Affiliate Marketing Online

Google Adwords Ads In Danger?

2008-03-23T16:26:00.000-07:00

I don't know if this has already been talked about, but I just noticed something that got me wondering what Google is up to. I've taken a screen shot of the SERP for the search phrase "golf swing" to show exactly what I saw.

Basically, the ads showing for the search term have been pushed further down the page due to two video results, one from videojug.com and another from youTube.com directly below these are 2 results from Google book search.

Finally after all that, we get to the sponsored links aka AdWords ads. Most of the ads ended up being way below the fold in my browser. The screen shot actually show more ads because I hid the nav/link/tool bars on FireFox in order to get a better picture.

Thankfully, from what I can tell this is a layout test, because I tried to duplicate this on two other computers and didn't see the same SERP layout.

My guess is that advertisers are seeing much lower CTRs with this layout. Especially since the video results will probably capture more clicks due to their position and the fact that they basically look like the now banned AdSense ctr boosting trick of aligning images next to the AdSense ad unit.

If this new SERP layout is the sign of things to come, then advertisers in certain niches are going to have to reevalueate their marketing strategies and start to consider adding video to their marketing efforts since from the look of things the sponsored links for certain search phrases are going to be taking a 3rd place spot behind image, video and book search results.

On a side note, although the screen shot doesn't show it, after refreshing the page a few times I noticed that Google occasionally replace the image search results with premium AdWords ads, but most of the time the top spot had image ads.

BlogRush Is Here

2007-09-15T00:24:00.000-07:00

So I stayed up for the launch of John Reese's BlogRush. A cool new blog content syndication network that's going to get major attention over the next few days/week/month/years. Sign Up was quick, faster than the 5 mins mentioned in the video. Looks cool so far, however stats are still missing. Not much of a big deal since it's beta.

Check out BlogRush, I'll do a longer post and review once I've looked around better.

Google AdWords Site Targeting Is Hot Stuff

2007-08-20T20:00:00.000-07:00

I've always felt Google's Site Targeting for AdWords could be a powerful addition to many PPC search campaigns, however I will admit that I haven't really spent as much time with it as I would have liked.

However over the past few months, I've been working with a client who had a pretty good site targeted campaign already in place. With a bit of looking into and tweaking, I was able to tweak it to go from good to fantastic. As of this writing, his site targeted campaign brings in more traffic, leads, and profits that his regular search network campaign.

Here are a few tips to help you out

1.You Must Use Conversion Tracking
If you are not using conversion tracking you are going to be wasting a lot of money. In fact, stay away from site targeting, if you can't track how well it's working for you. If you are running a campaign without tracking, stop everything you are doing and put conversion tracking codes on your site today. I like Google's own home brew the best (Analytics and Conversion Tracking) because of how easily it integrates with AdWords.

2. Reports Are Your Friend
The New Placement Performance report helps you see which domains and urls are working for you. In the settings, I recommend choosing a url report instead of a domain report since this give you a break down of which pages are actually working and converting for you. You'll find out that some pages on a domain convert much better than others. This report is probably worth reviewing daily.

3. Watch Out For Rogue Sites
Upon inspection, it turned out that the best converting site in the campaign was also burning a lot of cash. As a whole, the site was converting very well, with lead costs well under requirements. However my Placement Performance report showed that ads on the home page were costing us over $80 a lead. Other sub pages were working so well that the over all lead cost for the domain was under $20. It turns out the site in question was automatically refreshing the home page every few seconds driving costs through the roof. After fixing this issue, by removing our ads from the front page, our lead costs are now less than $4 on most days and the number of leads we get a days is actually up. This fix alone saved the client at least $3000 a month in wasted advertising costs. This saving has now been diverted to the urls that are working the best, so you can imagine ROI is up.

I could go into this topic a bit further, especially advice on how to pick the best sites for site targeting etc. But I'll leave that for another post.

Blendtech Blended iPhone on eBay

2007-07-15T12:09:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I watched in shock and horror as Tom Dickson from blendtec blended a brand new iPhone in a Blendtec Total Blender. I was obviously too distressed or entertained by the video that I missed the part where he says "I might put this on eBay!"

Anyway the blended remains of the iphone are now on sale at eBay. Current bid is $1,151.00 and you even get a new Blendtec blender when you win. Even better is the fact that 100% of the winning auction bid will go to the Primary Children's Medical Center.

If you missed it, here's the video of the iphone blending. The guy shouting "nooooooo" is me :)

There are even more videos of other stuff being blended at willitblend.com so check them out. These guys have done a great job with viral video. I know that when I'm in the market for a new blender, the blendtec total blender will be on my list. I wish they had an affiliate program, hint hint, I'd be first to sign up.

Google Search Counts Tool: 2 New Features Added

2007-07-15T11:38:00.000-07:00

In an attempt to make my Google search Counts tool (aka Google Keyword Metrics Tool) more useful I've merged in the functionality of my AdSense preview tool and also added a new AdWords ad preview to the results it generates. Both the AdWords preview tool and AdSense preview tool are available as stand alone applications. With the AdWords preview being the newer of the two.

I haven't done much to promote the AdWords preview tool until today because after developing it a week or two ago I kind of felt it wasn't of much use as a stand alone tool, however it may be because I don't know what to do with it yet. However when added to the Google search counts tool, it becomes much more useful.

Finally, I've also enhanced the report generated by the search counts tool and AdWords preview tool with Snap Shots technology. This lets you preview landing pages without clicking through to the site. However if you want to click to view the actual landing pages, you can go ahead because I've removed any tracking links from the URL that would cause the advertiser to pay for the click.

The next feature I'd like to add is the ability to select a geographic location for previewing ads. I'll most likely add it to the AdWords preview tool first. After that I'll figure out whether it's worth adding to the version on the Google search counts tool. Or even better yet, let me know if this is something you'd like to see added or not.

Attending Affiliate Summit East this weekend

2007-07-06T01:02:00.000-07:00

I can hardly wait, Affiliate Summit East is this weekend. I'm almost all set to attend my second Affiliate Summit. Still need to pack.

Last year I was lucky enough to win a free full pass from Vinny Lingham (thanks again Vinny), it was such a great experience meeting with other affiliates, merchants and friends I had known for years but never met IRL that I decided I had to make sure to attend at least one affiliate summit a year.

Two major things on my agenda this weekend is a meeting with a client/friend of mine who I'm working on a programing project for. Next is to make sure I definitely make it for Amit Mehta's presentation. Of all the speakers I think I'm probably looking forward to hearing what Amit Mehta has to share the most. I've been reading his blog for months and find almost all his posts insightful.

If you are attending, make sure to say hello if you see me. I'll be the guy with the name tag that says "Nana"

Apple iPhone Craze + AuctionAds = Cha-Ching !!!

2007-06-29T20:18:00.000-07:00

So the Apple iPhone just launched today, and geeks all over the country are in a mad rush to get their hands on one. Unfortunately for them (and fortunately for you) limited quantities mean many of the will have to turn to eBay for a chance to purchase an iPhone.

Have you seen the crazy prices the iPhones are selling for on eBay? At the time of this writing, the top closed price for an 8GB iPhone is $2500.

