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Don’t rush to install Blog Rush

Every man and his dog is currently pushing Blog Rush (no link guys not even with condom) which describes itself as…

The fastest and easiest way to drive to instantly drive targeted readers to your blog

Only it won’t and it never would have, this is an absoultely pointless widget backed by one of the most successful marketing strategies of all time.

The Idea

First off you go and install the widget quite blindly not checking what it does is it a trojan, what sort of data its collecting (to the best of my knowledge its clean but that’s not the point). Next you promote the widget and get people to sign up the more people who sign up using your referral link the more referrals and the more time the widget is seen the more time your links are seen by others. Is this sounding familiar?

Oh yes you got it’s a pyramid scheme, sorry its a syndicated content system those at the top with 1000′s of page views and 1000s of sign ups dominating the widget the small guy well his blog is no more seen then it was before all he done is promote the guys at the top.

Ok before people jump on me technically its not a pyramid scheme as no money passes hands, and most schemes require money up front or in this case links but you just being semantic, apparently rather then pyramid its a Ponzi scheme. Which is just like a pyramid scheme in the way referrals build up like a pyramid but not a pyramid scheme.

So what I’m an A list blogger I don’t care about the lowly bloggers

Well lets face it if your in such lofty positions are you likely to notice a huge increase in traffic? Well Darren Rowse has already indicated that his click through rate is 0.005% so the answer is its not likely to bring in that rush of traffic, remember we might not be at the peak but nearly every Internet Marketer is talking about it yet in our own field few people are actually using it to find new content.

Your jealous because no one signs up using your links

Bugger your right but to be fair I haven’t even signed up, I just can’t see this working as anything but another ugly looking widget (it won’t even integrate into most blog themes nicely) but I’m not alone Sebastian also has decided against BlogRush his reasoning is:

1. You won???t get free targeted traffic to your niche blog.
2. You???ll make other people rich.
3. You???ll piss off your readers.
4. You???ll promote BlogRush and get nothing in return.
5. You shouldn???t trust a site fucking up the very first HTTP request.
6. Pyramid schemes just don???t work for you.

I agree with all except Pyramid Schemes just don’t work I guess that one really depends where you are in the pyramid

I can’t stop you

I know your going to do it, by now you have signed up and if your reading this you may have found it looking for “why do I get no traffic with BlogRush” well I’m afraid that’s life. I just wish I had started it the next question is really who going to buy BlogRush and its large userbase.

End of Rant

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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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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