I don’t know about you, but when I’m searching for quality information, my first thought is that I always want the absolutely most recent thing. Especially if it comes from a source that isn’t well edited, most likely unverified, and has massive potentials for misuse or gross inaccuracy.
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.
"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.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Stay on top of the news!
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 pickupthe 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.
not be noticeable to anyone outside of SEO and online marketing;
offer a better end-user experience;
screw your hard earned spot in the SERP; or
all of the above.
If you pay attention to Google’s poster boy, Matt Cutts, you will have noticed that he has told people that G’s “Caffeine” is going to be going venti-noir-espresso double shot after the Xmas shopping season. The reasons for this are moot.
What you need to be aware of, dear affiliate, are that there are going to be changes in the algorithm to include a lot of “real time” search elements. Suddenly, those bit.ly backlinks may actually become worthwhile. Another change that we can safely assume is coming is anything something involving an obvious sub-ID in the URL. Google already hates direct-linking, and punishes you for it when you try to do it with AdWords, so I really won’t be surprised if it comes through on the dofollow links as well.
Perhaps the most interesting is that Cutt’s has actually said that page loading times will be factored in in future. This basically forces people to optimise code in a way that removes most cross site script loading, javascript and (oddly enough) Flash based sites because those things take forever to load (and often really just aren’t worth it).
So if you’re making your own sites, I give a hearty recommendation to going through the code when you can and optimizing it… and then thinking about finding out where there’s some hosting from an ISP that’s playing host to a Google Datacenter, and buying some space in a rack there.
eBay clearly has never heard of the Emancipation Proclamation
Those of you out there in PPC land probably already know about dynamic insertion. It’s a great feature that let’s you select a category of words, and then basically show up in the sponsored SERP for all of them if Joe Q Public types in the query. Of course, it also costs you a heck of a lot more to actually run with it turned on and can quickly bankrupt you if you’re running PPC full tilt, and don’t know how to use it all that well.
Now I’ll be dead set honest. I don’t use it myself, and I’m not really sure of all the technical stuff behind it. You’ll have to go and do a bit of research on it for yourselves in order to implement it well. There’s a decent enough explanation over at RedFly, which probably explains why they’re at SERP #1 for the keyphrase.
What I am good at is thinking of uses for things that a lot of people seem to overlook and neglect a lot of the time, and in this particular instance, it’s having that keyword dynamically load content for you. Again, I’m not going to give you guys code. I’m not that great at it, I normally get someone else to do it for me (outsource your weak points, folks, because pride gets you nothing), and you can probably find someone that’ll do it better. You’ll probably need to rewrite your .htaccess file to allow for dynamic URL generation as well.
However you choose do it, the fact of the matter is that you can get the keyword from your PPC campaign to load into you site in contextually relevant places: “Do you like {keyword}’s music? Listen to it free at www.yoursite.com/{keyword}”
Oddly enough, it's an actual dashboard widget if you're running a Mac
However, when people click through and only see a whole bunch of linked text, their spamometer tends to raise a few points. Which is why you’ll need to dynamically load some pictures as well.
The easiest way to do this is to actually have a repository of album or movie cover images. Although this will take up a rather large amount of space on your server, and who knows how often any of it will be needed. Theoretically speaking, you could load images dynamically getting the first SERP in an image search engine such as images.google.com or images.search.yahoo.com. I imagine you’d have to figure out some way of linking this all up with the API of the search engine. If you don’t know how to do it, get a developer to do it for you.
In this manner, you’ll be able actually load up not just relevant text, but also relevant imagery. Do it to a template, perhaps using an internal search function on your own site, and you can dynamically load relevant content to almost anything people are looking for… and if they think they are able to get almost any content they’re looking for, then they’re much more likely to convert into a sale for you.
Why would you run something like this? Well, being topical for a start. If another celebrity goes and dies on you, you’ll want a site that can dynamically load pictures of them and the albums they made or movies they starred in.
The only downside is that you are relying on the algorithm of an image search engine, meaning you could get some fantastically wrong image-to-article match ups happening.
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.
It seems, in an effort to get a bit more cash going through the coffers, the good folk at Google who do no evil are basically going to make the advertising market place that little bit more expensive.
It’s not quite what the title implies though. Instead of making the advertisements on Adwords more expensive for the affiliates, they’re merely opening up the competition a heck of a lot more. What’s happening is that inventory (i.e. sites that are using the Adsense widget) is being opened up to verified 3rd party advertising providers. This in turn increases the number of advertisers who are competing for placement on any sites within that niche… Enjoy fighting uphill against the big boys.
The “good news” in this is that it may put some people in for a squeeze. There’s a point in the equation where the amount of money spent on an advertisement ends up becoming more than the profit margin made. Whilst some super affiliates could probably afford to shave down their margins to a few cents per sale because they’re able to pump the kind of bulk that keeps it profitable, it just doesn’t really make sense to do so. After all, there’s no point competing in a space for almost no returns if you’re just trying to cut out traffic that other people could be receiving. Playing like that makes almost no financial sense, and good affiliates are financially sensible folk.
The one upside from this is that if you’re a publisher using Adsense on some of your sites, you might find yourself earning a few more cents per click for some of your sites relevant terms.
I suppose there is also the added benefit that it opens up advertising inventory that Google previously didn’t have, as little of it as there is.
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.
Just in case you’ve been living somewhere that Google can’t reach, such as the bottom of an ocean trench or one of the larger near Earth asteroids (although I hear they’re getting wireless soon), you’d likely by now have heard that Google is adding even more functionality to their search with Google Options.
So let’s stop and think about how we can use this to our advantage if we drive traffic via SEOd sites.
The clearly obvious one, of course, is the same strategies that you are currently using. Link building with consistently themed anchor text and regular, fresh content.
However, the break down of related material by types, such as video and forums, has a number of interesting applications as well when you start to get a bit black hat about it.
Many of you will likely be aware of programs such as xRumer or SEONuke. They basically do the forum posting and social-media work you would be willing to do yourself manually, but because they are automated, they can do it at a rate many times thousands faster than if you were to attempt to do it on your own. Well, if you’ve got your xRumer going, you can easily ensure that you’ve got content from the previous 24 hours in a variety of forums. Not only does this provide backlinks normally, and with the anchor text you want, but potentially speaking you could be getting search traffic in on top of what little organic traffic you would get from the forum’s regular inhabitants in the first place.
Continuing on from this, you can now branch out into forums that are semantically related. Using the “Wonder Wheel”, you could potentially look for related concepts and start posting in those places, with the caveat “whilst not strictly what this place is about, I thought it was related enough that people might be interested”… Of course, if you leave that entirely up to automation, you may end up with some bizarre results.
Using Google’s Wonder Wheel whilst looking for “Byron Bay Beach Towels”, apparently “offstreet parking” was a related topic… I guess people find it hard to get the SUV close enough to the beach without getting fined.
Regardless of my aquatic pursuits, if you also think about the way in which people search around a given topic and start targetting a multitude of sites that all link back to your one single page, you will create a strong interlocking semantic web.
Having gone through ComScore’s latest little nugget, we have managed to uncover some rather interesting news that will hopefully help you guys increase your conversions, whether your get traffic by good SEO tactics, or by PPC… sorry domainers, no love for you this post.
As you can see, a massive increase in the volume of people searching
As it turns out, the volume growth of long tailed keyword based searches has been growing in a fairly consistent line with the number of people actually searching for things in general on various search engines (Google, in ComScore’s data), yet the number of clicks on paid advertisements is not growing at anywhere near the same rate.
So what’s happening?
In a nutshell, computer users are finally figuring out that they actually get better and more relevant results if they use the long tail search, or search modifiers, and many of them have been doing just that.
Further studies also show that the more words people use in a search query, the more likely they are to actually closing the deal for whatever it is that they want.
0.3 words per search increase may not sound like much, butthat's against millions of monthly searches. It ads up to a hell of a lot of extra words.
If you can get into the consumer mindset, you can start to really ride the gravy train on this particular ticket. For instance, peopel searching for “latest music” are substantially less likely to be after a something in particular than people searching for “latest kanye west music” who are still not as likely to be interesting in the products and services we have as the people searching for “download latest kanye west album 808″.
Furthermore those people are less likely to be interested in his earlier work, as they’re clearly after something specific. So you’d want to make your keywords something like: download “kanye west” 808 -”college dropout”
Now again, we’re aware that the majority of searches out there are still being made by people with no clue how to search properly. Going for them is fine. The scatter gun approach works nicely… But if you want to increase conversions against your paid clicks, and lower the cost of advertising for yourself, you may want to consider all of this.
I don’t know about you, but when I’m searching for quality information, my first thought is that I always want the absolutely most recent thing. Especially if it comes from a source that isn’t well edited, most likely unverified, and has massive potentials for misuse or gross inaccuracy.
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).
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.
