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)

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)

The Affiliate Summit West 2008 in Las Vegas is coming up on February 24-26th and our own April Hartmeister will be there representing InsureMe. If you have never been to an Affiliate Summit, and you have some extra conference cash sitting around (or you just need a worthwhile write-off), you should definitely go.

Traditionally, Affiliate Summit is best known for its networking opportunities, with a heavily trafficked expo hall and plenty of semi-structured networking events. But the producers of the show, Shawn Collins and Missy Ward, have really stepped it up from show-to-show when it comes to the educational sessions and panels at Affiliate Summit.

Here are some links to check out so you can decide if you’re up for a bit of Summiting next month:

Main Site
Affiliate Summit Las Vegas Agenda
Speakers
Registration
Affiliate Summit Blog

If you are going, be sure to set up a time to meet up with the ever entertaining April H. You can email her at ahartmeister[at]insureme[dot]com.

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Prepare for a self congratulatory post folks…

I’m excited to announce that the InsureMe Affiliate Blog (yes, this blog) was chosen as one of the top 10 affiliate blogs of 2007 by AffGoo’s Durk Price. Having the chance to meet Durk a while back and getting to know a bit about him, I’ve got to say that inclusion on his list is quite an honor.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you may already be a reader of the other blogs on Durk’s list. If not, here is the top ten list so you can add all of these affiliate related blogs to your feed reader (I know there are a couple on the list that I hadn’t seen before):

1. Jangro.com
2. Affiliate Summit Blog
3. Carsten Cumbrowski (ReveNews)
4. CooperativeAffiliates.com
5. Avantlink
6. Mike Allan
7. 5 Star Affiliate Programs
8. AssociatePrograms.com
9. This blog (YAY!)
10. AffGoo

Thanks again for including us Durk!

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I was holding off on this post until this issue became super annoying. It is now super annoying.

WHAT IS UP WITH THE “BURBURRY COAT REVIEW” SPAM ON COMMISSION JUNCTION?!

Every day I get between two and five publishers applying for our CJ program with single page, spam blog URLs like:

http://burberrycoatreview128.blogspot.com

or

http://burberrycoats456.blogspot.com

Needless to say, they get declined every time.

Who is doing this? Or more importantly, who is telling people to do it? Is this the result of some type of eBook suggestion? I’m hoping someone from the affiliate community knows about this so I can start sleeping again at night.

Oh yeah, we are also getting other one page Blogger spam applicants with URLs like:

http://superweightloss-graceh.blogspot.com

and

http://appleiphonereview123.blogspot

I know Blogger is a favorite place for spammers, but why are there SO many applicants lately? If you know the answer, PLEASE leave a comment.

Posted by James Omdahl at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yesterday afternoon I finally got around to adding the Sphinn voting button to the blog (you can learn more about Sphinn here). You’ll notice the little “Sphinn It” buttons at the end of each post next to the BUMPzee buttons. If you like one of the blog posts you find here, make sure you click the button so you can help the story get some visibility on Sphinn.

I’ll be interested to see what happens when one of our stories gets some Sphinn love, and I’m really interested to see how it compares to BUMPzee traffic.

Speaking of BUMPzee, has traffic to that site been slowing down lately? I see far less traffic coming from it than what we did in the past.

Of course, it could just be that my writing has stunk as of late. :)

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

Affiliate Summit Miami is starting this Sunday, July 8th. Like every other Affiliate Summit, this is shaping up to be another great show from Shawn and Missy. Out of all the shows I’ve been to, Affiliate Summit is definitely the most networking oriented – which means it’s a lot of fun and a great way to meet people. And if there is any one piece of advice that I have heard over and over, if you want to learn how to make money online, the best place to learn in the pub during a search marketing or affiliate conference.

Speaking of networking, our incredible affiliate manager April Hartmeister will be at the Summit looking to connect some names with faces and meet new affiliates as well. If you haven’t had a chance to meet April yet, you should. If you want, give April a call at 800-467-8736 ext. 6120 or email her at [ahartmeister at insureme dot com] to set up a meeting.

Oh yeah! Keep an eye out for our latest batch of silly business cards that will be circulating at the Summit. The front side should look a little something like this:

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Just have to share the news – InsureMe was recently named the second best small company to work for in the United States (up from #19 in 2006). Pretty cool, if I do say so myself.

Here is a link to our press release, and a link to the official list.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Alright, so I didn’t get canned…but I’m off on vacation to Italy for a couple of weeks (do you get it? The boot. Italy…..yeah), so from this coming Monday until the 16th of May we’re going to have a line up of guest bloggers from the InsureMe affiliate team. These lovely and talented bloggers are:

April Hartmeister – The InsureMe affiliate manger you all know and love. April will be popping in with some of her thoughts and insights on the affiliate world.

