Most affiliates dont have a lot of cash to spare when theyre just starting out. (After all, thats why they become affiliates, right?) Whether paid search is their game of choice or they prefer experimenting with SEO, tips that help them enter the arena without spending an arm and a leg are always welcome.
Well, if youre a new affiliate–or even a seasoned pro looking to cut costs–heres a suggestion you might not have thought of: try using colloquialisms. Thats right, if you can find and use more informal terms (or those same terms in another language) and substitute them for terms more difficult to rank on or more expensive to bid on, you might just find yourself a profitable niche!
If youre wondering what Im talking about, or you think Im speaking another language, check out this recent post over at the SEOmoz blog on the subject. Itll explain things in more detail–and put a new twist on the long tail!
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 its 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, youll 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 youll 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!
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.
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.
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.
First off, apologies for the lack of posts over the last week. I was out of the office so things got a bit stale. I’m playing a bit of catch-up on work, but hopefully the posts will settle back to their regular intervals now.
I’ve been digging through my feed reader today and finding a number of gems. The greatest in my option that I have run across so far is a post from Barry Schwartz titled US Court Learns SEO, Decides META Keywords Don’t Matter.
The post discusses the recent case Standard Process v. Banks which looked at trademark infringement as it related to SEO. In the process of deciding the outcome of the case, the court got up to date on SEO and decided that the use of META keyword tags was immaterial to the ranking of a particular webpage.
Barry’s post is based off the analysis from law professor Eric Goldman, which can be found here, which includes a quote that I love. It is:
Lawyers, on the other hand, have been living in a parallel fantasy universe where keyword metatags single-handedly divert unwaveringly brand-loyal customers to piratical competitors.
Gotta love that.
This brings up an interesting SEO tactic - don’t try to figure out SEO, let the courts do it for you.
Kidding.
Two more articles of SEO interest for you to peruse over the weekend:
I ran across a post on the PPC Hero blog today that I thought I would share with you. The post, Un-Clutter & Optimize Your Account with Better Organization does a good job of laying out some of the basic guidelines to organizing a PPC account. While the post is a few months old, I don’t feel like any of the info is outdated.
The post does a good job of explaining what seems to be one of the more important aspects of AdWords success these days, account organization. It’s funny to me that account organization has become so important - and it really shows that there is, in fact, a fairly complex ranking algorithm running behind the scenes at AdWords.
I mean, I remember setting up InsureMe’s first PPC account and basically just tossing in keywords in whatever way made sense to me and my reporting needs at the time. Now we’ve got the fear of Google not liking the way our accounts are structured to worry about - and an accounts success or failure can depend upon the number and type of words you are putting in an AdGroup.
So if you are looking for some real world advice about PPC account structure, check out Amber’s PPC Hero article here.
BONUS: Aaron Wall recently gave a candid interview about the present and future of SEO to Marketmou. It’s certainly worth a read if you’ve got a few minutes.
That’s the feeling an SEO gets when it looks like their site has been banned by the search engines. Even if there is no real reason for a search engine to ban your site, suddenly not seeing your site ranking for a keyword can touch off a sense of panic that will get your heart racing.
Normally the panic is unfounded. Your site may have just slipped a few rankings or could have been indexed incorrectly for some reason.
It has happened to me.
Google bot decided to swing by InsureMe.com right in the middle of a site update once, and our site was suddenly cached as a blank screen. When I checked our rankings the next morning, we had dropped magnificently. It was a disaster.
But the good news was, we weren’t banned or penalized. After some quick checks I realized the issue and we were able to react accordingly. After a couple days Google reindexed the site in its correct form, and our site quickly made it back to its original positions in the search results.
Knowing how to check and see if your site has been banned is a fundamental skill for anyone who cares about their site’s search rankings. Mark Jackson at Search Engine Watch has written up a nice article that explains how to check and see if your domain has been banned by Google, Yahoo! or MSN - and how to go about getting it un-banned if it is.
If SEO is an art form, then link sculpting is one of the major tools that an SEO artist has at their disposal. I’ve spoken before about using the rel=”nofollow” link attribute to maximize the flow of link juice to your most important pages, and reduce the flow to the least.
But what many people don’t know is that they may have some link equity somewhere on their site that they don’t know about. Maybe someone linked to an article on your site randomly and you never noticed the link. Maybe someone picked up on a blog post of yours and pointed a link to that page. Heck, maybe a page on your site got included in an academic directory and you never noticed. Seriously, I’ve seen it happen.
Knowing where all your inbound links are pointing is essential to being a proactive link sculptor, and luckily Google provides a tool in their Google Webmaster Tools interface that can help you see where all of your inbound links are pointing.
