Archive for category Affiliate Tips

Keyword Check Time - Try No Spaces

I was just thinking about something so I figured I would share it with you all.

Are you using keywords with no spaces?

Let’s face it, people type quickly and make mistakes. Also there are common typos which are not technically typos and various ways to spell the same words or phrases.

Here are some examples of words to bid on:

learnguitar  |  guitarlessons  |  homeschool music lessons (as opposed to home school music lessons)

learn piano athome  |  pianodvd lessons  |  paintinginstruction

While the volume may not be high, you might get a ton of cheap keywords that still convert with these.

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Three Affiliate ABCs Podcasts

I was very pleased to be a part of three Affiliate ABCs podcasts last week with hosts Debbie Carkey and Vinny O’Hare.

In the first podcast, we discuss Evaluating Merchants for your Affiliate Site. This podcast is great if you are looking for other merchants in other niches. What should you look for?

I talk about how to choose merchants based on the customer perspective and the affiliate perspective covering topics such as “leaks,” navigation, the order process, commissions, cookie length, terms and conditions, banner quality and quantity, affiliate manager activity and responses, and more!

Check out this podcast here:


icon for podpress Affiliate ABCs #26 Evaluating Merchants for your Affiliate Site [28:22m]: Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download

And you can also subscribe to it in the GeekCast podcasts in iTunes.

Next we did a podcast about communicating with your Affiliate Manager. Whether you are working with us or another Affiliate Manager, this podcast is full of great tips for working with your Affiliate Manager. While some Affiliate Managers are admittedly not very responsive or open to questions or giving tips, a lot of us are very open and WANT to communicate with our affiliates. Some of the highlights of this podcast include: asking for help with creatives, banners, etc., communicating with instant messenger, phone, email, and forums, and discussing commission rates.


icon for podpress Affiliate ABCs #26 Tips About Communicating with Your Affiliate Manager [31:05m]: Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download

And the last podcast, Affiliate ABCs #27 is a spotlight on our affiliate program at Legacy Learning Systems. Unfortunately this podcast cut off at 25 minutes due to a bad connection, but thankfully we got through most of it.

We discuss the many ways that our courses can be promoted by affiliates and the different demographics and target audiences.

You can check out this podcast here:


icon for podpress Affiliate ABCs #27 Merchant Spotlight - Legacy Learning Systems [25:38m]: Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download

Enjoy!

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Is Your Website Being Filtered?

Is your website being filtered by content filters such as BeSafe, Barracuda, or Postini (or the hundreds of other filters out there)?

I had an interesting exchange recently with an affiliate yesterday in which he asked me to check out his new site. I was happy to do so of course and clicked on his URL.

Then I got this:

Content Block Filter

I have a Firefox plugin called “FoxFilter” and it was blocking his site. Knowing his site is perfectly fine I added an exception and told him about it.

He did some research and found that the word “adults” was causing the problem, as in “Children and adults alike can learn…” Nothing wrong with that!

So I encourage you to make sure to have a few plugins or get a software and make sure that your site is not being filtered. You could be missing a LOT of sales!

If you are being filtered, what could be some of the reasons?

First, it might be the text on your site. If this is the case, change your text. Simple as that :)

Second, it could be your server. If you are on a shared server and some other site is doing something shady, you might get penalized. So if that is the case, find a new host pronto. If you can afford it, seriously, get a dedicated server.

Third, it could be something as simple as an image name. Check your image file names and update those if needed.

Lastly, check your outgoing links. If you have links to some suspicious sites, you need to get rid of those.

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Long-Tail Keywords That Sell

Lynn Terry wrote an outstanding post recently that I want to share with you about using long-tail keywords that actually sell.

Really, this is one of the best posts in a long time on the subject of long-tail keywords because what I often read about is “how to rank high for long-tail keywords” but no one ever seems to discuss using the kind that make SALES, which is kind of the point after all.

