Earners Blog: Get in the Know

Recropical Link Cloaking – What you Need to Know

Stuart — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 23:55:58 +0000

We all get link requests, most of them are automated garbage & some are legitimate. Some are also too good to be true.

If it’s the latter then I advise you to look a bit closer at what is being offered as recently I came across a interesting Recropical Link Cloaking tactic.

Don’t think this is a new tactic either, this has been going on for a very very long time.

Setting the Scene

You get an email similar to this one:

Hello,

As I was surfing around Google , I discovered your website: http://www.earnersblog.com/ I am trying to add as many informative websites as possible to my site. Which in turn will benefit my users as well as provide you with relevant traffic to your site. I have a website with about 5,000 – 7,000 people on it per day who fit the same demographic as your site.

If you follow this link, http://www.widgets.com/?pg=2eC4L you will see that I put your link on my homepage.

Some website owners do not like when other sites link to them so I thought I might ask for your review.

Please get back to me when you have a chance, to let me know if the link I have placed suits your needs.
Also if you would like a custom Title for it just send me a email and I will get it updated.

Have a good week

Visiting the site in question you’ll notice a few things:

Decent number of Backlinks
Minimal Outgoing Links
Decent Pagerank (3 – 5)

Quite possibly the perfect link exchange? Unfortunately not. Look a bit closer.

The Detail

If you look at the email the URL should have a referral string on it (Something like ?ref= or ?pg=). This either sets a cookie when you click on it or logs your IP (or both) which makes your site “appear in the sidebar”.

Thus very cleverly making you think that the website offering the link exchange does indeed link to you.

There’s a few things you can do here to check:

Run the referral link through a HTTP Header Checker to see if it sets a Cookie
Look at your Yahoo inbound links, does the site in question appear? (it may be too soon but worth looking)
Look at the site through a proxy & remove the ?pg or ?ref from the end of the string (Incase they use IP Tracking & not cookies)
Clear your cookies & try the site again without the referral path on the end

Very Sneaky

This unfortunately is a very cunning & sneaky tactic to harvest thousands upon thousands of Recropical links. I would imagine that the strike rate doing this is much much higher than just blasting out link requests to everyone in sight.

Be Careful

If you’re contracting an SEO company & they’re using this tactic I’d be very very careful. I’ve seen a number of players that have been branded as unethical by their whole online community for using such tactics.

[Hat Tip]

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Twitter me Timbers: 5 Ways to Profit from Twitter

Stuart — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 12:38:21 +0000

If you’re on there, add me here

Follow thousands of people

Pretty straight forward, just follow as many people as you can. If you’re interesting enough a certain percentage will follow you back, I’ve noticed a 10% ratio here, a bit higher if you’re a ‘beautiful woman’ *coughs*

Tweet famous people

There’s a lot of famous people on twitter now with A LOT of followers. If you can somehow get them to tweet back at you then you’ve got a lot of potential traffic hitting your twitter profile. Creativity is the key here.

Get something viral happening that’s re-tweetable

If you can create something that’s easily re-tweetable but makes you cash then you’re onto a winner. The sitelink fail was a small example of something. I had less that 20 followers when I tweeted it, imagine if I had thousands?

Use the Twitter API to create an app (i.e. twittercounter)

I saw an interesting stat that mentioned twitter gets roughly 10x more traffic via their API than the actual web service. There’s a huge market out there for interesting apps & a huge market to profit from it. This is probably the most lucrative point out of the 5. For example, no-one is really doing twitter backgrounds well yet?

Use twitter for new product/website launches

With plenty of followers you can really give a new website/idea a very nice initial boost or get the blogosphere talking. A trend I’ve noticed is that twitter users love useful apps, oh & twitter related apps

Links are masked anyways

All affiliate links get masked through tinyurl anyways, not entirely sure if twitter plans to address this. Hell if they were really smart they could replace all affiliate codes with their own. Did I just come up with the first real revenue idea for Twitter?

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Sitelinks FAIL

Stuart — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 04:12:27 +0000

Came across this today & had to share it. Major shopping retailer here in Australia.

Someone introduce them to Google Webmaster Tools please?

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Looking for a Ruby/Python Developer

Stuart — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 22:20:58 +0000

Hey guys, I’ve scoped out a new project & I’m looking to partner with a Designer/Developer to take things to the next level. My aim is create a team that is building a constant stream of affiliate sites that provide a useful purpose for people & share the profits.

The kind of person I’m looking to partner with:

Experience in building web applications with a focus on user experience
At least 2 years experience with Ruby/Python
XHTML & CSS is a must
JQuery knowledge
Data mining & Mysql
Experience in designing user interfaces

So if you’re keen to potentially get involved get in touch. Please note, this will not be a full time paid position it’ll involve equity in the business.

How to apply

Rather than taking your word for how good you are I’d like to put forward a quick test, I want you to create a quick skeleton site that performs the following:

Has a search box that allows a user to type in a url (i.e. www.earnersblog.com)
When a user hits submit I want you to create a page around the URL in the format (http://www.yoursite.com/www.earnersblog.com)
On that page I want you to pull a screenshot of my site, the meta description & show the last 5 posts below (not by parsing RSS).
If you can style this & make it look pretty then that’ll earn brownie points also
Once complete drop me a mail at stuart [at] earnersblog.com or leave a comment in this post.
I’ll test the system with another URL to check it works.

If you can do the above in another language other than Ruby/Python give it a shot I’ll not rule out other coding languages.

Cheers guys & good luck!

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Ultimate Dofollow Social & Link Building List

Stuart — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 06:17:23 +0000

Welcome to the one stop shop for link builders looking to utilise social networks & other forms of dofollow link building techniques. I aim to keep this list as an up do date resource that grows over time, so please don’t hesitate to let me know if:

There’s sites/resources I’m missing
One of the sites I have listed goes nofollow

Current Total: 95 Sites

Social Submission & Voting Sites

These sites are the bread & butter of social bookmarking. The idea is to submit your site/posts & let the community vote. Not only do you get the initial link from the social site, really sticky content has the ability to go viral & generate a much larger range of links from relevant blogs / forums & websites. Remember, submit your best content.

Social Bookmarking Management Sites

These sites allow you to keep a record of your favourite sites & organise them accordingly. Similar to how Bookmarks work in your browser, except you can now access them from anywhere at any time. Use these to bookmark the pages you want to increase rankings too.

Social Search Sites

Social Question & Review Sites

Social Content / Article Hosting Sites

These sites allow you to host articles. Use them to leverage links to your own network of sites, some sites allow unlimited links in the articles, some are limited to 2 or 3.

Social Image Sites

Social Networking Sites

Blog Hosting Networks

Create blogs around specific topics & use them to link to your network of sites.

Forums

Connotea

Wiki

CSS Galleries

Do you have a beautifully designed CSS site? Then there’s hundreds of dofollow links out there for the taking. Submit it to the sites below.

Social Bookmark Submission Software & Websites

If you’re looking to automate any of your submissions there are a few options:

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Aweber Form Trick to Triple Profits

Stuart — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:34:41 +0000

You’ve probably seen me harp on about the power of Aweber before, I use it to build lists for every campaign I run & also on almost every affiliate product based website I have.

I’m going to share with you a small secret that will help you triple your profits on landing pages in three different ways. This technique works best with product reviews, but I’m sure you’ll find a way to make it work with your niche.

Capturing Data

This technique works by capturing the customers data before you send them on to the purchase/presell page of the product that you’re reviewing. By far the easiest way to do this is to offer them a bonus download (worth $50 – $100) that is related to the product in question.

Here’s a brief example I found that uses this technique with Ebooks:

Redirecting the User

As soon as the user types in their name & email address you can use an input type in the form code to redirect them to the landing page of the product you’re reviewing. This redirect is normally used to send someone to a thankyou page:

[coolcode]
[/coolcode]

This will then give the user the option to buy the original product & an email offering the downloadable product will be in their inbox (they’ll also be subscribed to your list).

If you get the free download right it can have a massive influence on the chance of a conversion for the main product.

Choosing a Bonus Product

I’ll always try to choose something that relates as closely as possible to the main product. If you’re doing a review of Aweber & want to capture addresses then you might give away a free 30,000 opt-in mailing list (which of course would be useless to them without an email marketing product such as aweber). That’s just an example but you get the idea.

Profiting

So you now have the ability to profit 3 times from this scenario:

Main Product: If your review is good & your bonus product fits you’ll hopefully convert here easily.
Bonus Product: If you have time on your hands it’s possible to use the bonus product to generate profit. Write an ebook or guide on using Aweber (or whichever product you’re promoting) & give it away free (packed full of your affiliate links of course). Don’t forget to also add any complimentary products to the bonus too (like Web Hosting or Wordpress Templates etc). This also acts as a safety buffer, if the person decides not to buy the main product now, they may read the bonus product & buy from there.
Mailing List: You also now have an active member of your mailing list that you can provide newsletters, tips & tricks or more product reviews to. This is invaluable, without it, that person would be gone forever & you’d probably have little chance of ever selling to them again.

Test Drive Aweber

Aweber is allowing affiliates to test drive the system for free for 30 days. With the guarantee that:

If, for any reason, you have not captured more website visitors to follow up and increase profits then receive a 100% hassle-free refund.

It starts out at $19 & increases depending on how many subscribers you have. I have 1 account with around 600 subscribers that generates me anywhere between $300 – $1000+ every time I mail the list. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out which niches are most responsive to email offers.

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How to Apply & get Accepted by Affiliate Networks

Stuart — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 06:13:03 +0000

We’re currently working on the beta version of our Affiliate Network Reviews & as such I’m currently signing up to every network out there to really get an idea of how they operate.

I thought this would be a good opportunity to outlay some of the key things you should do before applying to a network:

What you’ll need

Name
Email
Other contact details (Daytime & Evening Phone)
Current Address
Business Name
Payment details (Paypal or DD)
Tax Information / SS (Unless outside USA)
Website details including UB’s & niche
How you intend to send traffic (i.e. Email, PPC or SEO)
If Email you may be asked for the IP address of your mail server
Other affiliate networks you’re working with

Domain

You’ll be asked to provide the domain that you’re using to carry out any activities. Make sure the domain is active & isn’t a holding page. Also make sure that this is a reputable domain that has potential to provide leads/sales to the network.