Brittany Heidtke – One of our esteemed paid search marketing coordinators…also, one half of the dynamic duo I refer to as the “Wonder Twins.” Brittany’s got a passion for paid search and a three-legged dog…what could be better than that?

Cassie Carson – The other half of the “Wonder Twins” and another passionate paid search marketing coordinator. When Cassie isn’t ruling Google and Yahoo! she’s busy lip synching to old Milli Vanilli tracks.

Penny Hagerman – As many of our long time readers know, Penny is a copywriter by trade but has become a paid search powerhouse over the last couple of years. Penny’s got the skillz when it comes to writing and testing to see what’s working in your PPC accounts.

So make sure you stop in often and leave some comment love…us bloggers love that type of thing.

Posted by James Omdahl at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With Google buying DoubleClick, and DoubleClick owning Performics, I’m wondering what the future will be for Performics…and more importantly, if companies like ours should be opening a Performics account in anticipation of growth in the Performics affiliate base.

So my question to you, fair affiliates, do you have a Performics account? Do you enjoy working with Performics? Where does it rank as compared to other networks? Do you think a company like InsureMe is stupid not to open a Performics account?

All always, your input is appreciated…either here or in the comments section of BUMPzee.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Wow…quite a busy week for this blog. Thanks to everyone who joined in on the Commission Junction conversation here and on BUMPzee. I really learned a lot and I am looking at our CJ account in a much different way. Also, I did want to mention that I had a conference call with our CJ rep and her director this week, and they were both great. Big ups to Anna and Ann.

I’ve gotta admit, I have a case of the Fridays. And since I am having such a hard time finding something that is awesome to link to, I’ll instead give you an awesome video to watch. I found out about it through the SuperAff blog, and my world hasn’t been the same since…

Have a mini-mall kinda weekend everyone!

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It looks like there is a new round of blog tag going around and I have been tagged by Leonard Chen (Sweet! I’ve never been tagged before – thanks Leonard!). When you get tagged you’re supposed to post five reasons why you blog, so that’s what I’m going to do – except since I got tagged for my work on the InsureMe Affiliate blog, I feel compelled to list the five reasons why InsureMe had decided to take the time (and incur the cost) of blogging for affiliates. Here we go:

1. To help affiliates succeed – You don’t have to operate an affiliate program for very long before you realize that there are a lot of people out there who want to be affiliates, but have no idea how succeed as affiliates. Since InsureMe does our own SEO and PPC work in-house, we feel that we have some expertise that, if shared, can help affiliates succeed. And more successful affiliates means more traffic for InsureMe…it’s the circle of life, etc.

Continue reading "TAGGED - 5 Reasons Why InsureMe Has an Affiliate Blog" »

Posted by James Omdahl at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

We’re in the process of putting together a number of how-to videos for our affiliate web site that will help our affiliates take advantage of some of the more advanced functionality our affiliate program offers (auto cobranding, PPC conversion tracking, etc.). In the midst of doing all that, I put together this…ahem…movie trailer to help get the word out about InsureMe.

I know it is pretty cheesy - hence the “InsureMe Cheeseball Productions” you see at the start – but I hope it will show people why some of the rockinest affiliates are working with us.

Please enjoy, give some BUMPzee bump-action, and forward it to the people you love…or something like that. Happy Friday.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I don’t know about you, but I am starting to get really excited about the Affiliate Summit. This will be my first time going to and Affiliate Summit and I am hoping to get the chance to meet…well… anyone who wants to meet. From what I have heard, the Affiliate Summit is amazing for networking – and since building a bigger network was one of my resolutions for 2007, I am hoping you all can help me out.

But yesterday I realized that my chances of meeting up with some of you is slightly diminished because I work for a “merchant” (P.S. – I hate that term). I think that stinks, but after meeting a number of affiliate managers in my career, I totally understand why. By nature, I try to avoid pushy, annoying people - and sadly a lot of (short-lived) affiliate managers are both pushy and annoying. No good.

So that brings me to my promise…

If you meet up with me at the Affiliate Summit I promise I will not try to sell you on the InsureMe affiliate program unless you want me to.*

Seriously. It might sound cheesy, but I would much rather build a solid relationships with a person than hunt down and pester super-affiliates for three days. I just want to meet some of great people at the Summit. Hopefully you will be one of them. So if you want to meet up, drop me a line at jomdahl(at)insureme(dot)com or stop by the InsureMe booth (#214).

* A quick warning, I will be working at the InsureMe booth and things might be a bit more “salesy” in the expo hall – but don’t worry, I’m not much of a salesman anyway :)

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last quarter, InsureMe's CEO Tim McTavish, bet his employees that 90% of them wouldn't participate in InsureMe’s United Way charitable giving campaign. Much to Tim’s chagrin, we made it to 90%. This is a video of Tim paying the price for betting his full head of hair …

Giving to the less fortunate feels good. Giving the big boss man a mohawk feels even better. Happy Friday!