Paul Bourque, better known as UberAffiliate, has been putting up a number of question and answer blog post that are full of interesting information affiliate marketers, especially PPC.
So far there are a total of 7 posts, 6 are text and one is video. All of them are worth a scan/watch if you have the time. Here are links:
Big ups to Paul for being so open and taking the time to answer a ridiculous number of questions. If you’ve got a question for Paul, you can leave a comment on the UberAffiliate blog.
I was having lunch with one of our PPC affiliates this week and the topic of privacy policy came up. Specifically, the affiliate said that even if he’s running traffic through AdWords to a thin site “one page site”, the site will still have more than one page - and one of the main reasons is because the site will have a privacy policy page.
Coincidentally, Search Engine Land’s Bill Slawski posted an article that talks about the importance of a privacy policy when you are doing search engine marketing. Like any of Bill’s articles, this one is well thought out and researched and points to three reasons you’d want to make sure you include a privacy policy on your site (so make sure you read the full article here). They are:
Privacy policies give your site credibility and reassures your users
Whether your site has a privacy policy or not has an influence on your PPC Quality Score with Google
Some people think that having a machine readable privacy policy will affect everything for search rankings to the filtration of sites by toolbars and other tools
All this privacy policy talk made me realize that a lot of new affiliate marketers probably don’t even think to add a privacy policy to their affiliate site - which could be hurting their chances of success. If you fall into that boat, you should make it a goal to get a privacy policy added to your site(s) by the beginning of next week.
Oh yeah, one other thing, don’t just go and steal someone’s privacy policy off their site…that’s bad form. Instead use one of the helpful online tools out there like this privacy policy generator.
Ok, the title of this post may be a bit dramatic, but the truth of the matter is that video on the internet is growing rapidly, and the affiliate marketers who are able to master video creation and advertising strategies will be much more prepared for the future of online advertising.
Just yesterday Hitwise came out with data that shows that UK internet traffic to online video websites increased by 172% between this February and February 2007. That’s 172%! The report goes on to say that in the UK one in every 45 visits was to an online video website. (You can get more details here).
As more and more people are watching video online, and as viewership and usage increases, so do the opportunities to advertise through and with video websites. As an affiliate marketer, you still have the opportunity to be a first-mover getting into the online video advertising world.
Admittedly, at this point video advertising seems to be more of a branding move for more traditional advertisers, versus a direct response channel (see this article for proof). But as Google continues to struggle to monetize sites like YouTube, I think they will do whatever they can to make advertising more viable for all types of marketers, including performance marketers.
Outside of YouTube, Google is still trying to figure out how to make video AdSense ads work for both their advertisers and publishers. As video becomes a more accepted form of media on the web, more people will be willing to click on these video ads, and more publishers will be willing to run them on their sites.
If I were you, I’d take some time and start learning more about the online video advertising world. I think that the affiliates who get it will be the ones most likely to profit from it as this market develops.
It’s been a while since I have checked out the SEOmoz blog, but since there has been a serious lack of interesting information being published on other sites (*cough*-Search Engine Land-*cough*), I decided to check in and see what Rand and friends were up to.
Now aside from having some of the most photogenic people in the search business working for them (I mean look at those profile photos - it’s like a geek modeling agency over there), SEOmoz tends to do a nice job of putting out actionable SEO advice, although mostly just for paying subscribers. Today though, I was excited to see some advice on the free site that discussed some recent test results from the Mozers.
In the post, Rand describes the findings of an experiment with the effectiveness of multiple links to the same URL coming from the same webpage. What they found was a bit of a surprise to me - when there are multiple links to a single URL on a webpage, Google only counts the first link on the page towards the distribution of both link juice and the anchor text of the link.
In the past I’ve always thought that each link passed link juice to the destination URLs on a webpage, duplicate or not. For example, if there was a webpage with five links on it, with 2 links to webpage A, 1 link to webpage B, 1 link to webpage C and 1 link to webpage D, I assumed that the following was true:
webpage A would get 40% of the link juice from the page
webpage B would get 20% of the link juice from the page
webpage C would get 20% of the link juice from the page
webpage D would get 20% of the link juice from the page
But based off of SEOmoz’s testing, the real link juice distribution would look like:
Let’s face it; no matter what you do for a living, getting burnt out on your work is inevitable. People need variety in their lives, and when you are super focused and pounding away at something day after day, you’re going to get sick of it.
Managing burnout is essential to keeping a consistent, healthy affiliate business, so knowing tactics to help things stay fresh and exciting is key.
