Diorex is Down for Good?

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Geez - maybe i need to start an ebook subscription service or something :)

I just passworded the blog, if you need something bad enough i can give you access, assuming I can figure how the heck to do that.

I closed the blog for lots of reasons... some SEC related, some because i had a few employees who thought they could have a blog and share the really proprietary stuff, some because I did not feel that what I was doing was all that relevant to the average affiliate and I did not want to steer people wrong.

I never expected any kind of reaction. Geez 5 star affiliate posted about me the other day just to get me to say I was alive... There were only maybe 2000 visitors a day or something. Was not like I was Shoemoney or something like that. Plus it started to feel like work, as much as I enjoyed it and the ROI was pretty miserable (I think I made $32.50 off one affiliate link LOL).
 


Hey there.

Why not just dump the Database and give it to us?
I for one would love to look at the stuff again, on a private WP install.

::emp::
 
I'll pull out a few of the good ones that I managed to save and put them here. Hope Diorex or whoever doesn't mind.
 
Does Price Matter?
January 16th, 2007
We recently tested price in one of our subscription campaigns. The results were frankly astounding.

Our agreement with the seller of the service is that we get a multiple of the subscription price, therefore if we can sell it for a little a higher price without losing sales, we obviously benefit.

The standard price was $19.95 to start and our landing page had historically converted at close to 15%. We tried 4 different price points and randomly served all paid search ads to one of the price points. The prices we tried were $14.99, $19.99, $24.99, $29.99. The product we are offering is somewhat of a commodity and competitors were offering similar services from $12.95 to $33.95. Other than price, everything about the user experience was identical.

The first thing we saw is that there was about a 5% drop in total sales between $19.99 and $24.99, but the difference between $14.99 and $19.99 was almost zero. The difference between $24.99 and $29.99 similarly was very close to zero. This reinforced the old marketing practice of making things seem cheaper by dropping a penny below a price threshold. $19.99 is not $20, it is in the teens…

Another interesting thing as the test ran is that the $19.99 price actually had a slightly higher conversion rate than the $14.99 price.

Some numbers. If we assume that we had 1000 monthly signups at the control price -$19.95. Here is where the other prices fell:

$14.95 - 987 sales - 1% decline
$24.95 - 952 sales - 5% decline
$29.95 - 942 sales - 5.8% decline
Obviously, the product we were offering was fairly price inelastic. A lower price did not encourage more to buy it and a higher price did little to discourage buyers.

Since we have instituted the new higher price across the board, some of our competition has actually lowered price and we have seen almost no conversion rate decline, even when they advertise significantly lower prices in their ads. (Our ads do not mention price)

We like to think it is because our landing pages look great and make the buyer feel more comfortable with the product we are selling. There is also probably a stupid consumer factor.

Next time your profits are getting squeezed and you think the only way to improve performance is to sell more, try raising your prices instead.
 
Most Important Factors for CTR
January 2nd, 2007
Search Engine Watch thread talking about most important things affecting CTR.

Title
Ad Copy
Display URL
Position
Narrowness/Broadness of Keywords in Groups
Dynamic Keyword Insertion
Other

As of this writing, there were only 6 votes, but let me take a swing at describing what i have found through my testing.

Title - Title is the most important piece of copy. That said, it can become useless if everyone else’s title says the exact same thing. If you are a brand name, then putting that brand name in the title can be huge CTR boost- double to triple. Price in title can be a double edged sword. If someone else has a lower price you are toast. We found that when we had lowest price, our CR went way up, but CTR suffered, perhaps because users already knew our price and shopped to see if they could do better.

Ad Copy - When I worked for a brand name, I had the theory that as long as i had the “keyword - brand name” in the title, that I could write anything at all I wanted in the ad copy, nothing I did or tried budged the CTR or CR. Now that I am on my own, I write keyword rich ads. If you can get several bolds in the copy that can help the CTR. I have also discovered that if it is a 2 or 3 word search term that it is not necessary to have all of the words repeated for bolding. I also strongly believe that non-bolded words between bolded words helps rather than hurts.

Display URL - If you have a domain that has the keywords you want, your CTR will go up. That bolded copy works. Short of having a strong brand name, using subdomains or folders with the exact keyword will increase your ad copy.

Position - Position is focused on too much. I can typically profit a lot more in 3rd or 4th position than in 2nd because my margins are far higher. 1st position is usually for name brands and suckers on high volume terms.

Narrowness/Broadness of Keywords in Groups - I put every single keyword into its own adgroup. I want to write different copy for plurals or different terms. Getting that bold is very important dont use the singular version in ad copy if you are bidding on plural version. Dont be lazy, start a new adgroup and make the copy change. Dont forget to track separately as well.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion - Tricky. I dont like DKI. What if someone types in a misspelling you broadmatch to? what if someone does an odd search that does not read well in Print. I want my ads to read exactly as I write them. Exception - Brand Names that Google will not allow you to use. With DKI you can get bolding where you otherwise would not have been able to bid on a brand name.

Other - Avoid gimmicks. Curiosity clicks do not convert well, so you are paying for traffic that does not work.

