I think everyone who attended Affiliate Summit West walked away with something - new business contacts, motivation, new passions, and new perspective. The more I look through blog posts summarizing people’s experiences, the more I realize what a top-notch event Affiliate Summit is, and why it is worth the not-super-cheap cost of admission.

Mike Allen from Revenews created a list of four of his take-aways from Affiliate Summit. They (paraphrased) are:

1. If you are just working for money, you won’t be happy. Have passion in your work.
2. Challenge yourself to think big. Most affiliate marketers never live up to their potential
3. Help others succeed, and in turn, help yourself. Build a network of friends and contact so you can help each other succeed.
4. Help the affiliate marketing industry long term by keeping your own tactics clean. The last think we want is to become bigger targets of regulators, search engines, and major industry lawyers.

Great stuff Mike.

I wanted to end this post with a fun clip of someone who was at the summit who is truly reaping the rewards of following his passion. The person is Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV. Gary runs the Wine Library podcast to share his knowledge of wine and to educate people about the wine world.

Gary has gained quite a bit of notoriety from his podcast and has appeared on Ellen, Nightline and, as you will see below, The Conan O’Brien show. As you’ll see, his passion for wine is infectious. Imagine what your business would be like if you were this passionate about what you do…

http://view.break.com/343258 - Watch more free videos

Posted by James Omdahl at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jason Calacanis, everyone’s favorite guru to love to hate, and founder of Mahalo and Weblogs, Inc., gave a controversial, interesting and enjoyable keynote at Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas. The speech, which was aimed to inspire affiliates to go beyond spammy tactics, thin sites, and small thinking, kept everyone talking throughout the Summit. In my book, it was one of the most successful keynotes I’ve seen.

If you weren’t at the summit and you are looking for something to listen to this afternoon, you should listen to the keynote over at Webmaster Radio. It might leave you inspired, angry or even a little depressed – but if anything, it should get you thinking.

Posted by James Omdahl at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If this sounds like an interesting concept for providing better search results to you…

VortexDNA is a technology that came out of the insight that the way we structure our beliefs is governed by the mathematics of complex systems. What that means is that we know the structure our beliefs, and because of that we can then map out the structure of our intentional DNA, the intentions behind the world we create, and that’s basically the breakthrough, the technology. It provides a map of the way people organize who they are, literally who they are, through their belief systems.

…you should probably read this article from Gord Hotchkiss at Search Engine Land that discusses the work of Vortex DNA.

While this might not be the exact future of search, it gives some insight into what people are doing to solve the mystery of searcher intent (i.e. figuring out mathematically if someone wants a computer or a piece of fruit when they type “apple” into a search box.)

Enjoy. Have a great weekend. And safe travels to all of you headed to Affiliate Summit in Vegas!

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Good piece in the New York Times yesterday about the coworking phenomenon. For those of you who haven’t heard of coworking, it’s basically a community/collaboration space where independent workers, like affiliates, can pay for the usage of shared office space.

Many independent workers have found coworking arrangements to give them the sense of community they miss out on while working from home. Coworkers also are able to collaborate more than the average independent home worker, and usually have access to helpful people/resources through their coworking arrangements.

While costs may be a little steep for some, if you are looking for an officey atmosphere without the officey reality of a boss, check out the coworking wiki for more information and a coworking location near you.

[Via WWD]

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today’s affiliate tip comes from a conversation I had this morning with one of the best affiliate SEO guys I know, who will remain nameless (because that’s how he rolls), but for the purpose of this post we’ll call him Mr. SEO.

As you might guess, doing SEO for Google in competitive verticals (like insurance) requires time, skill, and healthy amount of experimentation. Experimenting with eternal linking methods, content creation, site structure and internal links are usually necessary when trying to pull first page ranking on big money terms.

What a lot of affiliates don’t understand is that the same experimentation that makes a site successful in Google can also eventually lead to ranking penalties. Whether those penalties are deserved or not isn’t really the point – if you get zapped by Google, it’s time consuming and difficult, if not impossible, to recover – especially when you aren’t a mainstream branded site.

When faced with a fairly obvious Google slap to his main money making domain, Mr. SEO realized right away that it was time to dump his penalized site and start the optimization process over with a new domain.

This caused a bit of a problem.

Mr. SEO knew that Google wasn’t likely to give first page rankings to a newly indexed site for competitive search terms (yes – the mysterious “Sandbox”). Based on his experience, Mr. SEO knew a site would need to be in the Google index anywhere from 8 to 10 months before it had any chance of making it to the first page for big terms.

Without an alternative, Mr. SEO ended up buying a new domain, developing it, and after almost a year of no income from the vertical, got the site ranked for competitive terms once again. A great success, but not an ideal situation by any means.

With this experience in mind, Mr. SEO now makes sure he is prepared for inevitable fluctuation of his search rankings by keeping anywhere from 7 to 10 domains on the back burner, ready to rock, in case he has issues with his prime money maker.

These backup domains have fairly basic websites on them and he points some links to them from sites that are already indexed. Once the sites and links are up he keeps an eye out to see when Google indexes the site, and makes a note of it so he’ll know when the domain will be ready to rank in the eventuality that he needs it.

By keeping a handful of aged and indexed sites on hand, Mr. SEO is now ready for any issues his main money-making domain may face, and as a result, he protects himself from extended periods of reduced income.

If you’re an SEO affiliate, I’d highly recommend that you take some time this week and pick up some backup domains like Mr. SEO. That way, if you run into some Google ranking issues down the line, you’ll be able to get back on your feet and keep earning!

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Wow.

Debra Mastaler has done it again. To see what I am talking about check out her comprehensive list of link building tools at Search Engine Land. By comprehensive I mean she covers tools to help in all stages of link building, including tools that:

• Check for broken internal links on your site
• Check for sites that rank well on more than one search engine
• Find “hub sites” that link to more than one of your competitors
• Analyze anchor text on competitor’s links
• Check the age of potential link partner’s domains and their bad neighborhood status
• Search for directories and sites that allow URL submissions in your niche
• Search for blogs that can be mined for links

Based off a quick count it looks like Debra points to no less than 20 sites that can help you get a better grasp on how to build quality links to your site.

Needless to say, I know how I’m spending the rest of my day…

Posted by James Omdahl at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Readability is one of the essential elements of a well designed website that, at times, can get lost in the graphical segment of the design phase. At least once a week I run across an affiliate site that has pages that are difficult, if not painful, to read or even scan. Undoubtedly, if you are presenting someone with a website that is not easy to read, your conversions will suffer.

Here’s an example I ran across today that show what I’m talking about:

As you can see, the gradient from grey to black makes the words on the page harder and harder to read the further right you go on the page…and the fine font doesn’t help that much either. In the end the site ends up looking amateurish…not the best impression to leave when you are trying to make money online.

Of course, it’s not just affiliate sites that suffer from readability issues. A great example of great content destroyed by poor text layout is the Cool Travel Guide blog. The blog is authored by Lara Dunston, a professional travel writer who has experience writing for some of the biggest travel book and newspaper publishers on the planet.

Being a professional writer, I would hope Lara’s publishers give her text better treatment than the headache inducing Blogger template she chose for her blog. To get a taste, here’s a shot of a recent posts:

Now maybe my eyes aren’t what they used to be (which isn’t saying much), but I find the tiny font in bright white with the black background and long paragraphs nearly impossible to read. Actually, I have never successfully been able to make it through a post on the Cool Travel Guide because its text makes my eyes melt like the bad guys in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s a shame, because I really would like to read the blog.

With these two examples in mind it might be a good idea to do a quick review of the pages on your website(s) to make sure they are not only good looking but easily readable. If you find something that might be a bit questionable, have a friend check it out with their computer and get their opinion. It also might be a good idea to check your page in various screen resolutions.

Making sure your site is as readable/scanable as possible will make your site look more professional and increase your chanced of converting your visitors.

BONUS: If you are interested in learning a bit more about fonts and readability, I found this study from Usability News that you might find interesting.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Big news from Google, starting yesterday Google started a very limited test of video ad units on their search engine results pages (SERPs). In doing so, Google is taking a step forward (for better or worse) in giving advertisers more options of how to advertise through Google search.

Here’s a quick list of details on the video ad test:

• The test will be very limited to begin, and so far no one has reported seeing any of the video ad units
• To start, the videos will not be visible on the search page, but there will be a plus sign symbol attached to the ad that you can click on to open the video
• In the future Google may consider adding a thumbnail photo of the ad instead of the plus box
• Advertisers will be charged when someone views the video, or if the video is not viewed, when someone clicks on the text of the ad.
• Advertisers will only billed once if clicks occur on the video and the text ad
• Google feels now is the right time to try out the video ads in the SERPs since the currently are showing video results through Universal Search
• Google’s thinks that the video ad units could be used for branding as well as click throughs to websites
• Google will continue to focus on ad relevance – so you can rest easy if you think major advertisers will run “branding” ads on unrelated keywords

I for one am very interested to see where this all leads. From an affiliate marketing standpoint, I think it is time to start figuring out how you could leverage video ads for your promotions now. That way, when this program opens up to everyone, you can be one of the first in your vertical with a video ad.

