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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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. Its 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.
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.
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.”
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.
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:
Historical click-through-rate
Overall click-through-rate
On-page optimization
Inbound links
Site architecture and user experience
Behavioral and clickstream data
Manual adjustment based on industry
Manual adjustments based on ad spend
Curious to know what Andrew has found? If so, read his whole post over at Search Engine Land.
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:
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:
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.
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?
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.
So I just finished reading 
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.
Today I 
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