Finding the right colors for your affiliate website is an art and a science. And if you’re like me you are neither an artist nor a scientist when it comes to color (which explains why 99% of the t-shirts I own are black).

Happily, there are many tools and resources out there to help you pick an appropriate color scheme for your next site. One that I ran across today is on Wellstyled.com and seems to do a pretty good job of pointing out color combos that could work with your website.

Here’s a screenshot:

Check the site out here.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I think many of us can admit that we are not totally excited about the products we promote to make our living. Take me for example. I help people find insurance, a noble cause, but being perfectly honest; insurance itself doesn’t exactly get my heart racing with excitement.

A lot of times, those of us who promote highly profitable but less than exciting products or services end up building websites that mirror the level of excitement we have for our products. In the insurance market, there’s a number of “nice” websites out there, but when it comes down to it, the approach sites take to get people to convert are exactly the same. For example:

“Free quotes”…of course
“Protect your family”…got it
“Save time and money”…you betcha
BLAH BLAH BLAH

Broken record. I mean seriously, go look at 10 top ranked auto insurance sites and tell me that there is anything remarkably different between their sales approaches. There aren’t, I checked.

Now I’ll admit, mimicking the sales approach from high-converting insurance sites will help you get off to the right foot, and it is certainly the “safe” play for most. But with all the competition and all the same-old-same-old insurance sites out there, I see a huge opportunity for affiliates who are willing to take some risks and build truly original websites that stand out.

Yes, it will be risky. And yes, you may not want to put all your eggs into the originality basket if you have mouths to feed or rent to pay. But next time you are building a site, if you can stomach the risk, try experimenting with an original, wacky, personal or even seemingly stupid site idea. It could pay off in spades.

Need some inspiration?

I submit the following as proof positive that even the most absurdly boring thing on the planet, the pre-flight safety speech, can be interesting, worth watching and even funny. Here’s Virgin America’s take on the airline safety video:

Remarkable.

So before you start writing the same old website text, or start designing another cookie-cutter site for that same old product you’ve been promoting for years, ask yourself “what would Virgin do?” Done right, the answer to this question might help you cut through the clutter, increase conversion and awareness of your brand.

[Big ups to The Denver Egotist for pointing out the Virgin ad.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the video below, Google spam Czar Matt Cutts give a breakdown of what is included in the Google search results page, and how Google chooses what to display there. While some of this video might be old news to most of you, there are some helpful tidbits that helped clarify some things for me. Here’s the video:

Something interesting from the video was that Matt mentioned that Google knows that the word “car” and the word “automobile” are the same thing. While this isn’t too hard to fathom, it is something interesting to ponder this concept when doing PPC and SEO for terms like “car insurance.”

Also, Matt mentions the Google Experimental page in the video, which I never knew about. If you want to see some of the search concepts that Google is working on, check it out.

Posted by James Omdahl at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One thing that super affiliates do well is optimizing. When it comes to PPC, super affiliates spend a lot of time collecting and analyzing data that might seem mundane to most people, but to them it is the key to maximizing profit.

One metric that PPC marketers can use to optimize their accounts is time of week and time of day. Both Google AdWords and MSN AdCenter provide tools to modify bids based on time of day and week, but I don’t think a whole lot of people use them since it takes a lot to figure out when to increase and decrease your bids.

Search Engine Land’s Brad Geddes sheds some light on time based bid modification in his post Optimizing Bids By Day & Time Can Dramatically Increase Your ROI. If you’re willing to invest the time to do the research, this might be a new optimization avenue for you to explore.

Check out the article to see if day-part optimization is right for you.

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

We’ve all heard the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, but if you’ve ever tried to buy stock photos to use on an affiliate site, you might want to revise that saying to “a picture is worth a thousand bucks.” 99 times out of 100, affiliates don’t have a thousand bucks to spend on a single image, so what to do?

