Dec 20

Acai affiliates, you suck

Blogs, Can of SPAM, Cardinal Sin, Internet Marketing, Mind over Pixels, Moniez, Techniques, Virtual War 21 Comments »

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Yes, really, you do.

Why? Because you are doing it wrong. For those who are unfamiliar with the acai berry niche, 90% of affiliates do the following:

  1. Go to http://www.laurasweightloss.com/
  2. Register a girlsnameweightloss.com domain
  3. Set up a blog with the exact same pictures and exact same layout as laura’s
  4. Fire up a keyword tool, get approximately the same list as every other affiliate
  5. Set up prosper202 and,
  6. Fire up their adwords campaign
  7. Optimize the keyword list and bids.

What is wrong with that, one might ask. Well, if it happens 10, 12, 30, even 40 times its ok. When every single fucking acai berry affiliate does the exact same thing, then guess what? The niche gets saturated! And then all those affiliates whine about their profit loss, no sales days and google slaps. (update: as this post is written, there has been a report on wickedfire that an adwords account got deleted for promoting acai berries)

“Ok then you smartass, how would you do it?”

How would I dive in an oversaturated niche? Why, with a different angle of approach of course!

  • First of all, I would find a way to use Oprah’s name in my campaign. There is a guy who is already doing that, and the others call him an idiot. He is not, unless he gets caught. By using Russian dont-see-dont-care servers and fake whois (you dont need an amazing domain, even oprah-acai-berry-official.info will work) you can abuse this for a month or two, and then rotate everything to avoid getting caught. This is a downright scam, so newbies should not even attempt it (newbies in fraud, not IM). I did warn you.
  • Second idea. I would resurrect the whole damn history of weight loss supplements, and set up a blog with articles on why acai berry is better than each one. Why? Because I would create a keyword list for every old weight loss niche as if I were to promote it today. (it took me less than a minute to find 5 names http://www.philkaplan.com/thefitnesstruth/update.htm)

Why do that? Because, when you have the keyword lists of OLD weightloss niches, you can set your adgroups on each one, and write ads that say something like “Natural fat burners are a scam. Find out here”.

I would hire a good copywriter to make me articles debunking the INSERT OLD SCAMMY OFFER HERE, and gradually sell acai berry as the new “safe” offer. Rinse and repeat on every old niche. Cheap targetted clicks.

“People don’t look for old products!”

Yes they do.

  • Third idea. Hug and cuddle all the victims of the other acai berry affiliates. People got scammed, and the internet is full of scam reports and complaints and whatnot. Set up a site pointing out the scammy acai berry offers, and subtly suggest the “safe” acai offers. These visitors are interested in weightloss as well, they are just a bit more clever than the rest. If you can convince them, you can sell.

Visitors looking for acai scams can also get foraged for their emails by giving out free pdf reports. You can set up a forum on the site for repeat visits, you can tell them which phone numbers to call for credit cancellations, you can have instant non stop testimonials. You can also “rat out” the sites that are scammy from other affiliates, but of course you will not “rat out” the real ones. Simply ask for slapped abandoned acai blogs in #cakes and you got like a dozen to rat out every month. Make it look like a victory in your site “Another acai scammer taken down by ASR”.

Just play the good guy, find the least scammy acai berry offer, and point the visitors to it. “ASR approved” badge on the banner. (Acai Scam Revealed)

This is not just about acai berry niche, you should use your imagination on everything. This post will either rekindle the whole acai niche or rain a world of hatred on me. Maybe both.

The precious few will get the hint.

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Popularity: 6% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: ,

Dec 15

You can now set your own Googlebot crawl speed

Feed the Spiders, Google, Heavy construction, Internet Marketing No Comments »

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You can now set your own crawl speed on Google Webmaster Tools. What does this mean?

Many things actually.

1st, this shows that Google acknowledges that its automated settings are sometimes crappy, and an algorithm cannot always predict the perfect crawl rate for a site. Google is seldomly known to give options to the webmaster that affect rankings.

2nd, this makes Google Webmaster Tools even better than they already were.

All of you newbies, try to resist the urge to set the crawl rate at max. You don’t need it. On 99% of sites, the automatic setting works fine. There are only a few cases where you might need a custom setting. For example I have a few sites with thousands of pages, but only 10% of them are indexed. I assume that setting a faster crawl rate on those will help index a few more thousand pages.

It will be rare for someone to want to reduce it, despite the fact that Googlebot is the most frequent visitor, the automated setting is usually optimal. Maybe on huge indexed database sites? Nah, not even then.

So, when should you increase it? If you have a very new site, setting the bar at max might increase the indexing time. No idea, I am just guessing here. Try it.

