Last week we brought onboard Youda Games Governor Of Poker, just the first of many games we hope to introduce to our product list in the coming months.

RevenueWire also sent out two savvy scouts last week to attend the Casual Connect 2010 Gaming Conference in Seattle WA, as part of our plan to recruit online and social media games onto the network. And while we can’t name any names yet, we CAN say that we’ve got a few major game companies on deck and thinking about swinging the bat for the Blue & Black [that's us, the RW crew ]

What’s Casual Connect?

Casual Games Association Events are the premiere events for the casual games industry with over 3,000 professionals attending Casual Connect Events each year. Casual Connect Seattle brings together the most talented and knowledgeable experts in the casual gaming field to further the casual games industry with the best of networking and learning.

RW’s Casual Connect Mini-Report

Casual Connect was definitely a strong introduction to what’s up in the game industry today. It offered solid insights as to where companies are focusing their efforts through portals and game affiliate networks, with social gaming at the core of their business. There’s no doubt that social media sites are a key place to sell games, and that most of the money to be made is on first-play.

The show also gave us a good idea of the sales models that work best for online games – ones that we can start working on implementing ASAP to attract the best and most lucrative gaming products for our affiliates.

Stay tuned for more on RevenueWire and the gaming front!

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If it has in fact affected your site, the next logical question on your mind will probably be, “What exactly about my site may have caused it to be affected by the change?” To answer that question thoroughly, the first thing you’ll want to do is review the actual content on your website(s).

Content Is Still The King

As we’ve all heard so many times before, and rightfully so, content is king. The first thing you should do is take stock of your web site’s content and evaluate whether or not it’s offering something useful to your web site visitors, or, if it is engaging in deceptive practices, intentional or otherwise.

Content Audit With A Fine-Tooth Comb

Pay especially close attention to your web site’s affiliate program. Ask yourself if this part of your business is simply mirroring other websites instead of providing unique, useable content for your visitors.

In addition, you’ll want to review your content from the perspective of an outsider looking in, because that’s basically what Google is going to do. Ask yourself if the content you’ve posted is engaging to the viewer, or if it’s poorly written and nonsensical in places.

Does your page or pages content read as if it would make people want to stay on your site for a longer visit, or simply hit the back browser and look somewhere else for the answer to their query? If you notice a degree of stagnation or incoherent writing, then you should consider updating it with some fresh, engaging content. Your aim here is to make the visitor stay long enough to really read what you have to say.

The Fall Of The Blogger Automatons

Prior to the Google May Day update, using auto blogger software had been an effective way to generate fresh content; many sites simply used content scrapers to populate their web site’s updates. This practice was an extremely effective way to generate fresh content while using minimal labor, time and expense.

Unfortunately, after the Google update, any articles that are not written by the original publisher of the content will most likely be seen by Google now as being of lower authority and will not return the ranking and traffic benefits that this practice once used to.

While this is not always going to be the case, it is what Google has stated as a primary goal of the update, and we are all painfully aware that they update the algorithm regularly. If they missed it the first time, chances are they won’t miss it a second time.

Don’t Forget Your Product Pages

It will also help to make yourself aware of any of your product pages that could possibly be viewed as unrelated or having inadequate content. Pages that fit that profile will not assist in ranking anymore. Site depth is one of the stated factors that Google is weighing heavier than ever, which is to say you should make sure everything appears as correct and as fresh as possible throughout your site, not just on the upper layers.

The Appearance of Authority

In addition to automated scraping, and reproduced blogging and content, your website’s “appearance” needs to be authoritative and legitimate. It needs to present itself as being a serious, “real” business. Google is now reducing relevance for web sites that appear to exist simply to convert visitors to a sale. That is not to say that Google is anti-merchant, but the effect will be that web sites perceived as being of that “conversion only” nature are going to be ranked lower under the new algorithm change.

Some websites that are known as “Thin Affiliate” sites, which to Google may appear to offer no additional value to site visitors beyond a sale, will see a drop in their rankings as well. These changes have affected a great number of businesses, and in a very significant way.