In closing - I think this poll has the wrong focus. While CTR is important and can significantly increase position in the engines and lower the CPC, the ultimate metric is conversion rate and total profit. If an ad copy that does not use the keywords can pre-sell the customer and get a lower volume of clicks but a higher conversion rate, then you may be better off.

As with everything testing is vital. Test and Measure everything and you will get your own answers to what works best.
 
Also at smaxor's blog

The Affiliate Playbook

I have been asked how to scale probably 100 times since I started blogging. It has been a long time since I have tried to scale that I might not be the right person to ask, but I have done it 3 different times in 3 different ways for paid search campaigns over the last 5+ years. So forgive me if this game plan is hopelessly outdated or too brutally honest.

Our goal - starting with a single niche and the standard affiliate payout transform into a super-affiliate making 6+ figures a month.

Some caveats:
· This assumes that you are not in a terribly crowded field, so mortgages, payday loans, satellite, ringtones and a few other ‘flavor of the month’ affiliate campaigns probably won’t work on this plan.

· This is not going to work on a $2.00 zip submit payout, so please don’t ask. If you dont have a starting payout north of $10 it is probably best to pick a different product.

· The goal is sufficient (7+ figures per year) that I am not even going to try and pretend to do this with $2,000. I had lots of money in the bank each time I started over and invested significant sums to get scale with each.

· I am not going to live in my mothers basement and hope that the affiliate manager at my merchant notices me and rewards me with a higher payout, I am going to meet the senior guys at the network, then the affiliate manager at the merchant and then the affiliate managers director or VP and impress them that I can help them achieve and exceed aggressive goals. In short I am in a real business that happens to be online, but I am not a hermit crab.

Here is what needs to be in place to start:

· We have located a product with a decent payout, that is not already stuffed with affiliates, offered by at least 2-3 respectable networks.

· We have designed or paid an expert to design a great landing page with good usability and website surrounding it with good content and at least 8-10 pages deep of keyword rich content that is unique to my site that will pass all sniffs of the quality score test because it is quality and relevant.

· We have some good tracking in place so that I can determine ROI by keyword.

· We actually took the time to create well thought out ad copy unique to my high value keywords.
· We did not jam tens of thousands of keywords into one adgroup or campaign and then wait to see which ones work.

· We approached this with pride of ownership, something where quality of work shines through, nobody is going to call this crap.

· We came to the party with 3-6 hours every day to tweak and monitor this campaign, and not just for the first week but for the next 12-18 months. 7 days a week, holidays, weekends, when I am out of town, when I feel like shit and when my buddies are out doing something a lot more fun.

· We have a solid credit line dedicated just to this, and I dont mean buying 30″ dual monitors and Herman Miller chairs before I ever make a penny all those awesome systems you see online were bought after the fact not before.

If you cant, wont or dont know how to do any of the above, Stop reading. The rest won’t help you one bit.

So we now have a single affiliate offer at standard commission with well thought out ad copy, landing pages and some money ready to turn on our adwords campaign.

· My first goal is to just get on the networks radar, let them know who I am, do enough volume that my account manager does not have to figure out who I am, get me on his radar. To do this I need to drive consistent steady volume. Anyone can be a flash in the pan and bid to first place and lose a ton of money and then fade away. They see it all the time, and are not going to be impressed. Instead show them consistent steady volume, maybe do this with just a few high converting keywords, or lots of cheaper long tail ones, maybe just bid to 9-10th place on the short tail stuff. Our goal is to lose as little as possible while still being consistent.

· At this stage, no way am I going to get anything like a white label or even an invite to dinner when my affiliate manager is in town. I have a few limited options to test. The first thing is the display URL. I want something that describes the product generically (dont infringe on copyrights) in a short of way as possible using high volume keywords. Widgets.com is probably not going to be available to you. Try WidgetsDeluxe, WidgetsFast, WidgetsEtc. Take your primary keyword and get 5-7 short and sweet URL’s and test them in rotation using Google ad copy testing tool. 1 or 2 of these is going to perform better than the rest. This will take you from slight loser to slight winner. Increase bids accordingly until you are back to slight loser

· So with a little bit of traffic we probably just increased volume by 20% or more just by fiddling with the display URL and then bumping bids. With that small bump in volume over the levels your network was used to seeing, approach them about a better payout. You will probably get it since you have established consistent volume and are not just a flash in the pan, dont ask for a bump before you prove anything.

· With the 10% or so boost in payout, dump those revenues back into your bids. You are probably now 4-6 weeks in and are down a couple of grand and you are probably now in the bottom of the middle of the results. Now is the time to add in Yahoo and MSN. MSN will convert well but provide low volume, Yahoo will convert worse in most cases and be 1/4 to 1/3 of the volume of Google. Go back to your network again and get another small bump. You might need to play 1 network vs. another. Dont be untruthful about what a payout is being offerred, it is a small community and you dont want to burn bridges or be seen as a liar. Get that 2nd bump and now you are 20% or so higher than you were before.

· It is now time to test ad copy. Always start with things on Google since your test volume is Clicks/impressions rather than Conversions/clicks. Until you have good volume it is important to test what you can get answers on and not eat up tons of test bandwidth. Although CTR is important, be sure to drill down to conversion rate per test since that is ultimately what matters.