Avoid putting adwords.com or anything similar as your domain because this probably won’t get accepted (depending on the Network, most are fine with PPC only affiliates as long as you specify). If you’re just doing SEM I wouldn’t bother putting any website down.

I submitted Earners Blog as the domain for most of the networks since this is where I’m doing the reviews. Funnily enough I did get one application declined by CX Digital Media because they don’t accept sites hosted on free hosting. I don’t know if they’re retarded over there but it doesn’t take much intelligence to figure out that I’m not hosting on a free blog host.

Email Address

This is a vital part of the equation. It’s best to provide an email address that corresponds with the domain name you’ve submitted above, this helps to cement the fact that you’re legitimate with the network you’re applying to. Try to avoid free email accounts like hotmail, gmail or yahoo.

Verification

Quite a large number of networks will now ask you to verify that you either own the website or ask you to call up & have a chat with them. This is a good opportunity to start up a conversation with an AM before you get accepted. This may give you some insights into how knowledgeable they are.

I was even asked by one network to put up a text link to one of their partner sites as verification. Um no.

What not to do when accepted

Don’t lie about the website that you own
Don’t start trying to get a better payout on offers right away, wait until you start pushing volume
Don’t hassle the hell out of your AM, use them wisely
Avoid brand bidding, you’ll get booted fairly quickly for this
Be careful with incentivized traffic, some offers allow it but most don’t

How you should use your AM

Account Managers are a wealth of information at some Networks, the bottom line is that the better you do, the more money they make.

Ask the right questions, don’t bust balls:

Which offers are converting well currently?
Which landing pages are kicking ass? (most won’t tell you this but it doesn’t hurt to ask)

This should be all you need to really start rolling.

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Advanced Forum Link Building

Stuart — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 09:55:22 +0000

As part of your affiliate link building strategy forums should not be overlooked. They are endless sources of linky goodness waiting to be tapped into.

Why? Well for starters you have the ability to control a large number of factors:

The theme of the page you’re getting the links from
The number of links you’re attaining
The speed at which the links are acquired
The anchor text & associated page for the link (i.e. deep pages)

You also have an almost infinite inventory out there (1.8 billion results).

Negative Press & Controversy

Since you have editorial control over forum links many people in the industry regard them to be of little or no value, including Matt Cutts himself:

For some reason, I hate signature links. Hate them.

Whilst I don’t disagree with Matt & understand his reasons for not liking these particular types of links, but Google has decided to stick to an algorithm that favours “voting” (in the form of links) & whilst that is still the case SEO’s & Online Marketers will continue to do whatever it takes to game the system rank.

This guide will cover all of the techniques surrounding link building with forums, from the very simple to the downright dirty.

Don’t expect to get magical results with just forum links, but if you have a well rounded & natural link profile forum links do work.

These are legitimate ways to build links, as always please try to keep it relevant & useful, there’s no point spamming your links on thousands of forums because:

It won’t look natural to have 90% of your inbound links from forums
You might trip some spam filters & could risk a penalty
More than likely your posts & links will get deleted = waste of time

So sit back, make a cuppa & enjoy.

Keeping Track of Forums

You’ll want to get an excel spreadsheet to track all the forums you use:

Username: Rotate this on every forum, any good mod might search on Google using your username to see if you’ve been doing the same on other forums. Do a search for username generator if you’re running out of ideas.

Passwords: I use Roboform to fill all the other information when signing up. Except the username.

URL’s: You’ll want to keep a record of your Profile URL & the URL to any threads you post in (we’re going to run a check on which links are still live & for how long).

Finding Forums

Google provides some handy operators for finding forums. You’ll obviously need to find something that relates to the keywords you’re using so replace keyphrase with the keyword you want to search for i.e. affiliate marketing.

inurl:forum keyphrase
intitle:forum keyphrase

Vbulletin – inurl:showthread.php keyphrase
Invision – inurl:index.php?showtopic= keyphrase
PHPBB – inurl:viewtopic.php keyphrase
Simple Machines – inurl:index.php?board= keyphrase
Phorum – inurl:list.php? keyphrase
YABB – inurl:YaBB.pl? keyphrase
MyBB – inurl:forum- keyphrase

You’ll also need to check whether the forum allows dofollow links, there’s plenty of useful firefox extensions but I just use the SEO for Firefox, it highlights links that are nofollow which enables you to identify whether or not the forum is passing link equity.

Links in Forum Signatures

Forum signatures are the bread & butter of this link building exercise, your signature will show on every post you make therefore making it quite a lucrative spot.

Quick Tip – If you’re a member of a forum & have thousands of posts already you can utilise this signature space right away. It’s also an option to PM other members & buy advertising in their signatures (this can be good for targeted traffic also if the forum is on topic with your site).

A typical forum signature should contain descriptive links to deep pages within the site(s) you want to promote. Here’s a good example:

The above example is from a webmaster forum & looks pretty spammy. There’s a few tricks you can use to avoid this:

When you sign up to the forum don’t post your signature right away. Join in on the conversation for around 10-20 posts then come back in a few weeks & add your signature then. You’ll draw less attention to yourself this way. With this method you need to be sure that your signature will be added to all your old posts though (some forums disable or don’t have this feature).
Sometimes less is more, 1 link is much less noticeable & spammy.
If you’re trying to post more than 1 link try to create a sentence: I’m in the market for a new web host at the moment, nothing fancy so PM me if you can recommend any, there’s some decent reviews at this affiliate marketing blog but I just can’t make up my mind!
Test what’s working, if you’re having a high removal rate then obviously the way you’re doing things is not optimal.
If the forum allows you to style your links you can make them smaller, or even change the colours to make them look less obvious.

Profile Pages

The good thing about profile pages is that there’s less link leakage then in the main threads. Most profile pages allow you to add a link, Often they’ll show your signature too, so make sure you use this space.

Links in Posts

Naturally you can (other than your signature) add keyword rich links in posts. This can be risky, because you’ll always bring attention to yourself by bumping an old post to the top.

A great example of a company that executed this strategy perfectly is our old friends over at Xrumer (which incidentally is a forum spamming software). They simply used their software to sign up to thousands upon thousands of forums then instead of dropping a link back to their own site they asked a very simple question:

Has anyone heard of Xrumer? What is it?

People would then literally reply back in the thread linking to the Xrumer website with an overview of what the software is. Talk about getting other people to do you legwork?

Editing old posts

There is however a sneakier way to drop links in posts & that’s making 10 – 20 posts in the forum (in authoritative threads about your topic) then going back in a few weeks & editing your post to include your links. Some forums disable this feature so it’s work checking to see if you can actually edit posts.

You can do something similar with signatures, participate for a while then go back & add a signature which will then get added to all your posts. Again some forums disable this feature & will only include the signature you have live when you make the post.

Images & Smilies

Often overlooked these are perhaps the easiest ways to drop links in posts. The smiley in particular is very sneaky, 99/100 no-one ever suspects someone hiding a link in a simile

Something like this should work on vbulletin [url=http://www.earnersblog.com/]:)[/url]

Questions

As I mentioned with the Xrumer example above people on forums love to answer questions & help people out. If you can get them to inadvertently link to you at the same time then you’re onto a winner. This technique works much better with brands than generic affiliate websites, but even if you’re asking a questions like:

Do you know any good places where you can watch sky tv on your pc?

Get people to respond then go back in a few weeks & turn the “watch sky tv on your pc” into a nice anchor text link to your affiliate site.

Final Thoughts

All of the above techniques can be a laborious process. There’s plenty of people on known webmaster forums that will do the grunt work for you. The key here is to do little & often, don’t blast 100 links a day because it won’t look natural at all.

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VPS Optimization Guide

Stuart — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 20:00:05 +0000

When you get to the level where you start needing VPS’ (Virtual Private Servers) it’s important to understand how they work & how you can get the most out of them. Poorly set up servers can cause you all sorts of problems like Downtime, Slow MYSQL or not withstanding the force of something like Digg.

This article will cover everything you need to do to ensure that your VPS is performing as fast as possible, which mostly focuses on optimizing your memory usage. Please ensure you make backups of your existing my.cnf & httpd.conf we will not be held responsible for any problems.

What you will need to action this guide:

Your server specs (most importantly Guaranteed RAM & Burst RAM)
Access to your Web Host Support for installation of
Root access to your VPS via SSH
FTP Access to your server
A brief knowledge of an editior (i.e. VI) if not I’ll provide the commands you need to know
How to restart mysql & apache in your server operating environment
Access to WHM

Viewing your PHPinfo

Create a file called phpinfo.php & include the follow in it:

[coolcode] ?>[/coolcode]

Navigate to that file on your server i.e. http://www.yourserver.com/phpinfo.php, you should see something like this:

What you need to ask your host to do:

Ensure that you have the latest PHP version (currently 5.28)
Make sure that PHP is compiled with the latest version of Zend Optimizer, Eaccelerator & Ioncube Accelerator.
Ensure that you have the latest apache version (currently 2.0.63)

Viewing your current resource usage

Commands:

top: your current server load & resource usage.
ps aux: all your processes & which ones are using the most memory/cpu
free -m: allocated memory, usage & free memory

If you use the top command you can get an overview of the load on the server & memory usage. You can see in the screenshot above my VPS has a load of 0.02 during the last 1minute, 5 minutes & 10 minutes.

No-one really knows what the ideal “load average” should be but my general rule is that anything over below 1 is good & above 1 is average. Above 3 & you may start to notice performance issues.

With memory usage you should ideally have 100MB or so free (if not more), you really need that buffer for large traffic spikes. If you’re coming close to your allocated memory usage then any allocated burst ram will kick in. On my server I have no burst ram, just guaranteed which means I don’t have that buffer, but my system is more stable (as everyone on the VPS can make use of the burst ram).

Removing & Tweaking Unnecessary Services

There’s a number of services that you can remove or tweak to increase performance. To remove any of these services log into WHM & go to Service Configuration > Service Manager or Cpanel > Plugins in the left menu.