As she points out, all long-tail keywords are not created equal.

So I strongly suggest checking out her full post here.

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How Many Reviews Should You Have? Part Two

Yesterday I wrote a post entitled “How Many Reviews Should You Have?“  Before you read more of this, read that post and the comment from Eric Nagel or it won’t make such sense.

Eric’s site has twelve reviews. Some research as I mentioned in the post suggests that too many options might hurt sales.

As “SlowCooker” said on ABestWeb where I also posted this:

Or maybe the answer is in how the selection is organized.  If all the jams/jellies are sitting together, that is a lot of info to be confronted with.  Maybe the consumer needs to be guided and the info organized for them.  Divide the jams/jellies into a couple of categories.  Then there isn’t as much to process.

So perhaps it has something to do with how Eric organizes and present his twelve options? Perhaps he would be better off with less options, or more options, or perhaps twelve is exactly the right amount.

I am redmined of Amazon’s “Buyers of this book also bought these book” feature, one that has been replicated by many. Does it confuse me and make me possibly lose track of what I originally wanted to do? Yes. But I often end up buying an extra book. I would guess for every time I lost track of my intention, I bought four extra books.

In my opinion, a LOT of it has to do with buyer intent.

In the study presented by Dr. Cialdini, no one came into the store searching for jam. But if a customer lands on your site after searching for guitar courses, I am sure that such a distinction plays a big role in the convertions. A keyword search of “guitar dvd course reviews” would certainly yield a different result than a search for “guitar lessons” as well.

What it comes down to is testing your landing page by your big keywords. “Guitar lessons” can mean anything from guitar instructors locally, guitar learning classes, to learn at home courses. These people must first be talked into the concept of learn at home and then shown a limited selection in order to not overwhelm them.

Whereas someone who searches for “guitar dvd lesson reviews” or “learn piano at home options” or something similar is much more open to many options.

Consider if the study had been done in a jam store. Anyone coming through the doors would be searching for jam. They would expect many options.

So to beat a dead horse…test, test, and test some more!

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How Many Reviews Should You Have?

If you have a review site and are reviewing, for example, various guitar courses, how many courses should you review?

I don’t know exactly. Some review only three courses, some as many as ten.  Ultimately you should test it and see what number results in the highest revenue.

Let me share some interesting research with you that might lead you in the right direction though.

In his book, Yes! 50 Scientific Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, Dr. Robert Cialdini (along with authors Noah Goldstein and Steve Martin) discusses the issue of how many selections to offer consumers.

One example involves a manufacturer of jams. The researchers setup two displays, one with only twenty-four flavors and one with only six flavors. The results blew me away!

Only 3% of the customers who saw the twenty-four flavor display bought, while 30% who saw the six flavor display bought.

Now think about this. The smaller display had a 4 times lower chance of having someone’s favorite flavor. The smaller one had no novelty flavors. And yet sales were 10 times higher!

Why? Their theory and mine is that having to differentiate between too many options makes the decision-making process far too frustrating. Reading through review after review, clicking on site after site, and trying to decide between so many courses often results in the potential customer giving up on the entire process.

So how many reviews should you have? I still don’t know the answer, but I would bet it’s not over five for sure. So start testing the different numbers and see what works best for you!

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How to Avoid Duplicate Content Penalties from Google

Many of you are undoubtedly using Private Label Rights (PLR) articles or post news on your site that you get from other sources. These could be considered duplicate content by Google. Or perhaps you have printer-only versions of your pages that are duplicate content of your own site. Whatever the reason, duplicate content can land you in serious hot water with Google and lead to big penalties, including having your site banned entirely.

Here are some tips to avoid duplicate content penalties with Google. Many of them are straight from Google.

First, make sure to tell Google your preferred URL (canonicalization). This tells Google that if you have duplicate content within your site, to refer to the main URL and not penalize you (yes, this is a condensed and basic version of what it does on purpose).

