Business Emergence

Status Update: Marketing Operations

2009-08-04T19:49:00.001-05:00

I will start with a little background. I am doing affiliate marketing, and I have been part of an affiliate network for quite some time now. The perk of being part of a network is that you:

Do not have to busy yourself with setting up new affiliate programs as the network is busy doing that for you.
You do not need to busy yourself with the ever changing legalities of contracts between affiliate and merchant.
In my case, one does not need to worry about the maintenance of the actual affiliate website. (Though I am responsible for the layout, tracking code, and whatnot)
Following 3, one does not have to be busy with keeping the website in compliance with each of the affiliate offers, as the network does that.
This frees the affiliate up to focus on the pure marketing of the website via CPC/CPM campaigns, SEO, and other efforts/innovations.

Now, in keeping with the above points, it does not mean that one can become complacent with the way the website is being run, nor the way traffic is going to and from the site. Though my marketing efforts, focus on back-links and link popularity I ran across an issue. My Google links seemed to be pointing to another site that, while very similar to mine, was not mine. This is not my CPC/CPM ads that I am talking about. I am talking about back-links. That raised a big red flag, and led me to begin the process of talking to those that maintain my website, as well as Google. I am still working on getting that straightened out but it is important to note how this sort of mix-up can easily happen.

I do not know if there are others out there that have a similar kind of structured affiliate business, but I do urge vigilance when it comes to making sure everything is in order, from page links, all the way down to back links. It does no good to have all of your efforts go to benefit someone else.

I will continue writing about how things go and how the situation was solved as the days progress.

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Internet Marketing: Amazon Affiliate Program

2009-07-28T19:36:00.001-05:00

This is an easy one. For those of us that have blogs, or even websites, it is a win-win situation. By that I mean it costs nothing join the Amazon affiliate program, and only involves a few minutes of your time to register for the program.

To get started you will have to first go to the Amazon affiliate program’s main page. Once there you either must sign up (register) if you do not already have an account with Amazon, or sign in using your existing credentials.

Once you have registered and or signed in you will be directed to enter a website URL to the site that you wish to display ads on.

After entering your site URL, you will be asked to enter information for the method in which you wish to be paid. This will require you to enter individual tax information , or business tax information if you will be doing this through a business entity. When I started this blog I spent a little time talking about the merits of setting up one business type over another. I chose S-Corp. You can have a look at earlier posts for how to go about doing that and why it is a good idea. The tax information is for them to be able to send you tax forms, as it would be another form of personal or business income which must be reported.

Now then, you must note the choices at the bottom of the form. I personally like the direct deposit option. Being paid by check requires a fee for each check paid to you. That eats into profits so I would stay away from that one.

Once you have completed this step you should take the “Get Started Now” tour just to become familiar with the process. The “Get Started Now” button is on the left frame of the page. You will find as you go through the tour that there are a few ways to “monetize” your site with Amazon content. You can use links in the body of your pages, you can use banners, and widgets, and even an online store containing Amazon items.

Throughout the tour you are able to create banners, links, and your aStore (Amazon Store). You will also see reporting tools so you can track your progress in the Amazon program.

Once you have created content within Amazon, all that remains is taking the new content to your blog or website. For example. My blog is primarily about business, marketing, and affiliate programs, so I will place books/software on such topics within my Amazon content. You will most likely see such content appear in my blog in the coming days.

So, there you have it. Another tool to perhaps further monetize your marketing/business efforts.

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Free Marketing Strategies: Social Bookmarking

2009-07-24T16:58:00.000-05:00

I touched on social bookmarking in the past but really did not really give details about the benefits of social bookmarking and the types of things that can be done within the bookmarking community. A few sites to consider are:

stumbleupon.com
digg.com
del.icio.us
reddit.com

The premise of social bookmarking is the allowance to bookmark sites of interest on the actual bookmarking site rather than on your desktop, allowing you to access to your bookmarks from any computer. I am sure you are thinking, how would that possibly help me with marketing my business. I urge you to keep reading as it will become clear momentarily.

The added perk to being able to bookmark sites online rather than on your desktop is the added flexibility that is involved. You are able to add comments to the bookmark, leave comments/feedback for the owner of the website, submit your own sites into this pool of sites that can be bookmarked, as well as others being able to see. You can share these bookmarks/interests with family and friends.

For sites like stumbleupon, and digg, the point is to leave reviews for websites. Start at 20 reviews. Once you have reached that point start adding others as friends. Continue reviewing sites. Most typically when you review sites of others that will have a look at your site and or review your site as well. Once your network of friends is large enough you can do interesting things like request that users look at your blog, or websites, and even request that they click on adsense links. I am sure now you are wondering why someone would do that. To understand that you would first need to understand the nature of those that are regular bookmarkers. Those that are regulars on the sites are really serious about what they are doing. So, if you were to suggest such things to them they would actually follow suit. Keep in mind that courtesy states that if this is done for you, if others have such a request you should also play along.

For example: You have an instance where you update your blog, and you simply let your bookmarking friends know about the post, and while they are there you ask that they click on an adsense link or two. It is a simple yet interesting way to drive additional traffic to your site(s).

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Internet Marketing: Tip Of The Day

2009-07-17T18:12:00.000-05:00

For my friends that are also doing affiliate marketing, and more specifically online malls, and credit cards here are the hot deals.

Online Mall:

Credit Cards:

I have mentioned these here because they are high converting offers. So if they are within your network or you are part of their affiliate programs, it is in your best interest to implement campaigns to market these items.

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Google Page Rank: On The Move Again

2009-07-14T09:55:00.001-05:00

It looks like Google is messing with the page rank algorithm again. I have once again noted that my page rank is changing, and not for the better. I mention this because I have been keeping my efforts constant. What efforts? The social bookmarking, blog entries, web directory entries, and the efforts to make CPC ads as relevant as possible.

Again news and blogs are buzzing to the tune of changes that Google is implementing. There is a rumor that Google will shake up how they deal with backlinks and give less relevance to less relevant backlinks. There are complaints of page ranks changing several times a day at this point. There is a webmasterworld.com post stating:

“I received a communication last night that discussed a buzz going around that Google is going to shake up how it deals with backlinks. Specifically that Google is going to give less weight to less relevant linkage. This source also heard from another direction that a big change was coming in the next few days. “

I guess for the most part there when creating backlinks we are working in a scope of relevancy so there would be no need to worry about a change such as this, but it is still worrisome.

I guess only time will tell how things will be once all the changes are implemented. If anyone has any input on this, please leave a comment.

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Google Analytics: Internet Marketing Campaign Optimization Continued…

2009-07-10T12:46:00.000-05:00

I wrote last about the benefits of utilizing Google Analytics (GA) in the last post and mentioned that I would drill down further into several topics of GA. The topics that I wish to cover are:

Setting up the linkage between GA and your website via Google Adwords
Using GA to optimize your website, if you have control over the editing and publishing of your site.
Using GA reports

Setting up up GA

From Google Adwords you can access GA and create website profiles for your site. In the figure below you can see where to find the link to GA. It is under the reporting tab.

Once you click the GA link it will take you a page where you can create website profiles. This will be the main page by which you can look at the GA reports for each of your sites. It also shows several key metrics in a basic overview so you would be able to see what is going on at a glance. The displayed metrics are visits, average time on the site, bounce rate, completed goals, and percent change based on the timeline that you select above the table. The timeline can be either day, week, month, or year. From this page you follow “Add website profile” link.

Adding your site to GA is not very complicated. If you have someone managing your website then you will need to collaborate with that person to add the analytics code to your site. If you have control of your own website, then the directions that GA provides is pretty straightforward. Once you click the “Add website profile” link it will take you to the following page shown in the figure below.

The default selection to create a profile for a new domain should be sufficient. In the section that is titled “Add a Profile for a new domain”, enter your website URL. The default selection to apply cost data is also acceptable. Once you have entered in all of the appropriate information click the “Finish” button. Once the finish button has been clicked it will take you to the tracking code page. This tracking code must be added to the body of the webpage you entered for the profile. What does that mean? It means that either you or the administrator of your webpage must add the tracking code to the webpage body tag. Literally it means adding it between the <body>[tracking code goes here]</body> tags. More specifically the instructions say just before the body closing tag which is the tag that looks like this: </body>.

Cut and paste this tracking code into your page, as well as save it somewhere else in a text file in case you need it again later. Click the finish button at the bottom of this page. Once you have done so the GA configuration will be complete. You will be taken back to the overview page. Once your tracking code is placed into your webpage, it will take a day or so for the tracking to take affect. This is the beginning of the optimization.

Using GA to optimize your website

Once GA has been properly configured and you have allowed several days of data collection you can go in and analyze the performance of your website. The power of GA is in being able to track various goals conversions. For instance if you have a ecommerce website, and all checkouts end on a thank you page for example. That would be one of your goals to track. From the looks of it, you are able to create four goals. Configuring these goals allows you to really be able to see where your conversions are and which keywords or ads need optimization. The video (a long video) that I mentioned before really does talk about how to get to the traffic sources area of GA. There is another video on finding the best keywords using GA This last video shows what you are able to do once you have goals defined. However they do not go into any detail when it comes to setting up those goals.

The Google Analytics help center is also a good place to go and look for information. One of the topics was setting up goals. From the dashboard view of your GA website profile you must click the “Goals” link that is in the left frame of the dashboard page, as shown in the figure.

From this page you must click the “Set up Goals and Tunnels” link. We are interested in setting up goals here. Once you have clicked that link it will take you to the profile settings of the website profile. In the “Conversion Goals and Funnel” area of the profile settings page you need to click the “Edit” link to get started adding a goal.

From there it will take you to the goal settings page. You have the choice of setting a goal that is matched by the URL head, an exact URL match, or a regular expression match. The head match allows you to have dynamic session identifiers in the URL. Exact match requires the client URL to exactly match that of the reports, thus no dynamic session information can be included. Regular expression matching are just that. The next thing that must be entered is the goal URL. When this goal page is reached it will constitute a conversion. You can name the goal, decide on whether or not the URL is case sensitive, and enter a goal value. The goal value would be the cost of the product, the commission paid on the lead, application, or sale.

You will also notice that you can also define funnels for each goal. A funnel is a serious of pages required to reach the goal page. This is especially useful in figuring out where customers leave the goal path. By that I mean you can find out what page turns customers off, or cause them to be disinterested in the offer.

Once the goal has been entered, and you have saved it, you are done. From this point forward your goal tracking will begin. If you go back to the GA dashboard, and once again click the Goals link it shows a lot of information. It tracks, total conversions, conversion rate, goal verification, reverse goal path, goal value, and goal abandoned funnels. Funnel visualization allows you to see graphs of various funnel metrics.

Using GA Reports

GA Reports are great for optimization. With your site equipped with analytics tracking code, as well as goals, you can really drill down to see how everything about your website is performing. You should be able to analyze and optimize the following aspects of your website and campaigns:

Keyword performance
Ad Performance
Goals and goal performance
Goal Funnels
Conversion rates
Total Conversions
Bounce rates (and the reasons for them)
Regional Traffic via traffic sources
and more…

Look at my previous post for more information (Current Events – Ad Campaign Optimization) . Traffic sources is the best place to start when it comes to using the reports to optimize your marketing efforts. In each of the tracking areas that I mentioned in the last post you will notice that there is a “Goal Conversions” tab on the report. You can see the performance of each of your goals from this tab.

If keywords of your ads are underperforming you can pause them, alter them, or delete them to streamline sets of keywords for your ad. If you are certain that a set of keywords are doing well, then you can try creating a new ad group with the same keywords, but a different ad body.
If you note that a specific goal, typically tied to your ads, is not performing you can use the goal funnel to see where along the goal process a customer is being turned off. There are a few solutions to this problem. It could be the ad, keywords, or the presentation of the webpage itself. Each of these can be altered if you are in control of your whole marketing solution.
If you have high bounce rates, you can do many of the same things that I just mentioned for goals. In fact you can use the goals/funnels to see where the problem is if it is indeed the website.

So basically analytics allows for the streamlining of all marketing efforts.

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Current Events – Ad Campaign Optimization

2009-07-07T09:50:00.000-05:00

As I have been working on my affiliate/internet marketing business I have learned that there is no shortage of work to be done. SEO optimization has really taken the largest part of my efforts lately.

In order to continue to be effective in this business it helps to balance out the work being done. One cannot neglect paying close attention to the cost-per-click campaigns and their optimization. All of the SEO work in the world is meaningless if you have not optimized both the CPC campaigns, as well as the website itself.

In collaborating with others on proper ad form and keyword choice the need for experimenting with different variations of the same ad has become apparent. Sometimes it is hard to explain why a particular ad would attract more attention than another, but it is worthwhile to keep trying different variations until you achieve high click through rates for each ad.

I think you will understand what I mean, or at least also be able to join in on the question as to why this small difference would cause such a drastic increase in click through rate. Here is an example:

Total Visa Credit Card

Apply Now for a Total Visa Card

Instant Decision. Bad Credit Ok

www.americanccplace.com

Total Visa Credit Card

Apply Now for a Total Visa Card

Instant Decisions. Bad Credit Ok

www.americanccplace.com

When experimenting with ad variations and keywords alike it is important to keep in mind the proper length of the test. When working on optimization it makes sense to try variations out for a week at the very least. That literally means once you have decided on a variation and published it to your campaign, you should not alter or tweak it for a week at a minimum. With that in mind the first ad variation yielded a 7.63% click through rate over a weeks time. Some days during that week were as high as 33%, and other days were as low as 2%. The the second variation yielded a fraction of a percent over the same week. Another important note is that the two ads were done as completely different ad groups rather than variations on the same ad group. If you do variations within the same ad group, you do get to see which one performs better due to the fact that Google/Yahoo/MSN will give more exposure to the better performing ad, but since they compete for exposure the click through rates that you see will not fully reflect standalone ad performance.