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

I wanted to give everyone a heads-up that a few of us InsureMerians will be heading out the Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas on January 21st. We are hoping to get a chance to meet up with anyone who wants to meet with us while we are out there. If you want to get together, give me a call at 720-548-6190 or email me at jomdahl(at)insureme(dot)com.

The InsureMe posse will consist of Mike Sajdak (a.k.a. Big Bossman, a.k.a. CF Oh My Goodness), April Hartmeister (a.k.a. Apes), Eric Baliruno (a.k.a. The Man Who Cuts Checks) and James Omdahl (a.k.a. me).

From what I have heard, the Affiliate Summit is a great event and a great place for affiliate marketers to meet up and keep up with the latest and greatest trends in online marketing.

Also, we are pretty excited because we will have a booth in the Expo hall at the Affiliate Summit this year. Please make sure you stop by and check it out. We just designed the booth and it looks pretty darn cool.

Posted by James Omdahl at 09:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Happy New Year!

It seems that Mother Nature really didn’t want us working for the last couple of weeks. We had two blizzards that really snarled traffic here in the Denver area, and so InsureMe ended up having an unprecedented four snow days in the last couple of weeks. I am happy to say that the roads are finally passable (at least the major ones) and I think most of us made it out pretty much unscathed (I wish I could say the same for my car!)

The weather, combined with scheduled holidays, and vacations, has really made the last coupe weeks fairly unproductive for me. If you sent me an email and haven’t heard back yet, sorry about that. I hope to get replies to you by afternoon.

I hope everyone had a good holiday season and, if you are like me, you are ready to get back to work. And let me tell you, there is no better time to get back to work than right now. Traditionally, January is the best month for insurance leads, so hopefully in the next couple of days you will really start to see the money roll in. :)

I am going to start scanning around to see what is hot in the affiliate marketing space. If you have any hot topics you want me to post about, make sure you leave a comment.

Looking forward to another fun and profitable year with you in 2007!

Posted by James Omdahl at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

First off – we are on snow day number three here at InsureMe, meaning the office is officially closed. A few of us are in the office this morning though…cabin fever was killing me and I won’t be in next week, so I wanted to get something accomplished before 2007.

Here is a picture looking out of the west side of the InsureMe building…pretty snowy, eh? Alright, enough about the darn snow, let’s talk about AdWords.

One of the biggest complaints that advertisers have about Google AdWords is the lack of clarity Google gives when it comes to their Quality Score calculation. Since Quality Score is one of the key elements to Google’s ad serving algorithm, not “getting” quality score can be a little more than frustrating for an advertiser.

It seems that Google may have finally realized that they were being a bit vague when explaining Quality Score, and in a rare act of “black box” clarification, Google has added a fair amount of information about quality score to the AdWords help center.

The new Quality and Performance sections are:

Quality and Performance Overview
Quality and Performance Factors
Troubleshooting
Improving Ad Performance

While I doubt there is any super-secret AdWords info in any of the pages, but getting a high level understanding of Google’s intentions certainly won’t hurt. So if Quality Score has been hurting your head as bad as it has hurt ours in the past, print out everything you can from these help sections, grab a cup of hot chocolate, and read away. Who knows…you could figure something out that could make you a gillion dollars. :)

[Bonus: I enjoyed this post on Quality Score over at the Out of My Gord blog.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 08:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, the snow continues (for now), and the InsureMe office is closed for the second day in a row. Actually, pretty much everything is closed today, including most of the shopping malls.

Our apologies to anyone trying to get a hold of us on the phone. It looks like the road crews are making some headway on the highways, so I am hoping that I will be able to brave the roads in the morning to get into the office.

We have about two feet of snow on the ground in downtown Denver and it sounds like they might have three feet at the office. On the plus side, it is guaranteed to be a white Christmas here in Denver.

Posted by James Omdahl at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There’s a blizzard here in Denver today, so the InsureMe office is closed. Thankfully, our office was closed early on this morning so most of us got the word before we left our houses (thanks Tim!).

Sounds like the snow will keep coming until tomorrow afternoon – but I am hoping to be back in the office in the morning.

Here is a photo I took from my balcony at home. It doesn’t do much justice to the storm…but it sure is pretty. This is one of the reasons why we live in Colorado…snow rules. :)

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This is our final video blog entry for our Insurance Blog - I thought I would share it over on the Affiliate Blog as well. Don't worry, we will start posting videos on our Agent Blog after the new year starts.

We decided to do a fairly ridiculous Holiday Special. Enjoy...