Simply put this in the <head> tags:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mysite.com">

If the content is a duplicate of your own pages (such as printer-friendly versions), you can tell Google not to index the duplicate pages. Simply include this is in your <head> tags on the duplicate page:

<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow">

If you are using Private Label Rights (PLR) material, then you will still have to put in a little effort in order to avoid duplicate content penalties. Change some of the words, especially the high-density keywords, so that:

“The easiest way to learn guitar…” becomes “The best way to study guitar…” or “The number one method for learning guitar…”

OR

“Guitar lessons are often expensive” becomes “Learning guitar can be costly” or “Guitar instruction is generally reserved for the wealthy”

Use a thesaurus and find synonyms for common words.

You can also reorder some of the sentences and paragraphs, or take out a few sentences that aren’t needed, as well as add your own content. Add a sentence of your own to each paragraph or two.

When you are done, be sure to use a copy checker like CopyScape or one of the free tools from Google and Yahoo to check it out.  I hope it helps!

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Random Web Design Tips for Review Sites and Others

For some reason over the past week I have been oft asked the same questions by affiliates regarding their review sites, so naturally I decided it would be helpful to share some of the tips that I gave them. These are the things that Google likes and prevents them from slapping you silly. These are the things that site visitors like and prevents them from going back to Google to seek out another review. They lead to more visitors and more buyers.

I have rewritten some of the most useful tips here and hope that help you.

One of the most common themes was the presence of very salesy content. I actually covered this topic yesterday somewhat in this post. Of course, you want to convert them into a buyer, but the more salesy you come across on your review site, the less genuine your review becomes. Trust me, we will try to sell them, so let us do that. Say a few nice things and tell your story…then let them come to us for the sales pitch.

You definitely need a privacy policy, contact page, and the like. I have written about this twice in FeedFront Magazine and I can’t think of anything I would add.

The Five Most Common Missing Pieces to Affiliate Sites and my Top Ten Web Site Design Tips from 2001 articles cover these topics in depth.

Review sites often have a boatload of outgoing links and very few in-site links. This is backwards.

On review sites, for every outgoing link, affiliate or otherwise, you have, you should have at least two or three in-site links. Add a ton of content pages, tips, articles, a glossary of terms, whatever, and link early and often to these pages.

Ultimately, the objective is to come across as what you are presenting yourself as: a review site; a site that reviews products, gives the reader the pluses and minuses of each product, and makes a recommendation.

Good reviewers aren’t trying to sell anything and they aren’t afraid to get asked questions by their readers.

This ended up being a much shorter post than I expected since a lot of it is covered in the other posts I link to, but I do hope it helps!

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Drawing a Line in the Sand by Chris Rempel

Chris Rempel of the Lazy Marketer’s Blog wrote literally one of the best posts I have read in a long time.

I am not suggesting that his post applies to anyone in particular, but if you read it and feel convicted, you know it applies to you. At worst, I hope that it motivates you.

Here is an excerpt about a guy he is interviewing soon, who recently surpassed seven-figures online. The most amazing part about it is that he is BLIND!

Blind, as in can’t see anything. Born that way.

Can’t see the sites he’s building, or what they look like. Can’t use so many of the tools and resources that we take completely for granted.

And yet he’s built an online business (just imagine yourself doing this without being able to see) to a level that most “gurus” and teachers haven’t even attained with years of experience and, of course, the advantage of being able to SEE.

Now, I dunno about you guys, but this guy’s story essentially shoots down EVERY excuse I’ve ever received (as well as every excuse I’ve ever made myself).

Oh - you have a full time job and it’s hard to “make the time”?

Try doing it blind. (And amazingly, you have time to watch TV, drink beer, play video games, etc.)

Oh - you don’t like how long it takes to produce good content?

Try doing it blind. (Aside from the fact that good content pays off for years.)

There is a LOT more to this post and I encourage you to read it. He draws a line in the sand…check it out.