Regardless of what an image-free Craigslist has managed to do, images are extremely important to most websites. Use the wrong images, you are going to drive away visitors in seconds, use the right images and you’ll see the conversion numbers you’ve been dreaming about.

But where can you get quality photos to use for your affiliate site without breaking the bank? Loren Baker knows, and is willing to tell you in his post 10 Places to Find Free Images Online and Make Your Content More Linkable.

Read up my friends, and if you site’s images leave something to be desired, it might be time for a photo-facelift.

[Big thanks to April for finding this gem.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Getting started in SEO can be a bit challenging, but not for the reasons you may think. The first skill one must learn when learning about search engine optimization is how to filter through the gobs of SEO information online. I can’t tell you how many times an affiliate or colleague has approached me with an outdated SEO tactic that they learned about from a webpage that is two or three years old.

Google search isn’t much of a help when it comes to this stuff, since natural search in Google tends to favor older information. A lot of times searching for something SEO related on the Google will bring up dated and plain old wrong information.

So knowing you can’t really search for SEO info on search engines, where should you search?

The e:visibility Insider knows, and in their blog post Newbie Guide to SEO – Where Do I Start?, the Insider point our where SEOs can get accurate, timely and trusted information on website optimization. The post also includes an SEO Tools section that covers a lot of our favorite tools here at the InsureMe Affiliate Blog.

If you’re an SEO newbie, check out the post and maybe even bookmark it. I have a feeling you are going to want to come back to it as you progress in learning about SEO.

Posted by James Omdahl at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week Google took its most aggressive swipe at paid links so far by wiping out the visible PageRank for sites in the Pay-Per-Post network. From an objective point of view, this is a pretty smart move by Google. In effect, Google is breaking PPP’s business model by broadcasting that they’ve been devalued. I’m sure it’s not the last time we’ll see Google target specific linking schemes with a total PR smackdowns.

This is yet another warning to SEOs that if you are going to buy links, you better be covert about it. The days of the open, visible and public link buying are over my friends. The underground link market will become the mainstream link market. Link buyers are going to find themselves having to sign NDAs to get into the underground, and many linking programs will become invite only. Luckily, it’s in the link seller’s best interest to send out a lot of invites…so if you aren’t invited to the party yet, chances are you will be soon.

Google is on a rampage folks. Who do you think will be the next to face the GoogleWrath?

For coverage on the Pay-Per-Post and link buying story, refer to the following posts:

Is Google Going to Expand its Punishments of Paid Links? – Eric Enge
Are SEOs Still Buying Links? – Barry Schwartz
Google Goes After the Everyday Blogger – IZEA Blog (the PPP company blog)

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Occasionally we get a call from an affiliate who tells us that they’ve got a ton of visitors on their site but none of them seem to convert (or even click through to InsureMe for that matter). The affiliate may rank well naturally for some keywords and is usually baffled that so many people can see InsureMe’s offer and simply pass it up. Usually, after a bit of diagnosis we find that the issue has a lot to do with who is visiting the site and what they are doing there.

If you are having trouble converting your site’s visitors check out Lisa Barone’s post, Is Your Search Engine Optimization Campaign Broken. Lisa does a fantastic job explaining what could be going wrong if you have a bunch of visitors but terrible conversion.

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

So I just finished reading How the Affiliate Marketing Industry Killed Itself on the DM Confidential site, and I got to say I’m a bit annoyed. Maybe this article was just written to get some links, and if that’s the case, congrats to the author David Rodnotzky, you got one. But seriously, if links were your goal you could just write an article called Why Puppies Should Be Refined and Used as an Alternative Energy Source. That would get you way more links.

[Note to self: write article titled “Why Puppies Should Be Refined and Used as an Alternative Energy Source” tonight for personal blog…I need more links.]

The thing about the article that gets me going isn’t the assumption that affiliate marketing is going the way of the Dodo, it’s that the article is based off the premise that affiliate marketing is all about the “wild west” days of affiliate marketing, and without the wildness, affiliate marketing doesn’t exist.