The eBay Affiliate Sales Report Tool Now Uses eBay API

2007-06-23T10:46:00.000-07:00

After my last post about my "eBay Affiliate Sales Report Tool" I immediately took some time to get acquainted with the eBay API. As of yesterday afternoon, The eBay Affiliate Sales Report Tool is 100% API based.

As expected, it only took a few minutes to recover my username and password. After that I spent 2-3 hours reading documentation, applying for tokens, and trying out the sample code. I had to call it a night(morning) when the eBay API went down. It was displaying Http/1.1 Service Unavailable for my requests. Looking back it was probably a good thing since I may have been up all night coding.

I initially thought I had been blocked or something because I went to check shoemoney's auctionads system and saw it was still serving ads. But then I remembered that they also had a killer caching system in place, so it was very likely that it would take a while before their own systems went down.

This is one major problem with living off a 3rd parties API. You also have to suffer through their system downtime, unless you have a system in place to keep going for a while. Certain types of API based applications can withstand API downtime better than others.

My app is based on returning data that I don't know I have to return until it's requested. So it makes it almost impossible to prepare for API downtime. One work around would involve switching to the good old system the app was developed with whenever the API is non responsive.

Another new problem I now have to deal with is the 5000 eBay API calls a day limit for the eBay API. However after certification the limits will go up to either 1.5 million calls a day for the application, or a user-based limit of 20,000 calls per user. My other option is to have users install the app on their servers and have them use their own API quota. I'll be evaluating both options over the next few days.

New Tool For eBay Affiliate Program

2007-06-21T23:45:00.000-07:00

I've been active in the eBay affiliate program for a little over a year and a half (If I remember correctly) and it took me a while to realize that the auction ids for the sales you generated were hidden in the csv reports from cj.

Anyway after this little discovery, I've been manually hand picking different line items to id. Basically the process is as follows.

1. I log in to cj an check sales for the day.
2. I notice a big commission from eBay and export the report as csv
3-4. I search for the sale, identify the auction id and plug it into eBay search to find out what I just sold.

Steps 3-4 are repeated for every interesting line the the csv file.

I don't know why this info wasn't just included in the csv file. I also don't know why it took me over a year to site down and write a script to automate this task.

So anyway last weekend I did something about it, and so I now present:

"The eBay Affiliate Sales Report Tool" or eASRT for short. Don't you just love the original name?

It's still in beta because it's not yet perfect. First of all I'm not using the eBay API yet. I have a developer account from years ago, and because I've not done anything with it I have no idea how to sign in or anything. I'm sure I could recover in info with 5-10 mins of digging around, but I wanted a good excuse to sharpen my regular expressions skills.

Now that I have a semi workable script, I need a good excuse to get acquainted with the eBay API. The next revision of the script will use the API. This should definitely improve the speed of this tool quite a bit. I've had someone tell me they had to wait 3mins for a large report to run. Yikes!

Anyway check out "The eBay Affiliate Sales Report Tool", I'd like to hear your comments, and suggestions.

New Google Website Optimizer Tool in Beta

2006-10-18T11:04:00.000-07:00

Note: I had been trying to get back to posting on my blog for a long time, but never got round to it. But this Google Website Optimizer Tool definitely had what it took to get me posting again.

Whether you are doing PPC Advertising for affiliate products or your own products, you can't overlook the importance of testing your landing pages.

From my experiments, testing different components on your landing page can lead to conversion rates the are 2x, 3x and sometimes even 4x+ higher than the original.

There's no doubt that conversion testing experiments are important to you bottom line, but running these experiments are not always easy or cheap. This is especially true for the beginner to intermediate PPC advertiser/website owner.

I've gone through a series of my own ways of testing, from tools, to home grown solutions. All of them were based on Traditional A/B testing, and not the multivariate testing method which generally lets you test multiple components in one go. You therefore usually get results faster than running a series of A/B tests.

I have been looking to start using multi-variate testing for my ppc landing pages, however the solutions I've found have been cumbersome or expensive, and this has caused me to put it off longer than I had planned.

So imagine my excitement when I saw that Google is now accepting beta testers for their new website optimizer tool. I've watched the demo videos and read through most of the technical documentation. So far it looks like it will be a very easy tool to use and it's tied right into your adwords and analytics account.

The sample report generated from the optimization experiments you set up are very easy to read. I like the way they use the simple bars and color cues to represent how different change with increase or decrease conversions.

Right now using this tool will not affect your adwords quality score, however it's easy to see how data from this tool can be used in the future to reward advertisers who optimize their landing pages.

The way I see it, a quality landing page benefits, Google, the searcher and You (the advertiser)
I definitely recommend you check out this new tool, apply for a beta account. You won't get accepted right away because it looks like they are manually approving people into this round of beta tests.

I'm still waiting for my account, and assuming there are not NDA agreements, I'll be able to provide a full report of this new tool once I'm accepted.

New Google AdSense Referral Program

2005-11-04T09:53:00.000-08:00

Google AdSense finally has a referral program worth promoting. The new public program, which seems to have launched today, pays $100 after your referral earns their first $100. They also pay $1 for every Firefox with Google toolbar download you referrer. This money is credited to your account and paid out during your next payout period.

I do recall some sort of limited referral program that was only available to a few sites a while ago, but now it's open to all. It looks like they really want to quickly ramp up the number of sites in their content network. Considering how much money these sites generate for Google, I'm not surprised.

There's now a new tab in the account center for creating referral buttons, but at the moment the options are limited to white graphical buttons. I hope in the near future, they allow publisher to customize the colors or even provide text based links. I'm kind of surprised they didn't do this to begin with, especially since I'm sure they know how well people click on text links as opposed to graphical banners.

Google AdSense Preview Tool

2005-10-16T19:30:00.000-07:00

This weekend I decided it was time to add a new tool to my list of tools at http://www.technobloggie.com so I spent some time experimenting and tinkering. The final result, is my own version of the AdSense preview tool.

Yep, I know there are others out there already. But, I also needed a project to practice my newly acquired regex skills on. I've been learning about regular expressions for about a week now, I feel like I'm still a newbie, but I'm excited about the new possibilities that will open up because of this.

The AdSense preview tool will be getting minor tweaks and updates to make it stand out from the rest. But for now, it's mainly like the rest. Check it out.

Yahoo! Launches Beta Publisher Network For Small and Medium-Sized Publishers

2005-08-03T16:38:00.000-07:00

Self-Serve Platform Provides Access to New Sources of Revenue and Yahoo! Content

Yahoo! Inc., a leading global Internet company, today announced that it is extending the Yahoo! Publisher Network in the U.S. to small- and medium-sized web sites. This will allow the broader publishing community to take advantage of Yahoo!'s relevant advertising products as well as quality content through an easy-to-use self-serve platform.

Initially available in the U.S. through an invitation-only beta, the Yahoo! Publisher Network self-serve platform will allow webmasters to sign up online for Yahoo! advertising products and receive fast, easy access to other syndicated Yahoo! content and products. Through the new platform, small- and medium-sized publishers will now have access to the same large advertising network, content and applications capabilities that Yahoo! uses while working with the world's biggest, brand-name publishers.