Clamd: This is a virus scanning service, it uses up a ton of memory do generally I’ll remove it.

Entropy Chat: Disable this.

Spamd: This uses a lot of processes & memory. You shouldn’t remove this, instead we can tweak it. Go to Cpanel > Plugins & install spamdconf, once done go to the bottom of WHM & click on Setup Spamd Startup Configuration. Change the maximum children to 1 or 2. This will stop spamd spawning too many child processes.

Cpanel Tweak Settings

In WHM under Server Configuration > Tweak Settings:

Make sure default catch-all mail address is set to FAIL, this will use the least CPU time.
Untick Mailman, this is a resource hog.
Change the number of minutes between mail server queues to 180
Uncheck Analog Stats, I also usually uncheck Webalizer.
Make sure you tick delete each domains access logs after run, otherwise you’ll start using heaps of Disk Space.

Mysql Optimisation

You can edit your mysql configuration (/etc/my.cnf) by typing vi /etc/my.cnf

In order to add something in vi you need to hit insert, once completed hit esc then :wq to save & quit. If you want to save without quitting type :q!

There’s a few important variables that we’re going to tweak:

max_connections
wait_timeout
thread_cache_size
table_cache
key_buffer_size
query_cache_size
tmp_table_size

Via ssh you can type ‘mysqladmin variables’ to see their current values & you can also see a refreshed processlist by using the command ‘mysqladmin –i10 processlist extended-status’.

The settings below should work well for a server with 512MB Guaranteed RAM (also leaving you enough free for traffic spikes), if you have burstable then you can probably look at increasing the number of max_connections to 400 & possibly the key_buffer to 64M:

[coolcode]
[mysqld]
max_connections = 300
key_buffer = 32M
myisam_sort_buffer_size = 32M
join_buffer_size = 1M
read_buffer_size = 1M
sort_buffer_size = 2M
table_cache = 4000
thread_cache_size = 286
interactive_timeout = 25
wait_timeout = 7000
connect_timeout = 10
max_allowed_packet = 16M
max_connect_errors = 10
query_cache_limit = 2M
query_cache_size = 12M
query_cache_type = 1
tmp_table_size = 16M
skip-innodb
[mysqld_safe]
open_files_limit = 8192
[mysqldump]
quick
max_allowed_packet = 16M
[myisamchk]
key_buffer = 64M
sort_buffer = 64M
read_buffer = 16M
write_buffer = 16M
[mysqlhotcopy]
interactive-timeout[/coolcode]

Apache Optimisation

Apache settings are located in httpd.conf, you can use ‘locate httpd.conf’ or ‘whereis httpd.conf’ to find it.

Optimal settings for apache should look something like this, I like to keep the min & start servers slightly lower to stop too many child processes spawning & using memory:

[coolcode]
KeepAlive On
MaxKeepAliveRequests 100
KeepAliveTimeout 1
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 10
StartServers 5
MaxClients 150
MaxRequestsPerChild 1000[/coolcode]

Restarting Mysql & Apache

Once you’re done you’ll want to restart mysql & apache. You can do this via the command line or via WHM.

Restart Mysql: /etc/init.d/mysql restart (if mysql doesn’t restart consider commenting out skip-innodb in my.cnf)
Restart Apache: /etc/init.d/httpd restart

These commands may vary depending on what your server is running.

Monitoring Changes

Use the ‘top’ command, ‘free – m’ & ‘ps aux’ to get an idea of how the server is responding. Pay attention to how much RAM you have left & also how much CPU Mysql & Apache is using. You may need to leave Mysql running for 24-48 hours to get a true picture here.

Thinking about upgrading to a VPS but not sure who to choose, let us help you with our VPS Web Hosting Reviews, tailored specifically for Affiliate Marketers.

[coolcode]top – 19:56:30 up 27 days, 4:11, 1 user, load average: 0.04, 0.07, 0.09
Mem: 524288k total, 386432k used, 137856k free, 0k buffers[/coolcode]

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13 Smokin Tips to Increase Adwords CTR

Stuart — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 10:49:24 +0000

I’m slightly obsessed when it comes to CTR with my campaigns, I’ll always try to push things as hard as I can to get the best bang for my buck. These strategies can be used for established campaigns or new campaigns to get some quick results.

As you know, CTR is linked to your ad quality & also the price you end up paying.

AdRank = CTR x Maximum Bid

From my observations quality score merely dictates your minimum entry into the bidding. If you have a high quality score you can eventually bring you bids down to sub 5c, however if you have a low quality score then you might have to bid $5 just to show.

Two Examples of how CTR can Reduce Cost

Stuart is bidding on the same keyword & match type as Jenny. Jenny is bidding $10 with a CTR of 3.3%, Stuart’s maximum bid on the otherhand is $5 & his CTR is 10%. Who’s ad is showing the highest?

Jenny: $10 x 3.3 = AdRank of 33
Stuart: $5 x 10 = AdRank of 50

In this situation Stuart is bidding half of what Jenny is but his ad is much more relevant therefore he’ll end up appearing higher. This is the power of really tuning & testing to increase your CTR.

Tip 1 – Increase your Maximum Bid

Since we’ve already established that your maximum bid can have a huge effect on your positioning you can use this to you advantage. Simply increase your bid to position 1, watch your CTR build then slowly bring the bid back after a few days until your position starts to slide again. I’ve successfully used this method to stay in position 1 & ultimately pay much less than the person below me.

Tip 2 – Split test religiously

I always split test two ads at once, the reason behind this is if you test any more & 1 performs shockingly then it drags your overall performance down. There’s plenty of variations you can try, but simply start with 2 ads, then remove the underperforming one after a few days & rewrite it with your learnings from the previous test.

Tip 3 – Target your Headline

The headline is one of the most important parts of your ad, it’s probably what the user will see first. So try to make this as targeted as possible. i.e. if the user is searching for Health Affiliate Program then ideally that’s what you want as your title.

You can test with variations & also try adding calls to action in there like “Top Health Aff Program” (remember you can’t have more than 25 characters) etc. Quite often you can get away with abbreviations so don’t be afraid to try some.

Using official site in the headline also works well for increasing CTR:

Dell AU – Official Site
Latest Deals on Dell Computers
& Laptops. Buy Online Today!
www.dell.com/au

Tip 4 – Use Description to highlight your USP’s

Once your headline has grabbed their attention you really need to sell them with the description. Try to include the things that separate you from your competitors. This may be price, free shipping, money back guarantee or certain product features. Here’s an example of an ad that makes good use of the body text:

1/2 Price Broadband Sale
6GB for $19.50 for 1st 6 Months on
3’s $39 Mobile Broadband Plan!
www.Three.com.au/MobileBroadband

Tip 5 – The pyramid/arrow theory

You’ll notice that when you search for a keyword if it’s in your ad Google will highlight it. With the right positioning of keywords in your Headline, Description & Display URL it is possible to take advantage of this highlighting to create an arrow or pyramid that helps with drawing the users attention to it.

Instant Ringtones
Get Instant Ringtones
& Latest Rad Ringtones Online
www.Rebcell.com/Ringtones

When a user searches for Ringtones the ad above contains the keyword 4 times. Notice how when bolded the ad looks like a series of steps (or a pyramid), this is a proven method that subliminally attracts users towards your ad over all the others on the page.

Tip 6 – Test with the Search Network on & Off

The search network can have a positive or negative effect on your CTR, there’s really no way to tell how it will impact your overall campaign CTR. Make sure you test it on & off.

Tip 7 – Split out Broad, Phrase & Exact into their own Adgroups

I generally won’t do this for every single keyword in a campaign but for the high traffic / top converting words this really allows you to tweak your ads to best suit the match type. For example the ad that works for an exact match on the word “free ringtones” might not be as effective when you start broad or phrase matching because you’ll be triggering on keywords like “free ringtone downloads” which you’re not targeting in the Headline or Description.

Tip 8 – Test Keyword Insertion

I try to stay away from keyword insertion on the most part but it’s useful when you’re trying to get a campaign up & running quickly. It’s great for CTR since it’ll substitute the keyword into your ad.

Be careful though because keyword insertion can backfire (check out this search for “buy kids online” for example):

Online Kids Buy
Find Over 10,000 Offers From Major
Retailers Online Today With Lasoo!
www.Lasoo.com.au

Tip 9 – Run content campaigns separately

Whilst the content network doesn’t affect your overall search CTR it can confuse you when trying to evaluate your overall CTR for a campaign. I usually split them into two campaigns just so it’s easy to get an overview. I also find it easier to view & evaluate conversion data better by doing this.

Tip 10 – Curiosity killed the cat

People are curious creatures & you can play to this when writing your ad. This works incredibly well for product based searches. For this example lets use the term “arbitrage conspiracy”. Chances are that if you’re searching on this term you’re looking to buy the book.

Arbitrage Conspiracy Lie
Check Out This Shocking Truth About
The Flaw of Arbitrage Conspiracy!
ShockingReview.com/ArbitrageConspir

Tip 11 – Tweak your Display URL

There’s a few ways of tweaking the Display URL, this can have a moderate to large effect on CTR:

earnersblog.com
www.earnersblog.com
EarnersBlog.com
www.EarnersBlog.com
Keyword.EarnersBlog.com
EarnersBlog.com/Keyword
www.EarnersBlog.com/Keyword

I usually tend to go with option 6, but in some cases I’ve seen option 1 blow it out of the water. It pays to test the variations to get an idea of which display URL’s work best with your demographic.

Tip 12 – Play with Scheduling

I’ve seen scheduling used in some quite ingenious ways to build up history. For example initially only having your ads active for 1 hour during the day (around 8pm at night) to ease your way into a new market without your competitors spotting you & adjusting their bids up too quickly.

Scheduling for your industry may reveal that people are more click happy & night when at home or it may be the opposite, they may click less at home but more at work. You can use this to your advantage if you split test it.

Tip 13 – Use Trademark Symbols

Using trademark symbols for products can increase CTR by insane amounts, (something to do with people thinking that ad is the official site).

Conversions always rule over CTR

Just because an ad has a better CTR doesn’t mean it will convert better. I will always choose an ad that converts better or has a better ROI over one that has a better CTR.

