Happy Halloween!

You know where Halloween is really happy today? The Googleplex, that’s where. At least they better be happy with their stock price breaking $700 a share for the first time today. Pretty amazing to think about since they just broke the $600 a share mark less than a month ago.

On the other side of the search world, Yahoo! is rolling out an update to their crawl, algorithm and index today. All is looking well from where I’m sitting, but beware of some spammy sites popping into the results from time to time. Here’s some info from the Search Engine Roundtable (hats off to Barry and team for the killer Halloween theme at SER).

Finally something for all of you tech lovers out there – Nabaztag the rabbit. If you’re feeling lonely and want an artificial friend/butler/newscaster/feed reader then Nabaztag might be for you. Check out this Yahoo! Tech article for more info, visit the Nabaztag site here.

Have a safe night – eat too much candy.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Setting goals is an essential tool for most successful affiliates, but reaching those goals is the hard part. Even those of us with the best intentions run into obstacles on our way to achieving our goals. How we deal with these obstacles decides if we will succeed or fail.

The Zen Habits blog has a very nice piece of reaching goals in the face of setbacks in their article How to Stick to Your Goals When Life Disrupts ‘Em. If you’re in a rut because of some recent setback, this article could give you some strategies to get back achieving your goals.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[This post was inspired by the post Never, Ever, Pay for Traffic on the MarketMotive blog]

Today’s topic has to do with one of the mistakes that a lot of newer affiliates make, and that’s buying the wrong kind of online traffic. All web traffic is not created equal, meaning varied conversion rates, so knowing what you’re buying is essential.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a terribly excited but very green affiliate tell me how they just paid someone $100 to send 10,000 hits to their site. Their logic is usually that if InsureMe’s average affiliate converts traffic in the 15 – 20% range, and on average they earn $8.00 a lead, if they send us 10,000 clicks, they’ll be sipping frozen drinks on the beach by the end of the month. In reality, those 10,000 clicks will most likely net them nothing, because traffic that cheap is usually untargeted traffic, and untargeted traffic usually does not have the right intent (which means they don’t convert).

Princeton’s WordNet Search defines intent as “an anticipated outcome that is intended or that guides your planned actions.” Successful online marketing, especially in verticals like insurance, is all about intent. Search marketing (SEO and PPC) are amazing marketing channels because relevant ads are shown to consumers and those ads align with the consumers anticipated outcome, meaning intent (like buying auto insurance). This differs from more traditional offline and online advertising since it does not interrupt some other action or intent (for example – I want to watch this TV show but they keep interrupting it with commercials).

Because search marketing is so effective at catching consumers with intent, the price of this marketing has been climbing…which is alright since the return on investment from well placed search advertising is high. Thinking about it from an economic perspective, if the price of traffic is set in a marketplace (like AdWords) the higher the cost of the traffic, the more valuable that traffic most likely is from an economic standpoint. Usually, that higher cost can be directly linked to higher levels of intent to complete an intended action. So while higher prices make margins thinner, higher conversion (intent fulfilled) will hopefully make the advertising worthwhile.

As an affiliate it’s important to analyze the intent of the marketing channels you are using, and remember if someone is promising you traffic at an extremely low price the traffic will likely have no intent of doing what you want them to do. As you are analyzing new potential marketing channels to use, ask yourself the following:

• Where does the traffic come from (what sites, channels, methods)?
• Is there any guarantee that this traffic will be real people, not automated bots visiting my site?
• Will the traffic coming to my site have the intent of doing what I want them to do, or will they be there for some other reason?
• Is there any other incentive given by the traffic provider to visit my site? Is their intent to complete my offer or to earn some type of incentive?
• Does the price of the traffic seem lower than the going rate of quality traffic? If so, why?
• If the traffic source is not well known, why is it that no one knows about it?

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For some reason most articles out there that center on the affiliate lifestyle tend to focus on lavish vacations, hot cars and big mansions. The scammers ebook salespeople who write these about this stuff usually are just trying to sell you enough of a dream to get your $69.95 so you can download their affiliate marketing “insights”.

Here at the InsureMe Affiliate Blog we’re not so romantic about the whole thing. We know that successful affiliate marketers are hard working affiliate marketers. Successful affiliate marketers spend a lot of time in front of their computers (and not on their yachts), and run into many of the day-to-day issues that other web workers do.

