So have you heard the news? Microsoft has completely taken their offer off the table with Yahoo and now Yahoo and Google are going to team up–eventually.

No need to go crazy now with trying to figure out what you are going to do if/when Google and Yahoo combine their paid search ads, personally I don’t see the government allowing it (but that’s just my opinion)…monopoly anyone??
Anyways, from the reports yesterday, nothing is supposed to go into effect until September so we all have time to figure things out.
If you’d like to read more on it, Yahoo news has given some insight into it, as well as Search Engine Land.

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.

I’ll admit it. You can do some amazing stuff with Flash on a website. Great animations, interactive elements, stylization - but Flash is often used at the cost of natural search findability.

But not always.

While the people who practice Search Engine Optimization (SEO) have traditionally avoided Flash sites like the plague, there are ways to make Flash content accessible to Google’s crawlers, as long as you know what you are doing.

Eric Enge wrote a very helpful post for anyone who wants to use Flash on their websites called How Flash Can Be Search Engine Friendly. In the post he describes how you can use Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) and SWFObject to properly implement SEO friendly Flash.

Give the article a read, and let me know if you’ve ever been able to successfully rank a site that uses a lot of Flash.

Last week Yahoo! announced that they would be opening up their search platform in something they were calling the Yahoo! Search Open Ecosystem. I held off on writing anything about this initiative because, well, I really didn’t get it. But after reading some stuff online, I am still totally confused.

My basic understanding is that Yahoo! will allow webmasters to add certain tags (or microformats) to their sites that will help Yahoo! better understand the pages and the relationship between the different pages. Then Yahoo! will use this data to create better web results, since they won’t have to try to figure out the relationships between sites/pages/etc. through linking patterns and content exclusively.

The example given in the Yahoo! announcement has to do with LinkedIn, and says that by marking up its pages with these microformats, Yahoo! could better “understand the semantic content and relationships of the many components of the site.”

So that’s what I understand, but here are the things that are confusing me:

• Are these “microformats” any different from much abused meta tags of days past? Won’t giving webmasters control over these factors just encourage them to take advantage of the system to increase their search rankings?
• How technical must one be to put these microformats into place? Does this mean reworking an entire site to comply with the microformat standards? If so, could the changes being made hurt rankings in Google?
• Is this really a big deal at this point, or is it just a small step towards something that will be bigger later on?

If you can answer these questions, you’d be my hero. I really want to understand this stuff, but things seem to get way technical and over my head when I do any digging.

Thanks!

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]

As you may have noticed, I’ve been out of the office for the last week and a half. Because of that I’m sitting here catching up on emails, deleting the amazing amount of spam I get (in Russian no less), and trying to see if I missed much in the search engine world (right now most signs point to “no”).

Instead of boring you with stories of how my neck and back are sore from too much Xbox (yes I am a dork), I though I’d direct you too a list of the top 25 posts on Search Engine Land in 2007. It’s funny to see that the most popular stories tended to be the ones that are more entertaining and less about important industry news.

I guess that’s the nature of blogs, eh?

I’ve got to admit, I’m a big fan of brainstorming. Whether it’s with a group or alone somewhere in a coffee shop, I like trying to think up new ideas and solutions to problems. I’m a firm believer that in the affiliate world (and the business world in general) is shaped by the ideas of people who were willing to take the time to think about doing something new in a innovative and exciting way.

One of the biggest challenges most of us face is getting outside of the day-to-day minutia to take the time to unlock the more creative portions of our brains. Even if we’re in a brainstorming session, you can find ourselves trapped in short-term, small picture thinking and can’t get the innovative thoughts flowing.

Luckily there are some tools that are made to help you get your brain working towards innovative ideas. One that I really like is Oblique Strategies, a tool that was developed by musician Brian Eno.

Oblique Strategies started as a set of cards that had cryptic sayings printed on them. The idea is that when you are stuck in a brainstorm you can flip over a card and use the saying (for example “twist the spine” or “go slowly all the way round the outside”) to interpret your problem or ideas. While some of the cards may be a little too out there for your brainstorm, like “infinitesimal gradations,” some of them can get new thoughts flowing in ways you would have never imagined.

The cool thing about Oblique Strategies is that you can buy the cards if you want, but you can also just go to the Oblique Strategies website and get the same thing there. Also, if you’re a Mac user, some kind soul has created an Oblique Strategies dashboard widget (my favorite).