So now you have 13 things that you can test, find the winning combination & take you Adwords Campaigns to the next level.

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Niche Domination – Solid Strategy or One Trick Pony?

Stuart — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 00:22:27 +0000

Quite a while ago I wrote a post on building a lasting affiliate network, something that can potentially take 2-3 years to really achieve properly.

I was browsing through the serps recently for a new project that I’m about to launch here on Earners Blog which relates to the web hosting niche. This niche in particular really shits me, it’s as bad as the MMO (Make Money Online) niche – millions of idiots all promoting products because of their commissions rather than the value of the product to the client/shopper. But, everyone’s gotta make a buck…right?

So I stumbled across a networks of sites recently that has started dominating this niche quite well, it just so happens that it’s for all the shitty hosts that pay good commissions but provide a terrible service (how ironic?).

In this post I’m going to take apart his network & show you the things he’s done it & also the mistakes he’s made along the way (without directly linking to the sites).

The Network

Lets firstly look at one of his sites. It’s the #1 SERP for the term Bluehost Review.

Just by looking at it you can tell it’s Wordpress with the iTheme, lots of categories & using the site: operator we can see there’s around 172 pages indexed.

Now this particular affiliate is using three tactics that work incredibly well:

Calling the domain the exact SERP he wants to rank for. In my testing I have noticed that if you’re getting backlinks with an anchor text that matches the name of the domain name it’s less likely to trigger anchor text penalties (because that’s what your domain is called).
Hiring people to write content on every bluehost related search term there is. If you don’t use the Adwords Keyword Tool then you’re crazy.
Interlinking this bluehost review site with all the other sites in his network. Giving each site anywhere from 9k – 14k Yahoo! Backlinks.

The Layout & setup of Wordpress is pretty stock standard. Plenty of categories with optimised title tags & listing them all in the sidebar. I’d personally normally list the posts in the sidebar but if you can include some unique content on each category page using wordpress conditionals (or excerpts) then this method works well too.

Notice how the header of each single.php also has the same Bluehost offer right at the fold line. This is a great technique for grabbing the attention of the reader (after all with these types of sites the content is secondary, you want them to see the offer).

Mistakes

All of his sites are using the same template (iTheme for Wordpress), if anyone is manually reviewing these sites say goodbye.
I can easily find out who this guy is using this search & seeing that he calls himself charlesgan on forums. It appears he calls himself the same on all forums. It also appears that he spends a large amount of time buying & selling links on digitalpoint (& also hiring content writers for Web Hosting Articles). If I can find this sort of stuff out in about 2 minutes I’m sure Google can too.
Interlinking each & every site seems to be working in the SERPS but it’s also very easily spotted. If someone decides they need to take the whole network down for manipulating the SERPS it leaves Charles in a very unfortunate position & 2 years of hard work down the drain.
No mailing list, whilst this isn’t a big thing Charles could potentially build a large mailing list of subscribers (after all someone doesn’t stay with the same host forever), this could turn into quite a nice recurring revenue stream.

Things done well

Whilst I don’t endorse doing this Charles has provided fake whois info for the domains. Which could possibly be helping him in resisting any automatic interlinking penalties with Google. He hasn’t gone as far as setting anonymous nameservers with someone like easydns but that’d probably be the next step.
The layout & organisation of the content is done very well. Plenty of topics all covering all the questions someone might ask about Bluehost. Mysql, Wordpress, Server Speed all that stuff.
He has over 50 domains dominating this niche, quite a bit of work for one person. So I’m guessing most of the content is outsourced.
Charles also interlinks the sites well within the content of the posts. Using keyword rich anchor text. There’s a few plugins for Wordpress that you can set to do this automatically.

Conclusion

I’m guessing that this network is making some pretty decent money, if you consider some hosts pay up to $150 for a signup. This shows that sticking to your guns & focusing on a particular niche can really pay off in the long run. However it does also have its consequences, in that if the network is detected you risk losing everything.

My tip is to diversify, don’t rely on a single network to build your income, but at the same time don’t ignore the potential rewards for putting the hard work into building one. If you can outsource the creation & content you can still work on your other projects.

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Hack Alert (remv.php) – Upgrade to Wordpress 2.7

Stuart — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 05:02:11 +0000

If you haven’t upgraded to Wordpress 2.7 yet then I suggest you do it sooner rather than later. There’s an exploit in earlier versions of Wordpress that are compromising installations & turning them into mass zombie DDOS machines.

How to you check if you’ve been hacked

Via ftp go to the folder /wp-content/themes/ if there’s a file there named “remv.php” then you’re one of the unlucky ones.

What is remv.php?

It’s an application called PHPremoteView, it basically allows anyone to run any php commands on your server. This could result in a wide variety of damage (lost files, password, having your adsense code changed, affiliate url’s changed etc etc).

Currently most of the compromised installs are being used for DDOS attacks. So if you notice also an unusually high load on your server this could be the cause.

What to do to fix it

Delete the remv.php file first.
Look to see which files in the Wordpress folder have been altered lately, it’s possible that your theme headers or footer could have unsuspecting spam links to pharma affiliate sites.
Export all your Wordpress posts via XML then reinstall Wordpress 2.7 & import your posts.
If you’re hosting multiple sites on your server you’ll want to check for all the files that have been modified within the time range since remv.php was created.
Change all your passwords, user, root, wordpress, mysql databases….everything.
Upgrade all your plugins to the latest versions (some might not work in 2.7 also).

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Coupon Affiliates are stealing from you

Stuart — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 23:02:53 +0000

Apparently now in the UK 1 out of every 200 visits to an online retail site comes from a Voucher/Coupon Code website. As this type of traffic is increasing year on year, your hard earned affiliate commissions could be getting flushed down the drain when your cookie is overwritten by these rogue practices.

How it Works

Many of the big voucher websites have one incredibly sneaky way of overwriting your hard earned cookie (There are legit ones out there that do things by the book, but I’m not naming names here).

So in order to even view the discount codes you first need to click on the button to reveal them, this opens up a popunder which sets a new cookie, overwriting yours. Now this is where it starts to get very very sneaky.

When you have a large database driven site it’s very easy to start creating pages around every merchant / site known to man that has an affiliate program (regardless of whether they have voucher codes or not), some sites have to do this manually others can do it on the fly. They then start optimising the pages for “Merchant Name Vouchers, Discount Codes & Coupons.”

So here’s now a typical scenario:

You send a customer to the merchant via your affiliate redirect
Customer sees a nice shiny laptop & decide to buy
They get to the checkout & see the merchant has a “coupon code field”
Their eyebrows raise ever so slightly & they type “merchant coupon codes” into Google
Up pops one of the Voucher Code sites with a nice shiny button similar to that above
But….low & behold there’s no coupon codes.
The voucher website has STILL overwritten your cookie though.

This is what pisses me off the most, people are ready to buy, ready to commit. Yet you have you sale stolen from you at the last minute (seemingly without any effort).

Networks are turning a blind eye

One of the UK’s large voucher websites last year reported they sent over $250,000,000 worth of sales through to merchants. With this type of volume the networks are turning a blind eye & letting these sites get away with stealing YOUR commissions.

What is the Role of an Affiliate?

It seems this varies considerably, but here’s a few thoughts (I’d like to know yours also):

What do you think the role of an Affiliate is?

What can be done to combat this problem?

There’s four solutions to this that I can think of:

I look very carefully before promoting some merchants now, if they have a coupon discount field it’s a big RED FLAG for me.
Ban the offending affiliates from Networks
Disable the overwriting of Affiliate Cookies
Credit the Affiliate that sends the consumer to the purchase page before the affiliate that provides the coupon.

What solutions do you see to combat this rising problem?

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$1k+ a month with a Celebrity Website

Stuart — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:37:58 +0000

I normally find that the amount I post is inversely proportional to the amount of money I make therefore when I’m onto something good you might find things quiet around here. Either way, on with the show.

This post is in relation to a question I had a few weeks ago (feel free to ask questions here):

Stuart, I have a website that gets around 3,000 uniques per day (in the celebrity space) but I can’t seem to make more than $6 per day from Adsense. What advice can you give on increasing this?

So lets assume you already have a celebrity site getting a decent amount of traffic (anywhere from 1k+ visitors per day), if you don’t then check out some of my earlier posts on affiliate link building & the 2008 link building guide.

Celebrities can be a tough to crack, but you just have to persist:

There’s plenty of niches to pick, I’m not going to go into details but there’s hundreds if not thousands
Traffic is HUGE, millions of people unfortunately lead boring lives & need their celebrity fix. So you’ll be focusing purely on volume here then figuring out testing the best way to monetise it.
These sites are usually littered with ads, so in other words, they also can’t make enough money from just adsense. We need to be smart about monetisation.

Bread & Butter Monetisation Networks

Celebrity Sites are notorious for offering up low CPC’s with Adsense, there’s a few quick methods to increase your income:

Adsense: I normally run with a 728×90 Adsense above the fold, this is tried & tested for me as being the optimum spot for clickthroughs. I’ve recently been playing with YieldBuild, which automatically tests & rotates combinations of ad sizes & colours then continually tries to optimise for the best eCPM. I’ve seen a 25%-30% increase in about 30 days.

You could also go through & filter out the MFA ads but I’ve not had much luck with that.

Value Click Media: I average about $110 on around 420k Pageviews for one site with Value Click CPM advertising. Not the best, but it’s an addition to Adsense.

Right Media: I also run Right Media & let advertisers fight for my ad space, this generates decent returns but since my overall income is split between 4-5 advertisers I end up getting 4-5 US Cheques (I’m in Australia) which cost me $10 each to cash. Bit of a pain but it’s another income stream.

Zango Cash: This isn’t something I’ve exclusively had time to trial but I’ve had reports from at least 4 or 5 contacts that are making some decent bank from the Javascript Overlay on Celebrity Sites. I wouldn’t plan on using this if you don’t want to annoy your visitors, if you don’t care then you’ll make some decent money here.