Today I want to point you to a couple of posts that may help improve your daily life as an affiliate.

The first has to do with your workspace. If you work at home, like many full time affiliates, you are likely surrounded by potential distractions. It might be the view out your window or the books on your bookshelf (or the Xbox hooked up to your TV) – either way, having your workspace clear of distractions could greatly increase your ability to get things done. The Zen Habits blog has a very useful post that will help you take your workspace from distraction filled to distraction free in five easy steps. Read it here.

The second affiliate lifestyle related post I ran across has to do with one of the trickiest issues that face affiliate marketers with families – work life balance. If you’re a gung-ho affiliate who is always thinking about business you might see success in the short term, but the stresses and pressures of being “always on” could affect your health and your family life in the long term. Web Workers Daily has a good write up on how to separate your business and personal life from a financial and lifestyle standpoint. Check it out here.

Have a great weekend…go Rockies :)

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

SEO Book’s founder Aaron Wall has gone koo-koo for videos as of late...which is good news for those of us looking to learn more about SEO. Aaron’s videos span a number of SEO related topics, and thanks to the magic of YouTube video embedding, here are a number of the most recent videos:

How to Create Elegant Search Spam (great fundamental SEO tips):

[Click through for more videos]

Create Google & SEO Friendly Page Titles (how to balance the needs of users and search engines when writing title tags):

Magical Description Tags (how to write them to increase click through from the search engines):

How to Use SEO For Firefox (using the SEO for Firefox plugin to do competitive SEO intelligence):

Check out the rest of the videos on Aaron's YouTube channel. Thanks to April for pointing these out!

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

No Google isn’t sending out Googlers to go all America’s Funniest Home Videos on paid link sellers, but they are doing the next best thing – removing PageRank from sites who sell links. From what I’ve read Google started doing this over a week ago, but a new round of sites that are known for selling link (and some that aren’t) are getting a symbolic kick to the groin from the Google spam team.

Why is lowering PageRank an effective way to deter link sellers? Mainly because people who buy links pay more for links from sites with high PageRank…so when the PageRank drops, the value of the links on the site go down. Also, sites that are getting hit with PageRank decreases are likely to have already been tagged by Google to not pass any link juice…so in effect, Google is killing these sites’ ability to sell links meant to improve search rankings. (Of course, if you are buying links just to get traffic from a site, spend away.)

Of course, a move like this will only hasten the move of the linking market to the underground…where a lot of link buying activity has headed. (Or at least that’s what I’m hearing.)

The amazing Barry Schwartz provides us with a list of some of the larger penalized sites and also links to a plethora of reports from other bloggers on the switch. See Barry’s post here.

[Update: TechCrunch has another theory about the PageRank update...they think it has to do with interlinking between blogs such as AOL's Weblogs Inc. Read up here.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I like creating websites with the Cutline template and WordPress in general for a number of reasons:

• Cutline has a clean and professional look to it
• It comes in two-column or three-column varieties…so you can chose a layout that fits your needs
• The top banner images can automatically rotate or be set up to have different top banners for different categories (like auto insurance, health insurance, home insurance, etc.)
• Cutline is actively being developed, so help is available and newer versions come out from time to time
• Since WordPress is a blogging platform, it makes adding content easy, but can be modified to look more like a website and less like a blog
• Hosts like Site5 have built in tools to install WordPress, so you can get WordPress added to your domain in less than a minute

Sounds pretty good, right? Using WordPress with Cutline could be a great way for newer affiliates or affiliates who don’t currently have a site to get something up and running quickly.

If you do end up using WordPress and Cutline for your site, make sure you add the All in One SEO Pack plugin as well. It lets you make the changes you need to each page’s title and meta tags for SEO purposes quickly and easily.

Maybe at some point I’ll get the time build a modified version of Cutline for InsureMe (and other) affiliates, but in the meantime it might be worth exploring on your own. If you have questions about using WordPress for affiliate sites, let me know :)

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you are working away today and looking for something to listen to in the background I’d suggest listening to the latest episode of SEO Rockstars from Webmaster Radio. The show always covers interesting topics and I learn something from just about every episode that gets put out (although new episodes are rare there days).

The episode recorded on 9/25/2007 was particularly interesting when Greg Boser, a well know user of the darker side of the SEO force, talks about how his company is spending a good amount of their time on content creation and the development of WordPress themes for their clients. Greg also mentions that he is pretty much done with chasing the algorithm like he used to do back in the day.

Anyway, SEO Rockstars is a worthwhile listen for anyone doing online marketing so check it out!

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I ran across an interesting post last night from Steve Rubel claiming that a pay-per-click recession is looming. Steve bases this claim on the following reasons:

1. Clutter – too many ads being displayed for search terms
2. Declining Relevance of Traffic/Transition to Cost Per Action – advertisers are going to want to pay for action, not clicks, in the future
3. Rising Costs – cost per click is getting too expensive
4. Marketers Spread the Ball Around – online marketers will move their ads to social media, behavioral targeted ads, etc.
5. Search Ads Are Viewed as Untrustworthy – people don’t trust search ads

Steve makes some interesting points, some I agree with but most I don’t. Here’s my comments on the topic:

1. Clutter – Steve points out that 10 ads are too many, I disagree. Ten ads is nothing new when it comes to competitive PPC terms and it doesn’t seem to stop people from clicking. As searchers become more savvy, they will realize that the paid ads are actually very useful when shopping online, while natural search is better for gathering information.
2. Declining Relevance of Traffic/Transition to Cost Per Action – a CPA model would be ideal, but in the mean time, companies like Google will do anything in their power to make PPC ads as relevant as possible. Once they get the relevancy just right, a CPA model will be an easy(er) transition financially for the search engine, but not before.
3. Rising Cost – Yes, costs are going up…and they have been for as long as I have been doing PPC. This is nothing new. There will be a point in most verticals where the little guys can’t afford top positions anymore (although there will always be a long tail), but the big guys will more than make up for it when they start spending branding money on paid search. Look at the insurance market, I doubt there is much profit coming from a $12 click on a term like “auto insurance” – it’s all about the brand and positioning, baby.
4. Marketers Spread the Ball Around – Money will go elsewhere, but as far as I’ve seen, behavioral targeting is a lot less cost effective than PPC. Same with most social marketing since it resembles more of a traditional marketing channel (make something you think is cool, hope people tell others, cross fingers, etc.) The PPC (or CPA) model will remain relatively cost effective for some time to come.
5. Search Ads Are Viewed As Untrustworthy – Possibly, but who trusts any other type of ad? The only real trusted resource is word of mouth, and if I could buy that at a good price I would (but success is certainly not guaranteed, making WOM expensive most of the time). So we are stuck with marketing through channels that suffer from low trust…big deal, that’s why good marketing is challenging.

So that’s my take. I can see where Steve is coming from, but I’m don’t think a recession will be coming any time soon. There will be change in the PPC space, but I know there are a lot of industries who are just getting their feet wet in search. Money will continue to pour in and people, like it or not, will keep clicking ads.

What do you think?

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This post will be short and sweet. Why? Because I am too busy because I am pouring over the information available through the Google Webmaster Tools interface. And guess what? You should be doing the same.

Google just rolled our some new features for webmasters like Sitelinks controls and the ability to filter reports in different date ranges (more detail info on this on SEL). For me, the information about our sites internal and external links was not only helpful, but also led me to some pretty good conclusions about changes that should be made to our site. I mean, if Google is going to let you know what they know about your site, don't you want to know what they know? (huh?)

Enough reading…get over to Google Webmaster Tools and start crunching your data.

It could change your life (or at least your afternoon).

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

SEO theorist and analyst Michael Martinez put together 20 interesting tips for doing “Hard Core” SEO…which seems to mean doing SEO with the intention of being a better optimizer. Not a bad goal, eh?

A number of Michael’s tips are aimed at proactively improving website rankings such as:

• Redesign your Web site once or twice a year


• Add 5 pages of content to your site every week


• Change the titles on your least successful pages twice a year

Other the tips will help you keep your SEO skills sharp such as:

• Create your own SEO book by collecting your favorite SEO related info and putting it into a .PDF file


• Write 10 blocks of ad copy every week and post them somewhere


• Using only a text editor, code one of your web pages from scratch

There are even tips that will help you to not fall back on the SEO basics (just in case), like:

• Stop using keywords in your URL
• Stop using keywords in your titles
• Define metrics to track that are not Google PageRank, Alexa Rankings, etc.