· You have now gotten 2 bumps from networks and are probably not going to get a ton more since they only have so much to give. You should be 3+ months in, plenty of time to have hit a pubcon or ad:tech or SES or just arranged an onsite meeting with the affiliate marketing manager for the product you are working on. Start by email, then work your way up to an occasional IM and eventually phone and in person meetings. Your goal is get your foot in the door and remove the affiliate network from the picture and get them to agree to a white label situation. This may take months, so get cracking early on this. Your white label will get you 10% increase in conversion overnight.
 
The Affiliate Playbook (cont'd)

· Either right before or right after you get the white label (at the very least be in talks with them) start aggressively testing landing pages. Start with 2 or more radically different designs and then pick a design winner and then test other elements like hero shots, call to actions, button language, placement of items on the page. Before starting this, you should have invested in SSL certificates and be landing in a secure environment and displaying the security seals prominently to let visitors know you are serious. If you cannot get a 30-50% increase in conversion with your landing page, you are not trying hard enough.

· Between the 10% security seal boost, the 10% white label boost, the 30% boost to conversion from testing the page, you should now be pulling yourself back to even and even turning a small profit, dont spend it just yet though. Just like with the affiliate network, you need to establish a baseline of consistent results where the merchant starts to assume your volume is always going to be there.

· You have worked with the merchant for 2-3 months and they are treating your volume like their volume (trust me this will happen). You have flown to corporate HQ and met the director or VP who the affiliate manager reports to, you are now negotiating with him rather than through the affiliate manager who has no real power in most cases. You need to let it be known that you could drive a lot more volume with a decent sized payout increase. They will salivate at the idea of volume, but will also be hesitant to give you a big boost. At the same time you are seducing the VP, you are making inquiries to one of your largest competitors about moving your volume over, you want to get a white label from them from the start (they are poaching an affiliate which is different than working with a small guy). Before you move your volume over, you call the VP at your original merchant and “give him a heads up” that you are going to test XYZ (tell them the name) for a few days, but you dont want him to worry too much, you will turn the volume back on in a few days, worst case a few weeks. You have now caused him to sweat and think that he might lose you. He has already budgeted in your volume and those resulting profits to his boss, he has probably mentioned to his boss that their could be more volume if they were willing to pay up. Now the choice almost becomes nothing from you or pay you more.

· In almost all circumstances, you will probably want to work long term with the same company and not jump around to the highest pay out all of the time. That does not mean you don’t flirt with the others and even have a few “test runs” for a few weeks every so often. Don’t seem fickle or emotional, just act like you are a businessman (which you are) and you are looking out for your own interests as good business (which it is) and you will soon be viewed as a strategic partner rather than an affiliate.

· At some point it will probably make sense to go to some sort of tiered pricing structure. Make sure you can hit these targets. Do not get paid $x for first 10,000 units and $y for units 10,001 - 15,000 and $z for 15,001+. Instead you want to hit a tier and get paid retroactive to the first unit. They will resist, but this is imperative for you. It means that sometimes you can take a loss per unit the last few days of the month and drive a ton of volume in order to hit your tier so you make a greater overall profit. The reason this is important is that the merchant sees these volume surges and starts thinking how they can get them every day instead of just the last 3-4 days of the month, then you are on for another round of negotiations. Always have a tier you have not yet met. When you start hitting the last tier, time to start negotiating for a new tier.

· In time, the merchant will get addicted to your business, they will spread their overhead across all of their traffic (much of which is really your traffic) and start seeing economies of scale. This is when you really have leverage. Dont be a bad business partner, just dont be a meek one either.

· The last 4-5 bullets I have not mentioned continual testing of things like the form, possible cross-sells, gathering an email list, retargeting, and a whole host of other stuff. Our philosophy is that we have to increase conversion by 20% each year to just stand still, once you start standing still, others start to pass you and you start to lose your leverage. Once you lose leverage, it is almost impossible to get it back. Never stop testing.

OK I want to thank both of the people who made it to the bottom of this post. It is obviously not exhaustive, but it is a reasonable series of steps for how to start as a dinky small fry affiliate today and 18-24 months from now be writing your own blog and posting a big check. Of course you will be doing so well you might also think, being rich and unknown with no competition may just be better than rich and famous with 100 new people entering your space hellbent on killing your margins…
 
The Short End of the Long Tail of Affiliate Marketing.
June 2nd, 2007

Last night, while sitting in the bar at the W in New Orleans waiting for my wife to get dressed for a night out. I got to thinking about something I read on the plane ride here and realized how it applies to affiliate marketing. Pardon me if it does not come out crystal clear, it was much more lucid last night.

I dont agree with everything Seth Godin writes, but in his new book The Dip, I think there is some great hidden wisdom. For $10 or so, I have gotten my money’s worth.

I keep reading it, and taking away things from it that are very subtle. The underlying theme of the book is that if you cannot be the best at something in your world, then you either need to work harder or you need to quit and focus your energies on something where you have the ability to achieve greatness.

This applies to affiliate marketing. Too many of the people who I talk to are scattershot affiliate marketers. They do 4-5 different verticals, but they all seem to have hit a wall. They cannot seem to figure out how to get past there current level of income. (Many of these guys are earning well over $25k a month, but just cannot seem to scale..)

All of these guys tend to play in the tail of keywords. When I share my average CPC they gulp, and wonder how the heck I can make that work.