Ideal monthly income breakdown by Network:

Adsense: $300-$600+
Valueclick: $150+
Right Media: $200+
Zango: $300-2k+

Others to consider: Tribalfusion, Fastclick, Clicksor & Adbrite (Interstitials)

Use your Analytics to Profit / Understanding your Visitors

I can’t stress enough that making money with these types of sites isn’t about slapping up the banner advertising above & moving onto the next project. Always check your analytics on a daily/weekly basis.

An example of this may be:

You notice that a particular page dedicated to Megan Fox is getting a significant amount of traffic this week from a movie website all drooling over her pictures. Do you A, sit back & watch the Adsense dollars trickle in or B try to find an offer that appeals to fans of Megan Fox, it may be the transformers DVD or it might even be a Megan Fox Poster?

Either way you get the idea here, you can target individual pages with different offers depending on where you’re getting the traction. There’s no point setting up a niche offer on every page until you see the traffic come in.

User Interaction

Interaction is key to monetisation. Ask yourself this question:

Once a visitor leaves your site are they ever going to come back?

If the answer is no then we need to find a why to bring them back over & over again. This can be done in a number of ways:

Email List: Creating an email list that mails people when you update the website. The hard part about this is getting people on the list in the first place, try offering an incentive like a competition or a free giveaway.
Forum: Everyone loves a forum, this is by far & away the best way to keep people coming back again & again.
Social Features: Allow interaction with content & users.

Expand your Network

Are you dominating this niche as much as you can? or are you simply moving onto the next one without first capitalising what you have? Remember, it’s easier to grow what you already have than it is to grow something from scratch.

Think carefully around potential partnerships with similar sites & also unique advertising deals that (if you’re the leader in the niche) no one else can provide.

Research!

How are the other Celebrity websites out there making bank? I normally like to check out the Sitepoint Marketplace to see actual revenue figures & where that revenue is coming from. I’ve seen some bloody ingenious revenue generating schemes/ideas on here so that’s my hot tip for the month.

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Making Money with Internationalised Products

Stuart — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 04:04:54 +0000

So I’ve been pretty busy lately, at lot of my own projects have been brushed aside for the time being. But because I’ve been so pushed for time I’ve been forced to look for easier & quicker ways to grow my affiliate income stream.

I came across an interesting article not long ago about how one affiliate managed to dominate the Australian Ugg Boots market just as they were becoming popular (I can’t find the article off hand but if you know it kindly post it in the comments). I put this theory to the test by searching for similar items that had an international appeal but no-one was capatilising on yet.

Now there’s two ways that you can approach this method:

Look for a product that’s in demand in your own country but no-one is really selling it, then look for someone who’s selling it abroad. You can either set up a relationship with the supplier/distributer or even see if they have an affiliate program. Problems with going down the affiliate route is that the shipping will be a good deal more. I’ve had good success with the affiliate route even though the shipping is pricey provided I’m about 40% cheaper overall than anyone who’s selling the product locally.
Look for a product that’s in demand abroad & is already well established in your country. The above scenario applies to this too & if the product is well established it’ll probably have an affiliate program.

If you’ve done your research correctly you should already know a few things:

What the international competition is like
Whether or not you’re beating their prices
How they format their PPC Ads (I use the Google Global Firefox Extension for this)

You want to make sure that you can provide the same product cheaper than they can get it locally (including shipping). This will be your selling point. For example I sell one product locally that you can only buy in Australia for around $99 (excl shipping), however abroad I can bring it for around $59 (excl shipping). Which one do you think will appeal more in a PPC Ad?

Now create a minisite dedicated to the product, the site should contain general product information (including variations) & most importantly a review about the product.

I now create a very targeted PPC Campaign using branded terms & other very targeted terms I think will convert well. I know the brand terms will convert & the rest of the terms I’ll constantly test (including tweaking the review landing page) until I’m happy I have a set of 10-20 keywords that’ll convert for a minimal spend. The nature of these campaigns will attract a high CTR on the ads (since they’re so targeted) so you should be able to bring the CPC down gradually & maintain a decent position.

I’ll put this example into perspective for you. Take the Iphone, it’s only just being launched in Australia after being around for quite some time. However, tens of thousands of people in Australia “Already have one.” Now imagine getting on that train in the beginning (I admit that is probably a once in a lifetime product). But you get the idea.

Now sit back, monitor & move onto the next one.

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How to Upgrade to an Adwords My Client Center

Stuart — Wed, 28 May 2008 10:11:21 +0000

Thanks for your emails & concern, yes I am still alive I’ve been taking a bit of a break recently, focusing on work & getting stuck into some of my own projects including finalising my Australian Residency. I try to answer all emails so just shoot me one if you have any questions.

Here’s a question from Jared:

Do you use an Adwords My Client Center? & if so what are the advantages?

If you’re managing multiple Adwords Accounts upgrading to a Google MCC Account makes perfect sense. You don’t have to log in & out to switch between them & also creating new accounts is a breeze.

I highly recommend making the jump across regardless of whether you have 1 account or several & also especially if you’re spending more than $500 a month.

There’s a few perks to having an Adwords MCC Account:

You can manage multiple accounts from 1 interface
You can split things up much better & assign budgets
You can bill each account seperately
If you spend more than $500 consistently you can take the Adwords Professional Exam
Get your own dedicated Adwords Professional Page
You can qualify for vouchers (only once you’ve completed the Professional Exam)
If you decide to take on clients you’re already set up

If you decide to take the GAP exam (which is valid for 2 years) you’ll be able to show it off on your sites. Not only that but I guarantee it’ll get you a much larger foot in the door if you apply for any SEM related jobs.

Upgrading your account is pretty simple:

Join as a Google Advertising Professional
Input one of your existing Adwords Account
Create a new Google Account to use for the login & you’re done

Now just log in & link any other existing accounts.

As a rule of thumb I normally create 1 account per website that I’m working with, I normally find that this helps me manage spends & budgets much easier.

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Dealing with Dodgy Merchants & Affliate Networks

Stuart — Mon, 05 May 2008 11:24:45 +0000

I’ve been following a thread on Wickedfire closely over the past few days that talks about dodgy affiliate networks. I realised that I’d never really covered this topic in any detail on the blog, so here’s my spin on it all.

Dodgy Merchants

It’s inevitable that if you’re trying out hundreds of merchants every month you’ll eventually run into a few dodgy ones. It’s easy to think that everyone in this industry is nice & “looking out for one another” but if you think that then you need a serious reality check.

You’ve got three types of merchants

Those that manage their affiliate program in house with a dedicated team
Those that outsource the management to a network but still approve the leads/purchases themselves
Those that manage the program by themselves (1 man show)

Speaking from experience I’ve had trouble from all three types. But, most of the time it’s from numbers 2 & 3.

So what are the ways that merchants can cheat you out of your well fought after commissions?

Scrubbing Leads – This is unfortunately very common in our industry (especially in the adult space). It happens at the merchant level & at the Network level. This basically means that the merchant or network won’t credit a certain number of your leads, pocketing the profit for themselves & you won’t even know it’s going on.

How to combat – There’s only one real way to combat this & that’s to generate your leads locally, or get friends to generate leads for you & catch the merchant red handed. Bottom line is, if you suspect your merchant is doing this move on….quickly.

Lead Lag - This is quite common in the financial sector & relates to the processing time of applications for loans or credit cards. Make sure that the merchant is regularly approving or declining the leads that you’re sending through.

How to combat – A quick email to your AM or their manager will usually get the ball rolling on this issue. If the leads lag too long just switch merchants & save yourself the headache, their loss.

High Refund Rates – I’ve come across a number of merchants in my time that have a very high refund rate. This is one to be very wary of, especially in the financial space. If it’s your job to provide someone with a “lead” then the merchant should not be entitled to refund it for a failed application, but some merchants just don’t get what the meaning of a lead really is.

How to combat – There’s no way around this, if there’s a high refund rate then call the merchant & ask for an explanation. If it’s not worthing pursing then just move on.

Test Orders – I also get these ones from time to time, it’s possible that the occasional one or two is fine but any more than that & you should start to get worried. Why on earth are you testing so many orders under my affiliate ID, don’t you have a test ID?

How to combat – Ask the question above.

Bidding on their own Brand with an Affiliate Tracking ID – This is one of the ones that pisses me off the most. I can do all the work & presell to the customer but if they decide to go away, think about it & then come back through typing the brand into Google the merchants Cookie will overwrite mine. This is extremely common & is something that I check for before starting any campaign.

How to combat – If you can, outbid the merchant on their own brand & test how many other affiliates they’re ripping off

Non Payment – Perhaps the worst thing is not getting paid for all of your effort & hard work. Remember from time to time merchants can be late with payments or perhaps forget, but there’s a difference between a late payment & not getting one…ever.

How to combat – Email your account manager or affiliate representative first, if there’s no response then try again. If you’re talking to a brick wall then get in touch with a lawyer, they’ll write you up a letter that may provoke a response. Remember to try & research potential merchants as much as possible before you put any serious volume through them & ALWAYS have a backup incase things go belly up.

Dodgy Affiliate Networks

Running In House Campaigns – If you were an affiliate manager who was paid on the performance of their affiliates & you had access to “what was working” would you run your own campaigns? Well, there’s plenty of AM’s out there that do this & you have to cover your tracks to not give away any secrets.

Keeping your campaigns secret not only protect your profits, but they also protect your niche. Ever been bidding on a keyword with 0 competition then almost overnight you’re up again 1 or 2 competitors?

How to Combat -

Use Redirects: PHP redirects generally pass the referrer string right through so you’ll want to use a redirect that doesn’t. Meta Redirects or Javascript redirects normally do this pretty well (remember that some people do turn Javascript off). When I want to keep stuff really hidden I’ll use double redirects to prevent the AM from back tracing the redirect or seeing the real redirect as a referrer.

Encode your SubID’s: If you rely heavily on Sub ID’s don’t go naming them stuff like subid=affiliate_marketing_blog, you may as well give away your top converting keyword list on a plate. It should look something like subid=9954412, if you don’t know how to code then simply put the real subid value in a spreadsheet. If you’re a dab hand at PHP you could create a simple tracking script of your own that will identify the subid with the real search term in your stats.

