Chasing the dream… and finding out exactly what that means
Archive for July, 2006
Attending teleseminars
Jul 24th
If you’re continually being asked to attend teleseminar calls, there’s a reason for it.
The reason is simply that people want to sell products. That’s what motivates them most of all.
Often, teleseminars are attended by people who have been led to believe they’ve found that elusive black box that they only have to turn on to start the money flowing. If you’re interested in a teleseminar, that’s fine, but my advice to you is that it’s best to check whether it will be a worthwhile use of your time beforehand.
Basically, a teleseminar will be composed of two things:
- Useful information for those that attend.
- Some form of selling or pre-selling for current or future product offerings.
Teleseminars are similar in a way to infomercials, and often there is a product sale involved. If no product is described for sale then the reason for the teleseminar may well be to prepare for future selling, making you more receptive to information that will be forthcoming.
Note that none of this is evil. It’s simply the way things work. Everybody needs to make money! Always attend a teleseminar if you believe that it will fit with your business plans; you may be able to make money out of a product that is being sold, and you may even be able to make a joint-venture partnership out of it!
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
More on AdWords Quality Scoring
Jul 14th
On one of Digitalpoint’s forums, the new AdWords landing page quality score issue is being hotly debated. On this page, people are suggesting that the pricing policies used by Google AdWords may be illegal.
If you visit a shop to purchase something, you would not expect to be offered a price of £10 to buy a screwdriver that somebody else was able to purchase for 10p just because you look like a roughneck, yet this in effect is exactly what Google is doing in the digital domain. They’ve been doing this for some time, but the current situation with certain keywords attracting huge minimum bids has brought this issue into sharp relief.
It is illegal under certain circumstances to refuse to sell a product to a customer. However, Google is not refusing to sell a product. Google is, instead, quoting an uneconomical price for that product.
Google is refusing to give details of the system of quality scoring that they use, to prevent the system being manipulated by any other means than guesswork and experimentation. However, transparency in terms of pricing structure is simply not available, and this may fall foul of the law.
In a reply to somebody who was hit with a massive price hike in their minimum bid for certain keywords and logged a support request, it was confirmed that their landing page quality score had been adversely affected. When asked what they could do to improve their quality score, they were met with the following response:
“Unfortunately we cannot go into specifics about what changes you can make to get a better Quality Score other than to make sure that you are following the posted guidelines and that you consider the quality of search user’s experience when thinking about the advertising experience you are providing.”
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
Opportunity knocks for AdWorders
Jul 13th
One of my successful campaigns has been hit by Google’s landing page quality scoring, although, to date, most seem unaffected.
There’s an opportunity here! What we all need to do is to learn exactly what Google wants to see in landing pages. I’m guessing that a 500-word article along with affiliate links and AdSense are not what Google considers to provide a good user experience. If you have a site that actually looks like it’s been constructed with care, as opposed to thrown together in a couple of hours, I think that’s more likely to attract a good quality score from Google.
The opportunity is as follows. Google is now serving less ads. The search volumes will not have been affected by this change. Therefore, there will be less competition for the ads. As long as you can present a good web site to Google, you should still be able to find cheap clicks, and they should be cheaper than before. There is an opportunity to rank well for phrases that had a great deal of competition in the past!
That’s the way I’m thinking about things at the moment. It’s worth hanging in there. It has been claimed that Google is trying to weed out the MFA (“Made For AdSense”) sites, and keeping the quality ones. Therefore, Google are trying to reward the people that pay more attention to their sites.
I’ve logged a support ticket for Google to tell me why it is the case that some of my pages have a low quality score, and I’ll pass on anything that I feel I can share. I’m half-expecting a canned response, so I’ll see what happens and report.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
CJ's new Javascript links: the secrets revealed
Jul 13th
I thought I’d take a closer look at CJ’s new Javascript affiliate links, with a view to seeing exactly how they work.
