My first blog après James' being gone and I already know I have some big shoes to try and fill (he was tall). But his talent has been noted all over the place, including blogs and social networks.

Let's chat a little about social networks. They are SO web 2.0! But is it worth the time and effort? Is it really connecting people or just increasing more niche marketing while allowing people to have more degrees of separation? It seems like I have more desire to IM or email or something like that now instead of putting the effort into contacting my friends via phone or in person!

I have a Facebook account and a LinkedIN account, but don't dare touch MySpace because it scares me. I'm not a professional social networker, but I have used it and will continue to use it. I run into old colleagues, very old friends and acquaintances and have worked business deals after connecting on either of the two, so it has had positive benefits. However, it also is time consuming and if I spend time on social online networking, then I'm kinda burnt out on anything else.

Here's a good article kind of talking about the emergence of social networking and it's snowball effect:

Now, since I am an avid nonuser of MySpace, if I end up clicking on a link that takes me there, I automatically assume it's bad/spam advertising and will go no further.

Facebook? These Harvard guys had something. I've connected with people all over the world here. There is very targeted marketing to me specifically. To the point that I've actually joined a few groups because of that targeted advertising. I'm not going to suggest you try it, but let's just say a suspicious 30something year old is open to that kind of niche marketing. Top Ten Reviews had something to say about ranking social networks.

Click here for some stats on advertising dollars spent on social networks:

Now: get back to socializing, folks! There’s gold in them thar so called networks!

Posted by April Hartmeister at 03:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Writing for the web may not be your cup of tea. After all, who but a seasoned web writer can craft SEO-friendly text, insert a phenomenal call to action, and convince visitors they simply have to have whatever you have to offer--especially when it's as boring as insurance?

You can! Whether you enjoy writing on the side or you can barely construct an understandable sentence, knowing what NOT to do when writing landing pages is just as important as knowing what TO do. The premise? If you can avoid making mistakes up front, you'll save yourself a lot of time and frustration on the back end--no matter what your level of experience.

To find out what makes landing pages go wrong, check out this handy-dandy article I ran across. If you'll take its pointers seriously and avoid common missteps, even you can write landing pages that rock!

So flip the switch, shed some light on the subject--and start writing great landing pages now. You really can do it!

13 Sure Signs Your Landing Page is a Turn-Off

Posted by Penny Hagerman at 03:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So as you’ve already read James (the traitor—just kidding we still love you James!) decided to leave last Friday and we’ve decided to keep the blog up and running.
It’s going to sound a little different than what it did when he wrote because we are going to have multiple people writing through out the week so get ready for some variety!
With that being said, you should check out our newly updated blogger profiles and read a little bit about our new bloggers.
We were also thinking that it would be great if we could get some input for you, our readers, as to what you needed help with and what type of stuff you wanted to read about. So here’s what we’re asking of you—if you have any ideas please send them our way. Would you like to know more about PPC? More about SEO stuff? Or just general affiliate goings on? (We’re also up for giving updates on the Colorado weather…but that’s probably not all that interesting)
Let us know what you want in the comments and we’ll give it to you!

Posted by Brittany Heidtke at 03:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As some of you may already know (if you follow me on Twitter), Friday is my last day here at InsureMe. I’ve had an amazing, life changing, and exciting 5 years with InsureMe and deciding to leave wasn’t an easy choice. I’ve been given a new opportunity with a start-up in Europe, and at this point in my life it feels like time to take a chance and step out of my comfort zone.

Actually, one of my favorite quotes, which I’ve mentioned on this blog before, seems to apply well in this situation:

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. - Mark Twain

One of my greatest joys over the last two and a half years has been writing this blog for all of you. It truly was a labor of love, and all of the feedback, comments, and relationships that have grown from the blog have made the process of writing almost 700 post worthwhile.

Hopefully over the years you’ve read at least one thing here that has helped you be more successful as an affiliate marketer…if that’s the case, I consider this blog a success.

The good news is that InsureMe plans to continue posting to this blog going forward. While post might not be as frequent as they currently are, InsureMe has a team of talented online marketers here that will continue to add tips, tools and news to the blog to help you succeed in your affiliate adventure. So make sure you subscribe via RSS and keep an eye out for future posts.

If you’d like to stay in touch, or follow me on my next adventure, track down my personal blog and website, which is easily found by searching for “James Omdahl” on Google. You can find my contact info there if you want it.

Thanks so much for reading and stay tuned…more InsureMe Affiliate Blog goodness is on the way…

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For the first time I have spotted an instance where Yahoo! is calling out an email spammer right in their search results. Let’s look at the screen grabs.