"Yahoo! has developed many highly successful relationships with web publishers around the world, and is building on those experiences to bring new revenue sources and compelling content to even more high quality sites," said Bill Demas, senior vice president, Yahoo! Partner Solutions group. "By helping the broader publishing community maximize the value of their sites, we aim to create an even more rewarding Internet experience for publishers, advertisers and users."

The first advertising product Yahoo! will be offering through the beta is its Content Match(tm) contextual listings. Content Match enables publishers to place Yahoo!'s contextually-relevant listings on their sites and receive a share of the revenue generated by them. Already proven on Yahoo!'s large distribution sites, Content Match can help small- and medium-sized publishers monetize valuable site inventory and provide additional qualified leads to Yahoo! advertisers.

The Yahoo! Publisher Network self-serve beta will also provide easy access to other Yahoo! products that can enhance their visitor experience, such as "Add to My Yahoo!" and Y!Q Beta. The "Add to My Yahoo!" feature provides publishers of all sizes - from professional webmasters to independent bloggers - the opportunity to promote and distribute their content on Yahoo! via RSS, drive traffic back to their sites, and develop repeat daily relationships with their readers. The Y!Q Beta is a first-of-its kind contextual search product that can help webmasters increase the "stickiness" of their sites by providing visitors with convenient, related search results overlaid directly on their website.

Yahoo! plans to offer additional features in the near future to enable publishers to enhance their visitor experience including "Save to My Web" and Web search. The "Save to My Web" feature enables readers to easily save and share pages from a publisher's site to My Web - Yahoo!'s personal search engine service - increasing return visits and improving loyalty. In addition, Yahoo! is conducting tests to evaluate the advertising capabilities of Y!Q and RSS feeds.

To create an ongoing dialogue with its small- and medium-sized publishers, Yahoo! has also built feedback channels and opinion surveys into its online Publisher Center that will provide members the opportunity to raise their questions, voice their ideas and express to Yahoo! the types of products and services that would be most helpful to them in the future.

"We are deeply committed to the publishing market which is why we are investing in building meaningful relationships with our publishers over time," stated Will Johnson, general manager of the Yahoo! Publisher Network self-serve offering. "Through Yahoo!, publishers have the opportunity share their ideas and help shape current and future products to support the global publishing community."

After completing the initial beta period, Yahoo! aims to expand its self-serve beta program before the end of the year. To learn more about the Yahoo! Publisher Network or to submit information to Yahoo! about your site, please visit http://publisher.yahoo.com

Google Keyword Search Counts tool

2005-07-05T11:58:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I made any major modifications to my Google search Counts tool. I'm now in the development mode again, and would like to add more features and also polish up the site a bit more.

I have my own ideas about how to make things better, but I thought I'd get feedback from everyone. If you have any comments/idea please email me(info in my profile) Or just leave a comment on this post

Thanks

Yahoo Testing Behavior-Based Content Ads

2005-06-23T23:57:00.000-07:00

According to a story on ADWeek Yahoo is testing out behavior based content ads. The technology is based on work done by Revenue Science a Washington company.

This is an interesting change from what Google is doing with AdSense. I'd be interested in seeing just how effect behavioral based ads are compared to context based ads. With behavioral ads, instead of the ads being targeted to the content of a page, it's actually based on the visitor's past behavior. This could include data such as what pages they views and what they typed into search boxes.

Google lowers price of Urchin

2005-05-05T06:56:00.000-07:00

A while ago when I wrote about Google's purchase of Urchin, I talked about how they were probably going to reduce pricing. It's finally happened.

In addition to reducing the price, a new feature they added is the ability to import pay-click costs directly from Google AdWords accounts, the first integration of Google's services with the Urchin platform. Google says this will enable users to more easily evaluate the return on investment of their online advertising campaigns.

Google Gulp (BETA) with Auto-Drink

2005-04-01T08:09:00.000-08:00

Today Google launched Google Gulp (BETA) with Auto-Drink. It comes in four great flavors Glutamate Grape, Sugar-Free Radical, Beta Carroty and Sero-Tonic Water. See images below.

Google Gulp can stimulate your ionotropic and metabotropic receptors, and it's low carb as well. I've been secretly beta testing Google Gulp for the past 3 months, and it really works. My brain capacity has almost doubled, and I can quickly process and hold vast amounts of information.

Since the beta was invite-only, at this point in time you can only get Google Gulp by turning in a used Google Gulp bottle cap at a local retailer. I have a few bottle caps to share, if you want one leave a comment. I'll be sharing on a first come first served basis.

Don't throw away that AdSense Check!

2005-03-30T18:40:00.000-08:00

This month's Google AdSense check came in a very different envelop. It's very plain and looks like junk mail. I usually open my check as soon as it gets in, but this Monday when my check came in, I completely ignored it. It didn't even look like a check. Over here plain envelops get tossed or ignored. It could have ended up in the shredder.

There one good thing about this change. If any publishers have had problems with stolen AdSense checks, it's most likely not going to happen anymore

FYI: The envelope is much larger than normal. The return address is a Buffalo NY P.O. Box. So if you are wondering where your check is, look in the trash.

Google buys Urchin: A web analytics software company

2005-03-29T13:40:00.000-08:00

It was announced today that Google is buying Urchin, a Web analytics software company.

"We want to provide Web site owners and marketers with the information they need to optimize their users' experience and generate a higher return-on-investment from their advertising spending," said Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of product management, Google. "This technology will be a valuable addition to Google's suite of advertising and publishing products."

From Google's past behavior, I wouldn't be surprised to see a free or reduced priced version of the software Urchin makes being offered to Google Advertisers very soon. They did a similar thing after purchasing Picasa and Keyhole.

Affiliate Landing Pages

2005-03-16T17:50:00.000-08:00

Next Thursday March 24th, KowaBunga and MarketingSherpa are going to be holding a Teleseminar called "Affiliate Landing Pages - How to convert more clicks to sales".

It looks very promising and if your schedule is free, make sure to register to attend. With the changes to Google's AdWords terms and conditions, the information that's going to be provided on this event should be of great importance to many affiliates.

More details can be found here

Yahoo AdSense equivalent coming soon?

2005-03-08T20:19:00.000-08:00

Looks like Yahoo is very close to launching their AdSense type tool for small publishers

To support the publishing community, Yahoo! will be introducing new products and
services-including publishing tools, advertising products and access to our
Yahoo! audience. Our products will leverage the Yahoo! network to provide
the most value for small publishers.

You can now sign up to get alerted when they launch it: http://publisher.yahoo.com/

Overture Services To Become Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions

2005-03-01T14:40:00.000-08:00

Will Offer Sponsored Search and Submit Products, Providing One-Stop
Search Marketing Resource for Businesses Worldwide

Overture Services, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yahoo Inc. today announced that it will be re-branded Yahoo! Search Marketing
Solutions and will bring together its sponsored search offerings and
Yahoo!'s listings submit products under the new banner. Through Yahoo!
Search Marketing Solutions, advertisers of all sizes will enjoy convenient
access to the industry's most comprehensive suite of search marketing
and related products and services.

Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions' suite of offerings will include the
following products:

Sponsored Search Listings, the flagship search
advertising product

Content Match™, Yahoo!'s contextual advertising
listings

Local Match™, Yahoo!'s local sponsored search offering

Site Match™ Self Serve and Site Match Xchange™,
Yahoo!'s search URL submission products

Yahoo! Product Submit™, the Yahoo! Shopping URL
submission program

Yahoo! Express™, the Yahoo! Directory URL submission
program

Marketing Console™, which enables advertisers to
track campaign performance across multiple online channels

Search Optimizer™, which allows advertisers to
improve their campaign performance and reduce the amount of time spent
managing their listings

The group will also continue to enhance and expand Yahoo's network of
sponsored search distribution sites.

In conjunction with Overture's re-branding, Yahoo! will launch a new
Advertising Solutions Center in the U.S., through which businesses can
plan and buy Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions products. In addition,
the new center will offer marketers information about Yahoo!'s customized,
creative media solutions, providing them access to the largest set of
search marketing and brand advertising solutions on the web.

“Our mission is to be essential to marketers of all types around the
world,” said Ted Meisel, Senior Vice President, Yahoo! Inc. “Unifying
all of our search marketing and related products under one banner and
one common approach reflects our commitment to integrate and simplify
online advertising, allowing businesses of all sizes to take advantage
of the Yahoo! search marketing solutions that best fit their marketing
goals.”

Overture will formally change its brand in the U.S. early next quarter.
After the U.S. re-branding is complete, Overture's international markets
will be re-branded at a later date – except for Japan and Korea, where
the Overture brand will be maintained. Several products within the suite
will be re-named once Overture assumes the Yahoo! brand in the U.S.

About Yahoo!

Yahoo! Inc. is the No. 1 Internet brand globally and the most trafficked
Internet destination. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., Yahoo!'s
mission is to provide online products and services essential to consumers'
lives and offer a full range of marketing solutions to enable businesses
to connect with Yahoo!'s hundreds of millions of users worldwide.

Google's New Affiliate (referral) Program

2005-02-02T08:14:00.000-08:00

I see Google has launched a beta version of an affiliate program for AdWords and AdSense. You get $20 for each Advertiser who signs up and spends $20 on AdWords. If you sign up an AdSense publisher, you earn $20 if they earn $75.

I'm in the process of applying for this program. I'll post an update after I get accepted( I hope).

I personally think is a good idea to finally start a program like this, I know there's been a lot of free word of mouth advertising for both AdWords and AdSense. I've done that several times, but like everyone else, I'll do it even more knowing there's a small reward for each referral I send to Google.

Is it time to move to Overture?

2005-01-17T11:15:00.000-08:00

I've been ignoring Overture for a while now because Google allowed direct linking to merchant site via affiliate links. For as long as I remember, Overture has always required a landing page. But now that Google also requires a landing page, I'm starting to reevaluate what overture has to offer.

I already had a few landing pages for some programs I had been promoting, but it seems like Google has a very strict rule about what an acceptable landing page is.

Right now it seems like overture is less strict about landing pages, so I'm going to start testing how my ads work on overture.

As for AdWords, my long term goal is to start building "landing mini-sites" instead of landing pages. But this is only going to be for my most profitable campaigns.

Google AdWords™ Announcement: Affiliate Policy Change

2005-01-06T19:20:00.000-08:00

Hello from the Google AdWords Team:

In January 2005, Google will incorporate a new affiliate
advertising policy that is designed to provide a better user
and advertiser experience.

What is changing:

With this new affiliate policy, we'll only display one ad per
search query for affiliates and parent companies sharing the
same URL. This way, users will have a more diverse sampling
of advertisements to choose from. As always, your ad will be
displayed based on its Ad Rank for given searches, which is
determined by a combination of your ad's maximum cost-per-click
(price) and clickthrough rate (performance).

For instance, if a user searches for 'books' on Google.com or
anywhere on the Google search and content networks, Google
will take an inventory of ads running for the keyword 'books'.
If we find that two or more ads compete under the same URL,
we'll display the ad with the highest Ad Rank.

How this will affect you:

If you're an affiliate, this means that you no longer need to
identify yourself as an affiliate in your ad text. However,
your current ad text will continue to display your affiliate
status until you change it.

Affiliates or advertisers using unique URLs in their ads will
not be affected by this change. Please note that your Display
URL must match the URL of your landing page, and you may not
simply frame another site.

What you should do:

We recommend that you continue to monitor your ads'
performance and optimize your ads as needed to ensure they're
bringing you the best results. Please visit our Optimization
Tips page for more information:
https://adwords.google.com/select/tips.html

By improving our ad relevancy, we believe that users will have
a better search experience, which will help you reach more
potential clients in the future. We'll continue to make
improvements to AdWords over time to further improve the user
experience and help increase the performance of your ads.

We look forward to continue providing you with the most
effective advertising available.

Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team

Big changes for affiliates using AdWords

2005-01-05T17:01:00.000-08:00

So the buzz everywhere is that Google is soon going to allow only one affiliate per search phrase. This announcement could happen as soon as tomorrow.

There's been a lot of talk about what this means to affiliates, and what affiliates can do about it. But, until Google makes this announcement, we're all really guessing.

I'm going to keep looking into this and report back to you once everything is official. I'll also have suggestions and tips on how to change your advertising to comply with any changes that may occur.

Accepted for perfomics

2005-01-05T09:28:00.000-08:00

I just got accepted into the performics program a few days ago, I've already appliade for a few of the affiliate programs that I listed in my earlier post.

Just joined Performics

2004-12-23T08:32:00.000-08:00

This morning I finally decided to join the performics affiliate network. I'm currently waiting for approval. I'll let you know my thoughts about the network as soon as I get in.

Here are a few of the companies I'm Looking forward to promote:

AOL
L.L.Bean
Bose
Blockbuster Online
CompUsa
Eddie Bauer
Fossil
Gevalia
hpshopping.com
Jos. A. Bank
Motorola
Peapod
Samsonite
Verizon Wireless
The Container Store

New Google AdSense Url Channels

2004-12-06T16:43:00.000-08:00

I've been using AdSense channels to track different sites since they were introduced. But, one thing that I found difficult to do was to easily track performance at the page level while still being able to track performance of the site as whole.

Today, I see Google has solved that problem with a new feature called url channels. Using url channels you can now do url based tracking, down to the page level very easily. You can track all pages on a domain, all pages below a specific directory, or just track a specific page. The really cool thing is that you don't have to modify any code on your site to use url channels for tracking. Just login to your Google AdSense account and go to the channels section of the "Ad Setting Tab". You can then add the new urls you want to track. Many of you who never used channels because of all the work needed manually modify your page will really appreciate this.

Like I already said; "This is very cool!" and I've already entered tracking url channels into my account. Unfortunately, the tracking only seems to happen once you have created the channel url. It would have been really nice if we could get results from the past. Knowing Google, I'm sure they have it. Another thing is that, there are only 60 channels available. So you will have to share them between the url channels and the custom channels. Fortunately for us, AdSense for search has its own set of 50 channels. If you have a small site, you can track every single page of your site

On a side note: There are now 5 new languages supported by AdSense for search. They are Czech, Hungarian, Russian, Slovak, and Traditional Chinese.

The AdSense Login page has also been redesigned, it looks cleaner and more refined.

SEO Tip: Yahoo Search Engine SERPS

2004-11-21T14:25:00.000-08:00

I just noticed something interesting while looking in the log files for my Flat Screen Tvs - Plasma Tvs - LCD Displays and HDTV blog.