In my mind, the short (and thick) head is where the money is at. Sure you can get $.10 clicks and lots of them in the tail, and we pursue those too, but volume is a fraction of what you can get from the more expensive head terms. SEO_mike wrote about this a few days back in many of you guys favorite vertical.

Best advice I can give any budding affiliate marketer - dont be a sheep and follow the crowd. If you are running ringtones or blockbuster or whatever the flavor of the month is, you are not going to be that successful.

Pick a competitive but unknown industry. Go gangbusters on the top 5 keywords. Drive a lot of volume. Test the heck out of your landing pages and ad copy. Then cut out the networks that earn more than most of you realize and go direct to the merchant. Show them your volume, your desire to work directly with them, and dangle the prospect of even more volume if the payout is good enough. There is some relationship building involved, but the affiliate networks are getting rich because affiliate marketers are too lazy too negotiate directly with the ultimate buyer of the lead/sale.

Lots of people focus on ROI. Focus on total profit. Would you rather make $5.00 100 times a day and invest $500 a day to do that or make $1.50 1000 times a day, but invest $5000 a day. Overall return is lower, but the IRS and your banker will like you more with the lower ROI. (Chicks think total profit is sexier than ROI too…)

Hedge Fund managers would kill for 1% daily returns and affiliate marketers are turning their backs on 50% ROI’s, if you have the program but need cash to scale it, let me know I can solve that problem. The head is where the low margin low ROI profits are.

Direct relationships with the buyer of your traffic combined with the volume you get from head terms is where the obscene profits are.

Back to drinking…sorry if this was a jumbled mess….
 
The ugly underbelly of affiliate marketing
May 31st, 2007

OK - it has been awhile since my last post. Not sure if I plan on being a regular blogger again, but I had something I wanted to get off my chest so here goes….

Affiliate marketing has a dark side. Sure lots of people, myself included make a very nice living from driving traffic to merchants, lead providers etc. But it is not always wine and roses.

As part of what I do, I am consistently looking for new lines of business for both my personal marketing and the super affiliate firm I am a partner in. I talk to lots and lots of people and have what I think of as pretty good insight into the industry.

Over the weekend, I attended a dinner party with about 15 couples and in the course of the conversation I came across someone who ended up being the CEO at a major name off-line corporation (you have heard of this company!) with a huge affiliate program. Thinking I might have hit pay dirt, I steered the conversation to the affiliate program which the CEO replied something that has really been bugging me. (before you ask, we were traveling in my wifes social circle not mine…CEO’s at dinner parties is pretty common)

He basically stated that they had spent millions optimizing the website with multi-variate testing, spent millions testing banners, paid search and other traffic generation tools. Basically they had not been cheap about their website. Then he told me that the affiliate program was designed to lose money for the affiliates. He basically said that although margins were about 4x what the payout was, that unless an affiliate was generating free traffic that they were not supposed to make money.

The company does zero PPC on their own (except on brand name) but knows exactly what it costs to generate a sale. They pay about 90% of that level and it is one of their most profitable divisions. I asked him how he kept affiliates long term. His response was he did not care about them long term. They have been part of many different affiliate programs, they have worked with many super affiliates, and gotten ringing endorsements from name-brand affiliate marketers but they don’t care that these people are spending money to drive essentially risk free traffic. They only care that the brand name is strong enough that every “sucker” in affiliate marketing(the CEO’s words) is willing to throw a $100 or so at their program because it is such a strong brand.

His statement was basically they get $75 back, we earn $300 and then hope they throw another $100 at it and see if they can make a go at it. These suckers are making our affiliate program a gold mine $100 at a time. A few hundred new suckers every single day.

Now I recognize that not every affiliate program is like this. It was just very disheartening to hear a CEO of a major online and offline company think of affiliates as a one-way meal ticket. As an affiliate, just realize that not all affiliate programs are everything they are cracked up to be.

Before you ask - I thought about posting the name of the company, but after looking at the angles, I have decided that the general warning was enough. I spoke with a lawyer friend and he said I would open up a huge can of worms if I said anything other than very vague information that could not identify the company. It would essentially be my word against the CEO and his lawyers. Just not worth the hassle. Take this as a cautionary tale rather than XYZ company is a bad affiliate partner.
 
Crazy Egg
Shoemoney put me on to the guys at Crazy Egg and I have to say that I am very impressed.

We started using this on many of our sites about a month ago, with very surprising results. Keep in mind that we track just about everything about our customers interactions with our site, yet we still found amazing value from the visual heatmaps.

A few things we learned.

We had some image logos prominently on the page which were not linked anywhere that were being clicked by approximately 1% of visitors, we linked them to our order page and conversion went up.