I totally disagree with David on this. In fact, I’d say that affiliate marketing is evolving into more mainstream and legitimate form of marketing. Yes, there will be a shake out of affiliates who don’t have the skills to survive or the will to adapt. But affiliates will thrive by evolving into highly skilled, legitimate marketing businesses that just happen to get paid on a CPA basis. And guess what David, the best affiliate marketers are already running their businesses like they are businesses - they don’t treat them like one time score at Tombstone Bank.

Every industry evolves. It's inevitable, like sunrises and Brittney Spears. We don’t say that the airline business disappeared because they switched from prop planes to jets. It’s still the airline business; it’s just faster, bigger and more efficient…once you get off the ground anyway…and if you don’t check your luggage.

Aw crud. You get the point.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Video ads. Just typing it leaves me with a feeling of opportunity and skepticism all at once. If you read the research, experts link that online video advertising will be the next big ad platform on the Web – and I bet they’re right. But I also bet that current video ad channels are ineffective in driving direct conversions and are more a branding tool. Not an ideal thing for your average affiliate marketer.

Even with my trepidation in this area, I think forward looking marketers need to start experimenting with this channel sooner rather than later. But getting started means doing something that may be a little outside of most online marketer’s comfort zone – creating a video advertisement.

Even though InsureMe has produced a number of videos in the past, the idea of creating a short video advertisement kind of freaks me out. I mean, what should an ad say? Should we use live action or screen grabs? Should we have music? If so, where can we find something that will sound right but doesn’t have royalties? Is our ad going to look so low-budget that it will scare people off?

Luckily, there are companies sprouting up that are addressing the video creation dilemma. One company of this type that caught my eye today was AdItAll. AdItAll allows you to put together videos using pre-made video clips, audio clips and text effects. The end result is a video ad you have the rights to use for $80.00 to around $400, depending on which elements you use. Here’s their video about how AdItAll works.

I took some time and played around with the site this afternoon, and my main impression is that you can tell the site is still in Beta. The interface is confusing at times, and after spending a little time making a test ad I ended up deleting it on accident just by hitting the back button. Also, after registering I had to click on a lot of stuff to finally start creating my first ad. Maybe I’m dense, but that shows me there are some serious usability issues. Still, the user interface for creating videos is pretty slick, here’s a screen grab…

Nonetheless, AdItAll shows promise as a company that can help affiliates create videos to use for online video campaigns. If you’re interested, get signed up with AdItAll (it’s free) and mess around a bit.

Oh yeah, if you’re a person who likes to produce short videos or music, AdItAll also has a program where you can produce video ads and get paid if people use them. Not sure what the payouts and stuff are, but it might be something fun to do if you’re into that type of thing.

Virtual high five to Linda at 5Star for writing about this.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

RANT WARNING

Ever since content match became an option on Google AdWords (you used to not be able to opt out), many advertisers have treated this piece of the AdWords Empire with a great deal of skepticism. Who can blame them? Most of the AdWords content traffic we get is of much lower quality than search traffic, as our conversion numbers support.

Google, in there never ending quest to make as much money as possible help advertisers deliver relevant ads to the users of various web properties, is constantly trying to improve the click-through-rate of contextual advertising (since higher CTR = More $). Even with a fleet of certified Stanford geniuses on the case, Google has yet to up this conversion to a point that is worth much attention for many online marketers, and more importantly to you, affiliate marketers.

After years of using engineering brainpower to try to get AdWords’ content match feature utilized by more advertisers, it seems like Google might have switched tactics to using marketing brainpower instead. In their most recent Inside AdWords post called Google Content Network Tips: Part 1, Google uses a lot of space talking about using contextual advertising to:

“raise awareness for your business and create demand among your potential customers that can be captured later by your search campaigns.”

HUH?

So you’re telling me that the best use for content match is for branding? That we should be using our contextual ads, not to drive conversion, but to be remembered for later searches? I wonder what those AdSense publishers in the CPA program think of this angle?