With this in mind, I decided to take a detailed look at the Javascript source code that will be presented to a browser when an impression of a link occurs. It’s always worth looking at any third-party Javascript to see what it does, for two reasons:
- You can make sure that your own page is compatible with it.
- You need to do it in order to know that the third-party Javascript is not posing a security risk to your web page.
The source code of the link that I decided to investigate is as follows: More >
Dynamic keyword content in AdWords landing pages
Jul 12th
If you want a simple approach to getting dynamic keyword content in AdWords pages, this is just what you need! It’s short and sweet, using php.
As always, when using php code within your web page, remember to give it an extension of .php instead of .html.
Firstly, your page will need to know what keyword was used in the search. You can either specify this explicitly for each keyword with a query parameter, or use something like the following at the end of your URL:
?kw={KeyWord}
If you already have any query parameters in your URL, you will need to replace the question mark with an ampersand symbol “&” when you add this parameter to the end of your URL.
To add this keyword to your page wherever you like, just use the following code:
<?php echo $_GET["kw"]; ?>
What happens if the page was accessed without a query parameter? In this case, you would get nothing output. If you want to guard against this, providing a default for the case that no query parameters have been specified, use the following code at the start of your page:
<?php
if (!isset($_GET["kw"])) {
$_GET["kw"] = "default keyword text";
}
?>
Replace default keyword text with whatever you would like to appear if the keyword has not been specified in the query string.
Just make sure that if you use this technique, you only bid on keywords that give you a page that makes sense. If you use the {KeyWord} shortcut, don’t bid on misspellings and the like, because your page will contain those misspellings. If you are bidding on misspellings, write out your URLs in full.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
Google changes quality scoring for AdWords
Jul 12th
The rankings of ads in AdWords, and the minimum prices paid per keyword, are being shaken up as Google rolls out a new quality score for the service.
In this post on the Inside AdWords blog, Landing page quality update, Google state that they are making changes to the way landing pages are scored.
This may be beneficial, or it may be troublesome, for those of you using Google’s AdWords method of PPC marketing. If somebody else’s quality score for an ad for the given keyword ranks lower than your own after this update, you will make a gain for the quality score for that keyword, but you will lose out if your own quality score goes lower. Personally, I am seeing more impressions, more clicks and lower costs, but a lower click-through rate, over my whole set of campaigns when I compare the statistics of 1st to 4th July to those of 8th to 11th July. If this is a sign of things to come, then I am quite pleased!
One of the factors that influences your landing page quality score is going to be the relevance of your keyword to the landing page, so a certain amount of optimisation to rank for that keyword, as if you were trying to rank for the free listings, certainly won’t go amiss.
When designing landing pages, it’s a good idea to consider common sense. Is your page informative and helpful to a user? Do you have any original content on it that pertains to the subject matter of the keyword? If so, then you stand to get a good quality score for your landing page.
There’s a way of dynamically varying the text on your page, according to the keyword used to access your page. I’ll be talking about that soon.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
Buy your word at …
Jul 8th
This is just a personal rant, and I offer some advice that you can take or leave, as you choose. I believe that people buying links from “500 Words” Link Sizzler sites are simply wasting their money.
It all started with the “million dollar homepage.” I won’t link to it, because I believe it’s got enough links already. You can find it in a Google search if you don’t already know where to find it. In the case of that homepage, Alex Tew, a student who needed a couple of new pairs of socks, sold pixels from his site at $1 per pixel. Pixels had to be ordered in 10×10 blocks, and each pixel was linked to a specific website of your choice.
That was fair enough, and it was successful for the person who came up with the idea for the site. As I write this, the site has a Google PageRank of 7, and it probably boosted the rankings of all those who purchased links from the site.
In the case of the link sizzler sites, you are buying a link on the site that consists of a word as your anchor text. No matter how successful these link sizzler sites become, you’re not likely to rank well for a single word in the search engines just by having one link from one of them. You may even harm your rankings if search engines think that you are using less than legitimate tactics to improve your ranking. Also, these sites are not news, except, perhaps, for the first one. How are they going to develop any page rank and actually be worth something to you?