We placed it on some interior pages and found that one page in particular which was our 3rd or 4th highest clicked item was not providing what users were looking for. how did we learn this? From that page, the number 1 clicked item was a request for that same page again! Obviously users thought they had landed on the wrong page and so they clicked it again. We re-wrote the page and the order now button now is the highest volume link from that site, Conversions went up
Another useful piece of knowledge was that people did not click on the privacy policy except on the order now page. Despite the fact that it was in the footer of every single page on the site. When it was removed from the most important page on the site, conversions went up.
We had one legacy page that had 2 order now buttons, the others had just 1 button. That 2nd button got a ton of traffic and we added a 2nd button on many pages and increased overall conversion rate.
The final learning was the most obscure and least likely to be discovered just using a spreadsheet. We had two pretty different versions of a landing page. Both converted almost equally. Each page had a different picture. Crazy Egg showed us that one picture got lots of clicks, the other page got almost none. We switched the pictures, the picture that got all the clicks, still got clicks, and the conversion rate for that page jumped significantly. The picture without clicks made the conversion on the page plummet. A simple easy change differentiated the two landing pages.
All of this data was available through our extensive non visual data collection methods, that we study religiously, just putting a visual layer over it made a huge difference.

That is 5 reasons why $50 a month is a bargain. Conversion, Conversion, Conversion, Conversion, Conversion. We are sending tens of thousands of visitors via paid search every single day. Even a slight fraction of a percentage increase in conversion goes directly to the bottom line since it does not cost us any more or less once the click is made.

Crazy Egg has a 5000 impression free trial. If you do not learn something about your website I would be shocked.
 
Fun with Content - #2
Ok here is something else I have been playing with that is having mixed results.

I find a page for which I want my ads to appear, but they are not currently. I want to be CPC, but I dont want the ugly site targeting ads that cost a fortune, I just want to show up in the normal adsense ads on that page.

This is probably stupid simple but here is what I do…

Go to the Google Tools page
Click on Keyword Tool
Then click on left tab “Site Related Keywords”
Then I copy and paste the URL where I want to appear
Make sure the checkbox is unchecked
Copy and paste all of the keywords Google suggests into a brand new adgroup

I usually not only show on that site, but on others I had not been aware of previously.

Not full-proof and not always cheap, especially if you are bidding on keywords not related to your site.

PS. Want to know what keywords Google thinks your landing page is about, do the exact same thing with your URL, use that list to massage your quality score for search.
 
It seems obvious to me…
September 18, 2007
Well after having a few people email or comment very excitedly about my last “book review” post announcing that I was still alive, I thought I would write about a few things that have been written about by others before but that I don’t see regularly in my affiliate journeys.

Namely Security certificates and SSL…. For a few hundred dollars a year you can get a security seal. (We prefer Verisign, but just about any seal will do) That seal tells people they are on a site that is run by professionals who are committed to the product they sell. To get the seal you have to get an SSL certificate and by getting an SSL certificate you might as well use https.

Now we white label all of our sites, but even if you just have a landing page you should do 2 things.

1. Put the landing page - not just the order form - in a secure environment. From the search engine you should change the http to https in every possible instance. This by itself has proven to add 10% or more to conversion rate. Be sure to also make sure any other pages on your site that you connect to be in https and those links from headers footers etc are also https.

2. Place the trust symbol for your ssl certificate on the landing page and in the footer of any other appropriate page. Have a FAQ? Add a question that says “Is my data secure?” Put the logo in the answer. The addition of a trust symbol adds another 10-15% to your conversion rate.

Now lets quantify that for those following along with their swiss bank accounts.

Say you have a PPC campaign that is merely breaking even. You spend $1000 a day for $1000 in revenue. Your credit card company and Google both love you, your wife is wondering if you have an internet girlfriend since the bank account ain’t growing. For our imaginary example we spend $1 a click and get a 1% conversion rate but get paid $100 a sale. Plug in your own numbers…

So we have 1000 clicks and 10 sales per day.

By adding SSL to the landing page that adds 10% in conversion you now have 1.1% or 11 sales a day. Now add the trusted symbol and another 10% that means you now get 12.1 sales per day.

This $500-$2000 per year expenditure just took your break even affiliate campaign to a $210 per day profit or $76500 per year. Subtract out the $500 for security certifcate and you now have a $76k cash flow stream. Already profitable? Add 20% to your revenue without an increase in expenses….

Admittedly these results are in an environment where we control the form and sign-up process, but if you are dealing with vendors who are not using secure forms then you could add another 15% or more just by getting them to be secure.

Your mileage may vary.
 
Some Keyword Insights
July 10, 2007
First in a series responding to readers requests (if you have any requests/suggestions for discussion topics, please say so), lets talk about keywords.

First off, my philosophy on keywords is that anything can be valid as long as it converts at an appropriate rate to be profitable. So test even things that are just tangentially related to your field, who knows there might be a goldmine you have not yet discovered. If you are not tracking to the keyword level, then you are not paying very close attention. Tracking should be a major focus.

Second - match types. I start just about everything on broad match and then move the stuff that works to [Exact] match. I dont use “phrase” matching at all. I used to, but found it typically did not add incremental revenues. I set-up a report in Google to be sent at the first day of every month to show me all the match types from the previous month. I typically take the top 20-50 (depending on click volume) and make those exact match keywords.

Third - Number of keywords - I dont really care about many more than my top 30-50 keywords. Over time that number has grown steadily but it still relatively small. With spreadsheets and Adwords Editor there is almost no incremental cost to have 10,000 keywords vs just a few dozen. Keep the ones that work and kill the ones that do not work.