See Also my article in Feed Front Magazine Affiliates: Stop Waiting for Overnight Success

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Can Affiliates Compete with the Big Guys?

The Affiliate Classroom Blog says “You Bet!”

They have a great 5-part series going entitled “Affiliate Marketers Can Compete with the Big Guys and WIN!” which has some great strategies for competing with the big guys.

Here are links to the three posts so far and their blog which will have all the posts. Great job Anik and team!

Strategy One - Know Your Potential Customers

Strategy Two  - Maximize the “O” in SEO

Strategy Three - Give Your Customers a Voice

Check out their blog for the full series

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Gifts, New Year’s Resolutions Make First Quarter Hot!

Picture this…Christmas morning little Johnny gets a guitar from his grandparents, but doesn’t know how to play. His parents put themselves through endless hours of non-chords and strings played in a sequence that make them long for the days of finger nails on chalkboards. Kind of sad isn’t it.

Christmas gift Guitar

Or how about Steve’s wife Sharon who just got a beautiful painting set from her husband for Christmas. She is so excited to get started and create her first masterpiece, only to realize that all those years of watching Bob Ross on PBS when she was sick growing up haven’t exactly paid off. She needs to learn how to actually paint to create those masterpieces.

Thousands…no hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. alone are currently staring at their instruments or painting kits and are desperate for instruction. Or they are determined that this will be the year that they will finally learn to dance with their spouses or really learn that instrument they have only been messing around with for years. They are looking for serious instruction…and we are just the place.

First quarter is the HOT time for our Learn & Master courses.  In fact if you look at our top months after December, first quarter dominates, with January, February, and March making up our 2nd, 3rd, and 4th biggest months. You can read more about our biggest months in detail here.

New Years Resolutions, new instruments, cold winter months inside…there are literally dozens of reasons why first quarter is going to be a GREAT quarter.

What are you waiting for…now is the time to start promoting our courses!

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The Billionaire and the Hare

This past Wednesday night, my wife and I attended a Financial Peace University class at our church. For those who don’t know, Financial Peace University is a series of classes done by nationally syndicated radio host, TV host, and best-selling author, Dave Ramsey.

In his lesson about investing, Dave discusses a recent meeting with a billionaire. Currently, there are only about 300 billionaires in America, so you can imagine how excited Dave must have been. It is a very rare opportunity to meet with one of these people.

He eagerly met with this man hoping to learn a few of his secrets about how to be a billionaire. He had his notepad and pen ready and asked what advice this man had for him.

The man told him only two things. The first was to keep on giving. Dave gives away a lot. To callers on his show, he often gives them a book or pays their way through Financial Peace. He has a non-profit to help people get out of debt and save money. This man told him to never stop doing that. For Dave, that was a no-brainer.

The second thing the billionaire told Dave was to read a certain book. Dave got excited. Like me, he is a reader. This man told him that he reads this book over and over; in fact he has read it many times to his grandchildren. The name of the book is one that almost all of us know, The Tortoise and the Hare.

There you have it…the secret to being a billionaire is to read that book! No, not really, but the man’s point was that slow and steady does indeed win the race. Every single time the tortoise wins! Every time.

Affiliate marketing success is much the same. The tortoises win. The tortoises start slow and have some bumps along the way. Affiliate tortoises plan their tests and test their plans. Tortoises understand and relish that affiliate marketing, like any career, rarely has overnight success and requires years of intense dedication.

Affiliate tortoises don’t mind watching the hares sprint ahead only to pass them a year or two later.  Tortoises don’t listen to the naysayers who say that what they are doing is impossible. Tortoises don’t fret about growing only 10% this year or having a bad month every now and then.

To be clear, affiliate tortoises certainly are not satisfied with stagnation. The tortoise in the fable did not merely stand still. He slowly crept toward his goal, the finish line. Affiliate tortoises work hard, but more importantly they work smartly and consistently.