Christine Churchill put out an article today that gives you ten strategies for avoiding search marketing burnout. Among them are tips for taking care of yourself physically, mentally, and learning to manage your workload. If you’re feeling a little bit of the burnout coming on, make sure you check out the article.
Also, I’ll throw in a little tip of my own.
If you’re looking for something that can give you a little exercise and get your creative juices flowing, consider picking up a Nintendo Wii. We’ve had one in the office this week and it’s proving to be a great way to increase morale, give you a little exercise, and relax a bit before you go back to the grind.
Yes, I’m obsessed with the Wii.
How do you avoid burnout? Leave your own tips in the comments.
Seth Godin recently posted the video below, check it out first, then read on…
While the reason this video was made has nothing to online marketing, it really is a good example of why it is important to know what people pay attention to, what they don’t, and how important focus is to the success of your message.
What I like about the video is it really shows that, when you attention is on one thing, there is a pretty low chance that you’ll notice things that have nothing to do with what you are focused on. This is why I am often skeptical of anyone who tries to sell me on cost-per-impression (or CPM) advertisements.
The way I see it, no matter how advanced CPM serving and targeting technology has become; it still does not address the fact that a consumer who is exposed to a CPM ad is almost always in the process of doing something that isn’t directly related to the action you want them to take. For example, even if your ad appears on an article about the auto insurance industry, the chances are still pretty low that that person is actively looking for an insurance quote at that exact moment.
To put it in the context of the video, the site visitor is counting the passes (the content they are looking at), and not looking for the moonwalking bear (your ad).
Actually, has LowerMyBills done a moonwalking bear banner ad yet? Or was that just a dancing alien? Hmmmmm.
I digress.
I guess my point is this. As an affiliate, when you are looking at the different advertising opportunities that are out there, you should aim to place your ads somewhere that they are the focus of the consumer’s attention. If you find yourself putting ads in places where your message is off topic or too far from your audiences attention, you’re chances of making money are going to be greatly reduced.
So next time you’re deciding whether or not to run an ad, ask yourself if you’re going to be part of the action or just a moonwalking bear.
Unless you are one of the lucky affiliate marketers who have come from a web design background, chances are you’ll have to find someone to build a website for you at one point or another. Hopefully, you know someone who can help you out…or at least know someone who knows someone. But if you don’t have any contacts, you’ll be forced to find a designer on your own…a daunting task.
While the type of design you personally like a matter of taste, there are some signs that the web designer you are considering for your next job is not the right choice. These signs are outlined by David Walsh from DZone’s post, 9 Signs You Shouldn’t Hire THAT Web Guy.
My three favorite things to avoid from the list are:
He’s a FrontPage expert
He’ll submit your website to [inflated number here] search engines
He can make you a great splash page Flash animation
There three points resonated with me since I see many affiliate sites that are built on FrontPage (often looking amateurish and are not SEO friendly), are excited that their site will be submitted to search engines (a service that doesn’t really do anything) and have a killer Flash intro on them (a classic conversion killer).
If you’re anything like me, you have a hard time spending your hard earned cash on bigger ticket items, especially if they’re for business, not fun.
Take computer monitors for example. Currently at home I work on my MacBook with a 13.3″ screen. I have a stand for it, and a keyboard and mouse, but I am still working on a tiny screen. To me, this isn’t such a problem and I really don’t notice it, but after reading this article from the Wall Street Journal, I think I’m going to start noticing.
The article cites a University of Utah study that found that having a larger monitor can help you substantially increase your productivity. Based off the study people were tested doing tasks on a 18-inch screen, a 24-inch screen, and two 20-inch screens. The results were pretty amazing.
When people used the two 20-inch screens they were 44% quicker at the tasks assigned to them than with the 18-inch screens. Even more amazingly, the people who used the 24-inch screen were 52% faster at completing tasks.
Interestingly, the researches found that the productivity increases dropped off when a 26-inch screen was used.
Of course, everyone’s experience will differ - and different people will work well with different sized monitors. But if you are like me, working on a small laptop screen at home, it might be time to consider picking up a something larger. I mean, just imagine what a 52% increase in productivity could mean to you and your commissions.
Here are a couple more posts about why and how buying expensive equipment can be more cost effective for you and your company in the long run:
Today is flying by and between my daily tasks, crunching numbers in excel and having a conference call, I’m running short on time. So I want to point you over to the UberAffiliate blog to a post called Random Mistakes in Affiliate Marketing.
The post covers some of the basic mistakes affiliates make, and explains why these mistakes need to be avoided. Quality stuff.
