, hiding your affiliate links not only protects you from undue scrutiny from the search engines but also can help increase your conversion and protect you from parasites trying to steal your affiliate commissions.

Sounds fair enough, eh?

To find out how to hide those affiliate links, first read Everett’s post “Hiding Your Affiliate Links from Spiders, Visitors and Parasites.” If you’re looking for instructions on how to hide those links using PHP, head over to the Stuge post on the topic. You can also check out the PHP jump script from SteveDawson.com.

One thing though, I know Everett’s post brings up JavaScript redirects, but from doing a little searching it sounds like Google is doing a pretty good job detecting these and penalizing sites for using them (and potentially the advertiser as well…ouch). I know that the penalty is meant for people who are cloaking web pages, but it seems a bit foolish to get nailed for something like this. I guess what I’m saying is stick to the PHP solutions listed above.

The blogosphere and news media has been buzzing about Facebook for the last couple months, so a few weeks ago I grudgingly signed up. What I found was a social network I could actually use and enjoy, not a MySpace-like mess of super hideous profile pages.

The most interesting thing about Facebook is that it’s becoming the business networking tool of choice for many of the technorati. People like Robert Scoble, Hugh MacLeod, Jason Calacanis and even Seth Godin are Facebook members (some more active than others). People like Scoble are maximizing Facebook as a communication platform, much like he does with his blogs, but with all the fun things that come with social networks.

I’m not telling you if you rush over to Facebook you’ll suddenly make lots of money or get famous or anything. While early adopters are finding ways to make money through Facebook applications (think of them as little widgets on a profile), I think the real value of Facebook is as a networking tool. And having a good network can help get you far in the affiliate marketing world.

So, to all of our affiliate readers out there reading this who have a Facebook accounts, search for “james omdahl” and add me as a friend. If you don’t have an account, get signed up and then add me as a friend. If I get a decent enough response we can explore other ways to use Facebook network to connect as affiliates.

If you still need convincing as to why to sign up for Facebook, check out this post. It gives a very good business case for using Facebook professionally.