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(Please excuse the obnoxious title – gotta have the right keywords, etc.)

For the last couple of months, I have spent a lot of time looking for a few good people to fill open positions here at InsureMe. While we have had a lot of interest in the positions, we have not yet found the right person for three of them. The thing is, we are a bit picky, but it’s like we are picking family members, so you gotta do what you gotta do.

The three positions we currently have open are:

Paid Search Manager – lead out amazing PPC team, strategize, analyze and kick some PPC tail

Paid Search Copywriter – create compelling ads and web copy that will entertain, educate and convert

Affiliate Coordinator – the backbone of our Affiliate Department. Help our affiliates by providing them the support they need to succeed

Why am I telling you all of this? Well, I am hoping you know someone who would totally rock at one of these positions. Or maybe you would rock? Eh?

If you do know someone who might fit well into one of these positions, let me know at jomdahl (at) insureme.com. Like I said, we are pretty picky when it comes to hiring people…but for the right person it could be a fantastic opportunity.

Did I mention that we were voted one of the best places to work in America? Did I also mention that our CEO drives a Mercedes covered in diamonds?

Ok, so I made up the Mercedes thing (thank you Photoshop!). But the best places to work thing it totally true!!!

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now that I have rambled on about tracking your work through your InsureMe affiliate account, I want to talk about another form of tracking that could be one of the most powerful tools in your PPC arsenal. The tool?

Google Conversion Tracking.

When we started doing pay-per-click marketing about three and a half years ago, we always found it kind of difficult to really understand what was and what wasn’t working. I mean, we could look at our Campaigns and see what are conversion rates were – and we could also see that for AdGroups if we set them up with a unique tracking number in the AdGroup. But beyond that, we were really flying blind. We really had no clue which keywords were really performing for us and which were not. Without really understanding what was successful and what was not on a granular basis, we also had a hard time figuring out best practices on Google.

I’m happy to say that that’s not the case anymore - and we can thank the Google Conversion Tracking tool for the change. Now when we sign into our Google AdWords account we can see the exact conversion rate for every single keyword we have (and there are thousands).

Continue reading "Tracking Week: Google Conversion Tracking" »

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I ran across an article from eMarketer titled Pay-Per-Click Not-So-Easy today and thought one of the stats was really interesting…in a scary way. In a survey of online marketers who have been using PPC for at least the last two years, 27% admitted that they did not know their cost of conversion for their PPC campaigns.

Pretty crazy, huh? To me that means they are setting up PPC accounts tossing money into the black hole we all know as the Intarweb.

Well guess what folks, tossing money into online marketing and NOT tracking your results is not so smart (read: dumb). Online marketing is the most trackable form of marketing on the planet…and if you ain’t tracking, you ain’t living up to your full potential.

And since being a successful affiliate isn’t easy (yes, I said it), you need to do whatever you can to be your best as an online marketer.

So with that in mind, I dub this week Tracking Week (YAY!). And this being the first ever theme week for the InsureMe Affiliate Blog, I hope not to disappoint (or forget to post).

My post this week will cover four topics:

• Using InsureMe’s tracking capabilities to better understand your PPC performance


• Tracking Google Adwords with the Google Conversion Counter


• Tracking Yahoo Search Marketing with the Yahoo Conversion Tracking tool


• Tracking your SEO efforts

Hopefully Tracking Week will rule, and help some of you get a better understanding of your online marketing efforts. Please leave a comment if there is a tracking related subject you would like me to cover.

Thanks! Happy Monday.

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since it is Thanksgiving tomorrow, a couple of us walked around the office and asked InsureMe employees what they are thankful for. The video below is the end result. Hopefully it will bring you some Turkey Day cheer.

I also want to add that we are thankful for our fantastic affiliate partners and all the wonderful things we accomplished with them in 2006. You might have noticed that a lot of people mentioned that they were happy about their jobs at InsureMe (we actually had to tell people to stop saying they were thankful for InsureMe). Please know that if you are an InsureMe affiliate partner, your hard work is a big part of what keeps our business going, and we are all thankful for that!

Happy Thanksgiving!

[Note: Sorry about the cheese-ball background music in advance. Royalty free music has its limitations!]

Posted by James Omdahl at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We just got our new InsureMe mascot costume, and we want to show it off. Actually, I say we just got it, but we had one for quite a while now, except the head got crushed in shipping. So we got the replacement head, and all is good.

Below is the full length dance scene from today’s InsureMe Insurance Blog Wrap-Up. Thanks to our favorite accountant Eric (aka the Ugandan Twista) for showing us how he gets down in the I-Guy.

InsureMe…alright.

[Update: This is also a little victory dance since InsureMe was just recognized by the Denver Business Journal as the second best medium-sized company to work for in Denver!]

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)