There is some exciting news for older adults who are less than savvy on the net. According to a national publication Google is launching “The Google” to help older adults surf the World Wide Intarwebs. Here is a quote from the story:
The Google will have all the same information currently found on regular Google, but with the added features of not stealing your credit-card numbers or giving your computer all kinds of viruses,” said Rick Tillich, The Google project director. “All you have to do to turn the website on is put the little blinking line thing in the cyberspace window at the top of the screen, type thegoogle.com, and press return–although it will also recognize http.wwwthegoogle.com, google.aol, and THEGOOGLE typed into a Word document.”
Ha ha ha…ok, so the “national publication” this story came from is The Onion (a fake newspaper), but seriously, Google might be able to make some money with something like “The Google.” Read the whole story here.
Today I was looking at some affiliate sites and I ran across something that really hurt my brain…hidden SEO text on a page.
That’s right folks, someone in the year 2007 is still stuffing keywords into their website using a font color that is the same as the background color of their page. Here is a screen shot of what the “hidden” text looks like normally:
And this is what happens when you highlight that section of the page:
Jordan McCollum at Marketing Pilgrim points out that Yahoo! is in the midst of an index update as we speak. Sounds like they plan to have it done soon, so we’ll see what the end result is.
From the searches I’ve done in the insurance space, it doesn’t seem like there is much different for InsureMe.com…but usually when I make a statement like that something dramatic happens, so we’ll wait and see.
Jordan’s post points to some potential issues with 301 redirects being misread during the update and also an improvement in ranking for some high authority, keyword heavy sites.
We’ll see what the end results will be…but I hope for increased rankings for everyone who reads this.
You may have noticed that the Affiliate Blog has been rather quiet for the last few days. The reason is that I was in Southern California at a wedding and visiting family with my fianc
Copyblogger has an interesting post up today that answers a question I’ve always had, does telling someone to “click here” help or hurt clickthrough rates on a website?
A Marketing Sherpa study looking at the use of “click” in anchor text, using baseline data from the link text “Continue here…” revealed the following:
“Click to continue” had a 8.53% increase in clickthrough rate from baseline
“Continue to article” had a 3.3% increase in clickthrough rate from baseline
“Read more” had a 1.8% decrease in clickthrough rate from baseline
[This post is self-congratulating, sort of like the Emmys, so if you're not into that type of thing, might want to skip this one.]
I just got the news today that the InsureMe Affiliate Blog won two Standard of Excellence awards from the Web Marketing Association for the second year in a row. Woo hoo!
This blog took awards in the Marketing and Blogging categories and I’d be lying to say I’m not pretty excited about it. Blogging without feedback is like a Ferrari without an engine…it’s cool to have but it isn’t really going to get you anywhere. (I’m not sure that analogy made sense…or maybe it did…bah)
Thanks to all of our readers for giving InsureMe a reason to publish our blogs…without the kind feedback we get from you we wouldn’t be doing this. And that’s why I’d like to give you one of the most sacred salutes there is…the slow clap…
If you look on the navigation bar on the right you will see that I have hopped on the BlogRush bandwagon in a hope to see if BlogRush can really bring in a substantial amount of traffic as it has for many other bloggers. The concept is a very impressive one, any you can learn all about its viral goodness from this video.
Sounds like the service is being crushed by its popularity at this point…which isn’t a bad thing. Let’s see if they become the blog widget de jour and sell out to one of the big guys, a la MyBlogLog.
BlogRush could be a great tool for you if you are an affiliate/blogger and you want to get more traffic to your site. My only fear is that the service will be overrun by spammers with AdSense/Blogger blogs…but heck, what isnt being overrun with spammers with AdSense/Blogger blogs these days? (Ahem, CJ says what?)
If you are interested in trying out BlogRush, please use this link here (so I get all the credits for your visits) or not. Thanks to Linda at 5 Star for posting the video…Linda, I went through your referral link because you rule.
Happy Friday! Since the online marketing world is not feeding me any tasty morsels of wisdom today, instead I present you this story of a hilarious yet surprisingly common pay-per-click mistake. (Via Sphinn)
Also, here is a total time waster video for you…if you ever went to Chuck E. Cheese or Showbiz Pizza when you were younger, this will freak you out!