Google Analytics is full of great tools that can help with ad group/keyword performance. I will briefly go over what I have been doing with Google Analytics, and actually drill down into the topic in the next blog post.

I originally spoke about Google Analytics in an earlier post titled Tools and Tips – For your PPC Campaigns. There I listed and briefly explained all of the various metrics that Google Analytics displays and reports on. Here I will show how to get at the various screens. First I will state that there is a great set of YouTube videos that talk directly to the point of using analytics to monitor your site, PPC ads, and keyword performance.

There are a couple of setups that I mentioned before when it comes to analytics. There is the case where you have full control over your marketing, meaning you have control of your website as well as your PPC/PPM ad campaigns, and the case where your site is managed by a team of designers who maintain and update the site on a consistent basis, leaving the affiliate only needing to worry about driving traffic to the site. I am operating within the boundaries of the latter case. There are merits to doing it this way, especially when there are a large number of offers on the website, legalities, as well as new offer updates, expirations, amendments and the like. So I will first talk about my case. I will add the second case in the next post.

Google Analytics(GA) is tightly bound to Google Adwords. You actually access GA through your Adwords account. The area of the GA that I will be focusing on is “Traffic Sources”. I am of course assuming that you already set your website up with Google Analytics. I will place a walkthrough in the next post. You have to go to the “Reporting” tab in your Adwords account in order to get to GA.

When you log into Google Analytics the first page that you come to is the dashboard. From the dashboard you select view report on the website profile that you wish to analyze. Once there look for the traffic sources link on the upper left frame of the page.

That will take you to a traffic sources overview. From there you can see that there are quite a few things that you can do here. I will be looking at “Ad versions”, and “Keywords” here. Obviously at first glance looking at the keywords in the picture, it is time to optimize them. The metric that I have been paying attention to is the bounce rate. Bounce rates of higher than 40-50% really need to be reworked. Ideally having bounce rates of 40% or less would be best. So as you can see in the picture above I have selected “Keywords” in the traffic sources menu (circled in red). I am in the process of reworking the keywords shown in the report above, along with trying different ad bodies as well. For keywords or I should say a keyword tool, I would say use the one that comes with Adwords, or an external tool such as keywordspy.com. The basic truth is to stay away from the words that have high cost per click, and focus on those that are not so popular but still attract ample attention to your ads and site. There is yet another tool offered by Google called the Search Based Keyword Tool still beta but highly useful. I found it while going through the Google Analytics Blog. I would recommend having a look there since it really does do a great job of showing you keywords that are relevant to your site. It too is bound to Adwords so the site that you are targeting with your ads will appear in the tool. What the tool does is give you either all relevant keywords across your entire website, or a specific set of keywords if you enter in keywords for the search. What is really cool about this tool is that it gives your the keywords for each page of your website, thus you can be highly specific in your ads. FANTASTIC!!!

The other item that I mentioned was the “Ad Versions” traffic source. Here you can see your ads, and how each of them is performing. Again I was looking at bounce rate for each ad so that I know which ones to optimize by trying different ad body or keywords.

The overall campaign bounce rate average is actually not so bad, but if you look at the individual ads you can see that there are some issues. What I see first is that there are several ads that are underperforming, while others have a high bounce rate. So looking here I could look at the keywords for a each specific ad and work on those, and/or try different ad bodies for those that are not receiving many clicks.

This is a quick way to see how ads and keywords are performing allowing us to maximize ROI by showing us where the trouble spots are in the campaigns.

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Blogging Continued...

2009-07-03T18:46:00.001-05:00

Continuing on my thoughts about blogging, and a blogs usage when it comes to marketing…

I wrote briefly on the merits of leaving comments on other blogs, responding to feedback, bookmarking sites, leaving testimonials, and the like.

There are benefits here:

Being active, reading blogs helps us learn more about what we ourselves are focused on.
Leaving comments that reflect your appreciation for another’s input into their blog, or article, is not only courteous but will also attract attention to you and your blog, by the owner of the blog in some cases, and also others that read comments
Responding to feedback left on your blog shows that you are active and present with your blog. It also personalizes the blog. This would definitely help with return readers.
Participating in bookmarking sites such as digg, stumbleupon, and de-li-cioius attract people to your blog because it also becomes one of the sites that people can reach through these networks. It is a mutual publicity forum for sure. The sites are basically a personalized rating system, allowing your site(s) to have wide exposure to relevant traffic.

Reference:

__________________________________________________________

StumbleUpon @ Wikipedia

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Tip of the Day

2009-06-26T20:07:00.001-05:00

For my friends that are also doing affiliate marketing, and more specifically online malls, and credit cards here are the hot deals.

Online Mall:

Credit Cards:

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Free Marketing Strategies: Blogs Demystified

2009-06-26T10:36:00.000-05:00

Blogs can have powerful uses when applied to affiliate marketing, or any other type of business. Blogging does a couple of inherent things. First it keeps you active in the subject matter of your blog. For example, my blog is about affiliate marketing, and in maintaining this blog I am constantly staying active. I am constantly searching for additional information that may help my business, and in so doing, I am also gathering subject matter for the blog. Because I am active in this way, I am growing in this area of expertise. Thus eventually one could say that they are a subject matter expert. Second, as you maintain your blog you will garner a following, as well as become part of the larger blogging community. Those that read blogs or are looking for the type of information within your blog, will also leave comments, either asking for more information on a particular topic, or asking about related information. All in all it really does help bolster knowledge in the subject matter of the blog.

I will restate the basics of how you blog should be formulated:

Blogs should stick to one niche and not deviate from it.
Blogs should be updated regularly. Decide on once or twice a week and stick to the same day if at all possible.
Blogs should reference other sites, blogs, articles, or material on what you are speaking about
Keep each blog entry relevant and interesting.
Be credible and always fact check.
Correct things that need to be changed.

When I got the comment to expand the information on free marketing strategies I noticed that I was missing something. The missing item was, how to drive traffic to the blog. One thing that I have come to understand is that publicizing your blog does not happen on your blog. Yep, I said it. It does not occur on your blog. What does that means is that you? Here are the basics:

Outbound links to other sites from your blog posts are seen by those sites as inbound links/back-links, and their authors may click back through to see what you’re saying and what you’re all about. That’s why it is important to pay attention to who links to you, and respond. As you write your own blog and link to blogs of others, that is one form of publicizing your blog.

Blogging in falls into the general category of social networking, and with that comes need to be active in the community. Does that mean going and talking to all of your friends, friends of friends, and so on? No, it simply means that you need to be mindful of the opportunities as you are looking for information on your own business, whether that information comes from other blogs, articles, and the like.

Bringing attention to your blog will happen in many ways:

If you are part of other social networks such as facebook, linkedin, myspace, and the like each time your update your wall, status, or profile information, everyone in your network sees your updates on their network home page.
When you happen to see a blog that has useful information in it, leave a comment. It will serve as a link back to your blog. Think carefully then about what you say in the comment.
When you happen to see useful information in a forum, leave a comment to the post
If you are not part of Twitter, you should join. When you post an update containing a link to your blog via tweets those following you or those discovering you will be able to see such posts. You should not however post every update. Your blog should be posted in your bio thus making it unnecessary to post every blog update. If it however something that you deem important, by all means post it.
If you are part of StumbleUpon, as you stumble on useful information, leave comments. Oftentimes those you leave comments for will in turn leave comments for you. If someone stumbles onto your blog through stumbleupon and leaves comments for you, you should be nice and respond.
If you are part of Delicious or Digg (very much like StumbleUpon) the same process applies.
If you place your blogs link in the signature of your emails, that too is a way to publicize your blog
When you pass out business cards which contain your blogs link, that is a way to publicize your blog
When you meet people in networking events, business conferences and the like, and an reasonable opportunity arises to talk about your blog, bingo, another way to publicize your blog.

As you get more involved writing comments, responding to comments, bookmarking sites, leaving testimonials, your following will grow. I will further extend this in my next post. There are other thoughts on my mind that I just have to write down. I am still learning this as well, so as I come across information I will definitely write it down.

There were some sites that I ran across via stumble upon that really have helped me understand what must be done to attract attention to this blog.

10 Reasons why readers do not leave comments @ Sucessful-Blog.com. A very informative and witty understanding as to why post and comments threads sometimes run people off.

Blogging Basics: Getting Attention to your Blog @ everdotconnects.com. Very eye opening as to the many ways that one can attract blog attention.

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Free Marketing Strategies: Web Directories Demystified

2009-06-23T23:40:00.019-05:00

I noticed a comment on one of my earlier posts and wanted to follow up on the information in that blog. There are several topics in that post, so what I will do is take one at a time and expand on them over the next few days. I will start with Web directories.

I mentioned before that Web directories are just that. They are directories on the world wide web that specialize in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links. There are different types of directories, both free and premium pay. I have personally been working with the free ones, because I am trying to gain a larger initial return on investment (ROI), before expanding my budgets.

The free directories are human-edited directories. Human edited directories are liked by the search engines because they tend to house much more reliable links and information on the websites that it contains. Because of the search engine/web directory relationship, web directories tend to have good page ranks. Linking your affiliate website to these directories will improve your pages ranking with Google, since it is Google that is the progenitor of page ranks.

Page Rank is calculated as follows: This is a simplified equation

Thus if you wish to calculate your page rank which we will consider page "A", and you are linked/back-linked to pages B, C, and D, your page rank is the summation of the page rank PR() of a linked page divided by the number of outbound links L() that page has. So it would make sense that as you continue adding your page to web directories and as the entries get approved you will see your page rank slowly increase since this effect is cumulative.

There are a couple of good tools for quickly getting a calculation of your page rank, or the page rank of any page. One tool is located along the left frame of this blog. It will show you the page rank of the URL you enter. This tool is called page rank checker. Another tool that I use to check not only the page rank but the validity of the page rank is called check page rank.

I have been paying particular attention to check page rank. Here are a couple of screen shots for your consideration. I will explain what is in them. The figure shows the page rank out of a possible 10, the link popularity, major web directory listings, and registered domains. Besides the page rank itself the other interesting thing to note is the link popularity. Link popularity is just another way to say the number of pages linked to your website. This is important because you will be able to keep track of how many of your web directory entries are being approved. The major web directories, DMoz, Yahoo, and Google are paid subscriptions and come at a premium. For example a listing of your website in Yahoo's directory would cost $300 US per year. Eventually I would apply for an entry into the major web directories, but perhaps some time later.

Improving your page rank in the search engines will mean better placement for your pay per click ads, and subsequently lower cost/click, as well as your website appearing higher on regular searches. Another added benefit is that you increase organic searches through referring sites. By that I mean all of those web directory entries that you create will increase organic searches. Organic traffic is traffic that comes from sources other than search engines (Yahoo, Google, MSN...).

Before I mentioned the resource that I have used to add web directory listings. The site is addurl.nu. When you go to this site you will notice a very long list of web directories (nearly 1000), sorted by page rank. Take this list and do the following:

Do submit your site to 10 web directories per day, as this keeps you from appearing as spam, and will assure your page rank being genuine.
Do follow the instructions for each web directory, though they are very similar
Do wisely choose the category for your listing (ex. credit cards go in personal finance, or finance and investment)
Do keep your website title short
Do keep your website description to the point, clear, and not more than 300 characters
Do not submit to directories where you must pay for a regular submission
Do not submit to directories that require reciprocal links.
Do not submit entries with reciprocal links.
Do not attempt to utilize a service that submits your website to some large number of directories.

Reciprocal links are links provided to you at the time of your directory submission. You are supposed to take the snippet of code, and enter it into your website. So because we are adding our affiliate website to lots of directories it is not in our best interest to do submissions with reciprocal links because it would mean you would need to edit your website to display a link to each and every directory, which does not make sense.

Below is a typical submission form. The various sites may differ slightly but all of the elements needed are the same. For example, some sites use captcha to verify your submission, while others allow you to enter meta keywords from your website, as well as meta descriptions. The typical procedure to add your website to the directory is:

Browse the directory looking for the proper category that your site belongs in.
Once you have found the proper category, click the "submit link" or “add site”, or comparable submission link. Sometimes it is on the top of the page, sometimes it is in the left frame or the right frame. You may need to look for it.
Once you have done that, the form below appears.

Just so you would know, Google.com has a page rank of 10, and has a link popularity of ~341 million.

Recently I had a drop in page rank when Google redid the way that it calculates page rank. I mentioned that there were practices that merit penalty, none of which I am doing. I mentioned page rank sculpting, and link selling. So, with that in mind with the decrease in my page rank I subsequently saw a decrease in traffic through my site. I said all of that to say this: Since my page rank has again started increasing I have again noticed a marked increase in traffic. My page rank is currently 1 for my credit card website, and 2 for my online mall website.

This is direct evidence of the importance of page ranks. I would say that from just an increase of 1 my traffic increased by at least 300%.

Feel free to leave comments if there are questions, as well as a way to write you back.

Next topic: Free Marketing Strategies: Blogs Demystified

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Page Rank, and Search Engine Optimization

2009-06-16T20:03:00.001-05:00

What I have noticed recently as a result of travel for training, is that if you do not stay on top of your search engine optimizations it would appear that your page rank will fall. I had been up to a Google page rank of 3 before the travel. The fall also coincided with various changes that Google implemented for, how do we say, clearing away the excess. By that I mean there have been inflated page ranks out there apparently due to page rank sculpting. There are those of us out here that really knew nothing of page rank sculpting but have gotten caught up in the penalties that have been passed out. At the same time, blogs are abuzz with complaints of lowered page ranks.

There are a few articles out there on exactly what page rank sculpting is, and while interesting, it is not recommended. The gist of what page rank sculpting happens to be is this:

It is the blatant manipulation by a webmaster to alter how page rank flows through a website. This means directing flow to certain areas of a website over others to artificially increase the page rank of particular pages, rather than having the overall website page rank being distributed evenly over the entire website.

No one really knows the update frequency of Google when it comes to page ranks but it would appear that it is on a three month cycle. So it may be that I end up stuck with a page rank of 0 for a while, which is rather unnerving. At least until I pink Google to figure out what is happening, as I am not doing anything that would merit penalty.

The infractions that would merit penalty are, the selling of links, and page rank sculpting.

References:

________________________________________________________

Page Rank Sculpting @ http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

Google Changing the Page Rank Algorithm @ http://www.dailyblogtips.com/google-changing-the-pagerank-algorithm/

Google Page Rank Changes in Progress @ http://www.dailyblogtips.com/confirmed-google-pagerank-update-in-progress/

Google Further Clarifies NoFollow and PageRank Sculpting @ http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/090616-130132

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Tools and Tips – For your PPC Campaigns

2009-06-10T21:46:00.002-05:00

I promised to address tools in this post. The tool that I wish to talk about this time is Google Analytics.

Analytics is useful and I would dare say essential to the streamlining and optimization of the total solution when it comes to affiliate marketing. The total solution in this case consists of online marketing campaigns, via CPC/CPM efforts, SEO optimization, Blogging, Social Bookmarking, as well as web site content. Basically it is useful for any effort that is used to drive traffic to the affiliate website.

Web analytics more specifically is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web page usage. There are two categories of web analytics; off-site and on-site web analytics.

Wikipedia states to following definitions for off-site and on-site web analytics:

Off-site web analytics refers to web measurement and analysis irrespective of whether you own or maintain a website. It includes the measurement of a website's potential audience (opportunity), share of voice (visibility), and buzz (comments) that is happening on the Internet as a whole.

On-site web analytics measure a visitor's journey once on your website. This includes its drivers and conversions; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase. On-site web analytics measures the performance of your website in a commercial context. This data is typically compared against key performance indicators for performance, and used to improve a web site or marketing campaign's audience response.

The Tool

Google Analytics(GA) is a free service offered by Google that generates very detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. One of the best perks of this tool is Its aim at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew.

GA can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing, social bookmarking, blog, social networks, and even digital collateral such as links within PDF documents. WOW!!!

GA's approach is to show high level dashboard-type data for the casual user, and more in-depth data further into the report set. Through the use of GA analysis, poor performing pages can be identified, where visitors came from (referrers), how long they stayed on any given page, and their geographical position. It also provides more advanced features, including custom visitor segmentation, and website testing.

From the dashboard there are several metrics that are most apparent. Those metrics are: visits, page views, pages/visit, bounce rate, average time on site, and % new visits. The graph above shows the visits, and pages/visit.

The Metrics (under the Site Usage section)

Visits – This metric is obviously the overall number of visits that a website will see on any given day

Page Views – This metric is how many pages were viewed on any given day

Pages/Visit – This metric shows how many pages were viewed per visit on average

Bounce Rate – This metric shows what percentage of visits ended with the visitor navigating away from the landing page without taking any other action.

Average Time On Site – This metric shows the average amount of time a visitor spends perusing the site

% New Visits – This metric shows the average of how many visits are unique on a given day

Visits, Page Views, and Pages/Visit really give an indication as to how relevant our efforts are to attract attention to the affiliate website. Ads and ad bodies must reflect the information that is on the landing page. Blog information must be relevant to the niche it focuses on and related in some way to the affiliate website. Display ads must also prove relevant to the landing page, and so on.

I have been informed recently that a bounce rate close to 50% or less is most typical. It is when the bounce rate is consistently well above 50% that one should be concerned. It is a clear indication that the marketing efforts need to be revised in some way. Relevance is definitely key when it comes to marketing. Keep in mind however, that not all CPC/CPM marketing offered by the various search engines are created equal. It is obvious that the most popular search engines present higher quality traffic. The top three are Google, Yahoo, and MSN. There are smaller entities that offer CPC/CPM marketing and those are: 7search.com, Search123.com, Miva, AdBrite. I am currently using Google, Yahoo, and Miva. Unfortunately Miva is not yielding the highest quality traffic, as I have seen high bounce rates recently. Thus I will try MSN next. Initially I went to Miva because the charges we significantly lower.

There are more sections on the GA dashboard for drilling down to more advanced information. The sections are:

Visitor Overview
Map Overlay
Traffic Sources Overview
Content Overview

The visitor overview shows a graphical view of the number of visitors/day within the dates selected. The Map overlay shows where the traffic is originating. The darker the green is on the map the denser the traffic is from that location. The traffic sources overview shows a graphical view of where traffic is coming from. The three sources measured are, search engines, referring sites, and direct traffic. Under each of these sections is a “view report” link. This expands the report to show highly detailed information of its parent section. (ex. you can see metrics on each of the pages viewed under the content overview report)

Integrated with AdWords, users can review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals). Goals might include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, or downloading a particular file. These can also be monetized. By using GA, marketers can determine which ads are performing, and which are not, providing the information to optimize or cull campaigns.

Getting started with GA is relatively simple. Setting up profiles within GA takes little effort. The process is as follows:

create a profile for your website
copy the generated code, and place it into the body of your websites home page.
Allow up to 24 hours for the metrics of the first day to be collected.

The snag that most run into is the copying of the generated code into the body of the website home page. If you do not have control over your website, then you must let your webmaster do it for you, if there is no facility provided for you. If you do have access to the source of your website then adding this is academic. It is non-viewable code so there is no need to worry about anything being displayed on the web page.

I have read that the official limit on profiles is 50, and the upper limit for metrics is 5 million page visits per day.

References:
__________________________________________________________

Bounce Rate – Demystified at Web Analysis, Behavioral Targeting and Advertising

Web Analytics at Wikipedia

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Tip of the Day

2009-06-01T07:48:00.001-05:00

Due to travel, my next post will be a little delayed. In the mean time have a look at an SEO tools site where there are so many tips and ideas on SEO that it would really astonish you, as it did me. The site is at:

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/

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PPC Ad Optimization and Tips

2009-05-26T21:05:00.001-05:00

Tips

One of the biggest challenges when starting out in an affiliate marketing business is just how to maximize traffic to your affiliate website without spending a lot of money doing so. Last time I discussed free marketing strategies, that have dramatically helped my business. This time I really want to talk about getting the bang for you buck, so to speak, when it comes to pay per click advertising.

The first thought that many of us have is that more is better. By that I mean the more keywords the better your ad will perform. The problem is not really that simple. We want to be able to allow our ads to reach a wide audience but at the same time we wish to have attention from people specifically looking for what we are offering. The bottom line that affects how much we pay when it comes to PPC marketing is the dreaded quality score. What is the quality score? Yahoo and Google are in agreement when it comes to quality score. Google states the following:

“Quality Score is the basis for measuring the quality and relevance of your ads and determining your minimum CPC bid for Google and the search network. This score is determined by your keyword’s click through rate (CTR) on Google, and the relevance of your ad text, keyword, and landing page.”

So, if you take the above statement literally, it is in your best interest to cater to as specific an audience as possible. More practically these are the things that you should think about when writing an ad, selecting keywords, and landing pages.

Make sure the ad body contains the keywords that you wish to use.
Make sure the keywords are longer rather than shorter.
Make sure the landing page also has the keywords within it.
Keep the number of keywords to 5 or less, if you have more than 5 split the keywords up into separate ads.
Make ads for specific offers rather than groups of offers
Stay within compliance when it comes to writing ads and what can appear in the ad body.
Do not constantly fiddle with ad keywords. Allow them to sit for at least a week before making tweaks.
Create one ad per ad group.

Note: The landing page is the destination URL that you specify during the creation of your ad.

The more relevant your ad/keyword/landing page relationship is, the higher the quality score will be. An example of this would be:

Green Dot Prepaid Card
Prepaid Gold MasterCard
No Credit Check. Apply Now!
<your display address here>

The wording of the ad body has many elements of what is on the landing page for this particular offer. Thus that point is covered. For keywords you would select things like:

green dot prepaid credit card
green dot prepaid debit card
green dot prepaid credit cards
green dot prepaid gold mastercard

The reason behind using longer keywords is to basically not compete for the short very expensive keywords. Highly popular keywords will for that very reason have a higher cost per click. Using longer keywords will have two results. The first is the number of impressions that your ad will receive will be fewer. The second result is the clicks that you get as a result will be high quality specific traffic typically resulting in a click through. This in turn increases your click through rate, which will ultimately increase your quality score. A steady high quality score has immediate benefits when it comes to cost per click, as well as your position within search results.

Following what I have mentioned so far has yielded very positive results for my campaigns. This is a snapshot from today. The grey line is the overall count of what was going on, while the lines below are from particular ad groups that I am running. The tips above basically yield high click through rates.

In some instances you may wish to test ad variations before ultimately deciding on one. While I said above that you should create one ad per ad group. This really should only be used for the purpose of testing your keyword/ad body ideas, as it causes your ad variants to compete with each other. I would rather create several different ad groups with the same keywords, or turn off serving optimization for the ad variants. This would be the best way to truly test the ads if you should chose to create several ad variations in an ad group. After a week of tracking ad progress you simply select the best one and get rid of the others. The reason for letting things run for a week or so, is simply due to the fact that demand changes each day, and you really want to collect a full week of data before making choices on ads/keywords.

Keep in mind that things work best when you have control over both sides of your marketing structure. By that I mean, having control over ads/keywords, as well as control over your affiliate website. In my case I only have control over one side my marketing effort. I have control of my ads/keywords, though I will be making necessary suggestions. If I had full control there would be a couple of ideas that I would implement. Those would be:

Add best performing keywords to the offer landing page.
Add the best performing keywords to the meta tags for the landing page.

There are other tips that I can note, but I do not have enough personal experimentation with them. Those would be things like:

Experimenting with different match types
Use Google Analytics to test landing page/ad performance

Typically exact match wins over broad match, phrase match, or even negatives. I use Google Analytics to track traffic, bounce rate, overall volume, traffic sources, and so on. Google has a great write up on using analytics to test ads, and landing pages. Once I use that feature, I will write about it as well.

Tools

There are very useful tools that are available for use in the creation and maintenance of ads/ad groups. Google has released an Adwords Editor, that is available now in version 7.0.0. It allows you to download your entire CPC campaigns, create new ads, make changes, and post those changes to your campaign all from a desktop application. It also allows exporting and importing. The import stipulation seems to be at least based on a minimum budget amount. I ran into this when exporting my ads from the Adwords Editor, and trying to import those ads into Yahoo. There is a similar stipulation for Google.

I cannot say enough about Google Analytics, but I would have to talk about that in the next post.

Next Post: Tools and Tips

References:

10 Ways To Increase Your Adwords Quality Score at RedFly Marketing
Google Analytics at Google

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Free Marketing Strategies

2009-05-22T12:32:00.007-05:00

When I started this business (Affiliate Marketing), all the talk and training focused mainly on PPC (Pay Per Click)/PPM (Pay Per Impression) advertising. When you are starting small, following PPC alone really can limit the progress and growth that as a new business owner is essential for continued motivation and even more so, innovation. I had a chance to sit down with others who started this business at the same time I did, and among them it was common to have low morale due to PPC/PPM ads not performing to their liking and driving the amount of traffic to their websites that would keep the excitement going. I did have the chance to reinvigorate their morale by showing them that it is indeed working for me. I hope my friends are reading this entry because I wish to give more advice on driving traffic to our websites, and how it can be done without actually having to pay for it. All it takes is a little time. Time is something that we should not be afraid of devoting anyway since it is our business and we all have our reasons for starting a business in the first place.

There are several free marketing strategies out there that are available. Many times we tend to overanalyze things and in turn miss out on various possibilities since we ourselves do not think in such a way. For example... when I first thought of using PPC/PPM advertising, I thought, "Who clicks on those sponsored ads? I never do." Of course, I have had my eyes opened on that particular topic as well as quite a few others recently. What are the free marketing strategies?

Web Directories
Blogs
Twitter

These free strategies have a two fold effect on your affiliate website. The first effect is via search engine optimization which in turn leads us to the second, which is basically to drive traffic to your site in as many ways as possible.

Web Directories are just that. They are directories on the world wide web that specialize in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links. There are different types of directories, but I am only going to talk about those that are free. Also these are human-edited directories. Linking your affiliate website to these directories will improve your pages ranking in the major search engines. Improving your page rank in the search engines will mean better placement for your PPC ads, and subsequently lower cost/click, as well as your website appearing higher on regular searches. Another added benefit is that you increase organic searches through referring sites. Your page rank is essentially calculated from the number of sites your page is linked to and how many sites link to your page. All in all this helps to increase traffic to your site(s).

There are great resources for finding these web directories. One such site is www.addurl.nu. It contains a list of nearly 1000 free directories. I would recommend adding your site(s) to the listed directories at a rate of 10/day. This keeps you from appearing as a spammer to the search engines. As with anything, please note that the affect of doing this will take a little time as there are approval times on some of the directories as long as 180 days, but do not let that stop you from adding your site to the directory. I have personally been doing this, for roughly a month, and have seen my traffic increase by nearly 300%. By the time you make it though the nearly 1000 directories, I can guarantee that one would be pleased with the results. I must also stress that you should be consistent in adding 10/day, as well as keep records of the directories that you have added your site(s) to. One further piece of advice, and that is stay away from reciprocal links.

Blogs - short for web log, has a couple of easily apparent benefits. First it can help one garner a following. By that I mean people that are interested in the topics you write about will follow your blog, or at least read it from time to time. This blog is a perfect example of the type of content that could prove interesting to those working on the same sort of business, or even business in general. Taking the time to create a blog also helps you to become an expert in the subject matter of your blog. For instance, I am learning additional strategies to apply to my business because of the fact that I am writing this blog, and vice-versa. After a while of having a blog and a following, people will provide feedback, and even ask questions about various things. Blogs are linked to your sites (for me in the personal pages on the right), and my blog is linked to other blogs that I find interesting. All in all it adds to the conglomeration of information about my site(s), and about my business in general, all of which provides another source of traffic. I would recommend the following as guidelines:

Blogs should stick to one niche and not deviate from it.
Blogs should be updated regularly. Decide on once or twice a week and stick to the same day if at all possible.
Blogs should reference other sites, blogs, articles, or material on what you are speaking about
Keep each blog entry relevant and interesting.
Be credible and always fact check.
Correct things that need to be changed.

