Affiliation Cash - The affiliate frontline

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

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.

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

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

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Stay on top of the news!

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.

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.

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

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

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}”

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.

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

According to MarketLive, the number of Americans shopping for their Xmas* presents online has risen a hefty 25%, bringing the ratio down from 1:5 to 1:4 people looking to get all their gifting needs online.

Utilize this!

PPC Campaigns

For those of you running PPC campaigns for your Affiliation Cash programs, this means getting the Xmas stuff up and running shortly, as people are already thinking about their Xmas shopping (I know I am, and I don’t even do Xmas!).

If you are using text based ads, try creating some new ad groups that involve matches for both “xmas” and “christmas”, intermixed with “gift”, “present” & “shopping”. You may also want to think about advertising using titles of songs and movies that are appropriate for the season.

You may also want to consider expanding into image based PPC campaigns. If you are able to show images that express what people are after, this often works substantially better than text, as images are much more emotively appealing. Consider the two pictures here. The mp3 player is a cool design, and definitely aimed at kids (or Japanese teenaged girls), but if a parent is looking for an Mp3 player for their kid, they’re going to see the happy kid so excited by his new Mp3 player because they can associate themselves with the situation - they envisage their own happy kid with the Mp3 player… Even if they’re not black.

Blogs and Websites

For a start, you’re going to want to try and get your SEO on for Xmas related terms. I recommend using the magic of link rotation and link farming. Don’t forget to use aLinks in that, as described in the just linked post.

Oddly enough, whilst Xmas only happens for a couple of months a year, there are people out there that SEO for it full time as that’s the period they make their annual wage, but they are generally retailers and often don’t understand the full magic behind SEO. You should have a natural advantage over them.

Either way, if you’re making regular posts, start using Xmas themes that are appropriate to content, and posting articles that will also focus on the Xmas related parts to your niche. Got a music blog? Find a review of the Top10 Xmas songs, (spin it,) and slap it up there with links to your Affiliation Cash program. Preferably with links to those albums / tracks within it if the program you’re monetizing through actually supports that.

Lastly, don’t forget to reskin your site for appropriate measure!

Wordpress makes it so easy (so long as you remember to re-update your plugins after changing the skin), and you’d be amazed at how the psychological mindset induced by having the right skin will increase the conversion rate. 3%-5% may not sound like much, but if you’re dealing with thousands of hits, it’s a couple hundred dollars more in your pocket

Happy Hannukah Hunting - Harvey

*It should be noted that by Xmas, I do mean to utilize this for any yule time celebration, be it Christmas, Kwanza, Hannukah, Bacchanalia, Festivus, or what ever it is that you do in your area or to get people to needlessly spend vast quantities of hard earned money on useless, chintsy stuff that their relatives aren’t going to appreciate anyway.

Does that make sense? Not really.

Intrigued by it and want to read more?

Well, probably not if you’re not a fan of Kanye West, which I’m not so I wouldn’t read it… but pretend you like inferior rap music (Seriously, it’s not 2LiveCrew, it’s inferior…). Now wouldn’t you be intrigued and potentially click through?

If you said no, you’re probably lying to yourself.

Because this exact trick was used to get hundreds of thousands of suckers, suckers who are potentially your next conversion, to load their computer with fake security software. Not only was this security software totally fake, they were also charged money for it, had their credit card and contact details logged, and probably sold on for later use by criminals somewhere in a former Soviet state, with the people behind harvesting all these details now richer than the Prime Minster of Australia (proudly celebrating 40 years of running electricity!).

The trick specifically?

Create fake, controversial news that people want to believe, and quickly spam it out to numerous social media channels, remembering to +1 it about 100 times through social bookmarks, and have it go to a faked blog that’s relevant to the topic. Then you have your affiliate marketing program as a part of the site with calls to action along the lines of “<action> to their last <creative work> before they tragically died”.

Some of our cleverer affiliates did this the moment they heard Michael Jackson had died, and experienced bumper profits for a week. This was using real news.

Real news does not last long, however, as you are going to get quickly outranked by major news sources, and you are not the original source of the information. Linkbaiting it gives you control over the entirety of the message delivery from start to finish, and if it’s believable, you’ll get about 6-12 hours of pure internet hysteria. People retweeting your original tweets (remember to have a few twitter accounts that you can use to retweet your hashtags, link and message), others +1ing your Diggs and Stumbles… in the meantime, all this goes back to your blog that you threw up 2-3 hours ago.

We call activities like this “Social Engineering”.

It’s powerful, so don’t over use it, and certainly don’t screw it up.

Happy Hunting - Harvey