Michael has some good tips for becoming a better member of the SEO community sprinkled in the list as well.

What I liked about this post is that it challenges people who are optimizing sites to take a broader look at what they are doing and why they are doing it. Even if you only implement a couple of Michael’s tips into your SEO routine, you’ll be proactively working to improve your SEO skills, and that’s a good strategy for long-term success.

Read the whole article, along with the reasons why everything was added to the list here.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the more important posts I have seen on Search Engine Land for quite some time is Alan Rimm-Kaufman’s Secrets of Google Quality Score Revealed!!! (Not). While the post obviously does not reveal any of the great secrets of the AdWords Quality Score algorithm, it does dispel a number of prominent myths that surround Quality Score.

The information comes from a meeting between Alan and people from Google and some of the topics covered are:

• Whether match type impacts Quality Score
• If there is only on Quality Score algorithm
• Will pausing ads hurt your Quality Score?
• Whether restructuring your account can remove your Quality Score history
• If high click-through rate = a high quality score

Click over to this awesome post to get the answers to these and other questions…if you are like me, you might find some surprising answers.

Big thanks to Alan for sharing what he learned…I agree with him that the less “black box” AdWords gets, the better for everyone. Post like his help shed some light on a very dark concept.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was doing some, ahem, research on YouTube and ran across the first YouTube overlay advertisement that I’ve seen. From the picture below you can see that the advertisement ran near the start of the video (15 seconds in), and was and ad for something YouTube and HP are doing together.

I thought it was interesting that an orangey-yellow marker appears on the progress bar at the point where the ad started. I guess that is in case you want to get back to the ad? I didn’t click on the ad, but from what I understand doing so would have overlayed a video player on top of the window playing the original video – (see an example in the SEL post). The really cool thing is that the advertiser is only charged if there is a click on the overlay ad.

Overall, I’d say that if you are going to try to make some money on videos without being annoying about it, this is the best way to do it, so kudos to Google. I know if YouTube suddenly had a bunch of pre-roll ads running before videos, I’d be looking for a new place to do my…um, researching.

The big question for me is - when will search marketers be able to start placing these ads on a broad scale, and will there be help with the creation of the flash ads?

Get the low down on YouTube overlay ads from Search Engine Land in this article.

And if you haven’t seen it yet (and you are a Star Wars fan), you might want to check out some episodes of Chad Vader...it’s classic stuff.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Have you ever had a Google AdWords account that seems to be cursed? You know, one of those accounts that seem to land you on the third page of the search results no matter what you bid? Well, the curse might have a lot to do with account’s AdWords history, and a recent blog post from UberAffiliate seems to confirm that having a poor account history with AdWords can decrease your chances of success.

Here’s the set-up. UberAffiliate took two accounts, one was an old account with a lot of rookie mistakes in its past. The second account was fairly new, and had a stellar account history since it was set up with a good knowledge of the ins and outs of AdWords. He then added identical campaigns in both accounts and watched what happened.

The results seemed to be fairly conclusive – using the same bids, the old account with poor history ended up showing ads somewhere on the second or third page of the results with high minimum bids, the newer account with good history showed ads on the top of the first page with very low minimum bids. Pretty cool, eh?

So what can we learn for this test?

1. If you are new to PPC you are bound to make some mistakes…these mistakes will be factored into your account history.
2. The rookie mistakes you made in the past may reduce the effectiveness of your account in the long run, even if you “fix” the issues in your account.
3. If you have an AdWords account that doesn’t seem to be doing well because of past indiscretions, you might want to scrap it, rather than trying to save it, and start over.

Before you start your weekend ask yourself if you have any poorly performing AdWords accounts that have been less effective than you think they should be. If so, consider opening a new account to see if you can increase your performance. Based on UberAffiliate's test, doing so might make you a lot more money.