At the top of the search results, Yahoo! shows this message:

And then in the results they show this:

And when you hover over that, Yahoo! pops up this:

You can see the whole screenshot here.

Looks like Yahoo! might be trying to differentiate themselves as the company that protects users from spammers. The real question is, if a company is so bad that they flag them, why show them in the results at all?

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If yesterday’s post about the SEOmoz Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet got you looking for more information on SEO standards and best practices, then the subject of today’s post will knock your socks off.

Today I ran across Adam Audette’s SEO Guide to Information Architecture and was blown away by all of the great information and practical advice all wrapped up into a single document.

The guide includes the following sections:

• Domains
• Sections & Categories
• Pages
• Internal Linking
• Final Considerations

As someone who has underestimated the importance of information architecture and on-page optimization for SEO in the past, I can attest that modifications to code, design, and internal linking can truly boost your site’s SEO performance in meaningful ways. So take some time today and read Adam’s guide…you can thank me later.

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If yesterday’s post about the SEOmoz Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet got you looking for more information on SEO standards and best practices, then the subject of today’s post will knock your socks off.

Today I ran across Adam Audette’s SEO Guide to Information Architecture and was blown away by all of the great information and practical advice all wrapped up into a single document.

The guide includes the following sections:

• Domains
• Sections & Categories
• Pages
• Internal Linking
• Final Considerations

As someone who has underestimated the importance of information architecture and on-page optimization for SEO in the past, I can attest that modifications to code, design, and internal linking can truly boost your site’s SEO performance in meaningful ways. So take some time today and read Adam’s guide…you can thank me later.

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I ran across this downloadable and printable SEOmoz Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet today, and I’d suggest you make yourself a copy and keep it somewhere close by. The cheat sheet covers many of the important rules and best practices for SEO web development, which includes:

• Important SEO HTML Tags
• Search Engine Indexing Limits
• Recommended Title Tag Syntax
• Common Canonical Homepage Issues
• 301 Redirects for Apache
• Important Search Engine Robots
• Robots Meta Tag
• Common Robot Traps
• Robots.txt Syntax
• Sitemap Syntax

If you hire someone to do web development for you, you may want to pass this list on to them. Making sure your site is built properly can make a night and day difference in your search engine rankings, so do what you can to make sure things are built right in the first place.

Here’s a link to the PDF, and here is a link to the SEOmoz post about the sheet.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

OK, so I had never heard of the AdWords Change History Tool until today. Yeah, laugh if you want – but I bet there are a number of you out there that have never heard of it either, so this post is for you.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Change History Tool, it is a feature in AdWords that allows you to look back on the account changes you’ve made in since 2006. In doing so, the tool helps you remember what changes you made that could have caused a change in your accounts performance.

To access the tool, just login to your AdWords account and click on ‘Tools” under the “Campaign Management” tab. Once you have done this, click on “My Change History” and enter a date range.

The way I see it, this is an invaluable tool these days, especially for people who are managing large AdWords accounts that require constant tweaking to try to increase ad ranking and decrease cost-per-click. By utilizing something like the Change History Tool, a PPCer will be able to better interpret the effects of account changes on their quality score/ranking/etc.

Also exciting (and the way I learned about this tool), PPC Hero announced that Google will be adding some graphing features that will give advertisers a more graphical look at how the changes effect their accounts.

If you’ve got an AdWords account or 20, make sure you start taking advantage of the Change History Tool…it could help you answer some of the magical mysteries of AdWords.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Aaron Wall has put together an insanely comprehensive blog post that shows how you can put a value on a #1 Google Ranking. At over 5,000 words, the post is epic, but certainly worth the time…and since it is so long, I’ll make this post short.

Go read What is a #1 Google Ranking Worth over at the SEOBook blog.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

PPC Master, John Hasson found a way to increase his Google AdWords content network conversion rate by 35%, and decrease his cost for conversion by 46%..

How?

Dayparting.

For those of you not familiar, dayparting, or ad scheduling as Google calls it, is the process of setting different bids for your PPC keywords depending on the time of day the search is being conducted.

So for example, if you knew you got your highest conversion rate from 5 PM to 7 PM, but extremely low conversion from 11 PM to 8 AM, you could set your cost-per-click to a higher or lower number to make sure you get the higher converting traffic and you get less of the lower converting traffic.

The funny thing is, I don’t know if there are really a whole lot of people who bother to use dayparting features when they are available. To many people it seems like setting everything up might be a bit too complex and might not be worth the time.

But seriously - if you could increase your conversions by 35%, and your cost-per-conversion by 46%., wouldn’t you?

Check out John’s blog post to see how he determined what times to run various bids, and how he made dayparting boost the effectiveness of his AdWords content campaign.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)