I've been getting a lot of traffic from yahoo. But the interesting thing is that my rankings are based on different versions of Yahoo's cache of my site. For instance I may have a top position for a keyword like "Dell LCD" based on Yahoo's cache of my blog on Monday, but at the same time I'm ranking high for "Dell Plasma" on a Wednesday cache of my site.

I had always thought that older cached versions of my site were being replaced with a newer cache, but that's not the case. I'm seeing at least three days worth of my index page in Yahoo's results pages.

This may be old news, but since I haven't heard or read this anywhere, I figured it was worth sharing. There are some very interesting possibilities for yahoo optimization based on this info. But I'll leave it to you to figure that out ;)

A HOT list of Free SiteSell Resources from Dr. Ken Evoy

2004-11-20T01:46:00.000-08:00

I've always been a fan of Dr. Ken Evoy's products and services. It just came to mind that many of you may not have heard of a many of the SiteSell line of products and service. They're all great, and many of them are free. Here's a list of some of the great content you can get for free.

Netwriting Masters Course
Want to sell more? Write better. Write smarter. First, write to PREsell. Then write to SELL. The only course on the Net that shows you how to do both. And it's free!

Affiliate Masters Course
Become a high-earning affiliate champion.

Service Sellers Masters Course
Attract new clients from around the world...
Or from around the block.

Make Your Net Auction Sell!, The Masters Course
Start and grow a profitable Net auction business. MYNAS! --> Now Free!

Webmaster BUSINESS Masters Course
Show Webmasters how to run the BUSINESS of Webmastering... Super-assisted, of course, by the ultimate productivity tool.

Make Your Price Sell!, The Masters Course
"How much money are you leaving on the table?" Price with complete confidence & double your Net profits.

Google's AdSense -- A Revolution in Web Site Monetization
A Tailor-Made Way To Monetize Your Site!...Rarely will a custom-made solution be dropped into your lap (let alone from the Net's smartest company), just begging you to capitalize. Ride Google AdSense for all its worth.

Max AdWords bid is $100

2004-11-19T14:13:00.000-08:00

While doing some research today, I found out the maximum bid amount on Google AdWords is now $100. I don't know when this happened since I didn't see any announcements. If anyone of you know when this happened, I'd be interested in knowing.

I hear that recently Overture increased their max bid to $999.99 so this could be a direct result of that. As for me, I really don't now why anyone would be willing to pay $999.99 a click.

I also wonder if this affects AdSense publishers in anyway. Is Google still going to share the same percentage of each bid? This could mean more earnings for some publishers in the correct niche.

New Google AdSense Support Center

2004-11-15T15:38:00.000-08:00

Today when I logged into my AdSense account I saw there was a new AdSense Support center being featured. I spent some time going through the site, it's pretty good. If you have any AdSense questions, make sure to check this out before emailing Google. You may find your answer faster.

Google now searching over 8 billion pages

2004-11-11T11:25:00.000-08:00

Google's index has almost doubled to over 8 billion pages. As of today, the message at the bottom of the main page says "Searching 8,058,044,651 web pages". According to the Official Google Blog, this new index includes HTML, PDF, PowerPoint, Flash, PostScript and JavaScript. The part about JavaScript is quite interesting. A lot of experts have been claiming that Google doesn't index JavaScript. But it looks like now they do. I've got to look into this further.

This is great news for all website owners. It means that it's more than likely that any page that you've been trying to get into the Google index is now in there. I wonder if this is a coincidence or good timing for the launch of Microsoft's new Search Engine?

Do Higher Rankings mean more Revenue Per Click on AdSense?

2004-11-09T21:38:00.000-08:00

I just saw an interesting post over at the Search Engine Roundtable blog. Apparently, there seems to be a possible link between how much is earned from your adsense ads and your search engine rankings. I haven't checked my sites to see if this is true or not, but it makes sense. You can also read more and discuss the topic here

Search Engine Optimization Inc - Toolbar

2004-11-09T19:57:00.000-08:00

The cool people over at SEO Inc have released their first-of-its-kind SEO ToolBar. This toolbar is a must have for anyone doing SEO work since it a real time saver. Take a look at some of the featuress it offers:

Features:

Lets you know if a site is indexed by DMOZ, and in what category.

How many pages for that site have been indexed by Google.

Search the number of inbound links to the site. Data come from (Google, MSN, Yahoo, and AOL)

New Localized German version of Commission Junction (CJ)

2004-11-08T09:08:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, I noticed a lot of new cj.com publishers that had a pay out in Euros. At the time, I just though they were doing a big push to sign up new publishers in Europe. The today, I became aware of a new announcement that answered my questions. Apparently, this is a result of CJ's Global Network Initiative.

They have just launched in the German market, with a fully localized version of the cj.com marketplace. This means a lot to affiliate publishers, because we now have a new market to target. The US market is saturated, and competition for customers is very tough. By promoting foreign programs now, you should be able to compete in a less crowded space. Affiliate marketing is growing in other countries, but right now it's not as big as it is in the US. Take this opportunity to make some relatively easy money promoting programs in other countries.

Google AdWords growth. What does it mean to you?

2004-11-05T11:20:00.000-08:00

I was reading Brad Fallon's Blog (Creator of Stomping the Search Engines) and noticed he had a post about an article that discusses the future growth of the Google AdWords program. They predict they'll be adding almost 100,000 new subscribers every year until 2008. There are currently about 280,000 advertisers in the program right now.

What does this mean to you? If you are an advertiser, the growing competition means increasing bid prices, which will reduce ROI. It's going to be harder to get the same results you've been getting. Now is the time to fine tune you campaigns, make sure you are doing everything you can to squeeze the most out of your advertising budget. This also means careful and constant tracking of campaigns, so you can really tell whether you are making or losing money.

For publishers, it means more revenue from AdSense. Higher bid prices and more advertiser, mean that you'll mostly likely be earning more per click over the coming years. This assumes that, Google doesn't change the revenue share percentages over the years. The increase in ads also means better targeting, since there is an increased chance of having ads that target your audience.

Instant Video Generator: Take a Sneak Preview

2004-11-04T07:50:00.000-08:00

Did the video below catch your attention? I bet it did. Now you there's an easy way to put video like this on your web site, and you don't even have to be a geek like me. Instant Video Generator, from Alex Mandossian, Armand Morin, and Rick Raddatz, will be launching later on this month. But there's a special pre-registration offer for the first 800 people that sign up now. You get some really nice bonuses.

6 Free GMail accounts

2004-10-28T14:37:00.000-07:00

I have 6 free gmail accounts to share and decided to reward buyers of Stomping the Search Engines by Brad Fallon. Just click the link above, and once your purchase is complete, send me an email. My contact info is in my profile.

Stomping the Search Engines is a great SEO package that will teach you everything you need to know to achieve top rankings in the search engines. I've been using Brad's techniques with great success, so I highly recommend you give Stomping the Search Engines a try.

Please note that I only have 6 free gmail accounts to give out so I may run out quickly.

Review: PosterSupply.com Affiliate Program

2004-10-27T16:38:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I signed up for the PosterSupply.com Affiliate Program. Based on what they offered, it was a very simple decision to decide to promote their program. Some of the highlights include a generous 27%-32% commission on sales. With a typical framed poster costing over $100, it's easy to see how this can become quite lucrative.

They also provide affiliates with multiple linking methods such as textlinks, banners, and a dynamic poster store that will automatically create a store based on your selections. Other programs that offer this feature only provide html output, but with PosterSupply.com, you also get SSI and PHP code.

The really cool feature is the prebuilt, web services driven, Instant PHP store that lets you set up a 200,000 item poster store in 15 minutes or less. Everything is dynamic, so there's no need to change your site once it's set up. The site is based on SOAP, so unlike a datafeed driven site, you never need to keep on downloading huge datafiles whenever they're updated.

A lot of programs that I promote don't pay me until 30 days after the sale, with PosterSupply.com you get paid weekly. This is really great for affiliates who use PPC to drive sales because it means you'll usually get paid before you are billed for you advertising costs. If done right, even affiliates with low cash reserves can successfully start on the path to creating an nice monthly income stream with a self funding PPC campaign.

As always if you need some help getting started, I'm here to help. Once you sign up for the PosterSupply.com Affiliate Program feel free to send me an email. I'll do whatever I can to help you get up and running.

My Kanoodle BrightAds stats

2004-10-22T23:26:00.000-07:00

It's been almost 2 weeks since I got accepted in the kanoodle Bright Ads program, and so far it hasn't turned out to be what I expected. My CTR is less than 0.5% compared to my AdSense CTR, it doesn't even com close.

I'm going to tweak things a bit, but I have a feeling the ads are not as targeted as the ones the show up with AdSense. Poorly targeted Ads lead to very low CTR values, and that's what seems to be happening here. The ads are too generic.

If Kanoodle hopes to be able to compete with AdSense for ad real estate space on publishers' sites, then they're going to have to do a LOT of work on their targeting algorithm

Just got accepted for Kanoodle BrightAds

2004-10-11T14:40:00.000-07:00

Just got accepted for Kanoodle BrightAds

On Friday I applied for a BrightAds account from Kanoodle, just a few minutes ago I got my acceptance email. I've been plating around with the interface and testing it out for the past few minutes. It's very different from Google's AdSense program. There are a few things that I like and some things that need work.

In terms of ad units, they have a nice range of ad sizes to choose from. Take a look at the following list:

120x600
728x90
754x90
468x60
240x90
125x125
600x400
pop-under 500x500
pop-under 500x500

As you see they have two popup ad units to choose from. The code for the pop-under is automatically generated. This is quite different from Google's AdSense since Google doesn't allow for the use of pop-ups and pop-unders. Of course with so many people blocking pop-ups, I don't know how well this will do. I'm testing out a few, I'll let you know how it goes.

The ad creation page is quite simple and straight forward. You simply select the ad size, customize you colors and hit next. For customization, you can edit the Border, Title, Background, Text and URL colors. There a default color scheme in place, but that's it. There's also no way to save anything you customize, so you'll have to pick your colors every time.

Since there's no equivalent to Google's AdSense Channels, it kind of hard to know exactly which pages are producing income. The reporting page shows you which ad unit was displayed, and also the category of the ads that were shown. At this point in time I'm not exactly show how ads are selected. The matching was good but not perfect. I haven't noticed any visits by any Kanoodle bots, so I'm assuming maybe it's manually selected? If you have more info on this let me know. The reporting is not in real time, but it seems to be pretty fast.

I'm happy with BrightAds at the moment. There are quite a few things that need to be fix in order to make things easier. Since I just got approved, I don't know how good the revenue is, so I can't comment on that yet. Like I said before, the 50/50 split is very generous, but 50% of 10-30 cents is not much.

I'll keep you posted on any new happenings. Also feel free to sign up for your own account, I'd like to hear your experiences

Kanoodle BrightAds

2004-10-08T16:28:00.000-07:00

Kanoodle has just launched BrightAds, a Sponsored Links program that competes with AdSense. According to Kanoodle, the BrightAds difference is:

The only sponsored links provider that maps ads by "groups" and "topics", not keywords (I hope to test this out soon, but I hear it's similar to what FindWhat does)

Clearly Defined Revenue Share (They split revenue 50/50)

High Revenue-Per-Click (No too sure about this, the last time I checked, their bids are lower than Google for many keywords)

The Human Element

No Public Service or Charity Ads (Nice)

PayPal (Even nicer, no more waiting for checks)

Simplicity

Creative Control and Flexibility

Detailed Reporting (I hope it's also realtime or near realtime)

I just signed up for an account today, but it take up to 3 business days to get approved. I'll let you know what I think once I'm in. At this point in time, I don't think it will match AdSense, in terms of revenue generated. But it could be a nice backup.

Finally Google PR Updated

2004-10-08T16:06:00.000-07:00

As of October 6th, Google is now showing updated PR information on the Google Toolbar. According to some PR watchers/trackers it's been over 100 days since the last update.

This blog is now showing a PR of 2. It's been online for almost two months. Nothing to show off about. Hopefully this will chance as more people link to it. Hint, hint :)

Globat $1 Web Hosting for 3 months

2004-10-02T12:04:00.000-07:00

I just became aware of this and knew some of my readers would be interested in this great offer. Globat is offering $1 Web Hosting for the First Three Months! Looks like you have to pay 1 year in advance, but that comes out to only $74.55 for the year. They also give you one Free Year of Domain Registration and a $50 Overture Advertising Credit. When you consider all of this, it's a great offer. If you are looking to get starting with a new affiliate website, you should really consider this offer.

This offer ends on Monday.

AdWords vs AdSense

2004-09-30T05:11:00.000-07:00

In my readings and research, I've noticed that more and more people are saying AdSense when they mean AdWords and vice versa. Makes things a bit confusing when I'm trying to research the latest happenings in those two areas.

An excellent Web Building Resource: The Web Style Guide

2004-09-24T09:30:00.000-07:00

Many years ago when I was first starting to design and develop websites, I found an amazing sited called The Web Style Guide It helped me get up to speed on a lot of web design issues, and I referred to it often. However, as I learned more, I used the site less and less. Just today, I happened to find the site again, and it brought back memories of how useful it was to me. So now I'd like to share the site with you. I hope it's as helpful to you as it was to me.

You can also check out a hard copy version of the site at Amazon.

Firefox: Another Browser to consider.

2004-09-22T15:30:00.000-07:00

The preview release of Firefox, has got to be one of the best web browsers I've used. Don't take this lightly, since I've been a heavy supporter and user of IE since version 3.0

It's powerful, full of great new features, and very user friendly. One of my favorite feature is the ability to open up new tabs. I'm a heavy surfer, which means that it's not unusual for me to have 10 plus browser windows open at the same time. Since I've been blogging and reading blogs more often, I also like the integrated RSS reader. This alerts you of a site's RSS feed on the corner of your window. You can then subscript to it and read feeds directly from the browser.

The #1 thing that helped make the switch from IE to Firefox easier was the fact that, during the install, Firefox can import all your favorites, options, cookies, stored passwords from IE. I don't know about you, but over the years, I've collected a nice bunch of favorites and customized my browser to suit my needs. the fact that I didn't have to start all over again was a very big deal.