Stand your Ground: Don’t let the network bully you into revealing your traffic sources once you start killing it with your campaign. If the traffic stands up on the merchants end then they network have nothing to worry about (except you not giving your campaigns away ) Bottom line is that they won’t risk losing you if you’re sending a decent amount of leads.

These are just my experiences over the years, I’ve learnt to become much more secretive about how I do things (especially when it’s PPC). I’d love to hear your experiences & what measures you take to protect your IP. Please don’t name any networks in the comments.

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DDOS Attack

Stuart — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:35:34 +0000

I’ve been trying to write at least one solid post per week, but unfortunately like Eli over at Blue Hat Seo I’ve been under a wave of DDOS attacks for the past few weeks. It doesn’t seem to be to quite the same extent but I’ve put the appropriate measures in place to make sure it has been contained.

Major thanks to all the guys over at SLHost for their support in solving any issues fast. If you ever need to get your hands on a decent VPS you really can’t go far wrong.

In the meantime, if you have any great Guest Posts that cover any affiliate marketing topics send them through to earnersblog@gmail.com & I’ll sort through the best ones

Thanks for your support.

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Explode your PPC Campaigns in 6 easy Steps

Stuart — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 11:15:27 +0000

Is your PPC campaign dull & lacking that oomph? Good, today is the day to take action & turn things around. Follow these simple steps & explode your PPC Campaign:

1. Try to avoid Phrases with less than 3 Words

There’s a huge difference between “affiliate marketing” & “affiliate marketing blog.” The more words contained within a keyphrase the more targeted your keyphrase is likely to be for that query. Put yourself in the shoes of the searcher, people looking for information will type “affiliate marketing” people who specifically want to read an affiliate marketing blog will type the latter.

The same works with all industries. Bidding on “doctor” is very different than bidding on “doctor in melbourne.” Start to think more about what phrases you’re bidding on rather than being lazy.

2. Don’t waste money – Lose the Broad Match

Whilst Broad Match generally generates more traffic you’ll often find that due to Adwords “Extended Broad Matching” that heaps of unrelated terms will sneak in. Unless your researching for more terms (by utilising the Search Query Report) you should not be throwing money away on keywords that you don’t pre-qualify. Don’t be lazy & do thorough keyword research before embarking on any Adwords campaign. My rule of thumb is always go phrase (with negatives) or exact. That way you know what you’re getting for your money.

3. Catch people in the late stages of the buying process

As I mentioned in point 1, there’s certain phrases that people will use when they’re in different stages of searching. Identifying these can mean the difference between paying $15/conversion or $5/conversion.

Helpful bidding ideas:

Bid on Brand Names of Products & Items
Bid on Company Names & Manufacturers
Use buy, compare & purchase keywords
Leverage product reviews

4. Watch the Search & Content Networks

Check your Campaign Settings to see if the Search Network & Content Network are switched on. I always switch off both initially as I don’t trust where the traffic is coming from. Once I get the campaign to a solid CTR, Position & Return I’ll then test the Search Network to see if it adds or removes value.

If you want to run a Content Campaign, I suggest that you run it within its own campaign. Alone.

5. Create Highly Targeted Adgroups

Theme your adgroups around a particular keyword. If that keyword is affiliate marketing blog then the adgroup may contain:

“affiliate marketing blog”

[affiliate marketing blog]

[affiliate marketing blogs]

Doing this allows you to write a highly targeted creative which relates specifically to the keywords that you’re bidding on. Keeping things highly related like this will increase your CTR, reducing your cost in the long run.

6. Use Highly Targeted Creatives

As explained in the previous point you can now write highly targeted creatives based around a small group of keywords.

Using the above ad group example your creative might look like this:

Affiliate Marketing Blog
Become an Affiliate Marketing Gun
with Earners Blog Affiliate Marketing Blog
Earnersblog.com/AffiliateMarketingBlog

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Ebay lays the Smackdown on the sale of Digital Items

Stuart — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 23:19:23 +0000

If you’ve ever been on ebay you’ll no doubt have seen this:

or this:

Or the thousands of other Digital Products that are being sold every day.

Ebay has introduced new guidelines that from the 31st March 2008 ban the sale of any Digital Products from normal listings that can be downloaded right away, they must now be advertised under the Classified Ad format (which is useless imo).

Using the Classified Ads format, sellers receive a 30-day ad at a fixed price. This solution enables sellers to continue to market their digital goods on eBay; however, because Classified Ad listings are a lead generation tool and do not result in transactions that go through eBay, Feedback cannot be exchanged between buyer and seller.

This change will include anything that can be downloaded or transferred electronically, i.e.

eBooks
MP3’s
Digital Videos
Websites
Domain Names
Graphic Design Services
Photo Services
And any other service that can be delivered electronically

This change is going to put a lot of people who depend on selling digital products on ebay for a solid income in serious trouble. Naturally there’s probably ways around this change, like physically shipping products, but that’s a pain if you’re used to everything being automated.

However I also think that the change is a good thing for Ebay. I’ve seen too many people get ripped off with Domain Names & Website packages just because they didn’t know any better.

No doubt we’re going to see a large influx of people into the Affiliate Marketing & CPA realm, there’s plenty of reading on this blog

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Must have Firefox Extensions for Affiliate Marketers

Stuart — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 01:22:12 +0000

If you’re a full time affiliate marketer there’s a very good chance that you probably don’t use internet explorer anymore. There’s a number of reasons most people switch, but the most common, is the lack of plugin functionality & 3rd party integration.

Firefox has really embraced these types of applications & allows you to integrate them seamlessly into your regular workflow, helping you to do tasks or use functions that the original developers didn’t hardcode.

I use quite a number of Firefox Extensions that really make a huge difference to my workflow & productivity, but the aim of this post to be the definitive list of Firefox Plugins for Affiliate Marketers:

Foxmarks

When you have multiple computers & workstations it can become painful to always keep your bookmarks in sync, especially when you’ve got hundreds of websites. Foxmarks will store all of your firefox bookmarks externally & then keep them updated & in sync no matter where you go (provided you have the extension installed on the computer). This means that the bookmarks on all of my computers always match, a massive time saver for me.

Greasemonkey

Greasemonkey is an extension for Firefox that allows you to write or download scripts that change how web pages behave or look. There’s literally thousands of user written scripts that do all sorts of things from Downloading Youtube Videos to removing the annoying parts of Myspace (I thought it was all annoying though? ) or showing you the Link Data in Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Google Global

This extension allows you to view the Google Search Results from different locations around the world, right down to regions, cities & postcodes. Extremely useful if you’re running PPC campaigns outside your Geo Location & also if you want to see what your international competitors are doing.

SEO for Firefox

I’ve talked about how much I like this plugin before but if you’re planning on quickly analysing a particular keyword or niche or any other search results then this plugin is gold. It allows you to quickly see the inbound links to a domain or page, get an idea idea if the page has pagerank & also plenty of other features.

Search Status

Get an quick snapshot of Page Rank & Alexa Rank when viewing a particular page. Good for quickly analysing the popularity of a particular website/page.

Web Developer Extension

This is a very useful extension that allows you to manipulate many of the design related features within a page. You can disable Java, CSS, Referrers & Meta Redirects; Clear Cookies & disable Cookies; Resize pages & elements & also manipulate forms. Very very useful.

User Agent Switcher

Switch between user agents within firefox to see how web pages react. Useful for getting into areas that only allow Googlebot (naughty naughty) & a few other things.

Live HTTP Headers

Display the HTTP Headers from a website in Real Time. This can be used for debugging, to see what cookies are being set & to check for redirects.

Roboform

I use roboform to fill in forms & also fill in signup details for new websites. Saves quite a considerable amount of time if you set it up correctly.

Screengrab

All webmasters need to take screenshots once in a while. I particularly love this extension because you can grab an entire page as a screenshot.

Gspace

Gspace is a great extension that turns your 2GB of space in Gmail into your very own file storage area. Really useful for keeping backups & also transferring files between locations quickly & securely.

Gmail Manager

Manage multiple Gmail accounts from one extension. This extension is particularly useful if you’ve migrated completely to gmail, outlined in one of my previous posts.

XML Password Exporter

If you like to manage all your passwords via Keepass then this tool will allow you to export all your Firefox passwords to xml or csv format which you can then use to import into Keepass. Nifty. Now all we need is an extension for Firefox that integrates with KeePass (hint hint).

Autocopy

Just like in Linux this extension allows you to select any text & have it copied automatically to the clipboard.

Ref Spoof

Fake your referrer easily. This is pretty good if you want to catch someone out who’s cloaking or test/hack other referrer related things.

If you use any other plugins that you feel enhance your productivity or help you with affiliate marketing then let me know about them in the comments & help grow this list.

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Ebay ditches Commission Junction

Stuart — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:30:59 +0000

If you’re familiar with the Ebay affiliate program you’ll also be very familiar with Commission Junction. These two have gone hand in hand with each other like Strawberry’s & Cream for as long as I can remember. The program has also been a very very consistent earner for me over the years.

But in a move that really didn’t take me by surprise, Ebay have decided now to take the Affiliate Management & Reporting in house with the creation of the Ebay Partner Network, a global affiliate management network encompassing all of the Ebay sites into one manageable interface:

Easy global registration to multiple countries simultaneously
New, targeted banners and rich media creatives
New landing page optimization and geo-targeting capabilities
More detailed reporting capabilities for eBay’s programs

Now you’ll be able to promote every Ebay localisation without having to go through the sign up process for each, which will allow for much more diversification in who you target & also allow you to Geo Target regions you may not have been able to before. The network also takes out the middleman when it comes to support & affiliate issues.

I’m keen to see the new reporting features, as the current ones provided over at CJ are extremely limited, unless you download the daily report via .csv. I’m also interested to see if they provide Geo Targeted ad blocks (similar to what Auctionads was doing).

My heart goes out to Commission Junction, I can’t imagine how much of a hit losing Ebay will have on their bottom line, but the move makes sense. eBay’s Tradera AB, ProStores, Inc, Reseller Marketplace, Media Marketplace, eBay Stores & StubHub will however continue with CJ as normal so all is not lost.