If you are like me, you might find yourself modifying an existing website from time to time. And if you have luck like me, that also means you are going to have to mess with the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) for that page. The thing is, I’m not that great with CSS, and manually modifying a style sheet is an equation for disaster when I’m at the keyboard.
Luckily, Chris Pederick has built a Firefox extension for those of us who are not CSS inclined. The extension is called Web Developer and it gives you the ability to go to any site and edit the style sheet on the fly. The good thing is that the changes are not permanent, but if you like what you’ve done you can always upload the style sheet to your server.
The benefit here is you can modify multiple elements of a site’s CSS, in your browser, without actually having to make the changes to the live site. This extension also makes it much easier to modify multiple elements in the CSS and view the effects of the changes.
I was messing around with a site’s CSS the other day and the Web Developer extension saved me a lot of time and anguish. If you do any site design or modification, I highly recommend you download the Web Developer extension…and hey, it’s free!
Everybody’s favorite back hat SEO cloaker, Fanotmaster, posted about the rumored acquisition of GoDaddy by Google (yeah, you heard me right, the Google wants in on those famous Super Bowl ads).
He explains that there are a number of scary issues black hat SEO will face if GOOG does buy GoDaddy. Things like Google being able to identify, real-time, when domain names change hands (so Google can reset rankings and what-not) and Google being able to see behind the ever popular Domians-By-Proxy service so they can track down naughty site owners.
I’ll go one step further and say that this rumored acquisition could be really bad news for PPC affiliates using Domains-By-Proxy who open multiple accounts owned by the same company or person to drive PPC traffic. If Google’s PPC team can identify a common owner to multiple sites they can consolidate those accounts (don’t ask me how I know…I just do), making it a lot harder to scale your business.
Fantomaster provides three strategies to hide your tracks in case the GoDaddy acquisition goes through.
One involves setting up an offshore corporation, which is so Miami Vice and so cool…cue the opening credits…(read the whole post here.)
You may notice that lately I’ve been putting up a few posts that suggest ways to increase your productivity as an affiliate, and there is a reason for it (other than an apparent lack of interesting blog topics as of late). The way I see it, I can sit here and point you to the greatest tools, tips, and resources for affiliate marketing in the world, but if you can’t sit yourself down and accomplish anything, you’re never going to make it as an affiliate.
And helping you make it as an affiliate is what this blog is all about.
Seth Godin recently said “ideas are easy, doing stuff is hard”… he’s right, kind of. I’d say that the toughest challenge for a lot of struggling affiliates is that they do a lot of stuff, but they never really get anything done. They find themselves emailing, taking Skype calls, chatting over IM, tweaking a website or AdWords account and at the end of the day they haven’t accomplished anything to move them closer to online success.
The world of an affiliate marketer can be a cluttered one, and many of us have to declutter before we can be productive (and successful).
Leo from the Zen Habits does a fantastic job suggesting ways to simplify and optimize your life (both work and personal). In a recent post, Haiku Productivity, Leo shares some guidelines for focusing your efforts to maximize your daily productivity. His cleverly numbered list consists of:
I’ve been playing around with the Google AdWords Keyword Tool this afternoon and I’ve found it to be a good way to identify keywords that good a decent amount of search volume but aren’t already saturated with AdWords advertisers.
Enter in the URL of your homepage or one of the pages on your site
Optional: Check the box next to the words “Include other pages on my site linked to this URL”
Click on the “Get Keywords” button
Once you have the results, click on the search volume column title
Starting at the top of the list, look for terms with high search volume and low advertiser competition
Click the “Add” button to add the terms to your AdWords account
Repeat the process for the URLs of your competitors and other sites in your vertical
By identifying the terms searchers are searching for, but don’t have a lot of advertiser competition, you should be able to secure some good clicks at a lower price than normal…and who doesn’t like that?
Working at home can be a blessing and a curse. For about 6 months of my life I was a health insurance agent and I worked from home. It was nice to not have to commute, sleep in when I wanted, and not have to dress up unless I had an appointment. But I learned quite quickly that home can be crazy distracting and not a good place for someone who hates what they are doing (which I did).
Most of our affiliates who are doing the “affiliate thing” full time are working from home. Over the years I’ve heard a number of ways they cope with working at home, from locking the door to their home office so they can’t be distracted, to working out of coffee shops so the lures of home don’t pull them from their work. But one thing most successful work at home folks have in common is the ability to put themselves into the flow.
You know “the flow,” when you are cranking away on a project that you’re totally focused on…doing your best work and doing it efficiently. The flow is a good place to be - and Leo over at the Freelance Switch blog points out 6 ways to get yourself into the flow.
The tips are:
Have a clearly defined outcome for the tasks you are working on
Make rewards intrinsically rewarding…give yourself something to work towards
Do tasks that are sufficiently challenging
Clear away distractions while you work
Make sure you are relaxed and alert when you are working
Put yourself in a state when you have full focus on the task
Head on over to Freelance Switch to get all the details on how to get yourself into the flow.
Megan, our super ninja copywriter from our agent blog, pointed out a great resource for the ladies (and guys) out there in the online marketing world - SEO Chicks. The SEO Chicks blog is the collaboration of a handful of search engine marketing professionals, who happen to be female, that are giving a voice to the growing number of female SEM professionals out there.
But don’t let the gender thing sway you in either direction, the blog is packed full of good information and insight into the SEO world whether you are female, male, or RuPaul. I mean, how could you not love someone who writes the following:
…let me explain to you that most people, or should I say most NORMAL people whose knuckles don’t bleed when they walk, really hate MSN.
That’s quality stuff right there. Check out more at the SEO Chicks blog.
[Bonus: I also want to point out the Working Nomad blog, which shows us what happens when affiliate marketing and wonder-lust collide.]
I’ll solidify my geekdom with the following statement:
Tweaking internal linking structures for SEO purposes fascinate me.
There, I said it.
You see, finding ways to increase your rankings through your internal links is awesome since a) you have 100% control over your internal links and b) you can move your external link juice from page to page using internal links.
Dan Thies just did a internal linking write-up that gave me one of those “ah-ha” moments. The topic? Using the “nofollow” linking attribute to better control of link juice through your website.
Dan also does a really good job giving a concise description of how PageRank flows through a site:
One of the “subtle things” about PageRank is that the amount flowing out of a page is divided up between all the links on the page. If there are 10 links, each one gets one tenth. If there are 100 links, each one gets 1% of the PageRank that flows out from the page.
If you’re an SEO/link geek like me, this is a must read article…”nofollow” just got a lot cooler.
Thanks to April for finding another great article to share with y’all.
My comrade April sent me a link over to a MarketingSherpa article titled How to Improve Your Homepage Performance Significantly, and it seems to me that it would be a good thing to read for any affiliate who is building or redesigning their webpage (or is thinking about it).
The steps include:
Refocusing 80% of the page on a single primary audience
Moving your most useful links into the “small window-fold”
Using your internal search reports to rewrite navigation links
Dumping extra columns
Dumping external ads and banner-style ads
Bigger typeface
Fast load time (for at least half the screen above the smaller fold)
The article does a really good job of explaining each step, and from our experience all of these tips are a good ones.
My favorite tip is “dumping external ads and banner style ads.” If you are going to listen to just one of the tips from this article, let it be that one. I think the article says it best:
Dont let the Webmaster sling up Google AdSense “just to make a little more revenue on the side.” You can do that on your blog or on other pages that are not supposed to be dedicated to your company. Your homepage is to help visitors navigate based on their needs in relation to YOU.
You may have noticed that the Affiliate Blog has been rather quiet for the last few days. The reason is that I was in Southern California at a wedding and visiting family with my fianc
Copyblogger has an 
You may notice that lately I’ve been putting up a few posts that suggest ways to increase your productivity as an affiliate, and there is a reason for it (other than an apparent lack of interesting blog topics as of late). The way I see it, I can sit here and point you to the greatest tools, tips, and resources for affiliate marketing in the world, but if you can’t sit yourself down and accomplish anything, you’re never going to make it as an affiliate.
I’ve been playing around with the 
Working at home can be a blessing and a curse. For about 6 months of my life I was a health insurance agent and I worked from home. It was nice to not have to commute, sleep in when I wanted, and not have to dress up unless I had an appointment. But I learned quite quickly that home can be crazy distracting and not a good place for someone who hates what they are doing (which I did).
I’ll solidify my geekdom with the following statement: