For the affiliates that got to know me, they already knew I wasn’t totally devoted to online marketing. Great way to make money, but doesn’t leave one with a sense of fulfillment at the end of the day if you’re after a bit more out of life than just being monetarily wealthy.

So whilst I’ll continue to keep a toe in the water, and may see some of you around the traps, like WickedFire, DP or WaFo, it will be a lot less often as I concentrate more on my own personal passions that lie elsewhere.

For those that have shared ideas with me, I thank you. It’s helped me a lot.

For those that I’ve attempted to share my own ideas with on this blog, I hope I’ve prodded you enough into thinking of some new concepts. Sorry about not giving you the answer on a silver platter, but you’d never learn to think analytically if I had. Hopefully, you got something out of all these rambling posts of mine.

Lastly, for my affiliates, Brendan, Jo, Ricky or Mark will be taking you on if you have any questions or issues now that I won’t be around to help you out with them.

See you in Elsyium - Harvey

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GadZooks! The Fauklands are being invaded AGAIN!?

When it comes to ranking in the SERPs that count, there’s no such thing as enough back links (well, unless they come from bad neighbourhood sites… but that’s a post for another time). But how do you get good quality back links for free? Especially when sites with a decent PR are usually out right refusing, or want some hard cash?

Press releases…

Not only do these things often rank well for given terms, you’re also basically guaranteed a spot for a few minutes in the “real time” search on Google & Bing, and you’ll stick around for a little while in Google News if you’ve submitted to a quality site.

Of course the problem is finding quality sites that you can submit to, without it actually costing you anything. And I know you guys have better ways of spending your time than researching that stuff, so I’ve done it for you.

Here’s 18 free press release distribution sites for you, and I’ve thrown in their basic Google PR as well because I know some of you love to sculpt that stuff like it’s Play-Doh.

The real benefit of a press release is that, under Google’s current algorithm, as they age, they gain importance by virtue of being a press release and are more likely to show up in informational searches. It’s not like article marketing on EZA where they basically get tossed aside after a while because of the disposable nature of the site.

However you do need to keep in mind that you can’t just spam a press release site, and your article does need to be 1) professional in tone; and 2) actually seem newsworthy in some way.

Many of them actively actively approve or prune articles, and will ban spammy accounts.

Happy Hunting - Harvey

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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

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And because Wikipedia simply isn’t fast enough to do all that in realtime for me, I’m so amazingly glad that Google has decided to basically get live, streaming feed direct from Twitter.

Sarcasm aside, this has actually let a few glaringly obvious holes (at least temporarily) that can be exploited in Google’s insistence that newer = better, particularly if you combine it with their new “hey, we already know what everyone wants” attitude. And these glarignly obvious holes can be exploited to your benefit quite nicely for promoting your Affiliation Cash programs.

So let’s say you’re running aff links to one of our offerings that has a search parameter that you can embed into your affiliate link*. This little loophole is great because you can now tweet / status update that you’ve just watched / listened to a great movie / album that you got for free from this awesome website. You then insert the link with the correct address, and Bit.Ly hides your affiliate link nicely (even more so because most people don’t have the Bit.Ly extension for FireFox that allows them to see where the links go).

Ok, so you’ve done this once, and if you’re being fairly current, you might get 5-15 clicks out of Google before it drops out. Possibly more, possibly less, if the term is really popular. Certainly not enough to get a conversion every time… Sounds kinda like wasted effort, actually.

And if it does, then you’ve learnt absolutely nothing from me over the past year where I keep talking about things you nee to look into for yourself, like automation!

There are heaps of automation tools out there for Twitter and Facebook alike. Look around for some, and make sure that they have the ability to spin content. This is insanely important, because it will save you ludicrous amounts of time. You simply setup a line that’s readily spinnable to make it seem like you just listen to music or watch movies and TV shows non-stop, with enough current artists or movies, and let it go about once an hour on autopost, where it can spin the new content for you each time. Then, if the software supports conditions, attach the name to the correct search query on the site… Or don’t. Let the lazy slobs on Google search for that stuff once they get to the site in question.

Keep it going over a few different accounts, and the number of followers is entirely irrelevant, because you’re getting traffic from Google, not Twitter. Any followers gullible enough to fall for your army of automated, spinning bots.

Anyway, I’m sure Google’s bound to pick up on this soon. They’re not idiots over there, so you better take advantage of this one while you can.

Happy Hunting - Harvey

*If you have NFI what I’m talking about there, you’re welcome to email or MSN me, and I’ll explain in greater detail.

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Dammit! They're co-opting EVERYTHING!

We here at Affiliation Cash would like to wish all of our affiliates a very merry Christmas (and I suppose we should have wished you a happy Hannukah about two weeks ago… Apologies to Muslims, I have no clue when Ramadan is/was. Also, does anyone know what Buddhists do at this time of year?).

Either way, may the best of the season be with you and your loves ones.

Seasons greetings aside, this time of year is actually a gold mine of opportunity for those willing to put in a little bit of extra work.

Why?

December 26th.

Would you use this at ANY other time of year?

People world wide will have just opened gifts. Many of those gifts are going to be media players. Either brand new or upgraded. People are going to want to fill the extra capacity and capabilities of their new device. They’ll be looking for a way to do this cheaply. Others will buy the device and will be looking to purchase some sort of free downloading service to go along with it directly.

You might want to get a PPC campaign on the boil with things like “Need to fill up your new Mp3 player?” or “Need to put some Mp3s on Johhny’s Christmas iPod?” or some such.

Happy (Hannukah?) Hunting - Harvey

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"Awesome! Everyone one of these results is about hair styling products!"

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.

The typical reaction of an SEO based affiliate upon hearing about any change at Google

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”.

Grandpa just wasn't the same after attempting to look up information on Google using Little Jimmy's computer, due to Little Jimmy's search history & preferences

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

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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

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Be ahead of it, and you can dress like this too!

If you’ve been paying attention to search engines, or Twitter, you’ll know about “trending topics”. It’s the thing everyone’s talking about. I’m certain a lot of you are sitting there, reading this and thinking “yeah, if I knew what was going to happen before everyone else, I would sooo have an huge cash making machine of a campaign!”

The fact of the matter is you can! Kind of…

Believe it or not, the news media is a 24 hour kind of thing. The news that people get on TV, on radio, in print. It’s all old by the time it reaches them. Even online news is old when it reaches the front page of a news site, even if it’s under the “Breaking News” headline. But you can access this news faster than that.

First off, a little back ground.

I was just like this, but less charming and more hobo and no magic newspaper

Years ago, I used to be a total insomniac. I’d go for days without sleeping, so I’d find myself wandering around my suburb with my dog and generally having people assume I was homeless because I also didn’t bother to shave all the time. In actuality, I would often wander by the local 7-11, and pickup the newspaper to go and read in the park while mindlessly tossing my dog’s ball. Tomorrow‘s newspaper! You see, newspapers are actually printed the day before, and come off the press around 10pm, so they can be at major distribution points prior to 1am, and into most places in the general public before 6am.

I was lucky enough to live near a major distribution point, which meant I often got access to the news by 11pm the day before it hit most stands.

Most of the information in it was thoroughly useless to me, although a few nuggets here and there allowed me to run a PPC campaign well before the rest of the country had woken up, and when they hit up Google for more info on something they’d read, there were some of my ads.

So how does this relate to the earlier part about getting the news before anyone else does?

Well, think about it for a moment. Where does the Newspaper actually get “the news”? They sure as hell don’t have their own staff anymore for any real journalism. That’s mostly left up to bloggers… and freelancers at press agencies like Reuters and Associated Press. Go to their websites, and get yourself onto the RSS feeds for anything that might take your fancy. If you’re using a proper RSS feed program or plugin, limit it to the last hour or two of news only. This way you won’t be distracted, and you’re likely to not have had news media outlets or other people using this trick jump the gun on you.

If you are past hour 5, give up on that trend. You have been beaten.

Considering Affiliation Cash’s programs are predominantly download based, you can limit it even further if you want to entertainment sections, but that’s up to you. Whatever it takes to make sure you don’t get distracted from what you should be doing, which is building a PPC campaign, or throwing up a spun article on your own site and then social bookmarking the bejeezus out of it (remember, sites that just copy and paste from others don’t rank as well, especially for news).

The reason for all this effort is because if you’re jumping onto the bandwagon when the topic has already hit the trend graphs, you’re too late. Other people are watching those to see what’s popular. This may take more effort, and there may be less volume, but there’s also a hell of a lot less competition.

Consider this nugget an early Christmas present.

Happy Hunting - Harvey

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Due to ongoing issues with ePassporte (which many of you being paid by it are more than aware of, I’m sure), we’re going to be dumping it as a method of payment.

We’re aware that a number of your like it a lot, especially the anonymity of it, but frankly it’s just a nightmare for us to deal with them, and their service is not getting any easier for us to work with.

As of February 28th, 2010, we will no longer be issuing payments with ePassporte.

We will still definitely offer PayPal, direct bank deposit / wire, and cheques. We are also looking into other options for a more anonymous payment method, and hope to have something for you buy then. Affiliates that do not nominate a new method of payment by then will have their payment sent by cheque.

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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

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