Fourth - negative keywords - use the monthly report from above to filter out things you dont want or that do not convert. I cannot sell my product anywhere other than the US. So searches for UK or Canadian or Austrailian “keyword” are wasted and I dont want to pay for them. Same thing with credit cards - you have to have one for me to get paid, so I negative match keywords like “no credit card” etc. Lastly there are some search terms that just will not ever convert regularly like “customer service” and “scam”. Get rid of what does not work for your over time. Save just a few dollars a day and that will add up to money in your pocket.

Five - iterations - dont forget plurals, misspellings, competitors brand names, URL’s and other things that will have lots of different ways to be searched for. (think www keyword com vs keyword.com vs keyword com and about 20 other URL variations some are obvious some will be seen through the monthly report)

Six - new keywords - I no longer pay for any keyword tools, they all pretty much were some variant of the overture tool or otherwise flawed in data provided. The overture tool is no longer anywhere as near as useful as it used to be. lately, the way I get keywords is to type in the premium keywords in a vertical and see the top 5-10 URL’s. I then go into the Google keyword suggestion tool and click on site-related keywords. Type in the URL’s of the big guys and be sure to check the box Include other pages linked from this site. Then just scroll to the bottom select all, rinse and repeat and save into a CSV. then wash against the keywords I already have in Adwords Editor and then hand check to make sure to eliminate the obviously wrong keywords. I can usually add 500-1000 keywords every time I do this. As Google’s tool learns it produces better results, so be sure to come back once a month. One account earns $500 a day from my Google Suggestions AdGroup and that excludes the keywords I have graduated out of there into other adgroups. Ignore Google’s volume, CPC and position guesses they are not even close both high and low.

Seven - Organization - I have Campaigns for broad match, exact match, misspelling, and Misc (google suggestions etc). In this way I can easily locate what I am looking for. Content always goes into its own Campaign. I dont mind putting related words in the same ad group, but anything getting any traction in the way of clicks gets put into a 1 keyword adgroup.

Eight - Match ad copy and landing pages to key ad groups - you can make subtle changes to landing pages that will barely touch conversion but that might significantly improve quality score and thus CPC. Try putting the keyword in the landing page title (not dynamically) or in the URL (either subdomains or interior URLs), or work it into the ad copy, even paying attention to plurals can make huge differences. Anymore, the little details are becoming more and more important.

That is everything I can think of in relation to keywords - a lot of rehashing and my personal opinion - your results may vary.
 
Google Patents Vague and Broad
July 9, 2007
Read through the Google Patent applications that Bill at SEO by the Sea found.

Other than being great reading material for insomniacs, this is the perfect example of a patent that should not be granted. Not being a patent attorney or even very familiar with any of this stuff other than Google’s PPC models.

To my reading this basically says that Google can rate something on any of 44 different factors and then determine if it is “good” or not. It can use those factors unevenly and the ultimate arbiter of good is its human staff.

So what I get from this is that Google can rate one of your competitors sites a score of 88 (factors can include everything from bid to history to user bias to what the rater ate for lunch) and another one of your competitors sites a 55. They then look for ways to algorithmically arrive at those numbers and then use that algorithm to arrive at your ranking.

The best way for Google to arrive at that algorithm may be entirely unknown, perhaps it is the number of obscure punctuation marks on a page or the use of latin words or perhaps a URL that can spell a Google dog’s name when the letter are rearranged.

In other words, nothing is clear about how Google arrives at this ranking. It is completely and totally arbitrary. Trust me - when it is arbitrary big spenders and big brands are going to get human review and the benefit of the doubt and the little guy is gonna get the bag.

With my limited understanding of the patent system, it was designed to foster the sharing of knowledge in return for offering protection for the person who developed and shared that knowledge. Google just took the kitchen sink and threw it into a patent application with the realistic hope the patent inspector would be clueless and grant google a license to regulate all future attempts at an intelligent ad ranking system.

Under the spirit of the patent process, I would read this disclosure and be able to say these are the 3 most important things to focus on, and here are 5 more that are of lesser importance. That is not in any way done. It is not even till like item 41 of 44 where I even saw words like bid or CTR or anything having to do with what is historically Google’s model. I did not read it that close, but many of the other 41 items were things I was not even sure what they were, other than the fact that I cleared the cookies on every computer I owned after I read it.
 
Ask violating Google T&C and Google does not seem to care
June 22, 2007
Recently launched a new campaign in Google for search only. A brand new URL that was recently purchased and being used in Google only with Content network turned off.

I did a search for the URL string in the Google results to see if the page had been indexed yet.

Strangely, there were 2 results. One for my domain and another for the domain ChamberofCommerce.com (slimeball is good anchor text methinks) which has nothing to do with the US Chamber of Commerce or any other local COC for that matter.

So I went to the page (I am not showing up on the page I linked to…) and found a long list of sponsored results for which my ad was showing up amongst them. No Ads by Google link or anything. Just some scraped content (everything I copied and pasted from the site I found on other scraper type sites…) and then a huge list of sponsored results…

I had never seen a Google Ad group with 10 ads so this immediately got my attention, since not only are my ads only running on the Google network, but they are not running on content..So I investigated further…

I right clicked on the ad and clicked properties:

hotkeys.com/leadtracking?id=…ask.com (appended so it fits on the scree) which was then followed by a huge string of numbers….