So what does Firefox have to do with you as an Affiliate Marketer? Over the next few months, you are sure to notice that a lot of your visitors are using the Firefox browser. As I write this post, 1,671,594 copies of Firefox have been downloaded in just 8 days. This number is sure to grow. I recommend you get Firefox, and start testing your pages to make sure they show correctly. Unlike IE, Firefox is stricter about correct HTML code. You won't be able to get away with some of the things you've been able to do in IE. The last thing you want is to lose a sale because your website was incorrectly coded.

Google Conversion Tracker changes

2004-09-17T20:16:00.000-07:00

Google has changed the AdWords conversion tracker image to a simple block of text. I like the look of this new tracker better since it's less intrusive. On top of that, the background color can now be customized to match your site.

Big Hip: Email Marketing for Free

2004-09-17T16:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I found out about Big Hip, an email marketing service that provides you with powerful tools to manage your email marketing campaigns. I've been with them for less than a day, and I'm already liking their service a lot.

They have some very powerful list management and tracking tools that help you easily manage and track your campaigns. Each subscriber must complete a double opt in process, this makes sure that you only have people who are interested in being on your list.

There's also a cool category feature that lets you define different categorize. New subscribers can then select the categories they are interested in. You can then send mail to only members of a particular category on your list. This feature alone should enable you to target your emails in a way the produce maximum results.

Their statistics are in real time, and you will immediately know how many emails were delivered, and how many people actually opened your email. One feature I really liked, was the geographic statistics. It tells you exactly where your readers are located. You can then even send emails to users in a specific geographic location. Imagine being able to send a special email to only list members located in the UK. Amazing!

Do you want to know which links people are clicking in the emails you send? It's as easy as setting up a custom tracking url. This is built right into the system, and you'll get detailed information on which links were clicked.

Service and support is outstanding. You get unlimited phone and email support. There also a live chat support option. I used it today, and talked to a really helpful rep.

I found out that there some very exciting up coming features just around the corner. First, there's an auto responder feature. This will let you setup automated follow up sequences, based on a schedule you set up. Second, there will soon be a feature that can automatically categorize members based on their behavior over time. I didn't get the full details, but I image that you'll be able to get access to categories such as subscribers that read a certain percentage of your emails.

Finally, if you are familiar with email marketing you know how important it is to get your email delivered. Big Hip is AOL White Listed, and a member of the Bonded Sender Program. This means improved access to over 230 million mailboxes, MSN and hotmail use this program. So if a lot of your list members use MSN or Hotmail, this is an added advantage.

If you are interested in building a list, I highly recommend you take a look Big Hip. The started plan gives you free usage for up to 50 subscribers. You'll be able to send 1,500 a month. This basically means, you'll be able to email a list of 50 people every day of the month without hitting you limit. Other plans with more subscribers range between $19.95 and $249.95 a month.

The Holidays are coming, are you ready?

2004-09-17T00:00:00.000-07:00

The holiday season is just around to corner. Are you ready? For many merchants, the holidays mean an increase in sales and business. This in turn, means more opportunities for affiliate to earn more over the next few months. In order to make to most out of the holiday sales period, you must take some time to prepare your websites for holiday buyers.

Things to consider include:

A color pallet change
Holiday graphics
Optimization of your content for holiday related keywords
Preparation of holiday theme PPC campaigns.
Launching your site early enough to get picked up by the search engines.

One good habit you can pick up from brick and mortar stores is that, they start their promotions very early. I've been seeing Halloween candy and decorations in store for the past few weeks. The earlier you start, the more time you have to make sale and earn commissions. Of course, you can't always start as early as you want. Your merchants also have to be on board.

Revenue Magazine: A magazine for affiliate marketers

2004-09-14T23:57:00.000-07:00

I just recently received issue #3 of Revenue Magazine. From what I know, this is the first magazine dedicated to affiliate marketing. I think it's a great addition to any affiliate marketer's reading list. As affiliate marketers, it's always important to keep up to date with the industry. This field is steadily growing, and the competition is getting tougher.

Unfortunately, the magazine is only published quarterly, so don't expect a new issue every month. Issue #4 will be out in October, if you are interested, you should be able to find it at your local newsstand. You can also subscribe online at the revenue website.

Have any of you had a chance to read a copy of Revenue? I'd like to hear your comments.

Google Adwords Tip: Check your destination URL

2004-09-10T14:40:00.000-07:00

Today while reviewing my campaigns, I had a feeling to check my destination url for a keyword that was getting a lot of clicks. Imagine my horror when I found out the destination url was not for the item the ad was describing. When creating the ads, I made sure that all links were going to a valid url. However, I think, in between the multiple cut and pastes I over looked this ad. Fortunately, I had a very low bid price for that Ad Group and didn't lose much money.

Take a look at your campaigns and ad groups, if you are getting a lot of clicks but no sales, it could be a sign that your destination url may be wrong.

New Google Adwords Power Post Tool

2004-09-08T17:24:00.000-07:00

Here's another Google AdWords tool for you. For those if you familiar with Power Posting, I've designed this tool to help you quickly and easily generate a keyword list in the correct format for power posting. It's pretty straight forward and easy to use.

I spent some hours on this getting the formulas right and everything. If you like it, feel free to leave a donation :)

You can download the file here:
http://www.thebizbank.com/power-post-tool.xls (3.34mb)

It's quite big because I designed it to support up to 4000 keywords. If you are on dial up and want a smaller version of the file let me know.

New Free PPC Bidding tool

2004-09-07T15:04:00.000-07:00

I've recently started running more PPC advertising campaigns on Google AdWords, and one thing that I always worry about is: "How high can I afford to bid on this keyword?" The last thing I want to do is run a campaign that loses money.

I seen tools that tell you your ROI etc, but I could find something that could tell me the max I could bid before I started losing money. I also wanted to find out what my max bid should be if I wanted to achieve a certain ROI.

With this in mind, I spent the past hour or so creating a tool that would answer my questions. I've uploaded it to one of my servers, and you are free to download an check it out. Please let me know what you think. I checked my math, but if you find an error let me know. I'd also like to know if there are other tools you'd like to see.

You can download the excel file at http://www.thebizbank.com/PPC-Bidding-Tool.xls

Free .info domains

2004-09-03T18:56:00.000-07:00

I've just become aware of two domain name registration companies that are offering free registrations of .info domain names. I haven't yet registered any names with either company but, if I had to choose, I'd feel more comfortable ordering from NameSecure. They also have a tell a friend form that will send you a 10% discount on their other services and products. Have a friend fill out the form, or email me if you'd like me to send you the discount.

Check out both companies below:

Name Secure or their tell a friend form

DomainSite

AdSense News: Up to 3 AdSense units on a page

2004-09-01T15:12:00.000-07:00

Google just announced that publishers can now have up to 3 ad units per page. This means more opportunities to monetize your content.

8 Ways to boost your AdSense profitability and Income

2004-08-31T08:42:00.000-07:00

The nice people over at Google have published a mini guide to help you improve your AdSense profitability.

Take a look, try and test them, and see how well they work for you. I've already had success using some of the tips on my sites. I'll be giving my thoughts on these tips after you've had some time to read them.