This represents my personal opinion. If you disagree with it, fine! Post a comment. Maybe you know more about search engine optimisation than I do; indeed, many people do, and I could be wrong. However, my advice is simply this: don’t waste your money on these links. The only people making money out of them are the people who sell the links.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
How to personalise sales pages
Jul 8th
Somebody has asked me how I personalise a lot of my sales pages, and I thought it was a good topic to discuss here. Personalising sales pages is an important technique to use with relationship marketing, and it’s a technique that can increase conversions.
Obviously, you need to know the name of the person visiting your website before you can personalise your pages. My pages therefore only become personalised when the name of the person has been revealed to the system. This usually comes from a subscription to Aweber. Whenever somebody subscribes to a mailing list of mine, I ask for their name and email address.
Next, in Aweber’s web form generation interface, I check that “Post CGI variables to the thank you page” is selected. This means that Aweber will send a list of query parameters to the “Thank You” page, in which I also include my sales page. One of these query parameters is called name, and it includes the name entered by the user. In my sales pages, whenever I wish to use the name and personalise the sales page, I use the following code somewhere near the top of the page:
<?php
// Get first name.
$firstname = $_GET["name"];
$firstname = ereg_replace(" .*", "", $firstname);
$firstname = ucfirst(strtolower($firstname));
if ($firstname == "") {
$firstname = "Friend";
}
?>
The first statement retrieves the name from the list of query parameters. The second statement strips out names beyond the first one supplied. The third statement capitalises the first letter, and puts all other letters in lower case.
The purpose of the last statement is to provide a first name of Friend in the case that the page was visited somehow without a query parameter for name.
You can then place the name in your sales page directly, by including the following code wherever you want the name to be used:
<?php echo $firstname; ?>
Note that your page must have a php extension, or you must otherwise inform your server that the page is to be processed through php. In all other respects, your page can be the same as a standard static page with a html extension. Also note that the code that sets the $firstname variable (the main part of the code) must be reached in the source code of the page before the name is printed.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
How to choose a domain name
Jul 7th
Many people will tell you that a dot com domain will gain a higher ranking in search engine results than any other top-level domain.
I’ve found some evidence that tends to back this up. In this article, Distribution of Domain Types, Alexa have published an analysis of the top 65,000 web sites in terms of reach (proportion of web users that visit a given site). It can be clearly seen that dot com domains dominate, getting at least 60% of the reach at any given level.
In EzSEO Newsletter number 119, Andy Williams states his belief that domain names that contain hyphens tend to do less well in the search engines than domain names that do not contain hyphens. He decided to move one of his sites from a hyphenated domain to a non-hyphenated domain using 301 redirects, and he noticed greater indexing by the search engines.
What can be inferred from these two pieces of information? To me, they suggest that the search engines are giving a greater value to dot com domains, which suggest “we were here first;” and the same thing is suggested by non-hyphenated domain names. I will be considering these factors when I develop new web-based projects.
For more information about php, visit php.net.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
Search Engine Optimisation advice
Jul 5th
This is just a brief entry about a site that I think is particularly good. I’ve known about this site for some time, but I’ve never published a link to it here, and I think it deserves one:
Run by Dr Andy Williams, the advice on offer is very high-quality and well presented, and he’s also published a new eBook called “Creating Fat Affiliate Sites.” If you’re concentrating on search engine optimisation rather than pay-per-click, you need to have up-to-date, in-depth knowledge of what is required, and resources such as these are worth their weight in gold!
In all credit to him, he is one of the few people around in Internet marketing that actually seems to care for his subscriber base, and treat them like people, rather than automated vending machines. This is quite rare and refreshing, and anybody like that deserves a mention in a post on this site. The above isn’t an affiliate link, and it’s unsolicited.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer