Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Saturday, January 2nd, 2010
 According to some of the recent sales announcements coming out of Amazon, they sold more books for their proprietary Kindle system than they actual, physical, made from bits of pressed and processed dead tree, books.
Whilst this is quite good for the real Amazon (seriously, where do you think most paper grade wood pulp is coming from? It ain’t the commercial hardwood plantations of American oak), what the hell does it have to do with Affiliation Cash programs?
 Well, we’ve got Books Download site that no one’s been using for a few years, because the hype around eBooks died out in early 2006 when no one had any decent devices to read them on because iPhones hadn’t come out yet (even though iPod Touch had been out for a while, and most Windows based PDA phones, like the rather nifty XDA, had ebook reading software on them - but, y’know, not iPhone = doesn’t exist).
It now seems like a great time for some of you folk, especially those of you who happen to have domains in the “book” niche, to have a look into and think about promoting it. I can tell you that one of our affiliates saw this one coming and did pretty nicely for themselves out of it with a PPC campaign.
 If you’re one of our affiliates working by forwarding links from a warez site, you might want to consider using this from your “books” section if you’ve got one. Those of you doing paid search may want to look into specific models, such as Sony’s Reader Pocket. Whilst Amazon may be pushing it in a very monopolistic manner, the Kindle is not the only game in town.
Happy Hunting - Harvey
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
So after doing a bit of research after thinking up my post yesterday, I actually found out that someone, unsurprisingly, had my great idea way before I did… I’m wondering if they have a patent yet, because if they don’t, hellloooo easy money by patent squatting (hahaha, no, I wouldn’t do that… there are something that go well beyond ethics. Like enjoying working kneecaps.)
Turns out the luminary genius over at Profitopalisnot only had this idea about half a year before I did, he’s also a lot better at coding than I am… Or at least ha a developer who is (I’ll assume the former, though). He then proceeds to expand on it.
You can read his post and nab his image nabbing script that nabs images from Yahoo!s image search here: http://profitapolis.com/featured/impress-your-visitors-with-a-graphically-dynamic-landing-page.html
Apologetically putting the rifle down today - Harvey
Monday, October 12th, 2009
Some of you out there may be wandering at precisely why I’m covering what seems to be old ground and getting into demographics again, especially in regards to MySpace and Facebook.
 Facebook face meets MySpace face. Both decide to Twitter about it. For starters, there is no such thing as old ground when it comes to marketing to demographic groups on social networks. It’s something that’s constantly evolving, and these evolutions need to be taken into account when making advertising campaigns. Not only are the rules of the actual PPC advertising changing on a regular basis, but so are the demographics. There are some demographics on these sites that simply do not change, however, and today we’re going to have a brief over view as to what it means for you and your marketing campaigns.
It should be noted that these demographics are based on Nielson Claritas studies of North American users & statistics, and are most likely not indicative of other English speaking markets, such as the UK, Canada or Australia.
Interesting results from Nielsen
 Notice how the MySpace user actually knows how to aim a firearm? The top third of the socio-economic ladder, that uses social networks, is 25% more likely to be on Facebook than those on the lowest third. Conversely, those on the lowest third are 37% more likely to be users of MySpace. Users of Facebook are nearly twice as likely to also be registered on LinkedIn than those that use MySpace.
Already, we are seeing a distinct socioeconomic differences. Facebook users are more likely to be from affluent families, have gone to a tertiary educational institution (hence the reason for it to be named “facebook” in the first place) and be employed professionally, whilst looking to network with other professionals.
The study also notes that people that use blogs, or Twitter, are far more likely to be based around urban centers, specifically of larger cities.
So let’s take all this into account, and consider what it potentially means for the purposes of marketing Affiliation Cash programs.
MySpace Users
Generally speaking are less educated and less affluent. This means they are likely to live in lower social status areas, and be more exposed to clannish behaviour. Peer pressure is paramount amongst these, and they are therefore more likely to respond to a call to action that urges them to do what their peers are doing so that they can conform to the rest of the clan. In real terms, it means that they want to fit in with those around them so that they don’t get their arses kicked for being different.
Advertise to them in a way that appeals to their need for conformity, and target the advertising so that you accurately get cultural expectations in with the ads (i.e. don’t advertise rap & hip-hop to people over the age of 40)
Facebook Users
Due to a larger range of users, both in terms of sheer numbers and in terms of diversity, Facebook theoretically provides more potential. With that said, due to the diversity inherent in the system, you are actually going to have to try much harder to find your advertising succeeding. This is also before you take into account that Facebook users are more educated and affluent than their MySpace counterparts, and are less likely to be duped into a purchase by a marketing message.
The irony is that within the confines of their social spaces, these people are also seeking acceptance and to be like the rest of the crowd… Just in “more unique” ways. If you can figure out a way of getting them to a click an advert that goes through to a blog that appeals to their interests, you’ll probably be making a conversion more easily than the MySpace crowd who are often concerned about funds.
Now go forth and pillage the social networks!
Happy Hunting - Harvey
 This does not represent the views of the Management
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
 Keyword metatag: As useful as doing this For the more advanced users that read this blog, this will come as no surprise.
For those that still read WF or DP and believe them to be reliable sources of useful information, you are in for a nasty shock.
The Keywords Meta-tag has no effect on your SERP in Google or any other current, semantically driven search engine. This includes Bing, Yahoo, and numerous others that aren’t worth mentioning.
Now, if you don’t believe me for some bizarre reason, maybe Matt Cutts can convince you. After all, this comes straight from the gift horse’s mouth.
Now, this isn’t to say that they’re entirely worthless. Mismatched keyword entries can adversely affect your ranking because major search engines work in a semantic manner. That is to say, they’ll connect words that are similar in meaning (i.e. “Dogs”, “husky”, and “canine” ), or are conceptually linked through common real world occurence (i.e. “CPU”, “computers” and “video games”) throughout your content, assume that’s what your page is actually about, and then cross reference that against the keywords metatag.
 A visualization of conceptually linked keywords If that info is totally conflicting, then they’re likely to figure you’ve got no clue what you’re talking about and say you’re not as relevant as someone that does. It’s a reason why you shouldn’t have keywords about free porn, cialis, and beer when you’ve got a post about the latest Harry Potter film that’s then linked to a download link on one of your Affiliation Cash Programs (although I dare you to try and link those concepts up… go on, try it).
Not that it makes it much easier to understand, but I’ve put in a visual representation of how semantic search operations kind of work.
Likewise, this doesn’t mean all metatags are useless either. Plenty of them have uses, and the description tag especially so as it’s the text that shows up under your page title in the SERPs. What I’m trying to get across is that you don’t need to bother with keyword stuffing, or trying to figure out which five long tail phrases you want to put in there to rank for, because it’s doesn’t really matter half as much as just accurately matching the content of what you’re putting in a post.
Happy Hunting - Harvey
Friday, July 31st, 2009
So I finally got around to reading the bi-annual report from MailerMailer (it’s a service site for email marketers, similar to Aweber) with a whole raft of useful information regarding what makes people more likely to open their spam marketing driven email messages.
In amongst the dross was something that I figured would be quite useful to, well, anyone doing any kind of marketing, really.
 Lifecycle of Trending Topics It’s a Top 10 of words in the subject line that make people open these emails:
- news
- party
- newsletter
- free
- night
- sale
- com
- update
- holiday
- week
Now, with the exception of “free”, none of these are the sorts of words you would use in an advertising campaign!
Or on a site in general really… Which goes to show how vastly different each particular medium really is when marketing online. And not just by medium, but by demographic that is receptive to that medium.
Think for a moment: who predominantly still uses email as their primary form of online communication? Predominantly, it’s Boomers. From that, we can extrapolate that these words make good buzzwords that work on a Boomer demographic, and are therefore unlikely to work on different demographics. If you want to catch the words that are all the rage with the trendy 18-24 year olds, Twitter’s trending topics will probably serve you well, whilst 25-32, you’re probably wanting to keep an eye on Google Trends instead.
Just something to think about.
Happy Hunting - Harvey
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
It’s on again: $1.99 .COM domains at GoDaddy.
Use the code “199DOMAIN” at the checkout to get a sweet sweet disposable domain.
Happy Hunting - Harvey
Friday, April 24th, 2009
Got a GoDaddy account?
At the moment, you can get a .COM for $0.99 + $0.20 ICANN fee for a year using the following coupon code.
99BUYCOM
Happy Hunting - Harvey
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