Enjoy, and hopefully tomorrow I’ll have the time to wax poetically about some affiliate related topic…fingers crossed.
Most of what I write about here targets new and up-and-coming affiliates, and for good reason. A lot of experienced affiliates already know what they know, and really don’t need someone else telling them how to succeed with affiliate marketing. But according to a recent post on Revenews by Jeremy Palmer, this confidence in your success could ultimately handicap your ability to be more successful in the future.
Jeremy points out a recent article in Time Magazine that explained that experience can ultimately lead to negligence and apathy towards new ideas and improvements. He then goes on to list a number of helpful examples of assumption and mistakes that experienced affiliate marketers are likely to make (including some interesting PPC tips).
Check out the post for yourself to get the tips and learn more about how being an experience affiliate can cause reduced results.
You know what I’m talking about - the “online mall,” the “Internet superstore,” and (my favorite) the “Internet shopping portal.” I’m sorry, but unless you have a way of fulfilling every product related need for everyone in a way that is better than Amazon.com, your market is already gone.
I’m reminded of my one-stop shop phobia by Seth Godin’s recent post “The Long Slide to Gone.”
In the post, Seth shows a picture of a store he saw recently with a big sign on the front awning that says:
HOBBY SHOP
TRAINS - R / C - MODELS
COFFEE - LOTTERY
Seth points out that the store started as a hobby shop, but as business was not meeting expectations, they started adding more, unrelated products. Gradually, the shop started selling things that have nothing to do with what was their core business. In the end, the store has ended up being a so-so hobby shop, a so-so coffee shop, a so-so convenience store and absolutely great at absolutely nothing.
That’s a problem.
I think some affiliates can be guilty of a similar scattershot approach when things aren’t going as well as they planned. They may start out with focus on one niche or vertical, but as their website commissions wane, they decide that instead of starting something new they’ll add more products to their existing offers, in a hope to gain a wider audience.
The final result is often a decent site becoming bloated, overcrowded, and focusless.
Before you add a new offer to your site to boost revenue, ask yourself if you are adding something that really does compliment the current focus of your site or if you’re just trying to sell lottery tickets out of a hobby shop.
It’s true - I’ve become one of those people who use Twitter. Me, someone who called Twitter “annoying” in the past.
But here is the deal - there is a lot happening on Twitter that can help affiliate marketers learn, connect, and stay in touch with one another. Even though I would have told you to steer clear in the past, it’s now pretty evident that there is enough value in following and contributing on Twitter that I think you should open an account and get involved.
For those who haven’t heard about Twitter before, the best way I have been able to explain it is this…
Twitter gives people in different physical locations the ability to quickly communicate their location, status and points of interest to their friends and contacts in what can best be described as a virtual workplace/cafe. This virtual workplace may be the reason why so many web/independent workers find Twitter so useful - it lets them broadcast simple ideas and concepts with the people they care about without going through the formality of a blog post, email or even instant message.
In reality, Twitter sits somewhere between a blog post (because it is broadcasted publicly), an instant message (since you can direct messages to other Twitter users) and an email (since there is private messaging available). While this in itself might not sound so exciting, it’s the users who make it all work. Thought leaders in the marketing, SEM, affiliate and blogging worlds are all available, active and accessible on Twitter.
So get signed up here, and then go to the following pages below and become a “follower” (hit the “Follow” button under the profile picture) of these affiliate/online marketing superstars:
In the column, Shari suggests that SEO not use what a lot of SEOs call “link siloing” or “pagerank sculpting” because is being used to improve rankings and not to improve user experience.
For those who don’t know, link siloing is basically the act of using the “nofollow” tag on links to unimportant pages on your site (unimportant from a search standpoint - like privacy policy, T&C, etc.) so that other links without the “nofollow” attribute get more link juice from the linking page.
Shari seems convinced that the overuse of “nofollow” will eventually be considered a bad thing by Google, even though Google’s Matt Cutts has said publicly:
Yes, webmasters can feel free to use nofollow internally to help tell Googlebot which pages they want to receive link juice from other pages
Right now, maybe nothing…but very soon, maybe a lot.
Barry Schwartz of SEL and SERran across some chatter that Google AdWords is going to start using page load time as a factor for a landing page’s quality score.
The speculation started on the WebmasterWorld forums, but has spread to other outlets as people found this section of the About AdWords page:
Beginning in February 2008, youll be able to see a grade for your websites load time in your AdWords account. Load time refers to the amount of time it takes for a user to arrive at your functional landing page after clicking your ad.
Several weeks after your load time grade becomes visible, it will begin to impact your landing page quality and, therefore, your Quality Score. We recommend working to improve your load time during this interim if its received a low score.