Ask.com…I don’t advertise on Ask and never plan too after several experiences where they were distributing my ads outside of the search traffic, through Clicksor ads. I am a little pissed at Google that they will syndicate my ads and then allow that entity to re-syndicate them.

I immediately contacted my Google rep and explained the situation. They investigated and responded that this ad was not being served by Google, rather that it was being served by Akamai, which was not at all affiliated with Google.

Google was adamant that this was not a Google ad despite the fact that it landed on the proper URL, even going so far as saying it was possible someone was running this and not charging me….

What I had not told Google was that since I had rotating ad copy, that my ad was showing up differently each time I hit the refresh button. I asked the rep to hit refresh and the response was “we are not serving this ad, but we will see if there is some way that someone could know to rotate your ads.”

Even with pretty convincing proof of Ask.com serving my Search Only ad in a content setting, Google was unable to accept it. Now Ask is probably more important to their business than I am (and who am I kidding, I am not gonna quit Google…) but even when shown a blatant example of them intentionally re-syndicating ads in an improper manner they just do not seem to care.

Overture feeds are the single biggest problem at Yahoo. Google’s largest issue is the parked pages and that they seem to think the quality of traffic from excite, ask, & myway is the same quality as you see from AOL or even the Google network itself. Yes, I know you can go Google only, but I have tested it and even with all the fraud and junk clicks I am still better off than otherwise.

Google - you recently gave us insight into Content, but I think you need to follow that up and give us insight into the search network. Let me know where my ads show, give me a way to track it without having to use Google Analytics, and allow me to opt out of anything in your network, or set proper bids for individual traffic sources and I will pay you far more than I do now, because I will be able to weed out what does not work and concentrate on getting as much of what does work as possible.

Unfortunately, search engines seem to be in a race to the bottom, and quality suffers. They are falling all over themselves to give syndication deals to crappy engines with huge fraud potential. Google states they want to be about quality user experience, but seems to fail to recognize that the most important users are those footing the bill, what about the advertisers experience?
 
What would you do if you were just starting out?

June 25, 2007

I get asked the question “what would you do if you were just starting out?” at least once each week by a reader and I have tried to offer advice where I can, but I just figured I would blog about since this seems to be a popular query.

Since most of my knowledge is PPC - let me focus mostly on that, I am not a good resource for SEO or Social media or building a community, other people are far more qualified to talk about that than I am.

A few things I would not do first:
1. I would not spend any money on e-books or other guru lessons. While they can be useful, there is just too much good information out there for free.
2. I would not spend too much time on forums - nothing against forums, but many of the people there are far from being experts and are probably not far from being in the same boat as you. Wicked Fire had the infamous Chris Lingle who turned out to be a fraud, yet hundreds followed his advice. The other reason I would avoid forums is because you will get a ton of conflicting ideas (many of them good) but if you are always off starting new projects and never finishing the old ones, nothing ever gets done.
3. I would not spend any serious money on domain name purchases. While there are bargains with great traffic, people who know far more than you about valuing domain names have probably already passed it over. Besides you can usually get a reasonable domain name for $10 from GoDaddy or other registration places.
4. I would not try to compete in ringtones, mortgages, blockbuster, porn, gambling or any other highly competitive PPC space. In general, if you have read about how lucrative it is on a forum or a blog post, then it is probably not a good area to pursue. You want to be the only affiliate in a space (or one of a very few) if the page is full of affiliate ads, you are going to have to be better in some other way. I have accumulated skills, knowledge and experience to pull this off and I still avoid most of these verticals, the average person just getting started has no chance.
5. I would not focus on zip submits or email submits. They can look enticing with $.05 clicks and 30-50x that payout. There is some ROI to be had, but the hassle is huge. It is hard as heck to scale. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard people say - I made $5 on this one zip submit, if I can just do that 20 more times I will be good. A lot easier ways to make $100 a day on the internet than that…
6. I would not put any faith at all in what someone from Google or another engine says. After dealing with their reps for years, I have come to the conclusion that most are guessing at best. They have no insight at all into their algorithms or what will or will not work. The vast majority do not even really understand how their system works anywhere near as well as they think they do.

Things I would do:
1. I would join lots of affiliate programs and dabble in different PPC for lots of different merchants. I would not necessarily avoid retail or brand names, nor would I avoid seemingly obscure spaces. If you can be the only person bidding on a highly relevant keyword that earns you money in an undiscovered space you can do very well for yourself. Some of my most lucrative verticals started almost by accident.
2. I would not be afraid of being in a space where it seems like 2-3 major name brands own the space. There are spots for 10 ads on the page and they can only have a few of them, you can sometimes get highly relevant traffic for very low costs in medium positions. This is becoming less common, but there are still plenty of opportunities. Stay away from online only businesses even without brand names - Satellite and InkJets are 2 that can be brutal. One opportunity is a review/comparison site of 2-3 major brands. With affiliate links to them.
3. I would focus on Content - It is a fickle and ever changing game. Most major brands and even SEM firms are just not going to put the time in to optimize this. You can often land directly on a merchants page without having to focus on building landing pages or owning domains. Plus you can find a lot of cheap traffic this way. Try the major keywords in combinations of 1,3,5, or 10 keyword combinations or all of those and more. You never know what is going to work. Focus on brand names and otherwise prohibited keyword sets. Since there is no way to police exactly what you are bidding on, you can get away with bidding on the brand names in content, which can be very lucrative. (someone will probably make $1000 next month off that tip alone)
4. I would start with Google - they are the most difficult nut to crack, but the rewards for cracking that nut are worthwhile. Stay away from Yahoo Content! MSN is going to have 1/10 the traffic at 10x the hassle.
5. I would start to focus on what is working. Slowly leverage what is working, add volume, ask for larger payout. Start to reach out to affiliate managers at the merchant themselves, dont get buddy buddy with your Network manager. The goal is eventually to go direct in one product. This will remove middlemen, offer you the chance to get higher payouts, better tracking all the way around a good deal.