Internal Links and Back-links

Other factors for you to consider are your internal links or “internal linking” as Google sometimes calls it. A web site’s obvious lack of links to deep pages, for example any product pages coming from the homepage, are going to be devalued under the Google May Day update. It doesn’t matter whether this is intentional or not. The absence of links to deep pages can and will have a serious effect on your traffic going forward.

Lastly, take a hard look at your site’s deep linking or back-links. The May Day update reduces relevance for sites displaying a lack of links into the deep pages. When landing on your site, if your content appears to have all links which seem to point to the homepage, regardless of what is stated on each individual link, then you are probably one of the web sites feeling the effects of the recent update.

Deep linking is probably the most time consuming of all the solutions for the May Day update, but the easiest to make. Those links need to go somewhere, and unfortunately, all links pointing to the homepage won’t earn you any points with Google. If you have products to sell, consider modifying these deep links to go to new products or offerings. This is the equivalent of “killing two birds with one stone” as far as the Google update is concerned, and you should see some of your ranking or relevance return, and quite possibly even see an increase in ranking in certain areas.

For example, instead of linking: www.yoursite.com, use something like www.en.yoursite.com/new/product if you have multiple language pages. Even an URL like www.yoursite.com/julysalepage may be more effective for your purposes. The idea here is to differentiate these links from simply reflecting 10 links on your site that read www.yoursite.com but are hyperlinked elsewhere.

Spell Out Your Sell

Spelling out what you’re selling is beneficial in more ways than just the obvious; it will get you traffic from Google as well.

In general just keep in mind that these changes, while frustrating, are actually good for your business in the long run. Furthermore, you can be encouraged by the fact that there are multiple solutions and ways available to you to ensure a positive outcome for your business.

Next in the series, we are going to take a hard look at how to improve your web site’s quality to combat the effects of the May Day update, and we will make a few recommendations to get your traffic back, and in some cases, even improved.

***This article is the second installment in a five part series brought to you by our partners at Metamend, the Search Marketing Experts. Since 1998 Metamend has been widely recognized as one of the leading search engine optimization firms in the industry. Providing advanced organic search and Internet marketing searches to clients in over 60 countries, Metamend works to bring pre-qualified visitors to their clients’ websites and to convert those visitors into long-term commercial relationships. Metamend’s search and Internet marketing methods follow the best practices outlined by the major search engines, and its staff maintain strong personal relationships with others at all levels of the search marketing industry.

This update is part and parcel of Google’s “caffeine” modification, which returns data that’s 50% fresher than what was yielded in past searches. This increase in the volume of fresh data rendered is now made possible by Google’s switch to processing data in “pieces” rather than in “layers”, which was standard practice prior to the update.

Schizophrenic Algorithms

It might not come as much of a shock, but each year Google changes its algorithm anywhere between 350 and 500 times. What often happens as a result of these changes is that people who get too focused on exact ranking factors see their site drop when Google releases these algorithmic tweaks.

Minor Quakes From The May Day Update

On the face of it, the May Day modification is simply a rankings change, not a crawling or indexing one. That said, it has still had its effects on some websites. For some it has resulted in a decrease in traffic volume, even though their pages are still getting indexed. After the update the pages seem to not rank as high as they did before, and this is where the stress comes from.

Google’s changes seem to be primarily affecting “long-tail” traffic stemming from the longer search terms that more sophisticated searchers use. When you calculate the net effect of those searchers per site, it adds up fairly quickly, given that long-tail searches convert at a higher rate.

The algorithm change also seems to be affecting very large sites with “item” pages, such as e-commerce sites. Pages of this nature usually don’t have many inbound links, and the links they do have are usually buried within the site. Chances are also very high that these types of sites don’t have substantial amounts of unique content.

The Importance Of Unique Product Descriptions

An important observation to make is that it’s beneficial to keep unique product descriptions for anything you’re selling on your site. To date, the sites that only use a manufacturer’s generic product copy could suffer the most from the May Day update, experiencing a heavy loss in direct traffic to their product pages.

Provide The Freshest Content Yet

Products aside, having relevant content that addresses the search terms that you’re trying to rank for is always a good idea, and the main search keyword is just the start; Google looks for synonyms, uniqueness and strength of the linking profile.
***Looking for original content? Check out our friends at www.constant-content.com

What Is Google Trying To Achieve with This Update?

The goal of the May Day update is to universally improve search quality and user experience. Google has openly stated its intent to ensure when you search for something, you’re provided with the highest quality content on a per search basis. Basically Google trying to make search more helpful and weed out any content duplication, as well as minimizing the impact of what it considers to be lower quality websites.

What Types Of Websites Are Being Affected By This Update?

The hardest hit by the Google Algorithm change are auto-generated pages and content farms. As already mentioned, the May Day update is basically engineered to improve search quality.

This is a good reminder for affiliates that you should always be providing the highest quality content for your consumers. A recommended tactic is to provide content not available anywhere else, and ensure that it’s helpful; also,  avoid scraped, generic and low quality content whenever you can.

How Can You Determine If Your Site Is Affected By This Update?

The best way is to check on your own around the time between April 28th-May 3rd. This is when a lot of sites notice a loss of 5-15% of their normal long-tail traffic. Furthermore, if you check your search referral traffic between April 28th and May 3rd you may have seen a drop in these statistics as well.

Check to see if the change is in the number of referrals, or the number of pages getting traffic. A drop in traffic to your bigger terms probably is not a May Day effect, but drops in search referrals could be. Also, if your index or crawl stats changed suddenly, this could indicate you were hit by the update.

To be certain, check any links to your child pages across the site; these pages may have suffered a May Day relevance drop. If you don’t have unique content, even on your less important pages, you may have seen a dip.

In part two of this five part series we will cover in more detail what factors cause the site to be affected, and in subsequent articles we will discuss what improvements can be made and what you can do to minimize the impact of this algorithm change.

***This article is the first in a five part series brought to you by our partners at Metamend, the Search Marketing Experts. Since 1998 Metamend has been widely recognized as one of the leading search engine optimization firms in the industry. Providing advanced organic search and Internet marketing searches to clients in over 60 countries, Metamend works to bring pre-qualified visitors to their clients’ websites and to convert those visitors into long-term commercial relationships. Metamend’s search and Internet marketing methods follow the best practices outlined by the major search engines, and its staff maintain strong personal relationships with others at all levels of the search marketing industry.

SHARE IT TODAY AND WIN!

Post a comment on this blog post by Friday, July 16th at noon and you could win an Affiliate Summit East Silver Pass (value $249)!

How To Enter: Receive an entry into our ASE Silver Pass draw by posting a comment to this blog post. Try to make it as interesting and entertaining as possible! Let us know what you’re most excited about for at Affiliate Summit East, or tell us about your wildest Affiliate Summit experience from the past. You can also get an extra entry into the draw by tweeting this contest!

Your Silver Pass Includes: Admission to ASE Affiliate Meet Market, the Exhibit Hall, Keynotes Speeches, and the Affiliate Summit Social Network. Affiliate Summit is the premiere affiliate marketing industry event, and a great place for you to meld minds with the best players on the circuit. Not to mention it’s being held in the greatest city in the world, NYC. Don’t miss out!

Check out more details here: http://www.affiliatesummit.com/

This contest runs until Friday, July 16th at noon PST. The winner will then be randomly drawn and announced by Friday at 2pm PST.

**RevenueWire will be at the Meet Market at Table #81, and in the Expo hall at Booth #RG2022 and RG2024. Come visit us and see what exciting new digital products we’ve got on the go!

***Silver Passes cannot be transferred. Must be 21 years or older to win.

Bobbi’s article focuses on how affiliate marketers can use video in their campaigns to improve the quality of their sales pitch and ultimately grow their revenue stream. Filled with practical insights and pointers, affiliates will be able to easily incorporate the article’s wisdom into their marketing mix.

Read the full article here: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/27143.asp

Do you use video in your campaigns? What software and techniques do you use to create them? Have your videos produced conversions? Drop us a comment and let’s discuss!

The EU Court of Justice (Europe’s highest legal authority) ruled that companies using competitors’ names as Internet advertising keywords are not infringing European trademark laws. It further allowed that customers of Google’s paid-for Adwords service may choose whichever words they want, within reason, without infringing trademark law.

You can read more details about the case and its effects here:

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=B1FB02FD-1A64-67EA-E4153A0926DAC5EF

A similar ruling was also recently handed down in a Canadian BC (British Columbia) Court:

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5104/135/

The decision means the Courts are taking a more laissez-faire approach to the issue, allowing advertisers to duke it out in the PCC world, but ultimately putting the onus on consumers to an independent and informed choice about the ads they click on and the products they buy online.

What do you think about the ruling? Drop a comment and let us know!

Watch the hair blazing video of the event:

Aptly named the RevenueWriders, our team raised over $5,000 for heart and stroke research. Not bad for a smaller outfit competing against some big competition! Everyone had a great time and made significant individual contributions to a great cause. A big shout out goes to one of our merchant members, ParetoLogic, whose team also had an amazing Big Bike showing, winning the Golden Gears Award for top fundraiser with a tally of $10,000.

Here are some stats from the RevenueWriders ride…

Total Distance: 3.6km

Total Time: 25:49

Moving Time: 20:06

Max Speed: 23.4 km/hr

Average Speed: 8.6 km/hr

Average Moving Speed: 10.km/hr

You can also browse photos of the ride and us decked out in our red “IHeartRW” t-shirts here.

Pretty cool shirts, huh? So cool, you might even want one for yourself. All you have to do to get one is share one of your charitable experiences through a witty, insightful, awesome comment on one of our Big Bike photos, video, or this blog post, and we’ll enter you into a draw to win a hot new red RW T. Remember: Red is the raddest color!

Big Bike is named after the BIG 30-seat BIKE that teams ride to raise money for a great cause. Teams are made up of 29 riders (and one driver from the foundation) pedal through their community in support of heart disease and stroke research.

]]> http://blog.revenuewire.com/index.php/2010/07/revenuewriders-drive-the-big-bike-for-heart-stroke-research/feed/ 0 http://blog.revenuewire.com/index.php/2010/07/revenuewriders-drive-the-big-bike-for-heart-stroke-research/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Revenuewire/~3/Uvz8Yqgio-E/ http://blog.revenuewire.com/index.php/2010/07/online-direct-response-the-secret-weapon-of-champions/#comments Mon, 05 Jul 2010 18:28:34 +0000 admin http://blog.revenuewire.com/?p=2312 Advertising mogul David Ogilvy called direct response advertising “my secret weapon.” And you can bet it made him more than just a pretty penny over the course of his illustrious career. In fact it was so good to him, he built an entire advertising empire on it. Curious about direct response marketing yet? Here’s some of that golden wisdom straight from the old silverback himself…

Direct marketing, more than any other method, is all about testing and quantifying consumer responses. The advantage that online direct marketing has over its offline cousin is that the responses generated online (click-throughs, conversions, sign-ups, etc.) are likely to get measured, tested and improved upon more rapidly. The Internet is a giant data recording machine, so it has naturally taken David Ogilvy’s founding principles of “testing, testing, testing” to the next level of awesomeness.

Definition of Online Direct Response: The process of generating a lead, sale or other similar action directly from an Internet ad. Online direct response is measured through click through rates (CTR) and conversion rates (CR). Cookies and special tags are used to track which ads, landing pages and paths deliver the most conversions. This type of tracking is also used for cost-per-action (CPA), where the advertiser pays for a pre-specified action (e.g. sale, sign-up, etc.).

Probably one of the most underused online direct response techniques is email. This personalized, targeted and simple tool can boost average conversion rates into the stellar range (e.g., STOPzilla’s emails convert at an astonishing 10%), far higher than other affiliate methods such as PPC. Affiliates should definitely look into using email as part of their campaigns. (Stay tuned for more articles on this subject!)

Direct-response is a powerful strategic tool for affiliates. Do you actively use direct-response techniques in your affiliate campaigns? If so, which ones? How successful are they? We’d love to hear what you think!