Now I know that watching costs is something that all affiliates try to do, but this change solidifies that affiliates should make sure their sites are hosted with a reliable, speedy hosting company. (Of course, you should be doing this for conversion and user experience reasons anyway).
I know that in my daily perusal of sites I run across a good number of affiliate sites that take way too long to load, especially if they are sites that are being hosted on a third party’s domain. So if that describes you, it might be time to start looking for a new host.
Luckily, there are a number of decent hosts out there that can get you quick load times without busting your budget. Personally I like Site5 and our developers tend to favor Westhost…but if I were you I’d shop around and find someplace that works for other affiliates.
If you have a personal hosting favorite, let us know in the comments…but don’t leave an affiliate link, ok?
Here’s a video from 45n5.com’s Mark Wielgus that explains his 2010 rule for SEO. The premise is that you should only try to do SEO in niches where you can build a webpage that is 20% better than the top 10 results for a particular keyword. Here’s the video:
What I really like about the 2010 SEO rule is that it challenges affiliates to actually create a site that adds more value to a particular niche than anyone else is currently. This in itself is really what I think defines a good affiliate site…a site that is not just able to rank well, but is able to rank well over time, even under the scrutiny of a manual review by a search engine’s search quality team, because the site adds value.
Sure, 20% better is a bit vague - but I think the number is more symbolic than anything. The real point is that you should do whatever you can to create the best website for the niche you operate in.
Take a look at your site and compare it to the top ten sites for the keyword you’d like to rank for. Is your site better? If not, what could you do to make your site better? Is there information you can add? Can you make your site more user friendly? More entertaining? Can you offer more options than the top 10?
Figure out everything that can be improved upon and strategically incorporate those things into your site. That’s your “20% better.”
By challenging yourself to create the best site in your niche, you’ll give people more of a reason to seek out your site, link to your site, and tell their friends about your site. And that folks, is a powerful path to SEO success.
PPC guru and affiliate marketer John Hasson has updated his list of PPC companies that work. If youre looking for some new places to spend your PPC dollars, you might want to explore some of the companies on his list.
With that said, Id remind you that John does work in multiple verticals, and the smaller engines he lists could work for some verticals and not others…I know our companys experience differs from Johns.
Also, never forget Vinny Linghams principal of Return On Effort (ROE) - make sure you are spending your time in the places where you can get the biggest return…and in the PPC world, that often means the bigger search engines.
Thanks for updating the list John - keep up the great work!
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.
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.
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.
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…
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:
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.
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:
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:
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.
If you are one of those affiliates who find other affiliate marketer’s success annoying and demotivating, it’s best that you stop reading now. If, on the other hand, you get extremely motivated by affiliate success stories, I highly recommend that you start reading the UberAffiliate blog.
UberAffiliate, is a 19 year-old guy named Paul Bourque who got into the affiliate game about a year ago and has managed to quickly move into the 6 figure per month earnings range.
The thing I like about the UberAffiliate blog is that Paul seems to be a fairly open guy, and it looks like he’s willing to share a bit more than your average affiliate blogger. As an example, here is a video post he did recently, where he answers questions from his readers. I find the section about his strategy for setting up PPC campaigns quite interesting.
Most affiliates dont have a lot of cash to spare when theyre just starting out. (After all, thats why they become affiliates, right?) Whether paid search is their game of choice or they prefer experimenting with SEO, tips that help them enter the arena without spending an arm and a leg are always welcome.
I ran across a post on the PPC Hero blog today that I thought I would share with you. The post, 
If SEO is an art form, then link sculpting is one of the major tools that an SEO artist has at their disposal. I’ve spoken before about using the rel=”nofollow” link attribute to maximize the flow of link juice to your most important pages, and reduce the flow to the least.
I was having lunch with one of our PPC affiliates this week and the topic of privacy policy came up. Specifically, the affiliate said that even if he’s running traffic through AdWords to a thin site “one page site”, the site will still have more than one page - and one of the main reasons is because the site will have a privacy policy page.
It’s been a while since I have checked out the 
If you’re anything like me, you have a hard time spending your hard earned cash on bigger ticket items, especially if they’re for business, not fun.
Hot Dog!
It’s true - I’ve become one of those people who use 
There’s a bit of an uproar going on over at Search Engine Land about an article written by Shari Thurow’s called 
Right now, maybe nothing…but very soon, maybe a lot.
PPC guru and affiliate marketer John Hasson has updated his 
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.
Everyone’s new favorite affiliate blogger, UberAffiliate, 
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?