From an affiliate point of view, this may give you another reason to avoid messing with content match. I mean, Google is pretty much pointing out that their content network would be better served with banner ads (can you say AdWords image ads?) and not text based advertising – and that you might not want to expect those clicks to convert. I don’t know about you, but as an affiliate in the insurance world I would want to pay for clicks that will become conversions…not try to build a brand on an affiliate budget.

I also find it interesting that the author of this post, Feng, quotes the founder of an SEM agency in this post when it comes to the importance of using content match. Here’s the quote:

There is no doubt that if we were to take our clients' campaigns off of the content network today, we would see a decrease in their conversions on search tomorrow.

Not surprisingly, the case study leaves a lot of detail out…I’d like to see some hard numbers, not just a broad statement about a 25% increase in revenue. What about gross margin on that revenue? And how much is being spent on content vs. search?

How about a quote or case study from a company who actually makes money when things are SOLD, not when they get paid a percentage of an ad spend? Oh, that’s right, because aside from the few unfortunate AdSense souls who got pulled into your CPA experiment, GOOGLE REALLY DOESN’T CARE IF PEOPLE ACTUALLY BUY STUFF AFTER THEY CLICK.

SHIPOOPI!!!

End of Rant…for a cool down let’s watch some Vern Fonk:

[Disclaimer: I know that there are affiliates out there who make a killing on content match…although most of them are actually just making the killing on the AdSense side of things ;) ]

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Today I read that AOL purchased a company called Yedda, a company that runs a business model similar to what Yahoo is doing over at Yahoo! Answers. The idea is to build a community where questions are asked and answers are given, and in the end you get a massive amount of content written for free, in natural language and it has a good chance of ranking in other search engines. It’s worked great for Yahoo! Answers and it now looks like AOL has decided to tap into the power of users to get quality content.

Bravo AOL. [Never thought I would get an opportunity to type that :) ]

As an affiliate it might be a bit ambitious to think you could compete with these large Q&A services in a broad sense. With that said, there is a lot to learn from the Q&A concept.

If you want an example of someone who has been leveraging this concept for years, look no further than Dave Taylor. You may have never heard of his site, AskDaveTaylor.com, but that’s ok…the search engines certainly have, and Dave makes a pretty good income from getting search engine traffic from pages containing user generated content.

Ranking an affiliate site #1 for “auto insurance” is a lot less likely than ranking for “how do I find Colorado auto insurance?”. Ranking well for common questions might be the answer to your SEO success.

I’ll leave it at that…did deeper if you’d like.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yesterday I mentioned that paid search marketing is challenging because of all of the ad serving rules and nuances set out by Google’s Quality Score. Ironically, I was looking though my feed reader this morning and came across an article that is all about those subtle (and not so subtle) nuances. In the article, The Mysteries of Ad Quality Revealed, Andrew Goodman talks about the various factors that play a role in ad quality, and talks about the links between organic and paid search optimization.

Andrew is a well know expert in the world of paid search, and though various forms of experimentation has observed the varying level of importance of the following factors on Quality Score:

1. Historical click-through-rate
2. Overall click-through-rate
3. On-page optimization
4. Inbound links
5. Site architecture and user experience
6. Behavioral and clickstream data
7. Manual adjustment based on industry
8. Manual adjustments based on ad spend

Curious to know what Andrew has found? If so, read his whole post over at Search Engine Land.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Hello, Hello.

First off, just wanted to let everyone know that our company trip to Juarez to build a couple of houses in Juarez, Mexico was a success. We worked hard for a couple days and in the end were able to build a home for this family:

The other half of the team built another house nearby for another family in need. A great time was had by all. If you are interested in the organization we worked with, you can get more info here.

Ok – back to work.

If there is one thing I can say for PPC, it’s that it never stops being a challenge. It seems like the already nuanced art of pay-per-click advertising gets more and more nuanced as time goes on, and advertisers who pay good money for clicks are left wondering how to appease Google’s confusing AdWords algorithm.

But before any affiliate marketer can worry about the nuances of paid search, they need to avoid the simple mistakes that can lead to wasted money, clicks and time. Jennifer Laycock, a woman who knows a thing or ten about paid search was kind enough to lay 5 of the most common mistakes that marketers make that can crush a paid search account. These mistakes include:

1. Ego Bidding
2. One Ad, Many Keywords
3. Focusing on Budget Instead of ROI
4. Sending All Traffic to One Page
5. Not Separating Content from Search

Head on over and read Jennifer’s whole post to find out what these all mean, why they are bad and how to make sure you don’t make the mistake.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yes.

Have a good weekend.

OK, just kidding – I’ll expand a bit.

In the modern world of affiliate marketing, content creation is an important element to properly marketing your affiliate sites. An affiliate site with good, targeted content will:

• Up your quality scores with Google AdWords
• Increase your conversions
• Give you a shot of ranking naturally in the search results
• Ensure greater site longevity for SEO purposes (good content makes your site less likely to get an affiliate Google slap)
• Allow you to build a real asset, not just a one page throw-away site

Content creation is good but one of the tricky parts of creating content for a site is actually getting that content from whatever word processing program you wrote it in onto your website. When I first started working here at InsureMe we did not have a content management system in place; so every time I needed to add a page to the InsureMe site I had to hand code the HTML and have it added to the site and the site map. Needless to say this system was inefficient, and at one time there were dozens of articles backed up waiting for coding and uploading. In short - it stunk.

So eventually we realized we needed an easy way to add content to our site, and a content management system was the way to do it.

If you’re unfamiliar with what a content management system does the easiest way to explain it is that a CMS lets you add new web pages to a website in an interface that looks a lot like email. The end result is the ability to create new web pages as fast as you can write content. This can be a huge advantage for any affiliate, from the newbies to the most technical uber-geek, since it will save you a lot of time and hassle.

I’ll even go out on a limb and say that if you’re going to build an affiliate site with more than five pages on it, you should use a CMS to build it (and if your affiliate site is going to have less than five pages, you might want to reconsider your strategy).

The obvious question is what CMS program should affiliates use. A few years back, there were very few CMS options out there…especially ones that were in the price range of your average affiliate. These days there are many options high quality options that would fit the budget of most three year olds out there (read: free).

Since cost is not an obstacle, picking a CMS program for your affiliate site should be done based on the ease of use, compatibility with your server setup and, this is going to sound pretty high-school, popularity. You see, the more popular a CMS platform, the more people are usually developing cool templates, plug-ins and upgrades.

To gauge the popularity of different CMS solutions, the mighty DaveN recently put up a blog post asking which CMS systems were the best for online marketers. In the end it seems that the winner by a landslide was Wordpress, which I totally agree with. Other honorable mentions were Drupal and ModX.

Here at InsureMe we have used Website Baker with some success (and it is very easy to use), but I’m not sure if WSB is great for SEO.

Anyway, I feel like I’m rambling a bit here, so I’ll close with this bit of advice:

USE A CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Subtle, eh?

OH YEAH! A number of us from InsureMe, myself included, will be heading to Juarez Mexico for the next few days to build two homes for two families in need of help. Posting may be a bit light for the next few day, but I should be back on Thursday for more online marketing fun!

Posted by James Omdahl at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Holy cow. I’ve seen some less than beautiful websites in my day. Heck, I’ve seen some terrible websites in my day. But some of the sites listed on BlogStorm’s post Top 10 Worst Websites You’ll Wish You Hadn’t Seen are so bad I my eyes are bleeding. I mean, wow. You’d have to go out of your way to make sites this insanely ugly (don’t click that link if you have epilepsy).

AFFILIATE TIP: If your site looks like any of the sites on this list, please redesign it. It’s the right thing to do for conversion, for your users and for humanity.

If you know of any other websites that could have made this list, leave a comment so we can all laugh and cry together.

Posted by James Omdahl at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)