On thing that worries me is to think that a year or two down the line your Google click-through rate might be dramatically affected by the quality of the videos you are able to produce. Kind of makes we wonder if the “little guys” are going to be able to compete with major players who have ad agencies and are already producing video advertisements.

Check out Danny Sullivan’s take along with some mock-up shots at Search Engine Land.

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Everyone’s new favorite affiliate blogger, UberAffiliate, did a short post that pointed out the possibilities of keeping a close eye on sites like Yahoo! Buzz.

While most of the keywords that are showing at Yahoo! Buzz are celebrity/music related, there are some gems that seem to pop up here and there. A great example is the search term “10 easy ways to save money” which is currently the #10 buzz leader. If you’re looking for something to do, it might be time to write an article titled “10 Easy Ways to Save Money on (place your product/service here).”

Not to be outdone, Google also has a buzz service called Google Trends. You can check out a list of the hottest search terms here. The cool thing is that you can check different dates to see if there are any patterns, and you can click on the search terms to see the latest news articles and blog posts.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This may or may not matter to you depending on the level of craftiness you use on your AdWords accounts, but if you have been using different display and destination URLs on your ads, you’re going to have to rethink your strategy.

According to Barry Schwartz (hi Barry!), Google has decided to even the playing field for advertisers by tightening the destination and display URLs policies for AdWords advertisement. The good news is that this mainly has to do with redirecting and sending traffic to other sites, and not (as far as I understand) using display URLs that don’t perfectly match the destination URL.

For example, if we want to send traffic to our auto insurance landing page, which has a destination URL of https://www.insureme.com/landing.aspx?Type=auto, we can still use a cleaner display URL like www.InsureMe.com or InsureMe.com/Auto.

On the other hand, if we wanted to use a different site’s URL as the display, like www.InsureMeBlog.com, but we sent the click to a page on www.InsureMeBlog.com that redirects to www.InsureMe.com, that would not be acceptable. Also, we couldn’t send traffic to another URL if it had identical content to www.InsureMe.com, and we can’t promote InsureMe in the ad and then send traffic to a URL different from www.InsureMe.com.

I have a feeling this may be a reaction to some of the wild AdWords tactics that were pointed out on the Shoemoney blog recently – and it is unclear whether there will be algorithmic or manual enforcement of this policy.

From what I understand the changes will take place in August of this year, so if you’ve been getting creative with your display and destination URLs, it might be time to start coming up with a new plan.

Posted by James Omdahl at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This goes out to my homegirls Cassie "Qulity Score" Cizzle and Brittany "Keyword Bomber" Heidizzle...

You gotta love that guy.

Posted by James Omdahl at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Link building maven Debra Mastaler put together a list in September of ways that someone who is new to link building could start getting some links. While I wasn’t following her blog at the time, I am now, and I figured I’d put a link to the post since it is really a good resource for anyone who has to build links (hence, the post recently won a Semmy award).

The thing I really like about Debra’s approach to link building is that she looks at it with an eye towards traditional marketing as well as online. In Debra’s list you will find all the classic methods like directory submission and press releases to more creative approaches like contacting journalists and getting interviews.

If you have a website that you’d like to seem move higher in the search results (who doesn’t), make sure you read the post and apply what you learn.

On an unrelated note, here is Carlton Banks dancing to Tom Jones. Happy Friday:

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you are an affiliate who doesn't have a word processor on their computer, and you want to quickly write something up in a word processing program, you have a couple choices, both of which have their drawbacks. You can either go out and pay Microsoft a bunch of money to get a copy of Word or you can use one of the alternative programs that are out there like Open Office.

While Word can do a ton of fancy stuff, the average user will likely never do a whole lot with the more advanced Word features, and paying Microsoft and bunch of money for Word never feels that good. Open Office is a good (and free) alternative, but going through the process of downloading and installing can be a bit of a hassle - so if you are into instant gratification, you're not going to be happy.

Luckily, if you are the type who is as impatient as I am, there are some online alternatives to traditional word processing programs that will get you processing in less than a minute.

The first of these alternatives is Google Docs. If you currently have a Google login, Docs is ready and available to you. Just sign in, follow this link and start typing.