[Thanks to our PPC Jedi Brittany for finding this info. Also, as Brittany pointed out to me, this is one person’s opinion, but it sounds like at least one other person who did this experiment got similar results. So I guess what I’m saying is try this at your own risk…and remember you can pause an account instead of deleting it.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of my daily routines is to go into the InsureMe Commission Junction advertiser account and approve or decline potential publishers. Generally I enjoy doing it since I like seeing all of the different sites and tactics publishers are using. But one thing that really bothers me in the process is that I often don’t have enough information to make a good decision on accepting or declining publishers. Let me explain…

When I look at new publishers, I am primarily looking for the following:

1. At least one website that has something to do with insurance or something related to insurance (cars, health issues, property, finance, etc.)
2. Someone using only approved methods of promotion…meaning no software
3. No incentives being offered (incentive site traffic, even if it is charity incentives, causes more problems for a lead generator like us than it is worth)

Sometimes the approval process is fairly cut and dry. You applied to us with Burburry coat Blogger spam blog? Declined. You use software to drive traffic? Sorry. You label yourself as an incentive site? Buh-bye. You have an insurance related site and promote through search? Welcome aboard!

The problem is the grey area that a good percentage of publishers fall into. For example, you might be a reasonable successful publisher but have yet to build an insurance website, but don’t want to until you have some offers to promote. Now from my end, I will likely decline you, only because I have no way of telling what your intentions are and you have no easy way to tell me them either.

[Let me say real quickly that I take no joy in declining publishers…it actually bums me out. However, in order to keep out account more manageable, we want to aim for quality publishers, not quantity.]

What I’d love to see is a way for publishers to add some additional, customized information to their application when they are applying for a program. Some publishers are already trying to do this by adding information to the “incentive” section of their account to explain what they want to do with a program, even if it doesn’t have anything to do with an incentive. This can be helpful…but I’m hesitant to accept anyone who has entered anything into the incentive section out of sheer paranoia, and many advertisers automatically decline incentive sites.

CJ might also point out that publishers can use the email function in CJ to better communicate with advertisers…but I speak for a lot of people when I say that CJ email pretty much stinks…it takes a long time to load, and since you have to sign in to get to it, the email account is lucky to be checked more than once a day.

So CJ (and I know there are CJers that read this blog), why don’t you give publishers a way to communicate to advertisers through the application itself? Simply make an optional text box for affiliates when they sign up for a program…if they want to send a message to me to explain why all of their sites are blogs about their cats but they have an awesome insurance site idea, shouldn’t they be able to do that quickly and easily?

I know I would appreciate it as someone who manages a CJ account…and I bet it would save a lot of frustration for affiliates who are getting declined from great programs only because they can’t easily communicate their intentions with advertisers.

So that’s my rant suggestion. I can guarantee I’m not the first person to ask for something like this…and I won’t be the last. But CJ needs to understand that fairly simple enhancements like this will increase the number of new and meaningful advertiser/publisher relationships on their network…which means more money for CJ.

I think there is a no-blog comment rule at CJ, but if not, can someone from CJ comment on this? I’d love to hear more from their end about this. Also publishers, am I totally off base on this one? Would you use an option like this in your CJ account?

Leave your comments below, thanks for reading…

Posted by James Omdahl at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’ve always looked at SEO link building as the process of getting links to your site from other sites that are well respected by the search engines. I figured there was only one real kind of link building. After reading Dan Thies’ article Mastering Both Kinds of Link Building – Authority & Reputation, I’m looking at link development through different eyes.

Dan article focuses on two distinct kinds of link building. They are:

1. Authority Link Development – the process of getting authority or “trust” from the search engines because you have enough links to be included in the visible search results (the top 1000)
2. Reputation Link Development – the process of getting links with the right anchor text pointed to the right pages…essential for getting ranked well for particular keywords.

Dan argues that these two types of link development should be done separately rather than together to make link development easier…and who doesn’t want link building to be easier?

The article also dives into the importance of internal linking strategies, especially when it comes to getting your pages the right “reputation.” It sounds like this can be a powerful tool since:

I've seen countless examples, where my students are able to take control of a huge share of search engine referrals in their own markets, simply by making better use of internal linking. In fact, some of our greatest success stories involve students who put almost no emphasis on anchor text in their link building campaigns, and focused instead on creating more unique content within their own sites.

Sounds pretty awesome, eh? Check out Dan’s whole article here – he also has some free resources available if you are looking for more information on SEO and link building.

[Thanks to April for another good piece of “blodder” (blog+fodder)]

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I think about linking a lot…since it frustrates the heck out of me and all. For this reason, a lot of the reading I do has to do with link development.