Thanks to Web Worker Daily for pointing out this tool, as well as some others you can read about here.

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.

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.

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:

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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:

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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

As I think I mentioned before, I’ve become quite a fan of WordPress recently. In my spare time I have been messing about with various templates to see how well they can be modified to build a nice affiliate/ecommerce site. While some templates are pretty much rubbish, there are some other templates that will let you put together a clean looking site in less than an hour. One template I am infatuated with is the Cutline template by Chris Pearson (pictured above).

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

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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.

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.

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.

You may have noticed that the Affiliate Blog has been rather quiet for the last few days. The reason is that I was in Southern California at a wedding and visiting family with my fianc

I’m not sure what happened this morning over at Yahoo!, but whatever it was, it was a mess. When I was checking our Yahoo! search rankings this morning I ran across the page you see below. I’m not sure if some of the big filters they run at Yahoo! broke or if they pushed an update that made things go haywire, but either way they weren’t winning any fans searching for “auto insurance quotes.”

The #1 spot on the page was taken up by a site that you have to be logged into to view, so you got some type of custom error page when you hit it. The other two highlighted sites on the page, #3 and #5, are sites that help you create a free forum. What that has to do with auto insurance quotes is beyond me…but it certainly isn’t right.

Things seem back to normal now, which is good. It would be interesting to see what the real story behind this mess was…Yahoo! Search Blog, I’m looking at you.

Ironically, today was the day that Danny Sullivan picked Yahoo! as the “Google Free Monday” alternative search engine. Maybe Google’s Matt Cutts was behind the whole thing…I hear the guy worked in the CIA Special Ops and was responsible for numerous missions to destabilize the USSR before the wall came down. Word on the street is that Matt is made of liquid metal.

Ok, I made that last part up.

First off, I’ve got to admit, just like Linda and Shawn, this PopShops video featuring a three-year-old using PopShops caught my attention. I mean c’mon, this kid is cute:

But after watching the video I signed up for PopShops to see what it is all about - and it’s really neat. Straight from the PopShops site, this is what it’s all about:

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I love working on the Web. I’ve had all types of jobs, and let me tell you, sitting in front of a computer and cruising the Internet to get things done ain’t a bad gig. If you’re a professional affiliate marketer, I’m guessing you’re a fan of Web work as well.

But if you’re like me, working on the web can get challenging at times. When you’re banging away on your keyboard coming up with keywords, or battling a particularly troublesome stylesheet, its easy to take advantage of the web to, well, screw around a bit. I think we’ve all found ourselves researching that new Aston Martin or looking for hotels in Paris when we should be getting things done so we can afford the Aston Martin or the trip to Paris someday.

Even if you’re not surfing the web to waste time, many of us get sucked into long IM conversation with friends or get caught up in a massive back-and

As if our indexing problems with Google weren’t enough to worry about, from the looks of things, Yahoo! has decided to mix things up with a fairly substantial algorithm change.

From what I have been reading, early in the update there were a couple versions of the algorithm showing, with one being overrun by spam sites and one showing decent, yet decidedly different results from the last algorithm. Now it seems like the higher quality results are showing and things are starting to get consistent across datacenters.

I’ve got to admit, I liked the old algorithm better - mainly because we ranked a lot better with it. Interestingly, in the insurance vertical I am seeing a lot of sites that are appearing high in the rankings that have come out of nowhere.

I’ll be sitting tight and seeing how everything settles on this one. Hopefully good old www.InsureMe.com will work its way back up…but if not, well, guess we just have to wait for the next update (trying to keep the “glass half full” on this one).

Vlad has a three question interview with Janet Meiners over at his My Affiliate Journey blog that is worth a read. Janet shares some tips that have helped her succeed as an affiliate.

One big thing I got out of the interview is that Janet, like many affiliate marketers, is a big fan of Jeremy Palmer and his QuitYourDayJob.com blog. Admittedly, I forgot about Jeremy’s blog, but after checking it out today I am pretty excited about rediscovering it.

Good work on the interview Vlad, I like the short interview format. And make sure you check out Janets blog as well.

What do Blackle and a Jackel have in common?

Well, nothing really. A jackel is a nocturnal creature and Blackle is a website that basically is the black screen version of Google, but it supposedly saves energy. Soooo, how much energy would this actually save?