Keyword Research Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool and more

2004-08-30T23:12:00.000-07:00

My number one free way to do research for your next website to build is with the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool By spending a few minutes with this tool I can get a good idea of what kind of demand a market has. I also use the View Bids tool to easily see how much other advertisers are willing to pay per click. Usually a high bid price means there's a lot of money being made in that market.

The next step is to build a quality content site focusing on this niche. Because of the competition in this field, it will be tougher to get high rankings on the popular keywords. Focus on creating a large list of related keywords with less competition. Another good tool to try is Wordtracker. Using Wordtracker you can find out which keywords get high search counts, and few results pages in the Search Engines.

The main source of income from this site will come from your affiliate links and AdSense income. You can even run PPC campaigns to get visitors to your site, just make sure you bid low. The income from your AdSense will be enough to cover your advertising.

My contact info

2004-08-30T13:23:00.000-07:00

For any one who needs to contact me, my contact info is now in my profile.

Another High Paying Affiliate program

2004-08-30T12:02:00.000-07:00

Online dating is a hot, and growing market. So it's no surprise that there are a lot of opportunities for affiliates to make money in this market. I just recently joined the Match.com Affiliate program, it looks very promising. The payout ranges from $18.71 - $65.70. They provide a lot of banners in many different sizes to choose from, and they're also categorized so you can choose the right one to reach your target audience.

Another cool feature is the fact that they offer direct deposit. I have come to appreciate this feature since there has been more than one occasion when I almost threw out an affiliate check with other junk mail.

In the next few weeks, I'll be building a web site to promote this program. I'm also thinking about documenting my results in a blog of some sort. If you are interested in following along, let me know so I can gauge interest.

Finally, the Match.com Affiliate Program is 2-tier, so you can also build a team of affiliates on a 2nd level. I'll gladly offer any kind of assistance needed to help all members of my team get up and running. To join my team, just use this link, then email me when ever you need help.

Consider Google AdSense

2004-08-29T21:45:00.000-07:00

It's been over a year since the Google AdSense program was launched for web publishers, and from my experience, it's been one of the best performing program I've been a part of.

The fact of the matter is that not everyone who comes to your web pages is interested in what you have to offer. The majority of times they leave your site, leaving you with no income from your traffic. That's were Google AdSense comes in handy. The ads that show up on your site are chosen to fit closely to your site's content. This creates a situation where your visitor sees ads that they are most likely very interested in.

Many times, I've had situations were the income from AdSense outperforms the income from the affiliate programs I'm promoting on a site. I'm not alone with this observation, and many other affiliate marketers have also shared the same experience. In the coming months, it will be interesting to see how the affiliate marketing world reacts to this.

If you are just getting started building a new website to promote an affiliate program, you should consider integrating AdSense into your site. You may be pleasantly surprised with your results.

Please note that if you don't have an AdSense account, you should hold off on applying for an account before your site is completed. Make sure you have solid content on your site, or you may end up not being approved for the program. If this happens, take some time to beef up your site's content and try again.

Take the Google AdSense Tour for a detailed overview of the program. In the future, I'll be sharing some tips in the future that will help you make the most out of the AdSense program.

John Reese's "Traffic Secrets" ... Free?

2004-08-27T15:27:00.000-07:00

I'm sure a lot of people will be very interested in this deal. Gary Ambrose and Co have an interesting offer right now. You'll get a chance chance to win a copy of John Reese's "Traffic Secrets" There's no purchase invloved. check out his site for more details.

Brad Fallon's Stomping the Search Engines

2004-08-27T13:38:00.000-07:00

I've recently been hearing a lot about Brad Fallon's Stomping the Search Engines package. Apparently, he used SEO techniques to help his 6-month old Website make over $156,037 in Sales. For a new website, that quite an impressive accomplishment. I haven't yet bought the course, but I did check out a sample audio and subscribe to his seven part course titled "The 7 Mistakes Search Engine Optimizers Make" If you click the link you will see the sign up form about 4 screens down the page. It's a great read, so I recommend you check it out. Even if you don't plan on getting the course. I picked up a few good tips, and I consider myself to be quite knowledgeable in the SEO field.

Also if you've tried out the course, I'd like to hear your comments.

High Payout Affiliate Programs - VMC Satellite and Rapid Satellite

2004-08-24T19:20:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of affiliate programs that pay big! If you can establish yourself in one of the high paying niches, you will do quite well. The unfortunate thing is that everyone and their dog are also working hard to get high rankings in those niches, so competition is very tough.

One area that pays quite well is the Satellite Market: Check out VMC Satellite and Rapid Satellite, you can make up to $100 per sale.

Sign Up with VMC Satellite - Dish Network
Sign Up with RapidSatellite - DirecTV

If you sign up with the links above, let me know. I'll help you get started so you can make money quickly.

Google Adwords

2004-08-24T18:38:00.000-07:00

It's quite likely that you've heard a lot about Google AdWords and how great and how easy it is to get targeted customers to your site in minutes. If you've never used Google Adwords to promote your site or other Affiliate programs, I recommend you give it a try. You can usually setup and AdWords account in about 15 minutes. Your ads will display on the Google search results page. If you choose to have your ads syndicated, they will also display on Google Partner sites. In the future I'll provide different tips and techniques that will help you get the most out of Google Adwords.

Also Check out these 2 eBooks on the subject. Perry Marshall and Chris Carpenter are both well respected experts in the field.

Perry Marshall's Definitive Guide to Google AdWords
Chris Carpenter's Google Cash

A look at the Major Affiliate Networks

2004-08-23T17:06:00.000-07:00

One of the easiest ways to find new affiliate programs to join is to sign up with one or more of the major affiliate networks. The two that I highly recommend are Commission Junction and LinkShare. A lot of the major ecommerce web site have their programs administered by either Commission Junction or LinkShare.

If you are just getting started, you will appreciate the fact that Commission Junction will combine your earnings from all your merchants. On the other hand Linkshare will not do this. You usually need to have approximately $25 in commissions with a merchant before you get paid.

There are certain disadvantages to being in a large network such as Commission Junction. One of the major concerns has to do with the fact that programs such as Norton Internet Security and Firewall block affiliate links. This means you lose out on commissions on sales that you've made. I've heard that the major affiliate networks are in discussions with Norton to get this issue cleared up. I'll keep you posted on any major updates.

[New: Commission Junction is now serving ads from different domains. I haven't verified this but, it may have solved this issue. I'll do further research into this matter and report back.]

NOTE:
My thanks to Sebastian for pointing this out, I incorrectly stated that linkshare combines payments from different merchants. My entry has been updated to reflect this change.

Introduction: Affiliate Marketers blog

2004-08-18T13:59:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my Affiliate Marketers blog. My aim is to create a resource to assist people make the most out of Affiliate marketing. I'll be posting my own thoughts, tips, links to interesting articles or news that will be of interest to affiliate marketers.

A little info about me: I started out doing web design in 1996 and slowly moved into web development. Around 2000 I developed my own textbooks exchange site and that's when I started experimenting with affiliate marketing. It took me 4 years to finally get things to a point where I was happy with the results of my efforts.

It's my hope that the information you get from this site will speed up the time needed to reach your goals. If you ever have questions or comments, please send them to me. I'm always happy to hear from my readers