The last few days have been fairly active as far as link news goes and the two posts listed below will get you caught up on the knowledge, drama and linking shenanigans that keep the SEM world interesting.

First, the Link Juicy Blog has a really good interview with Michael Gray up that dives into the world of linking from SEO. The interview covers subjects from link baiting strategy, the offline origins of “link bait” marketing and the ongoing debate about how Google is dealing with paid links.

There are certainly some worthwhile morsels in this one, so take a gander at Michael Gray Interview: Advanced Linking Strategies.

Second Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal reports on the Google PageRank update/smackdown that seem to be going on as well as other strange linking phenomenon that are being reported around the web. There seems to be very interesting (if not a little scary) things going down behind the walls Google right now.

Read his article here - Google PageRank Update & Link Selling.

[Stories via Sphinn]

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Aaron Wall, the man behind SEOBook, took the time recently to publish a mind map with every way he could think of marketing a website online (I wrote about mind maps as an affiliate tool here if you want more info on them).

Looking at Aaron’s mind map is a great way for new affiliate marketers to get an idea of the skills, tools, and strategies a person would use to market a product or service online. For seasoned internet marketers it gives you a chance to look for any areas that you might be leaving out of your online marketing toolkit.

Check it out and get educated.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I came across three great articles today that I thought I would share with you so you have some quality weekend reading.

The first article comes via Marketing Experiments and is one of the more inspiring marketing articles I’ve read in a while. The article, Transparent Marketing Tested, discusses the issues marketers face when writing web content for today’s cynical web users. If you write your own content, read this article…if you use a copywriter, email them this link…it will change how you look at your “sales pitch” forever.

The second article discusses the confusing world of pay-per-click bid management software, focusing on the bid management offerings from Google and Yahoo! If you want to understand what these platforms can and can’t do, and want to know why bid management software could be obsolete, check out ClickZ’s Has Big Management Become Obsolete?

Finally, do you ever wonder what links are helping you and which links aren’t doing anything to boost your rankings? Do you question whether those links you bought are worth the monthly fee? Do you wonder if your link building efforts should be focused on quantity or quality? Search Engine Watch’s Justilien Gaspard answers all of these questions in his post Link Value: Top Rankings, Secrets and Lies – Part 1.

Hope you find these articles as interesting as I did. Enjoy your weekend!

[Thanks to April for pointing out the first two articles…you rule the school!]

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

**This post would fit in a little better as a Friday post, but hey, I’m having a terrible time finding something to blog about, so here’s something fun for you**

Have you heard of Vern Fonk? Chances are if you don’t live in the Seattle/Tacoma area you haven’t. But thanks to the power of what the man in the video below calls the “InterMet,” Vern has made his way into my life.

Here’s his commercial (yes, this is a real insurance agency and real TV commercial):

Who says insurance can’t be funny?

I figure Vern is worth writing about because he is different…WAY different. I have a feeling he might not be the most loved insurance agent in his area, and I bet he offends some people as well, but Vern does something in this video that companies like GEICO have only been able to accomplish through heavy caveman make up, B-List stars and animated geckos (and a massive pile of loot)…Vern stands out an makes a heck of an impression.

What does this have to do with you as an affiliate? Maybe nothing. But realizing what Vern was able to do with a low budget, wild ideas and the guts to do something totally ridiculous to stand out from the corporate behemoths that dominate his industry might be inspiring for a few of you.

Or it might just make you laugh.

Dance!

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday I was asked by a coworker if we are doing anything to optimize our site for MSN’s Live.com. The answer was no, but this was a fairly timely question since MSN recently rolled out an upgrade to their search technology. After conducting a few searches on the “new” Live Search I was once again disappointed by what I saw and had any thought of optimizing for MSN scrubbed from my mind.

To be fair, the new Live Search is WAAAAAY better than past iterations. It looks like they might have taken care of the Blogspot spam blog demons that have been plaguing them for what seems like forever. But being better doesn’t mean being great, and Live is certainly not great.

With that in mind I thought I would share the 5 reasons why I don’t worry about optimizing our website for MSN’s Live Search:

1.

You Can’t Optimize for Unstable Search Results
The rankings in Live fluctuate wildly…so much so that it is really hard to tell what optimization techniques are good and bad. Back in the day we sat in the #1 position on MSN search for “auto insurance” – we were there for about a month and then one day, BLAM, we were knocked back to the 100th position for no apparent reason. Months later, we had moved our way back up to #1 – it lasted a couple days and then BLAM, knocked out of the top 100 again.