There are a couple of good blog sites that are more widely recognized. One is www.blogger.com, and the other is www.wordpress.com. Wordpress is more commonly used by business, but blogger is as well, and may have a larger following overall. I chose Blogger because it is driven by Google, and it allows you to have Google ads on your blog via Adsense, which honestly is another means of making money with the blog. So, based on the words in your blog post, relevant ads will be shown. If ads are clicked on, you are paid for that. So the larger following that you are able to acquire, the better you will do with making money that way too.

Twitter - is another form of free marketing. The essence of Twitter is that you enter in status messages as you go through your day. For example, I wrote: "Added another blog entry on Free Marketing Strategies". My Twitter profile is linked to my blog. People will follow you on Twitter, and you should follow others on Twitter with similar interests, whether they be individuals or business entities. The affect of this is traffic to your blog, which is in turn another means of garnering a following and bring traffic to your sites in the end.

Each of these items are easy and do not require an abundance of time.

Next Post: PPC Ad Optimization and Tips

References:
________________________________________________________
Web Directories at WikiPedia
Page Rank at WikiPedia

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Business Financial Foundations and Fundamentals

2009-05-19T11:59:00.013-05:00

I have learned quite a bit when it comes to starting and running a business. One of the things that oftentimes gets overlooked or at least severely delayed is the setup of a basic business structure. There are several different types of business structures. When I started I only really knew two structures in depth, but not much beyond those two. What are the business structures that really fit for small businesses?

Sole Proprietor
LLC - Limited Liability Company
S-Corporation

I knew of sole proprietor and had personal experience with that structure. I also knew of LLC since it offered some liability protection should your business require it. What I did not know is that the tax benefits between these structures and an S-Corp are like night and day quite literally. I will give a brief rundown of the differences, and will provide links for more in-depth study.

First we have the sole proprietor. The first question that I asked was how is such a structure taxed. I got my answer and did not like it at all. The basic truth is that as a sole proprietor you must report all business income and losses on your personal tax return, as the business itself is not taxed separately. When it comes to how much you pay in taxes the basic gist is that you pay 15.3% in the form of a self employment tax, and you pay another 24% tax as an income tax. So, can you imagine paying up to 39.3% in taxes? That would make someone not wish to do business. The next question for me was, what protections are in place for a sole proprietor, or in other words if someone wished to file suit against the business, what is the bottom line with respect to me and my own personal holdings? The answer to that is basically as a sole proprietor you are personally liable for any suits that are filed against the business. So, if someone should file suit and win, any and all personal assets are available and can be seized as restitution. Another thing to note is the sole proprietor business structure is the default business structure that the government will lump a business into that has not filed to be any other business structure.

For the LLC, one is afforded personal asset protection, however the tax structure is basically the same as that of a sole proprietor, meaning that you are still liable for up to 39.3% in taxes. I did not like that idea much either.

After lots of research and gnashing of teeth, I chose to utilize the S-Corp structure. I chose this structure because of the protections, as well as the tax structure. Utilizing this business structure provides legal separation between me and the business. This is the fundamental reason behind liability protection. An S-Corp is an umbrella business, making it possible to operate an unlimited number of DBA's (Doing Business As) within the corporation. As an S-Corp "shareholder", you are essentially an employee of the corporation so that self employment tax that is common to both sole proprietor and LLC, goes away. There are something like 330 tax deductions that are available to S-Corps. Operating costs are 100% deductible, and can include things like rent/utilities, internet access, gas mileage, cell phone, meetings, marketing, training, further investment, vacations, leasing of vehicles and so on. An S-Corp is in essence a pass through entity allowing some of the deductions of an S-Corp to be applied to my individual taxes. The basic paradigm is:

"Anything I do in the pursuit of profit is a deduction."

Needless to say the benefits here are phenomenal.

Each state has their own filing fees, but the what remains the same are the required forms needed to establish an S-Corp.

1. Pre-Incorporation Agreement
2. Corporate Bylaws
3. Shareholders' Agreement
4. Notice of Shareholders' Meeting
5. Notice of Directors' Meeting
6. Shareholder Proxy
7. Minutes of Shareholders' Meeting
8. Minutes of Directors' Meeting
9. Consent of Shareholders
10. Consent of Directors

It is obvious if you are the sole entity within the corporation that several of these forms can be abbreviated or passed over. The required forms can be found in your state at the Secretary of State website.

With any business it is a necessity to keep good records of expenditures as well as income, for the simple fact that it makes tax time a lot easier if you can simply go to the file cabinet and pull income, expenditure, marketing, training, and other such records at will. I cannot stress enough how important it is to keep good records on a daily basis.

Next Post: Free Marketing Strategies

References:
_____________________________________________________
Business Ownership Structures at Nolo.com
How Sole Proprietors are Taxed at Yahoo Small Business

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Business Emergence Status Update

2009-05-15T22:50:00.006-05:00

Sorry for the delay... I have been fighting the bot flag. For some reason my blog was flagged as spam, and the notification message reads:

"We find spam by using an automated classifier. Automatic spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and occasionally a blog like yours is flagged incorrectly. We sincerely apologize for this error. By using this kind of system, however, we can dedicate more storage, bandwidth, and engineering resources to bloggers like you instead of spammers."

So it has been an interesting few days trying to get that flag lifted. I think it has finally been lifted since I no longer see the flag information on my blogger dashboard.

I think I like the fuzzy logic reference, but that is just humorous to me due to years of being a software engineer.

Next Post: Business Foundations, and Fundamentals

Pay Per Click, and Pay Per Impression Marketing

2009-05-12T10:20:00.024-05:00

The initial work in driving traffic to my affiliate websites came in the form of pay per click marketing via the search engines Google and Yahoo. Keep in mind that there are more search engines out there than just Google and Yahoo. I chose those because Google is the largest commanding over 80% of the search engine market, and Yahoo because it is one of a few that make up the remaining 20% of the search engine market. If you look at the pie graph it kinda becomes obvious as to why I made my initial marketing choice.

The first thing that I did was sign up for a Google Adwords account, and a Yahoo search marketing account. These are cost per click marketing systems. This means that your ads are shown to people until your daily spending limit is reached. You are not charged for your ads being viewed, and you are not charged until someone actually clicks on your ad. There are some interesting points to note. Both Google and Yahoo rotate ads, thus your ad always appears on someone's first page. You have control of how much you wish to pay per click, as well as how much you wish to spend on content match ads. Content matching is also very useful. For example if someone is searching for acai berry free trials, and someone has a website dedicated to all things acai while utilizing google adsense on their website, this website becomes a candidate for your acai ad to be shown on.