Another alternative, if you are scared of the giant Borg of Google eating your thoughts, is a new site called Buzzword. I am actually using Buzzword to type up this blog post and it's working quite well. The site has a very clean design and the navigation and functions are all quite intuitive (something that can't really be said for the latest version of Microsoft Word).

The interesting thing about Buzzwords is that it is flash based, which to me is a neat use of Flash technology.

Both Google Docs and Buzzword natively allow you to output your documents into traditional Word formats, so you don't have to worry about compatibility problems with other programs (yet another problem with the new Word, which likes to put out documents in the "new" Word format which does not play well with other word processors). Both also have sharing and collaboration functionality...which is quite neat.

So if you're looking to save some cash but you still want to process some words, think about using one of the Word alternatives out there. For quick and dirty web work, they are all that you really need.

[Thanks to Web Worker Daily for pointing out Buzzword]

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wow. Great news from InsureMe - yesterday we were purchased by Bankrate, the consumer banking marketplace.

We are all very excited to be teamed up with (technically a wholly-owned subsidiary of) Bankrate, and we know that Bankrate will be able to help InsureMe and our affiliates take our businesses to the next level.

Thanks to all of our affiliates - you guys and gals made this possible for us.

Here is the official press release if you’d like to read it. And here is the InsureMe mascot showing his excitement through interpretive dance…

InsureMe…Alright.

Posted by James Omdahl at 09:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of the questions I get more often than not from new affiliates is “how do they do it?” How is it that InsureMe has affiliates who are pulling in tens of thousand, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars each month? Is it PPC? SEO? Something else?

My honest answer? I’m not totally sure.

Yes, our top affiliates use both PPC and SEO. But beyond the generalized tactics of creating good content, great ads, and knowing how to optimize for natural and paid search, there is a little extra something that all of our top affiliates use to make it to the top of our affiliate rankings.

Creativity.

But what is creativity when it comes to PPC? I mean, isn’t it all about good bids, high quality score and good click-through? Not always. Top affiliates make it a point to think WAY outside the box when it comes to PPC.

The Shoemoney Blog has recently pointed out two of these “outside the box” tactics. While these examples might be a little borderline, they are a good example of creative thinking in competitive PPC verticals. Check them out:

• How to earn an awesome quality score by sending your ads to a Google redirect
• Creating new AdWords accounts every few minutes and paying for them with resold AdWords coupons

Again, there are just examples of creative AdWords strategies. I don’t think copying them will get you very far, since there’s a good chance someone is correcting these loopholes as we speak, but I do thing they show the kind of thinking that is implemented by top affiliates.

So next time you are strategizing about your AdWords accounts, try to think outside of the box. Actually, strike that, burn the box altogether.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Quick post today.

Check out Danny Sullivan's thoughts on Google's objections to the Microsoft's Yahoo! takeover bid.

With Google looking like they are ready to battle Microsoft on this one, it's hard to tell if they are scared or just trying to slow things down.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, it finally happened. Microsoft, sensing the weakness of lucky-too-be-#2 Yahoo! has pulled out its checkbook and offered $44.6 billion for the intarwebs most trafficked portal.

Rumors of such a move have been around for quite a while. In this post from May 2006, I mentioned a discussion I had with Forrester analyst about Microsoft picking up a stake in Yahoo!. Funnily enough, the analyst laughed about the possibility of that happening (she actually clarified her stance in a blog post where she called the possibility of such a move as “hogwash” sighting the strength of Yahoo! and Microsoft. Sometimes I really wonder why people even listen to Forrester’s online marketing analysts. Yes, I am ranting.)

Needless to say, if the transaction goes through there will be some serious implications for affiliate marketers. I would hope that Microsoft would have the good sense to kill its AdCenter platform and switch everyone over to Yahoo!’s Panama (and while they are at it they should trash the Live algorithm and use Yahoo!’s instead).

More importantly, I would hope that a Microsoft and Yahoo! would find a way to get their search traffic numbers up so that search marketers would have a reason to spend more time optimizing for and bidding with Microsoft/Yahoo!.

In the end, I’m hoping this goes through. I think Google needs some real competition, and Microsoft and Yahoo! have proven that they are no match for the big G when they are working alone.

What do you think? As an online marketer do you think Microsoft buying Yahoo! is a good thing or a bad thing? Leave a comment!

[For a more in-depth analysis from the search marketing field, check out Danny's post.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)