As someone who optimizes sites I am looking for patterns. If there is no pattern to how things rank, I have no strategy to optimize a site.

2.

Live Search Still Likes Blatant Spam Pages
As I said before, Live has finally taken care of their Blogspot spam issues, but other forms of spam live on. A good example comes from none other than Forbes.com. If you do any search for an insurance related term you will see what I mean. A couple years back some company convinced Forbes to create hundreds of keyword focused doorway pages and sell ad space on them. Since the pages live on the forbes.com domain, the pages rank well, and in turn are very visible to anyone looking for spam. Google got wise to this tactic quickly and have done away with the Forbes doorways…Live, not so much.

3.

Why Chase #3 When You Can Chase #1?
Let’s face it, Live wants to be Google. By looking at some of the spam that makes its way into Live, you can see echoes of the spam problems that once plagued Google. In the long run the process of optimizing a site for Google will be very similar to improving your rankings in Live.

4.

I want TRAFFIC, Not traffic.
If you’re going to focus your SEO on one search engine, it might as well be the one that gets the most traffic, right? Some people might say it is easier to rank well in a search engine like Live (ahem, spammers), and if it’s the only place you can rank well you might as well go for it. But if you are taking a long term look at your optimization strategy, Google is where the traffic and the money is at (although Yahoo! ain’t too shabby either).

5.

Live Search Corrupts the Youth
Live seems to have problems with some of the more important elements of search, like filtering adult content. The classic example that is being passed around lately is the search query “toys,” which gives you the following result.

I don’t have kids, but if my kids searched for toys and ran across that site, I would be furious. The funny thing is, people have been talking about this inappropriate result all week and MSN still hasn’t cleaned it up.

Those are my five reasons, but some of you might point out that the folks at Live might love this post. The logic would be that search engines hate SEOs and don’t want people optimizing sites at all. So if no one is trying to optimize for Live, they have a great chance of creating a better search engine, right?

Wrong. To me, I think Live will be a magnet for spammers as long as they rule the results. All of the “black hatters” who are tired of trying to crack the Google algorithm will head to Live because it is easy prey. In the process, Google will gain more trust from searchers and Live will lose it.

That, my friends, is why I don’t bother myself with optimizing websites for MSN Live. Like most people I hope that our future is less Google-centric than it is now, but my job is to follow the opportunity and dollar signs on the web, and at this point Live isn’t where it’s at.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

If you are reading this, there is a pretty good chance you are doing some affiliate business in the lead generation space. Heck, you might even be working with the greatest insurance lead generation affiliate program ever (yes, I linked that to our affiliate program – what of it?).

One skill all lead generation affiliates should know is how to create an effective landing page. By tweaking and improving your affiliate landing pages, you will be able to see a substantial increase in your revenue and conversions.

So what does it take to have a successful landing page? Jon Miller knows. Jon is the VP of Marketing at Marketo, and is an expert of lead generation in the B2B space. The Top Rank blog features an article from Jon titled Ten Tips for Lead Generation Landing Pages. The tips range from everything from making a good first impression to removing navigation and to test but not over test.

Take a few minutes to read the article and ask yourself if there is anything you can do to improve your landing pages today. If you find something you can improve, change it. If you are sending everything to your homepage, create some keyword focused landing pages. If your landing pages are covered with banner ads, clean them up. Good landing pages are one of the keys to affiliate success…if you aren’t optimizing them, you’d better get to it.

It’s a good thing.

[Image from Urch.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today’s tip is a fairly straightforward one, but one that could increase your conversions, so pay attention. The tip is:

Centering text is lame.

Ok, maybe not all the time (using centering for titles and stuff could look OK), but most of the time centering text on your page:

• Makes the text harder to read
• Looks less professional
• Could cause people to click out of your page in search of something more readable.

When I first stared making websites, I too was a fan of centering…I’m not sure why but it seemed natural to me to center the text on the page. Luckily the professor teaching my Webmaster certification course gave us the following rule:

You should almost never center the text on your website.

To make the point, here’s an example of centered text I ran into this morning:

Spelling and grammar issues aside, reading this text woul