Affiliation Cash - The affiliate frontline

Google has once again changed the playing field for those attempting to make money online. This time around it has been decided that they are going to basically ensure that everyone gets “personalized” search results.

The gist is that, even without being logged into any Google services, every computer (the computer, not the user, because Google seems to be running on the assumption that they are one in the same here - See pic below for humorous consequence) will have its searched preferences logged in cookie form so that subsequent searches on the G will yield results that are more in tune with what the person that predominantly uses that computer is after.

It should be stated that this is entirely an opt-out system, meaning that people that aren’t aware of it which is probably 85% of users (to pull a realistic but totally made up number out of my nethers) will get these results, and a further 10% of people simply don’t care enough to bother, or actively prefer the personalized results.

Naturally this (like every other change) has much of the SEO community up in arms as there seems to be the belief that people will never again be exposed to websites that they haven’t ever been to before. The logic of that seems to fail on the basis that people tend to bookmark pages that they intend to revisit, or at least remember enough about the name of the page or product (sometimes even the URL) and search for that, instead of the generic terms.

Where this becomes useful the end user is simply that Google search will finally be able to contextualize searches like they’ve been promising since 2001. No longer will I be offered coffee or holidays when I look up “Java”.

If you’re looking up “red socks”, and you’re not in the US, you’ll most likely get information that is more about something to go between your shoes and feet than it is about baseball teams.

So why am I writing all this when it clearly has little to do with Affiliation Cash?

Simple. I’m reminding people that the sky isn’t falling, and that SEO still has it’s place.

Most people are generally searching for something they don’t actually know about already, which means personalized search is useless for anything other than providing context around it. If your site is SEOd to the hilt for download based terms, and someone decides they want to “download free programnamehere”, there’s a good chance that your site will still have the same SERP as it would have without these changes. The differences lie pretty much only in areas where language becomes ambiguous, such as “bowling”. Someone might be looking for a lane of 10 pin, lawn bowls, or the equivalent of pitching in cricket.

So just chill out, and keep trying to get your sites decently optimised.

Happy Hunting - Harvey

We’re all aware that search engine’s and their related services, such as those offered by Yahoo! and Google, basically come to the consumer for kind-of-free. I say the kind-of- part because you’re actually exchanging two things for those free services.

1. User Data
2. Visiting advertisers

It’s basically the same model that free-to-air television works from. You have advertisers pay for the bulk, if not all, of your costs and then sell whatever statistical data you have on top of it to other marketing companies, or directly to advertisers themselves in the form of more expensive advertising due to greater degrees of targeting.

Which makes Yahoo’s latest offering somewhat odd: http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/opt_out/targeting/

The Yahoo Ad Interest Manager allows users to basically select which type of advertising they’re interested in, which is a good thing as it means they receive more relevant ads of a more relevant nature, which technically should mean better CTRs and conversion rates. But the bad part is that they let some users opt out entirely.

Now, Yahoo users have been proven time and again to be less savvy than users of other search engines. The reasons for that are unimportant. But this does technically shrink the pool a bit of users who are going to see you ads if you’re doing PPC campaigns on Yahoo and its partners’ platforms.

Now, I could be jumping the gun a bit here, but I think this is most likely going to be a good thing.

Given that the users of Yahoo are universally less savvy, it means that you’re getting a kind of reverse Darwinism going on, where the ones smart enough to not have purchased anything shown to them on the advertising platform anyway are basically going to opt out. This should lead to a higher CTR, which means a lower CPC. This leaves behind the more easily influenced and naive people who were entirely unaware that opting out was even an option or, better yet, those that actually want to see advertisements within specific categories!

If you’re advertising by PPC, but not currently using Yahoo, I’d recommend giving it a look into in a few weeks when more people have started to use this feature set.

Happy Hunting - Harvey

Most of the posts we make on this blog are generally about ideas to get more traffic, more conversions, etc. We don’t often talk about future events (at least one’s that aren’t guaranteed) or of social trends that don’t directly relate to being able to market things a little better. But these last few days, reading the news, I keep getting a stronger and stronger impression that we’re going to get a bit of an aftershock to the GFC’s earthquake from 14 months ago. I’m not sure how many of you pay attention to the global financial markets. I’ve often found if you’re an affiliate marketer the two often go more hand in hand than you’d think.

Either way, over the weekend while everyone in the USA was happily chowing down on some turkey, while the rest of the world contemplated the beef or fish, there was something of a market hiccup in Dubai. A large number of their insanely large buildings were not going to get completed due to lack of funds.

Precisely what does this have to do with people buying memberships to download music and videos with?

The answer is more than you’d think.

A lot of money, particularly North American money, flows through that region in the form of investments and bonds. that are owned by US financial firms that deal in equity and bonds for a lot of smaller investors (other trading groups, people saving for retirement, 401k/superannuation funds, etc). A lot of these groups are going to feel the pinch, and that in turn will take about four to six weeks to flow down to regular consumers, who will once again tighten belts.

What it has to do with Affiliation Cash and the programs it sells is that between this ripple effect, and people having gone and gouged a nice new hole in their credit cards with all the Christmas spending to show precisely how much they still believe in the economy, there are going to be a lot of people in the English speaking world that suddenly can’t afford to buy another DVD, download more tracks from iTunes or go to the movies.

They’re going to want to find something that provides for a cheap night in.

And you have about four weeks to build a campaign, either SEO or PPC, that can take advantage of it.

Happy Hunting - Harvey

About two weeks  ago, Yahoo! decided to finally shut down Geocities.

In case you don’t know what Geocities was, because you’re under 15 years old or were living under a rock since 1994, it was basically the precursor to MySpace. Free websites for everyone with a very basic GUI that allowed you to build a website that was amazingly painful to look at, generally filled with spelling errors, and often related to some kind of scam or racist material… util they cleaned it up in the early 00s at any rate.

The point is that it was freakin’ huge. Comparatively speaking, it would have had a similar per capita user base that MySpace currently enjoys. There were tens of thousands of sites of sites built that link to some page on Geocities pages of “relevant” information. Those links are now orphaned and have nowhere to point to.

Which is a goldmine for you to pick up on, as pointed out by the good folk at IAMSEO

They recommend using the following search string in Google to find sites that are relevant to you:

site:geocities.com inurl: your-keyword

One you’ve found the actual sites that were linked to that had relevance to your keyword, use Yahoo!s own Site Explorer to tell you where those links were coming from in the first place.

After that, it’s a matter of contacting the site owners and asking them if they’re aware that Geocities is gone, and would they perhaps like to link to your site now.

It’s certainly an arduous and long process if you don’t have a way to automate it, such as scripting, but it will be quite rewarding, as many of those links will be as old as the Geocities sites themselves, meaning the site they come from has some good link juice to be squeezed.

And if that doesn’t work, there’s always dropping links in their comments and/or guestbooks

Happy Hunting - Harvey

In this game, there are numerous ways to play.

You can be nice, and just do you own thing, earn money when you get good at it, etc.

Or you can be an absolute prat that isn’t content with that and has to ruin it for other people. Examples include people that had Flogs that were clearly misrepresenting the product, and are basically the reason the FTC is breathing down the back of the neck of every blogger in the continental United States.

For people doing PPC though, it’s click fraudsters. Unfortunately they’re pretty much a cost of doing business if you promote via PPC. However, as niches get hotter, and there becomes more competition for a shrinking pie, they can get nastier, and a bit more savvy… And in comes the botnets, turning zombified computers against your poor paid for ads in the background while the user is blissfully unaware his computer is costing you clicks.

This is also often perpetuated by people that have loads of auto-generating blogs that are monetized through Adsense.

I’m bringing this up because I recently read a report from Click Forensics concerning a few botnets out there, namely Bahama botnet from the Ukraine, and a yet to be named Chinese one of incredible sophistication.

As it turns out, there has been a massive increase in click fraud this year (up ~30% on the previous 12 months), and it’s being committed by fewer people, using more technologically impressive and large networks.

The moral of the story? Check your stats, and compare them against traffic trends over similar time periods i.e. the last 90 days versus the the 90 before that and the 90 before that. Don’t look at the raw figures, but rather the percentages of clicks to sales, or your EPC.

If something’s screwy, talk to your advertising provider and see if you can get a bit of a discount, because more often than not, they are aware that there has been something going a bit awry on their watch.

Happy Hunting - Harvey

Well, not really.

But they will no longer be tolerating spam… supposedly.

Now, I’m not sure how many of you reading this are doing so from the Twitter link. Possibly not many, because I get the feeling a lot of our Twitter followers are actually bots, but those of you that are reading this naturally, are already aware of our general opinion of Twitter being useless for promoting Affiliation Cash or other affiliate marketing programs.

This is even more so now, as Twitter is adding links to each and every profile that allows you to report that person for spam. This includes verified accounts apparently… This is supposedly being done by cross referencing email address, user name, and IP address, which in theory makes it harder for spammers to come back with new accounts. In reality, it’s a total fig leaf, because anyone with half a clue will know several ways around the IP ban i.e. unplug you modem for 20 minutes, plug back in, get a fresh IP… or use a proxy.

So there you have it folks - Twitter, no even less useful for marketing

Happy Hunting - Harvey

Remember that annoying little government body that basically tells everyone what they can and cannot say on North American TV and what have you?

And remember how they basically stated that they were coming up with rules about how you were allowed to market things on blogs because of people were throwing themselves at clearly too-good-to-be-true pills and loan offers faster than a lemming throws itself at a cliff edge when a Disney photographer is around*?

Well, they finally come out with the revised rules regarding promotions from a blog or other personal website, for web authors, about two weeks ago. I apologise for the delay, but I wanted to make sure this was final before posting it.

If you are promoting Affiliation Cash services through a blog or other sort of website that relies on endorsements, you may want to flick through the rules and make sure you’re compliant.

If you’re not, you potentially face $11,000 worth of fines if you’re a US citizen or resident.

Basic gist is here.

Long boring version in Governmentese here.

Happy Hunting  - Harvey

*P.S. Yeah, the lemmings thing… not actually true.

Being outside of the zone that it was available for in Beta, I must admit that this one totally passed me by. As the trial expands out, and I now have access, I’ve had a chance to try it out.

Google AdWords has a new feature called “Opportunities”. Basically it’s a synonym engine that’ll look into what you’re promoting, and how, and try to figure out other keywords and demographics you may want to attempt to target, that don’t already have a large number of competitors. It’s kind of like Google’s “Suggest” feature, but for your ad campaigns instead of general search.

There’s an upside and a few downsides to this.

Upside is that it’s going to open up some new areas for those of you that are advertising by PPC, so hopefully you’ll be able to get some more traffic on the cheap., and because Google suggested it to you, it should hopefully avoid the slapdown too.

Downside 1) These areas will only be cheap for the first people to get to them, because hordes of people are likely to pour into the spaces that they never thought of before. There is a first mover advantage in AdWords PPC, so you’re likely to be able to keep your click costs lower if you’re in on something first, but the chances of being first, especially with my own post on this being so late, are pretty damn slim, unless you’re targeting traffic that the early adopters think is pretty worthless… And if they think it’s worthless, there’s usually a good reason why.

Downside 2) and this is a biggun. People with large PPC budgets are likely to also have the moeny to hire some freelancers to make a script that’ll automate this all for them and expand out almost instantly, leveraging their budgets to do a quick turn around and get the customers you’re trying to find.

Personally, I found it didn’t add much to my bottom line. The ads that it did suggest broke even for me. Then again, most of my PPC is no Bing and Facebook nowadays, as the people on there that I target tend to be spendaholics. I feel that, as a ratio thing, Google has a higher level of user intellect.

If you keep up with news from Searchenginia (it’s my made up name for the land of search engines… although who am I kidding? Really it’s part of the San Fernando Valley) you’ve probably heard that Microsoft is taking over Yahoo’s search function by basically dumping a Yahoo skin on top of Bing, much in the way that Google now runs Baidu.

The point is that the Yahoo algorithm sucks, they’re finally acknowledging this, and letting people with some idea run the show. No, really, Bing is actually a quality search engine for anything that involves you handing over cash. Not so much for general information & research though.

The point is that if you’re trying to rank your site high via SEO tactics, a) you no longer have to bother about trying to go for Yahoo traffic, b) you will have to worry about going for Microsoft traffic, and c) the categorically dumbest customers have now been rolled into one for you.

This is good news!

As of July this year, Google had 67.5% of the global market. Yahoo came in second place at 7.8%, and MS’s various search names held a paltry 2.9%. The combination means you’re effectively getting a slice of 10.7% of the global search market. Now, I’m well aware that 10.7 is not even a sixth of 67.5… but you’re dealing with less intelligent people that are more inclined to buy things! Don’t forget, these are the people that use Yahoo!Answers that we’re going for

So start trying to rank #1 in Bing. It’ll grow into importance over time, and your site will have been optimized for it long before the others, giving you the first mover advantage.

So those of you that are promoting via SEO tactics are most likely totally in love with the higher tier social bookmarking sites, i.e. Digg, because of the high quality dofollow links it provides.

The value of social bookmarking when promoting something that is available from other providers is simply the SERP boost you can get out of having good quality backlinks.

Well, strike Digg from your list.

Whilst you were probably aware that the main links were nofollow to begin with, the comment links are no longer dofollow as well. This  means you no longer get the delightfully tasty linkjuice from them. Sure, you might still get some organic traffic… but let’s not kid ourselves. Unless you have something that’s seriously newsworthy or bizarre, it’s unlikely to make it terribly far on its own steam, and people aren’t likely to +1 it on their own either.

(Not quite so) Happy Hunting - Harvey

P.S.  Sorry that this news is late. I didn’t notice this until recently because I don’t really do much social bookmarking so I don’t keep on top of it…