The network opens on April 1st 2008 & all links must be migrated over by May 1st 2008. If you migrate over in April you’ll get a 5% bonus to all traffic for that month only.I’ll report more info when I get it & expect a full review of the new interface & reporting when I get access.

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$50 Adwords & YSM Vouchers for Australians

Stuart — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 01:29:07 +0000

I came across both of these vouchers in a magazine yesterday, they’re only for people living in Australia. Enjoy.

$50 Adwords Voucher for new Advertisers

$100 YSM Voucher for new Advertisers

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Gmail Power Usage: Total Mail Management

Stuart — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 05:05:01 +0000

Email is one of those things that has the ability to really zap away much of the precious ‘work’ time that you have during the day. If you’re a compulsive ‘email checker’ then perhaps this tutorial isn’t for you, but if you have to manage a large number of email accounts & addresses all at once then this tutorial will save you so much time & hassle that you’ll never, ever look back.

Since I have a load of different websites with their own mailboxes it’s safe to say that I have a lot of ‘accounts’ in my Thunderbird that send & receive mail from each of the sites. Recently this method was becoming very cumbersome, I was getting increased amounts of spam & I was really finding it difficult to check mail on the go (via squirrelmail).

This called for action, I realised that somehow I:

wanted to consolidate all of my mail into one account, but still be able to utilise all the addresses
be able to read all my mail from the web from one login
eliminate the insane amount of spam I was receiving
still be able to download all my mail via pop to thunderbird

I’ve long used Gmail for my personal email, but never anything website related. But it just so happens that all of the things I’m looking for it handles, not only that but Gmail has perhaps the best spam filter going, you you can say goodbye to spam email forever.

So here’s what we’re going to do:

Forward all existing email addresses to Gmail
Download all the mail from our Existing Inboxes
Delete all of our existing Email Accounts from Thunderbird
Set up Thunderbird to Download all mail from Gmail POP
Set up Outgoing mail in Thunderbird
Set up Outgoing Email Addresses in Gmail
Set up Rules in Gmail
Set up Rules in Thunderbird

By following these steps we’ll now be able to read mail sent to any of our accounts on the web via gmail, reply to any emails from the address it was sent to, download all of the email via pop to our own email client at home (whilst still keeping a copy on gmail) & filter out all the nasty spam in the process.

Step by Step how it’s done:

Forward Existing Email Addresses to Gmail

If you use Cpanel you can do this via the email settings, or if you use squirrelmail the option is there too:

Just set your current address to forward to your new (or existing) gmail address:

You’ll need to do this for all of the email accounts that you use. If you don’t use Cpanel, please refer to your Web Hosting Email admin panel for this feature.

Download Mail from Existing Inboxes

You’ll want to catch all the mail that was sent to your inboxes before you initiated the forwarding. Simply download your mail from your mail client as normal.

I use thunderbird for my POP mail client, but it all depends on personal preference, you may prefer Outlook or Eudora.

Delete Existing Email Accounts from Thunderbird

Since we’ll be downloading all of our mail through Gmail you’ll not need those other POP accounts. You can do this in the account settings area of thunderbird:

Setup Thunderbird to Download all Mail from Gmail via POP

In doing so we can not only read all of our mail online via Gmail but we can also download a hard copy to our Email Client. Log into Gmail & click on setting in the top right hand corner of the screen, next click on the Forwarding and POP/IMAP Tab.

Ignore the sections about forwarding & IMAP, instead you can choose to either enable POP for all mail you’ve ever received or just for mail from this point onwards. You can also choose whether to keep a copy in Gmail or not. Choose the setting that suits your needs.

Now we need to set up thunderbird with the Gmail settings.

Incoming Mail

Add a new account in Thunderbird with the following credentials:

Your Name
Your Gmail Email Address
Choose POP
Incoming server is pop.googlemail.com
Incoming username is your Google Email Address
When done select Port Settings
Port 995
Under Security Settings choose SSL

Outgoing Mail

To send outgoing mail through your gmail in Thunderbird use the following settings:

Server Name: smtp.googlemail.com
Port: 25
Username: Your Google Email Address
Use Secure Connection: Choose TLS

Set up Outgoing Mail Addresses in Gmail

One of the unique features in Gmail is that you can respond to all mail from your own personal email addresses. Since we’ve already forwarded our addresses this part will be a cinch.

Goto settings in Gmail again & click on Accounts. Click on add another email address & add all of your personal email addresses. Gmail will send a mail to those addresses to verify you own them. Since they’ve all been forwarded you’ll get the verification emails to your Gmail Account. Verify them all then choose whether you want to always reply from the email address that a mail as been sent to, or you default Gmail Address.

Set up Filters in Gmail & Rules in Thunderbird

You can now set up your rules & filter to organise your mail as you see fit. Naturally you may not want to organise your mail like I do but here some tips:

Gmail

Create Labels to file mail by Website in Gmail
Use filters to delete unwanted mail & report spam/mail you don’t want as you see it
Auto Archive mail that you get frequently (i.e. signup emails etc)

Thunderbird

Create Folders to file mail by website
Use Sub Folders to categorise mail even further
Use the filters to delete unwanted mail (this shouldn’t happen though since you’ve set this up in Gmail already)

Now you can sit back, whether it’s at home on or on move & never worry about spam again.

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Make your Systems Scalable

Stuart — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 23:51:28 +0000

Whenever you hit the jackpot on a particular campaign or with a particular method it can be pretty satisfying, especially when the income stream is steady & dependable.

When this situation arises there’s normally two types of affiliates, those that move onto the next idea & those that will try to milk the current system for as much profit as they can.

Let me ask you this, is it easier to make more money from something you already know is making money? or is it easier making money trying to find another system that works?

This fine line separates those who make serious money & those who chase money.

Let start with a few definitions:

System: This is a method, tactic or idea that allows you to generate an income.

Scale: The ability to take this system & duplicate it or increase its profitability. Now just because you duplicate a campaign that does not mean you’ve scaled it x2. In doing so you may have a lower ROI therefore you may have only scaled to 1.5 times your current earnings. But that’s still more money than you were making before.

Profitability = System x Scale – Spend

So what determines how well something can be scaled? For example, it’s much harder to automate a piece of software that has been written by someone else than it is to automate something that you’ve written yourself.

Scaling equates to Volume or Tweaking

Scaling upward allows you to push more & more volume through a given offer or merchant. If you push volume then you become more valuable to that merchant. This allows you negotiate much better rates, increasing your net profit. If you had 20 smaller offers you’d never ever be able to do this.

Tweaking allows you to push your campaigns to create more revenue, which in essence is also a form of scaling.

Look at ways that you can Automate

Can you automate creating Adwords Campaigns?
Can you automate checking your Stats?
Can you automate promotion?
Can you automate the creation of Dynamic Landing Pages?
Can you automate the creation of Wordpress Blogs?

Chances are, that if you can think of doing something. Someone else has already thought of how to do it 1000 times faster.

Time = Money

Look at ways to Squeeze Revenue out of Existing Campaigns & Sites

Can you find more relevant offers to your target audience?
Are you capturing opt-in subscribers?
Can you increase traffic to existing sites?
Can you increase traffic through existing PPC Campaigns you know convert?
Can you optimise campaigns for lower CPCs?

Simple Example of Simple Automation & Scaling

Lets take the example of creating Adwords Campaigns & importing a huge amount of keywords. How many of you manage your keywords in Excel then import them into Adwords Editor using the bulk feature?

Adwords Editor allows you to import keywords using this string:

[coolcode]keyword,exact,1.50,http://www.example.com[/coolcode]

Recently I ran a few campaigns related to DVD’s. I wanted to quickly create an adgroup around certain stars. I.e. Chuck Norris DVD’s.

I created an Excel Spreadsheet using the following piece of code:

[coolcode]=B3 & ” dvd,” & “exact” & “,” & C3 & “,” & E3 & “?aid=” & D3 & “&kw=” & SUBSTITUTE(B3,” “,”_”)[/coolcode]

This would then allow me to create a huge list of stars I wanted to target & the spreadsheet would easily create the code needed to copy & paste into adwords editor.

This particular code above creates something like:

[coolcode]chuck norris dvd,exact,0.50,http://www.example.com/?aid=999&kw=chuck_norris_dvd[/coolcode]

Using this syntax I’m able to grab a list of the top 2000 stars, fire them into this spreadsheet & have 2000 keywords all ready to roll within a matter of seconds. All I need to do is write the ad & use Dynamic Keyword Insertion & we’re rolling.

This small example not only allows me to automate the process of creating keyword lists, but it allows me to scale campaigns much quicker.

So if you’re one of those affiliates who likes to chase new ideas without really focusing on the ones that are working for you, take a step back & think about how you can make the most of what you have.

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No related posts

How Unethical are Ringtone Subscriptions?

Stuart — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 00:45:56 +0000

I sit here on a Sunday morning watching Channel 7, eating Breakfast & indulging in one of my favourite types of TV shows – “Australia’s deadliest Animals.”

However, Australian Sunday morning TV is notorious for the number of ad breaks, & who else would advertisers target at this time of the week than Children.

Every break for the past 60 minutes has contained 90% content related to Ringtone Offers. Now, Whilst I normally don’t have a problem with Ringtone subscriptions, these ads are clearly being very Deceptive:

Guess which animal is making this noise (you hear a lion roar in the background) text to this number & win $4000
Which cup is the ball hiding under, text to this number & win $4000

Then written in tiny text at the bottom of the screen the terms & conditions (which only appears at the start & end of the ad), which happen to mention the subscription side of the bargin, which mind you, is still hard to read even on my HDTV.

Names of Companies doing this: Blinck & Maxitext & Let’s do the math:

Blinck: $4 per text x 6 text per week = $24/week or $1248 / year

Maxitext: 3 Text per week = $10/week or $520 / year

I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid I certainly didn’t have access to that kind of cash & that (for me) is the major problem.

Kids are naturally the most susceptible to these kinds of offers because they tend to overlook the “fineprint” especially when the ads are on in between children’s cartoons & programs. And who ends up footing the bill?

This is one of the reasons why I have never felt comfortable promoting ringtones & ringtone subscriptions. I do agree that driving PPC traffic is much much less deceptive (depending on how it’s done), especially if you’re bidding on artists (i.e. Lil wayne Ringtones).

CBS News in America posted a story this week about about Ringing up Big Charges for “Free” Tones & we all know that Azoogleads recently got hit with a $1 Million Dollar lawsuit over “Free Tones.”

It seems however, that certain Australian advertisers are still allowed to advertise “Free Tones” even though they’re clearly not. The TV networks also don’t seem to care much about the deceptive ads.

What’s your views on Ringtone subscriptions, do you have a problem with promoting them & how do you feel about deceptive TV promotion?

Do you think that Ringtone Subscriptions are Unethical?

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Get your hands on Google’s Top Search Terms, Free!

Stuart — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 01:00:43 +0000

Wordze is giving away a free downloadable excel spreadsheet featuring all of Google’s top traffic driving search terms since 8th Jan 08.

I use Wordze combined with Google’s Keyword Tool for a large bulk of my keyword research for PPC & Organic SEO so I definitely rate what they’re doing very highly.

I’m pretty sure that most of this data is pulled from Google Trends, which updates daily with the top terms.

Simply visit the Gtrends Section of the Site & enter your information to get the Excel Spreadsheet

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Link Building Guide Part 8 – Kaboodle

Stuart — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:25:21 +0000

Welcome to the 8th part of the Earners Blog Link Building Masterclass, this particular technique is great for getting deep links into individual products that you’re selling on shopping or affiliate sites, it’s also great for driving traffic & potential buyers to the products on your site (outside of search engines).

Before I begin, hat tip to Ruck over at Cash Tactics for taking this technique a step further & sending traffic direct to affiliate offers on Kaboodle, it’d be interesting to see some stats on how well this method works for generating affiliate income. However, I always prefer, if possible, sending as much traffic to my own sites.

Why?

Well if they’re not on my site then I’ve got no way of getting them signed up to my product mailing list (which = $$$ down the track).

Kaboodle is more or less a Social shopping website. It allows users (& merchants) to add products via a link on your Browser Toolbar to the sytem, you can also create favourites, lists & wishlists, which are all viewable to the public. You can see what other people are buying & even make friends with people who have similar buying interests.

More & more people are now using Kaboodle to shop & find deals on certain products, & since the content is user generated they can often come across some mighty fine deals (that wouldn’t normally be found on paid shopping comparison websites).

This technique is pretty simple, we’re going to create some lists on Kaboodle relating to some products on one of our Ebay Affiliate Websites. Or if you’re a merchant with physical stock or dropshipping stock you can start by adding products from your Ecommerce Store.

Signup

Signup is fairly easy, make sure & add as many descriptive tags to your user profile as possible. This helps you profile get indexed much quicker & gives it a bit more SEO weight.

Once you’re done grab the “Add to Kaboodle” Bookmark for your Toolbar.

Adding Products

Ok so now that I’m done I’ll add 10-15 products from the DJ Gear site I originally used in my Ebay Website Example. You can see the finished list here at my Kaboodle Studio Equipment Page.

When adding products try to add as many tags as you can to the listing, this gets you heaps more exposure for searches & also gets your product listed on more pages.

I could sit here all night & add hundreds of products, therefore having deep links into individual products on my site. This should really help with trying to rank those products that are buried quite deep in your sites & it should also help you increase rankings for the products you currently rank well for.

Indexing & Ranking

You’ll notice that each product page links back to the original website.

It’s hard to say how well Kaboodle helps with ranking, I’ve certainly seen it help many more of my pages out of the supplemental index & into the main index. So I guess you could say that’s a big help with ranking.

Secondly I’ve also seen the Kaboodle Product pages get indexed in Google in a matter of minutes, which is a strong indicator of an authority site.

Everyone is Happy

You’re getting links & traffic to your site, Kaboodle is growing their product database & growing their search engine traffic by having new ranges of products & product pages constantly.

You only have to look at the Alexa graph to show how much traffic all this user generated content is driving to their site:

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2009 Link Building Guide

Advertising Update & New Services Launching Soon

Stuart — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 02:13:38 +0000

Advertising

Are you wanting to get your service or website in front of over 50,000 Affiliate Marketers a month?

I’ve just freed up some advertising spots on the blog & I’m giving them away as discounted rates. It’s first come first served.

Three 125×125 banner spots available for at $180 for 90 Days.
Five 468×60 Rotating spots available for $90 for 90 Days
Exclusive Banner & Text Link in RSS Feed (2,100 Subscribers) at $300 for 90 days.

Simply use the contact form to contact me.Link Building Automator

I’ve had loads of email about the link building automation service, it’s currently in beta testing & we’re in the process of trying to automate as much of my current link building guide into it, as well as some features to help you track rankings.

The service will be limited to 50 spots in the initial phase at a discounted rate (for life) so make sure your name is on my mailing list if you want to get in there first.

More info soon.

Earners Blog Exclusive Affiliate Forum

This is another service that’s currently in beta testing & content development, but I aim to have launched within a month.

This will be an exclusive private affiliate forum with new techniques & twists on existing techniques. With a sole purpose of helping people achieve success in Affiliate Marketing.

There will be a minimal yearly access fee, but nothing that’ll break the bank.

Let’s put it this way, why would you pay $97 dollars for a shit ebook that gives you outdated techniques when you can get access to a wealth of knowledge for less? Exactly.

Ebay Affiliate Marketing Technique

I’ve had about 10 emails from readers who are now easily making over $1,000/month using this technique. If only I got paid for second tier ebay referrals.

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Guide: Working from Home

Stuart — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 05:29:57 +0000

I get emails from time to time asking about how should someone that works from home structure their day & also what are the best ways to keep focused whilst working from home (we all know how easy it is to just play xbox live all day).

So I’ve put together this guide on what I think is important to help you work from home efficiently & also get the most out of the experience, naturally everyone will be different but I’d also love to hear if you do anything different to increase your productivity or make the whole experience better.

Get up Early & get to Bed Early

Getting into a proper routine can be difficult, especially when working from home. You’ve got no boss to impress but yourself, you don’t have to be anywhere at a specific time, you don’t have anyone telling you what to do. This is generally the first mistake that people make, it’s easy to get up at 1pm then work through to 10pm that night or even 3am the next morning. However your body won’t thank you for it in the long run.

Mornings are the most productive part of our day, so use them to get your most important tasks out of the way.

Get up & go to bed at the same time as if you were going to work, if you stick to this you’ll find that you get more done & you won’t have to work as late.

Get Regular Exercise

Working from home can make us lazy, there’s no real need to leave the house anymore…right? Well, Since you’re waking up at the same time you normally would for your day job; you now have more time to be productive instead of sitting on the train or in peak time traffic for an hour. Use this time in the morning to hit the gym or go for a walk, maybe go out & get some breakfast & unwind.

Don’t forget to Eat

When we lead busy lives it can often get in the way of day to day tasks. Don’t forget to feed yourself. Eating 5 Small meals a day will help keep your metabolism up (especially if you exercise in the morning).

8am – Breakfast
11am – Fruit Snack
1pm – Lunch
4pm – Savoury Snack
6pm – Dinner

Following this routine will ensure that you don’t get hungry throughout the day, it’ll also keep your energy levels up.

Get Showered & Dressed Every Day

Whilst it’s a luxury to sit around in your Pajamas & do work every day it’s not something that is commonly associated with being productive & active. Have a shower & get dressed after breakfast then you’ll feel ready to face the day instead of wanting to get back into bed after an hour of work.

Separate Work from the rest of the House

Having an office or a space that you can work in is imperative, doing all your work whilst sitting on the sofa won’t get you very far. An office helps to keep Distractions to a minimum & also when you walk into your office at the start of the day you feel like “you’re at work.”

Have a Start & Finish Time for Work

Try to treat working from home like a normal job, work starts at 9am & finishes at 5.30pm (if you need to work later later you can). This way you’ll try to get everything you need to get done by the time work is over. If the day is “unlimited” then we tend to waste time reading blogs & forums.

Schedule your Day

Building on the previous point you can schedule your day & write it up on the wall:

7am – Wake up
7.20am – Exercise/Gym
8.20am – Breakfast
8.40am – Shower & Get Ready
9am – Answer & Read Emails
9.30am – Read Blogs, Forums & Catch up on Stats
10am – Work on your Bread & Butter Projects (the ones that ARE making you money)
1pm – Lunch
1.30pm – Test new ideas & tweak campaigns on test campaigns
3pm – Work on Link Building & Promotion techniques for Affiliate Sites
5pm – Research offers & potential programs for following day
5.15pm – Update spreadsheets with yesterdays stats & profits
5.30pm – Finish – Free for all work on whatever you want

Ensure you have Good Communications

You want to have a decent DSL Connection, Phone Line (or Skype), the ability to send & receive fax. You’ll also want to have a decent instant messaging program (like trillian) that lets you log into multiple networks at once.

Be Organised

Organisation is key to making this work.

Record what you spend & earn in Spreadsheets, keep your finances organised (i.e. open a business bank account). Spend money during the month on your credit cards (to earn your points), then pay it off at the end of the month.

Set up all your tabs & folders in Firefox. I use the ‘Open in all Tabs’ feature to instantly check all my stats. Or for example say you run a Credit Card Comparison website & need to update the rates, simply have a folder with all the credit card product pages in it & open them all at once with one click.

Also check this previous post on increasing productivity.

Build a Team

There’s no bigger bottleneck in your whole operation than yourself. If something is working for you then get some friends on board, outsource tasks or form partnerships with other affiliates.

Get a Pet

Sometimes working from home can be lonely. There’s no-one to go out to lunch with or (if you’re in australia) all of the people you normally talk to are asleep. I got a cat & it’s one of the best things I’ve ever bought, it’s there when you wake up in the morning, it’s sits beside you as you work & it seems to remove that feeling that “you’re alone in the house.” Now there’s an idea for a business, the ‘Affiliate marketers Pet Shop – Making you feel wanted since 2008.’

Have Fun

Don’t overdo it, working from home is fun. It’s even more fun when you’re making more money than your old job, don’t let it get in the way of your personal relaxing time & time with your family. You know what they say:

A happy wife = a happy life

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