I decided to check out this Blackle and see if I was left out in the dark here….and apparently the black screen uses 59 watts instead of the usual 74 watts. If you would like to see the potential energy savings, check out Mark Ontkush’s blog… I’m all about saving energy and certainly agree with the belief that every little bit helps. In conjunction with it being so fashionable (black is always slimming), it can prove to be a little easier on the eyeballs, and for those of us who stare at a monitor for hours and hours, it could kill two jackels with one…um…well, I’m for leaving the animals alone and alive, and in tact.

So, check out Blackle and see if it’s the screen for you. Plus, you don’t need ackle to use Blackle!

Well it’s Friday! As I was enjoying my Friday afternoon I was reading a blog on Search Engine Land today about how the court has ruled it is okay to ‘google’ your employees. Interesting…

So naturally my train of thought went to, ‘Gee if my employer ‘googled’ me what would they find?’ Well if you type in ‘cassie carson’ into Google you will find beauty contestants, InsureMe blogs, and past jobs that I had at the University of Iowa (Go Hawks!) All the information can be picked through and you can come up with my graduation date, school address, and that there are a lot of dogs named Cassie, Cassandra, and Carson. Neat…

However, it fascinated me that employers would be willing to trust what comes up as results. Out of the top ten results only 2 of them are actually me. I guess what I’m suggesting is to make sure to ‘google’ yourself before going into a job interview. There may be a story on there that you need to defend yourself for, or just let them know it’s not you! Just some food for thought…

Happy Friday - Enjoy the Weekend!

Who wouldn’t want to be in Sultry Miami? Oh, wait, this is July 8-10, their hottest, most humid time of the year…but who cares, because we will be inside with air conditioning and connecting with fellow affiliates.

Not to piggy-back (oh, but I am) on Cassie’s posting yesterday…however, I have to agree that this is truly a good time to be with fellow inhabitants in the same realm of work. I still can’t really explain what the affiliate world is all about to others. So, it’s really nice to be able to connect with those who “get it”…..any of you going? If so, I’d want to meet up with ya. I definitely like putting a face with the name, along with seeing some cohorts that I actually had the pleasure of meeting and spending some time with previously.

Some of the things I have learned from prior Summits:

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Well I don’t really love Yahoo as much as Molly and Gracie, but I’ve been thinking lately that I’ve only been in this whole online marketing realm for 6 months, give or take, and I’ve found Yahoo (well at least the new version) tons easier to understand than Google…in terms of algorithms, how to get placed where we want to be placed, etc., etc…

But sometimes I feel like it’s too good to be true…like one morning I’m going to come into work and BOOM Yahoo will have exploded our account and we will be in the red!

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Get rich quick sites. There are thousands of them out there. Thousands. And unfortunately, many new affiliates make the mistake of believing the hype and buying the latest and greatest CD, DVD, piece of software, or magic voodoo stick that will help them get rich in days with little to no effort. The problem is, get rich quick schemes usually only benefit the scammer hawking the goods, not the buyer.

So how can you avoid the scams? How do you know if what someone is selling is just a bunch of fluff or really is a valuable resource?

Aaron Wall of SEO Book decided to shares some of the questions you should be asking before you make a purchase of any online money-making product. If you are new to online marketing, I beg you to check out his post, Questioning the Legitimacy and Authenticity of Internet Marketing Advice and Sources. Take a minute to learn from Aaron’s years of industry experience. It could help you avoid being scammed by a scammy scammer.

[Bonus tip: This was brought up by Danny Sullivan on the Daily Searchcast - if you are on a web site that forces you to scroll forever to get to the bottom of the page, the odds are good that you are looking at a get rich quick scam site.]

Duplicate content. It’s one of those things in life that we all hate but can’t avoid…like taxes, buses and bathing (joking).

But what is duplicate content? How does Google handle duplicate content? And can you really be penalized for it?

These are all good questions, and thanks to Rand at SEOmoz, we know have a slightly clearer idea of how Google identifies and handles duplicate content. Rand also goes through some of the more questions about duplicate content.

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Google just seems to be full of new and fun tools this week in the PPC world. As Penny mentioned in her article yesterday, they put in new quality score columns this week and are going to start with a new algorithm next week. And today we got email stating that they are going to allow us to pause and un-pause keywords. . I think they just want to keep us on our toes!

Now this pausing/un-pausing keyword tool might not get everyone as excited as I am, but it’s definitely going to be a time saver in the long run. If you guys run your PPC campaigns like we do then you know if a term has a high cost per conversion or no real conversion at all, then you delete it (after trying to fix the landing page and what not).

