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I got sent a question via email…

Hi Tim I love the blog and have learnt a lot from you and others but my site while popular doesn’t get very many sales through affiliate links what am I doing wrong can you help?

A quick look at both the site (which sadly will remain anonymous as the original emailer has asked it be kept that way ) and its stats indicated it was indeed a pretty popular site with nearly a 1500 visitors a day, which for a news portal is pretty good going. One of the features I really liked was at the bottom of each article was a have your say section which had a simple poll.

Do you think Mclaren should have been fined over ?�50 million pounds for spying?
Yes|No

Each poll was a question and a yes no answer along with the results, most of the polls no one had entered however to help get this site out of the red they would make an excellent place to peddle our affiliate links.

Zip and Email submits

Many Affiliate companies have zip or email submit campaigns running these campaigns offer the chance for people to win free items like phones computers etc, in exchange for giving up some personal details. The person is then entered into the draw, the affiliate gets paid per lead, so every time some one enters the affiliate makes some money between $0.80 - $5 you are not going to get rich of these schemes but they can easily compete with adsense earnings if properly managed. Zip submits tend to pay out more then email submits and both tend to be very geographically targeted a quick look at the site revealed nearly 70% of the site came from the US while a further 21% was from the UK so we hunted down two suitable campaigns. In the end we found two geotargetted campaigns both through the Affiliate group Copeac one was a Win IPhone and $500 visa zip submit for the US the other a Win a Digital Camera for the UK. Both have appalling small print but hey they worked well for our needs, however before we could get started we needed to organise a few things.

Incentivised or Encouraged

With most Zip and email submits you will come across the phrase ‘This offer Can NOT be incentivized’ what this means is you cannot offer something to go with it. So for example you couldn’t click here to receive a free pen and a chance to win an IPhone for example. The line between encouraging and incentivised is simple you can not give away a physical or electronic product to lure a person into providing their information. While we did check that offering the chance to take part in the poll was not an incentive we also took some extra steps and included small print offering a link to the free iphone/camera offer as well.
Finally we added both an entry in the privacy statement about linking to a third party who may require information to conclude offers, a statement in the terms of service indicating that we are not responsible for offers on third party websites.
To give you an idea of what the poll looks like here is one of the early mocks

Geo-targetting

We knocked together 3 versions of the poll settings, USA, UK and international each with their own offer for the USA and UK they went to our affiliate site once voted via a timed redirect with a means to escape if they just wanted to vote. For international users we asked if they would be interested in doing an online survey to win $100 through yet another affiliate company. You can easily do the same thanks to posts by both Nick and Patrick from Blog Storm on the subject which we linked to just last week. Once this was done, we had checked out that all the links worked, via proxies we sent it live.

The results

The number of people taking the poll rose by 900% this initially sounds a staggering figure but remember we only had around 10 people a day taking the poll so in reality this means we increased the number of poll takers to around 90 a day.
Out of those 90, 50% were from the US, 41% UK and the other 9% international.
In terms of conversions

• 45% - From US resulted in lead payment well above average for this sort of submit
• 5% - From UK pretty much average
• 0% - Well technically not 0 1 person did take the survey but I think it might have been me via a proxy!

The result is that in the last 3 weeks the site has been earning about $24/day from its polls but these are already dying with the last week seeing a disappointing number of results, this is down to several reasons the very high US conversion rate is coming down, Lots of regulars have either stopped voting or more likey are not visiting the same offer. My job was done and I have left my new friend to find some more offers for his polls I have suggested that either run several offers and rotate between them or at least offer a new offer every couple of weeks seems to be a good balance.

Have you had success with Zip and Email submits? Do you think that using them this way is a good idea, perhaps you think its slightly manipulative let us know!

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Its been a great few weeks since we last did a Link around so I thought we would cram a few more then normal in.

Geo-targetting Visitors

Kicking things of is Patrick from Blog storm with his post on Geo-targeting users also check out his 9 Link baiting tips for eccomerce.

Geotargetting is simply the art of showing different content to your visitors depending on which country they are from. For example if I have an affiliate offer that is only available to customers from the UK I know that it will be useless to US visitors.
http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/blog/geotargeting-with-php/

Patrick uses the pay for version of the Maxmind database but those on a budget and who don’t mind mislabelling all AOL users as Americans can use the free version and Nick ran up a quick script this morning on Webdigity for using the Free geo-targetting DB.