When your friends or some guru or some ancient voice from your childhood is telling you to quit or to try to be the hare, just remember, the tortoise wins every time!

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Let the Testing Begin!

We are getting ready for The December push, are you?

As I posted here (Biggest Months for Learn and Master Courses) December is our biggest month, but unlike most retail companies, the excitement for us continues into January, February, March, and even April.  November is our 6th biggest month.

So this month and next, we will be doing a lot of testing and I wanted to both share the tests with you and encourage you to be testing significantly this month and next.

We will be testing pretty much everything, using A/B and multivariate testing.  Here some previews of the various things we will be testing in the next week or two, with more tests coming later.  Ultimately, our metric is revenue per visitor and every effort is focused on increasing that…and thus your commissions!

Our Calls to Action Order Buttons

This is small sampling of order buttons we are testing.

Order Buttons for Multivariate Testing

Testing Order Buttons - Buy Now

Order Buttons We are Testing for Conversions

Video or No Video

How does the video on our product pages effect conversions?  We will find out.  Add it, subtract it, move it, smaller, larger…

Adding Other Courses to Each Product Page

Graphics in our side white space for each product will show images such as this.  We will be testing different versions of them.

Other Courses - Testing Conversions with Multivariate

More tests to come!

What are YOU testing this month and next?

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Slapped by Google, Now what?

Earlier today I got an email about another Google Slap.  This was one of many emails or instant messages that I have received in the past month asking the same question…what do I do?

Most of the tips I have shared have been virtually the same, so I thought I would go ahead and share them with you here.  This is really not much of a list of recovering from or surviving a Google Slap, but more a list of best practices for your web site and SEO efforts and Pay-Per-Click campaigns.  If you have been slapped for poor quality sites, had your PPC campaigns shut down or SEO efforts derailed by being removed from the Google listings, these tips should help.

  1. Make sure your contact page has the necessary components: phone number, email address, physical address, etc. Read my article in Issue 7 of FeedFront for more.
  2. Reduce the number of outgoing links by about 1/3 or so.
  3. Add more internal links. If needed, create more internal content pages and link to them.  This reduces the percentage of outgoing links.
  4. Slowly get more links to your site. I realize this is easier said than done, but most importantly use different anchor texts than you have been using and vary them greatly.
  5. Submit your sitemap XML to Google Sitemaps.
  6. Update your site. Move content, change words, especially header text and bold text.
  7. Use nofollow for all affiliate links in your robots.txt file.

Don’t treat your site like an affiliate site.  Treat it like a help site and make sure that you would trust your own site to offer informative content and recommended products.

What are your favorite tips?

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Google Images Search Results Optimization

Have you every thought about optimizing your images for Google Images?  I don’t necessarily think it would drive a ton of traffic to your site, but it certainly could drive enough to make following these simple tips from Scott at the Stepforth blog.  He offers 10 great, yet easy to follow tips that could help you optimize your images to appear high in Google Images search results.  Image if someone wants  a good image of a “guitar teacher” and your image comes up #1…that could very well lead to a handful of sales each year.

Here are the tips, along with a link to his full post.

  1. Name the image file well. Use dashes (-) and name it something like “guitar-teacher.jpg” as opposed to “image2.jpg.”
  2. Use Image Alt Text and use it well. Name it “Guitar Teacher Offering Instruction to Guitar Students”
  3. Use the Image Title Attribute . Same as #2, use it well.
  4. Have relevant surrounding text.
  5. Optimize your whole web site.
  6. Use a high image resolution. This seems to affect the rankings. Higher resolutions tend to gravitate towards the top.
  7. Use an image specific page. When linking to a higher resolution version, create its own optimized page.
  8. Use Image Link Anchor Text. “Large Guitar Teacher Offering Instruction to Guitar Students,” for example.
  9. Use the other alt tags, height and width.  Don’t forget these!
  10. It’s a fun one, so check out his full post here.

Great post Scott!

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