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Clean Up Your Act With Some Quick & Easy Organizational Tools!

I think we can all agree that PPC advertising can at times be a bit overwhelming. There really is no one way to do it or to know exactly what is going to happen the next day. I just want to help you organize yourself and your campaign on a daily basis.

We look at our results everyday, which helps stop immediate damage, but can be very time consuming. So here are two tools you can use called Script to do’s and A-B Testing to help make every day a little better.

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Hey Affiliate Blog readers. Just wanted to let you know that this blog might be going up and down for the next day or so. It turns out that our host, Mosso, has been having issues that have led to a couple days of server outages. Word is their whole team is working to fix the problem…and if you are reading this it looks like they have things working for now.

Sorry about the inconvenience. It seems that no matter what hosting company you use you are going to have days like this.

To make things up to you, here is a picture of me and one of my co-workers Jeb all dressed up in our finest Scandinavian pop-group outfits. And yes, the green thing is indeed a man cocoon.

Now this might not be a bad thing, but if you were counting on bidding the same way you used to in the old Yahoo platform and ranking for what you paid for– you may have a rude awakening come February 5th.

I got a little note from Yahoo this morning telling me that starting February 5th, they are going to take into account a “quality score” when running ads.

This makes sense from a user’s point of view. When I read an ad, I want to click on something and go to a page that is relevant. From my point of view, (the one who has to now figure out how this new algorithm is going to work) it stinks!

What can we do…once one Yahoo headache is over, they find a good way of creating a new one!

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up of what’s going to begin February 5th. If you want to follow this link, it will explain in better detail how they are going to rank your ads and “other important things you need to know.”

Happy Searching!

I stumbled across this thread on Search Engine Watch and had a good laugh. If you are fed up with the less than stellar track record of Yahoo Search Marketing’s Direct Traffic Center (DTC), you are not alone. I know our PPC team doesn’t exactly love Yahoo right now.

It seems that much of the Direct Traffic Center’s functionality was down for about three days, and frighteningly enough, while it was down it sounded like Yahoo had little faith in restoring the system any time soon. From the last post in the thread it seems like things might be working over there again…but who knows if everything is fixed and if it will last.

I don’t know about you, but I am rooting for Yahoo to get their act together. A world without Yahoo would be a bit too Googly for me. Unfortunately, it seems like Yahoo’s biggest threat is might be Yahoo, as a recent article in The Economist pointed out.

We can only hope that Panama treats us advertisers better than DTC - but as the Search Engine Watch moderator Discovery says

I have always found Commission Junction’s business to be an interesting one. For those of you unfamiliar with Commission Junction, CJ serves as a link between advertisers and affiliates - giving affiliates a “one stop shop” to find the advertisers wares to sell, and providing a place for advertisers to tap into a large pool of affiliates. For this service Commission Junction charges about a 30% commission…which is admittedly a bit steep.

InsureMe has worked with Commission Junction for a few years and we are happy to do business with them. However, being an advertiser we have been getting the feeling that Commission Junction has been shrinking year-over-year. I can’t give you any facts, just a feeling that we have, as do other CJ advertisers I have spoken with.

In her recent article in ReveNews, Beth Kirsch speculates that Commission Junction may be on its way to being sold by its owner, ValueClick. While Beth points out (numerous times) that this is all speculation, it appears that she might have some inside information she is not really admitting to.

After reading the article it seems like ValueClick selling CJ might not be a bad idea, since ValueClick doesn’t seem to “get” affiliate marketing, and that misunderstanding of the business may very well be hurting CJ. Also, the transaction could take ValueClick in the direction they would like to go (think online ad agency) and allow them to better develop their behavioral marketing technology (instead of trying to collect the information through affiliates like they did with the Link Management Initiative).

All in all, Commission Junction is a good company and an important part of the affiliate marketing industry. If selling CJ will help CJ get back on track, I am all for it.

Read the article - get learned - and then sit back and watch. This could be interesting.

Dear Affiliate Partners,

Thank you for your continued support and commitment. Last quarter was absolutely amazing! During that time, we rolled out our new lead site and began offering our affiliates script tracking, automated co-branding and increased payout frequencies.

As a result, our new lead site dramatically improved the consumer experience, as evidenced by improved conversions across the board. What’s even more exciting is a new, incredible ability to perform A/B testing on internal traffic, which we expect will lead to even more conversion enhancements.

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