Using no-follow on your own pages?

SEO Fast Start has a great article on how and when to use no follow attribute on your own sites it follows on from a series of discussions by SEO on the merits of no follow.

The key question is whether you can improve your position with search engines by changing the internal linking structure of your web site. http://www.seofaststart.com/blog/internal-nofollow-help

You might also like to look at SEO Fast Starts SEO guide (say that 3 times quickly) which can be downloaded for free!

Staying the course

Melanie has made her 100 post on SEO Cog (technically 101 by the time you read this) in which she lists her top 10 posts from the previous 100, I strongly recommend you go and read them all but if I had to single one out then I would go with ‘Small touches with big results‘.

There is nothing more satisfying than a little something with a big yield. I love these things! Its like polishing the chrome on and old car….Instant gratification.
http://seocog.blogspot.com/2007/08/seo-small-touches-with-big-results.html

Congrats Melanie, I hope you celebrated with style and we look forward to the next 100 posts.

Other notable links

Some of the hundreds of posts that caught our eye these last few weeks.

• Developing a mailing list - Web Development blog
• Proof you can gain Links with Google News - 97 Floor
• 17 Wordpress Plugins for Adsense - Mashable

Both myself and Nick would also like to take the opportunity’s to thank Olaf from finalwebsites.com for his Guest post yesterday and like to remind you that we are always looking for guest bloggers.

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Most webmasters I know believe that in order to make more money with their sites, they need more traffic. Of course this is true but you can always optimize your inventory in order to make more with what you have, and give better value to your advertisers. In today’s article I will try to focus on some of them and give some general tips on subject.

Know your audience

Let’s start with the basics. Knowing your audience is really important for your web site. By knowing your audience you can offer products that may convert better, or make advertisers (in case you sell your inventory) love you Of course if you are monetizing your site with a contextual program like adsense, then you probably wont need this but you need to know some things regarding the traffic of the site. I will explain that later.

Improving CTR (click through rate)

It’s all about clicks right? So we need to make the visitor click on the ads. Let’s give some tips on that.

Don’t fill your site with ads

First thing you need to know is that there is no rule like “the more ads you have, the more will be the possibilities to click on them”. In fact if you fill a site with ads is like begging and 99% of your visitors will never come back. In my opinion you should not have more than 2 ad units and one link unit, or a few small banners in your sidebar.
This way your site looks more professional and your visitors will be able to know that your site is cool before they click on an ad (after all we need return visitors, right?)

See what people see first in your site

That’s a very important thing. You need to find a few non techies and ask them to tell you what they see first in your site. This is the place where you need some advertisements. Past researches teach us that a user decides about a site in the first two seconds. So if they don’t like our site we need them to click on an ad in that time.

Ad placements

One of the major problems today is ad blind users. I mean people who know very well how ads look, so they wont even see the message in an advertisement at all. To prevent this you need to use a smart ad placement. To understand this better we need to know how a user see our site.

Experienced users understand very quickly what is the template of the site, and where is the content. So they will try to focus in the content from the beginning of their visit to your site. A good thing to do in that part is to put an advertisement in the top of your content or even better use a box mixed with the content. If this is an adsense style advertisement then using the site colors is better as our intention for this ad is to “trick” the user that it is content.

Now if the user find the way to read the content he/she needs to take a decision. Stay on your site - which is good anyway - or leave it? For the second option we can use a big box advertisement after the content. This advertisement should be something that user will pay attention to, so I would suggest to use blue colour for the links of this advertisement.

If your site has a sidebar in the left, it is good to have a 160×600 banner there. This is mostly because most of the people check the left side first. So this way if the user don’t like the site from the start of the session he/she can leave and give us some money

Colours for contextual advertisements

The colours you will use with your advertisements is a very big factor regarding contextual ads (adsense, YPN, etc.) Of course the exact colours you will use is connected with the colours of your site, so I can’t say much to this. But something I know and I advice you to test, is that the blue colour in links in most cases has better CTR.