If you think for a minute you can be a hermit crab and sit in your study and not make personal contacts and be a huge success in this business you are wrong. Pick up the phone and talk to the important people. The merchants affiliate managers always want volume. Dangle the prospect of volume in exchange for higher payouts. It is amazing how often you can raise bids, get aggressive and actually pay less for a higher position than you did for a lower one. It has to be done smartly and gradually, but it can be done with impressive results. Conversion will also improve as you go higher. You might even be able to completely replace the merchant in PPC, but it will never happen until you talk to them a few times, meet them at a trade show, and establish a personal relationship.

This is not an easy business, you will most likely lose your shirt many times before you start making it big. Just remember that you pay for bad ideas once, you reap the rewards from good ones over and over again. If you are not testing, you are leaving money on the table. If you are not pushing for a higher payout you are leaving money on the table. If you are not testing other vendors you are not being diligent. If you are happy with your affiliate manager at your network, then you are never going to break through.

It is nearly impossible to ask me how I would start over. I probably would not. The low hanging fruit is long gone. The days of spending a few hundred and getting back thousands right off the bat are few and far between for rookies. The rewards are amazing, but the rewards are in line with both the risks and time and effort put in. I work 50-60 hour weeks just to stay on top of what we are doing. Many days I feel like a total failure and like I have no clue at all, other days I own Google. On balance they seem to be winning of late. There are many more failures than successes. And the brutal truth is that by the time it gets blogged the idea is probably past its prime.

I know you are looking for a step-by-step process on how to get started, one does not exist. If I had one it would not be in a $97 e-book.
 
SEM vs SEO catfight = Stupid
December 22nd, 2006
It all started when David Pasternak started talking about how he thought SEO was becoming less relevant due to what he called SEO Spam, along with some of his predictions that the large search engines would start allocating a larger percentage of the page to paid search.

Then SEO Rockstar, Greg Boser responded with his rebuttal and a pretty nasty attack on Kevin Lee’s company Did-it.

Danny Sullivan, who i really respect and who is usually the voice of reason, jumped in (now I cannot find the link easily from the home page, Danny - you need a search bar!) with his own comments about the value of SEO. Unfortunately Danny used a really silly example for the search term “Danny”. Which is neither commercial or anything anyone would probably strive to rank for….

My thoughts are this -

SEO is neither easy or quick, especially if you are new at the game, do not have a name brand, and don’t have a large budget, SEO is probably not going to help you make money quick.

SEM is a fast,easy way to drive traffic that offers a measurable result with fantastic metrics and tracking.

In both cases, professionals should drive better results than amateurs.

SEO in my experience has always been sold with a hard sell, without offering any guarantee of results, and often with vague promises that are unlikley to be fulfilled.

SEM is also sold with a lot of BS. Some of the SEM firms I have worked with massaged numbers, tried to grab conversions that did not belong to them and practiced otherwise shady techniques.

Both industries have a long way to go before they should be pointing fingers at each other for ethics violations.

SEO is better suited for sites with lots of content and for sites with the ability to attract authoritative back links and that can generate fresh content on a regular basis.

SEM can be used on any site, but it is the best way I know of to drive specific traffic to a specific page that is designed for a specific purpose, provided you have a budget to do so.

These are not mutually exclusive, if you have a site, you can focus on one or the other or both. Depending on the site, the goals of the pages, the time sensitivity, and dozens of other factors affect which makes more sense.

At my company, we have more SEM’s than SEO’s, but the SEO’s we do have work every day to drive free traffic, where the ROI is substantially higher, even if the overall profit is not. The SEM’s drive more traffic, but it is all paid. It requires far more time and effort to manage these programs due to the constant fluctuations.

As a super affiliate, we have made an effort to focus on SEM for one reason “A change in the algorithm’s is unlikely to put us out of business in a single day”. That said, once you have a great site built, SEO’s can further monetize that in a substantial and very profitable way. A better site with bad SEO is probably preferable than a bad site with great SEO. But I much prefer a great site with great SEO. Don’t You?

For example: On a recent day in one of our verticals, Google SEM drove 337 sign-ups for one of our products. That resulted in about a 60% ROI. On the same day, SEO drove 63 sign-ups, but it drove about 50% as much profit as 5 times the paid search traffic, since it was essentially free. I don’t want one or the other, I want both!

This is not an us vs them environment. We are fighting the same war together. The war for traffic and conversions. Ideally if there are 10 ads on the page and 10 natural results on the page, aren’t I better off if I control more of those possible links? if you could have all 20, would anyone not take that?
 
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