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.

Happy Friday, have a good weekend!

[Bonus - An SEO post worth reading from Jill Whalen.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 08:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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:

Here’s the deal. Hiding text is a bad idea. Why? Google hates hidden text…it’s like a huge tip-off that you are trying to trick them. If for some reason your site pops up on their radar screen, you have a good chance of getting banned.

Also, a bunch of keywords smashed together on a page is not an effective way to rank for those keywords anymore. Google looks for natural looking text. Having row after row of comma separated keywords is not going to impress their ranking algorithm.

I know this from personal experience. A recent push of our insurance agent focused website ended up with the word “lead” on it something like 18 times (long story), when the prior version had used the word “lead” two or thee times. When the new site was indexed we almost immediately lost our rankings for keywords like “auto insurance leads,” “insurance leads” and things of that sort. Once we changed the text back into a less “stuffed” form, we saw a relatively quick recovery in our rankings.

The point – even non-hidden keyword stuffing is bad and can hurt you.

So, what would I do if I was the site with the hidden text? After removing the hidden text I’d take the list of keywords they are hiding and create a new quality content page for each group of related keywords, and then link to those pages through a site map and link between related pages throughout the site. Then I would look to get some targeted deep links to those pages from good sites.

By doing so the site will improve its rankings for the targeted keywords and protect itself from the wrath of Google.

So fair reader, if you own a site or sites that are still hiding text, please stop. The tactic is old and truly not worth it.

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Get the 411 on Yahoo! here and here and here.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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 fiancée…a good trip, but we were running all over for five days straight and we didn’t get home until after midnight last night. Needless to say, I’m pooped.

[This is the part of the post where I try to segue the story to talking about affiliate marketing…but I’m failing miserably at coming up with a good one...I blame the horrific jet-lag one experiences when traveling from Pacific Time to Mountain Time (that one hour is a killer). I give up on the segue...onward.]

And speaking of staying motivated as an affiliate (stick with me here), Web Worker Daily blog has a really good post about staying motivated when you work on the Web titled Web Worker 101: Staying Motivated. The post gives eight tips for keeping yourself motivated and moving forward with your affiliate work including timeboxing and going Bedouin.

For some reason my personal favorite is #5 - have a nap. :)

If you’re struggling with getting motivated and getting things done, make sure you check out the post. It will change your live…or something like that.

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

What does this mean for you as an affiliate?

I’d say it give you a good indication of how to write your text links and even what text to use on banners, buttons, quote boxes or whatever. For example, if you are using “Get a Free Insurance Quote” as a text link on your page, maybe you should use “Click Here for a Free Insurance Quote” or “Click for a Free Insurance Quote” instead.

If doing so gives you a nice bump in clickthrough rate making the change should be well worth it, right?

This article doesn't mention paid search, but I'd be curious to know if "click here" would increase CTR on search engines as well. Also, I wonder if having click here in your title tag would increase visits from the natural results as well. Hmmmmmmm.....

Click here to read the full Copyblogger article, and click here to read the Marketing Sherpa article.

[Bonus: Another gem from Copyblogger – Do Your Recognize These 10 Mental Blocks to Creative Thinking. Top affiliate marketers are remarkably creative people (maybe not in a coffee shop sipping, poetry reading, watercolor painting kind of way, but in a business creative way)…read this article and see if you are mentally blocking yourself from being a more creative (and successful) person. Don’t try to think outside of the box my friends…burn the box.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[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…

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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 isn't 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. ;)

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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!

(via the Denver Egotist)

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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!

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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.)

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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:

1 goal at a time
2 times per day to process email
3 most important tasks to complete each day
4 smaller tasks to accomplish a day all in one 60-90 minute burst
5 sentence emails (like Haiku, more words doesn’t mean higher quality communication)
6 RSS posts read per day - good for the RSS junkies out there
7 minutes of wasted time (Leo sets a timer for 7 minutes every time he gets off task and starts messing around…sounds strange but it might be brilliant)
10 RSS feed in your feed reader - again quality, not quantity
100 personal items – read the post for more on this, very interesting

If you’re an affiliate who feels like they are constantly in motion but never getting anywhere, the Haiku Productivity approach might be good for you. Read the whole post and let me know what you think!

Posted by James Omdahl at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Here’s how you can use it…

1. Go to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool website
2. Click on the “Site-Related Keywords” tab
3. Enter in the URL of your homepage or one of the pages on your site
4. Optional: Check the box next to the words “Include other pages on my site linked to this URL”
5. Click on the “Get Keywords” button
6. Once you have the results, click on the search volume column title
7. Starting at the top of the list, look for terms with high search volume and low advertiser competition
8. Click the “Add” button to add the terms to your AdWords account
9. 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?

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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:

1. Have a clearly defined outcome for the tasks you are working on
2. Make rewards intrinsically rewarding…give yourself something to work towards
3. Do tasks that are sufficiently challenging
4. Clear away distractions while you work
5. Make sure you are relaxed and alert when you are working
6. 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.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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:

Don't 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.

Amen.

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)