Another important thing to consider, is that if your site has many return visitors, you might want to serve different coloured ads per pageview. This is because your loyal visitors know where your advertisements exist in your site, and they don’t look at all there. But with colours changing on every pageview you may get them to see your ads.

Are your ads really contextual?

Sometimes the adsense bot doesn’t understand what your content is about, and that’s mostly a SEO problem. For instance if you have a blog and everywhere you can see the word “blog” adsense will display blog related ads even in your post about your vacation! In order to prevent this you can use section targeting. This will help the google bot figure out what to get from your page, and serve more targeted ads to your web site.

Do you know what the results are?

No matter what kind of advertisements you serve (CPM, CPC, own inventory, etc.) you need to know some basic stats for the advertisements you serve in your site. This can be done with channels in adsense or zones in openAds or even conversion goals in Google Analytics. The important thing is to note the changes you are making and then see what the results are for each individual advertisement. With a little trial and error you will be able to find out what really works with your site. To be sure that your experiments give you right results each experiment should be live for at least 2000 impressions, but if your site has some serious traffic then 10.000 impressions is even better.

Some final thoughts

Most webmasters own sites because they want to make money, but in the process they forget that the users actually look for information Be cool with the ads on your site, and always pay more attention on how to make a better site for the people who are using it. This way you may bring in less money in the next few weeks but I am sure it can make you a living in a year or two

Hope you enjoyed this article. Later we will publish more articles regarding ad optimisation, so keep in touch

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Why is Aaron Wall one of the top SEO???s?

Aaron Wall SEO Book, is one of the highest ranking SEO sites but why, on the face of it his site is nothing special a glorified blog it???s not even hugely optimised for the term SEO so why is it there?

Answer: Affiliate marketing
Aaron runs an affiliate program yep that???s his book we are promoting on the right, this scheme provides thousands of back links all from highly targeted relevant sites. For him it???s a win win situation his book gets promoted and he gets back links, lots of back links.

If you provide a service or product you to could be harnessing the power of an affiliate network.

Before you start
Now before you go getting all excited there are some cons to this win win situation and the con is the win your affiliates.

You soon realise that their good affiliates and then the spam junkies managing your affiliates can become a nightmare its one of the reasons people look to affiliate management companies to act as middlemen.

The second problem is the affiliate cut, you see they may be driving sales to you but they are also taking a cut from that sale if you have only a tiny profit margin on your goods you will see that shrink even further.

Doing it alone or Affiliate marketing company
Still with us, great now comes the big question do you run the affiliate scheme yourself or ask an affiliate management company to do it for you.

A Management Company takes care of finding, advertising and running your affiliates for either a percentage of the sales (cutting profit margins even more) a variable fee or both.

Doing it yourself means you need to find, manage and run your affiliates, organise payments etc

Ultimately this is going to come down to the way you want to handle your expansion, either way is going to cost at least a little, though the DIY is probably cheaper in the long run, you will not have the ability to fall back on the experience of your affiliate management company when it goes wrong. For this post I???m going to presume you went the DIY route (we will do a round up of some of the best affiliate management companies in a later post)

Self managing affiliates

You will need software to manage and track your affiliates, their sales etc
Both myself and Aaron use iDevAffiliate software its very reasonably priced with the basic version being just $99

However unless you are reasonable coder you will want to get the SEO friendly links module which is another $99.99. Personally I use the Gold version, which includes all the addon modules. There are plenty of others out there but iDevAffiliate does a pretty good job at a good price and I would recommend it.

Setting it up is a breeze and you will be managing your affiliates in no time, remember to use the SEO addon to create nice 301 redirects for your affiliates this way your affiliates will not only be bringing in traffic but also helping with your rankings.

A good affiliate scheme will provide banners and various link etc to assist its affiliates the more you can provide them the better, I offer banners, button???s, targeted anchor text links, and even example landing pages with additional graphics for their use be creative.

Recruiting Affiliates should be the easy part a good way to start is the ???closed membership??� advertise on forums etc for a 100 or so affiliates places like DP, Webdigity and Wickedfire are packed full of people eager to be your affiliate sadly for you they are probably not the ones you are after. However a mixture of forum activity and contacting well known and respected affiliate marketers might well pay off, after a few months expand the group a hundred at a time. I find this works really well particularly if you provide a waiting email list.

Paying your affiliates is the next problem the quickest and easiest way is through PayPal, make sure you have a PayPal business account that is verified, other options could include Google checkout or good old fashion cheques (though these come with their own added issues).

Final thought

This was a brief intro to the world of affiliate marketing from the other side and its suitable for everyone from a drop ship merchant, Directory owner even an SEO consultant!
One very final thought Aarons??? book is actually very good so maybe the reason he is considered one of the best isn???t just down to affiliates but you will have to read his book to find out!

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Lies, damn lies and Google

I think now is appropriate time to wade in on the are paid links spam debate the big boys have been fighting it out to the point that blows were very nearly struck, to be honest both side have well thought out and constructive arguments. I won’t go to heavily into the debate but will include some great web links where you can get a good idea of what is going on. Instead I was to draw you to 2 issues I feel need to be raised that seemed to have been forgotten.

Google is a company

Google is not a state, country or a charity Google is a money making company being listed in Google is not your right and you have no legal control over making them list your site. Therefore we can debate till we are blue in the face but the Google Search engine is controlled by a company that ultimately has to make money to survive, one of its main revenue streams sits on the right hand side of your screen every time you do a Google search. Google bosses must have by now realised the problem, if people can pay SEO companies to buy good links and optimise sites to get to the number 1 spot in the search engines then it will provide a far better return on investment then short term Adword campaigns it is therefore in their interest to see this becoming harder and more expensive to do.
Google has a problem it cannot alienate customers or competitors to much and therefore has made or rather left concessions in its policies.

What is editorial control

Why is it ok to buy links from Yahoo directory but not my site? Because according to Google, Yahoo directory shows editorial control, they filter out inappropriate sites that don’t fit a criteria and therefore are not motivated by money. Lets look at that again…
Yahoo directory is:

• A human edited directory
• Who takes only paid submissions
• Pays its editors

Now I’m sure the Yahoo editors do a great job but what makes them have any less or more editorial control then myself. Lets take this blog for example, their is no way I’m going to allow a Viagra company advertise here or any company except those relevant to the site. I have full editorial control and are perfectly capable of saying no I also know what I think is the sort of sites our readers would be interested in. In our community friends slot at the minute is Wordtracker they are a great company and yes the link is an affiliate one but that doesn’t make them any less of a great company. If Google wants to delist a site they have every right to do so but to delist it because of paid links is like they are saying the site owner was incapable of making editorial control, now I’m not a lawyer but thats got to be close to slander?

I am not a terrorist

In the UK we have anti movie copying ads on all DVD’s they go something like this….

DVD Piracy is wrong, its a crime, by making, selling or buying a pirated DVD you are helping terrorism

That was a bit of a leap, I copy a DVD for a friend I’m helping terrorism? Google uses the same techniques as that ad it has managed to blur the lines between what it doesn’t want you to do and the Law. Interestingly I hear a lot of people referring to Blackhat techniques as illegal and while many probably are being a black hat SEO doesn’t mean you break the law merely that you break Google webmaster guidelines.

Is it safe to buy links

2 things have become obvious through out this, one Google can’t detect paid links easily and with many Webmasters wising up to simple things like using the word sponsors it will become harder, hence they are trying to get people to rat out such links, two Google is a huge PR machine and ultimately it plans to eliminate paid links not algorithmically but through propaganda. Ultimately my advice remains the same, never buy for PR always buy for targeted traffic in your subject area with good anchor text alternatively look for button ads like the one to the right of this post, great links carry weight almost impossible to detect as paid for these might not be as useful as anchored text links but they have the potential to get your brand to 1000s of visitors.

Light reading

• SEOMoz - Matt Cutt on paid links
• WPW Video with Rand and Graywolf over paid links
• Graywolf presentation at SES
• SEOMoz coverage of Paid links session at SES
• Two quick ones from Andy Beard Slippery slope for Google | Paid Links vital for relevancy
• Last but not least Mr Cutts own words on how to report a paid link

One last thing

We still looking for community friends if your site, company or product would be of interest to our readers let us know we would love to welcome new friends to the site, though Pharmaceutical companies need not apply