Signing up for those is pretty straightforward. Google only charges for their service once a month, while Yahoo implements a pre-paid account model where you have a minimum balance threshold before being charged again. The good thing here is that you are in control of your monthly budget. Once the accounts were set up I turned my attention toward the creation of text ads. When creating text ads there are some things to consider.

Items of consideration

Compliance
keywords
proper ad body

On the topic of compliance... the affiliate is informed by either the affiliate network, or by the merchant as to the articles of compliance that must be followed. This is very important because if compliance is breached you run the risk of losing the affiliate relationship with the merchant, and in some cases, multiple infractions could lead to being kicked out of the affiliate network. More specifically there are usually keywords that are protected that cannot be bid on by the affiliate, as well as trademarks that cannot appear in the ad body, or the keywords. A concrete example of this is... say American Express Preferred Rewards Gold Card. American Express is trademarked and cannot appear in the ad body, or in keywords. In fact there is a long list of words that are off limits for use as keywords. Do not let that be discouraging, because there are still many ways to market the card. A good example ad could be:

Reward Credit Card
No Annual Fee. 10,000 Reward
Points. Apply Online Now!
"your website here"

The keywords for this ad to be something like:

reward credit card
gold reward credit card
reward credit cards
no annual fee reward credit card

I also learned that Google started to offer image ads in addition to their text ads. I tried using that and achieved great success with it. You still need to specify keywords, but you no longer have to worry about ad body.

There are also CPM, or cost per impression, marketing offered by entities such as Adbrite. Adbrite allows the creation of text ads, as well as image/banner ads. This is also a powerful means of driving traffic to ones site. I tried this and had some success. Of course when you are choosing images you have to pay attention to the legalities of the image contents. For example, you cannot have a picture of a celebrity and point it to a product offering. With cost per impression marketing you pay per 1000 impressions. An impression is when your ad appears, or when your ad is shown to someone doing a search. The selling point here is the low cost per 1000 impressions. Many times just pennies per 1000 impressions.

I have learned all of these methods of marketing over the last few months and could write at great length about them. If there are any questions about any of these topics please feel free to ask.

References:
______________________________________________________
2008 Market Share Analysis at MarketShare.hitslink.com
Cost Per Impression Marketing at Adbrite.com
Cost Per Click Marketing at Yahoo
Cost Per Click Marketing at Google

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The Business of Affiliate Programs

2009-05-08T18:21:00.029-05:00

As promised, I wished to talk about the fundamentals of affiliate programs and to further state why I chose to pursue this particular business model. As I state previously:

"Basically being an affiliate means that you never have to deal with customers; never have to sell or ship products; and never have to call people or coerce others into joining anything."

The basic premise is that the affiliate is compensated by the merchant for each visitor/customer directed to the merchant by the affiliate's marketing efforts. I could say it another way. Affiliate marketing is an internet-based marketing practice in which the affiliate markets the products of other businesses in return for compensation when traffic is driven from the affiliate's efforts to the business.

Compensation occurs when a customer performs a conversion. Conversion criteria are provided to the affiliate by the merchant. There are a few typical forms of customer conversions, CPA, CPL, and CPS.

(CPA) -- Cost Per Action conversions are typically achieved when a customer is directed to a merchants site and fills out a short form, such as an application, or provides as little information as a zip code, email address, or even create a free account.

(CPL) -- Cost Per Lead conversions are similar to CPA conversions but requires the customer to do a little more. For example: A customer signs up for a free credit report.

(CPS) -- Cost Per Sale conversions are pretty straightforward. The merchant pays per sale, via either a flat fee, or a percentage of the sale.

There are a couple of ways to break into the business of affiliate marketing. One such way is personally going to each company/business that offers affiliate programs, signing up for, and be approved by each of them. Another way is to buy into an already established affiliate network. I chose to buy into a couple of networks. One was financial based, in the areas of credit and personal finance, while the other contains direct sales/deals items like, "As seen on TV" products, health and fitness products, and so on. I chose these networks based on the demand for the products and services within the network. The second criteria for me when it comes to choosing a network is simply, if I could believe in the products being offered, or at the very least see them as needed and positive.

In my particular case, access to the network also came with the affiliate websites. Coming this far is really most of the leg work in getting things setup. This left me with only one task, and that task was to drive traffic to my affiliate website. The websites contain links to a multitude of merchant products, offers, free trials, and the like. The initial charge in driving traffic to the websites took the form of CPC/CPM marketing through the main search engine providers, namely Yahoo, and Google. I will go into the various marketing aspects in the next post. I will say this however... my first effort yielded a nice income. It honestly gave me faith in what I have plunged myself into. Money to reinvest back into the business itself and motivation to multiply these initial earnings.

References
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Affiliate Marketing at Wikipedia
Affiliate Programs at Affiliate Scout

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Business Emergence

2009-05-05T10:17:00.005-05:00

While I have always understood fiscal responsibility and the need to "live within my means", life has been more reactive than proactive. One would ask, what do I mean by that? Think about how we are raised. The first thing that many of our parents focused on providing for us, outside of a stable home environment, was our education. We are taught to go to school, go to college, and eventually to settle into a career. Many of us do so without question, go to college and even graduate school, and are generally very good at what we do for a living.

The scariest part about living in a reactive manner is that, we are not in control of what happens to us, and when a crisis comes along, sometimes it can wipe us out, or at least knock us down for a little bit. For example... the current economy has caused many to be without jobs for protracted periods of time. I was one of these. Working in a high tech industry, for a long time, one would think that it would not be difficult to find work elsewhere. The problem happens to be a little more complex than that. There are many people at the same time seeking jobs, many of which have similar credentials. Needless to say when you find yourself looking for a protracted amount of time, it really does serve as a wake up call. That simply means that what we have been taught about establishing a good career is not enough in the current day and age.

I really do wish we were all taught to diversify, seek out business ideas, as well as business fundamentals during our years in school. I wonder what the country would look like if we were all taught to be proactive in our lives. Living proactively just means focusing on the multiplication of what you currently have. For me it meant starting a business, because working alone, even with investment was simply not enough, and I know that the continuation of what I have been doing leaves me much too vulnerable to economic downturns, and company politics. I thought to continue relying on employment alone was madness.

Does this mean I do not work? No. It does mean however that I am working, as well as spending time building a business. I am sure that you are asking, what kind of business? I spent quite a bit of time looking for business ideas, and finally chose a business model based on affiliate programs, all of which can be conducted online. I will go into the details of affiliate programs in the next post, but I will at least say why I chose to do affiliate programs. Basically being an affiliate means that you never have to deal with customers; never have to sell or ship products; and never have to call people or coerce others into joining anything.

It is double edged. What does that mean? The good news is that you are in control of your own future. The bad news is you are in control of your own future. That always has seemed a funny statement to me. The fact that it is something that is mine, and my own efforts dictate how well I do, is refreshing.

The two sites I have so far are:

http://www.americanccplace.com

and

http://treasures.dealsmall.com

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