Also, you might want to increase it a bit if you have a frequently updating site and you don’t see your new posts on a search after a few hours. Although, as I said, the automated settings usually adapt to that scenario. But, if it does fail, here is your setting that will fix it.

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Popularity: 5% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , ,

Dec 03

Affiliate mini site example

Doodling, Heavy construction, Internet Marketing, Noobs, Techniques 9 Comments »

Many newbie affiliates are swamped in the sheer amount of information when they first come in this industry. It is understandable, without a background in some sort of entrepreneurship, or at least marketing, it is too much to grasp. So, for my newbie readers, I will talk about a fine example of a minisite, and we will also learn at last what I mean when I say “SEO’d to shit”.

The student credit card niche is one that is quite competitive, and that is because there is money in it. I found this site, http://www.studentcreditcards.com which is the textbook example of how a niche affiliate site should be like. Open the site in a new tab so you can see it as we discuss about it.

First of all, the layout is simple and nice, nothing to say here other than that it works. Sometimes clean is good. The lady on the laptop is a no-copyright image, free to use. The header has links with anchor text “student cards, credit school, consolidate, credit reports and blog”. Obviously, these are the targeted keywords for this guy’s SEO campaign. All is good, but I would whore it out even more, writing the link as “credit card blog” and “credit home”.

The domain itself is amazing, studentcreditcards.com, and a newbie affiliate is unlikely to get his hands on something similar, but the important thing here is to understand the power in keyword domains for this technique. Please note that this is a special case, and the keywords in the domain are 2, yes two, “student” and “creditcard”. We have to consider it as two, although it might be in reality 3. It just goes together, you cannot say “hard” and “drive”. Again, special case, in other niches, we go for 2 (two) keyword domain names. Always. But, if you happen to fall on a 3 word domain that the phrase has a lot of traffic, by all means register it. I have a longtail keyword domain that ranks (for its own phrase)  with only a page and a title.

Ok, onto the pages now. A simple glance and you can see that there is a lot of text, that means plenty of spider food, springled with seo keywords like “fico score, negative credit profile, credit line” and a bunch of others. Please note that the page is very light, fast loading and plain html. Now, I personally would not go for plain html, I would make it a blog. Studentcreditcards.com has a blog, so that saves the problem a bit.

When we click the blog, we basically see a lot of articles, about credit report and credit cards and debt consolidation, all the classic keywords, slapped on a simple template, with a blog, used for its pinging utility. They update with a post every once in a while, which are basically more “credit report” articles, and that keeps the freshness factor at satisfying levels with minimal effort.

So, this is a good example of a niche affiliate site, please take note on the points I suggest to change, and simply make one for yourself. This site is ridiculously easy to rank for “student credit cards”. Throw a few dozen incoming links with the above anchor text, a few quality ones from nice sites, and you are done. Onto the next project.

What you need to make a site like this is:

  • A keyword domain
  • A clean theme
  • 20-30 articles
  • 50 backlinks with the keyword domain in them

The bare minimum for a site like this is 10$, if you plan to do all the writing and linkbuilding of course. A more modest price with quality work would be +50$ for the articles, and another 50$ for modest linkbuilding. There is no cap of course… A 110$ investment on a procedure that you are familiar with can allow you to pump one of these every month easily. A credit card signup is about 30$, so you will get the initial cost back very fast. Learn, adapt, and replicate.

Popularity: 4% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , ,

Dec 03

Be the leader of your tribe

Cybertowns, Doodling, Internet Marketing, Mind over Pixels, Social abuse, Web 2.0 Cutesy Bullshit 1 Comment »

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I recently became involved in community building, and I must tell you, it is hard work. The time it takes to gather that group of people, to give them focus, to coordinate their efforts into a common goal, it is all hard and takes enormous amounts of time.

But the payoff is worth it. A post on Traffick discusses Seth Godin’s Tribes, but I am not talking about that specifically. Please note the part where it says:

Take Avinash Kaushik’s common-sense exhortation that “aggregate” is never the name of your website visitor. If you get bogged down in aggregate statistics, you might be overwhelmed with just how many loosely-engaged, “valueless” clickthroughs come to your website every week. Yes, but why not make an exercise out of ignoring the 80% of people who aren’t connecting with you and zero in on just the 20% of those who do? Study their characteristics. Build and grow with them. (And it’s easier than ever to study them. This week, using Google Analytics’ custom segment features, I hand-built a segment called “engaged quintile,” for the 20% of website visitors on a client’s site that stayed a long time and viewed many pages. By definition, guess what the “bounce rate” was for that segment? Yes, it was 0%! It’s heartening and inspiring when you look at life through that lens.)

When I analyzed this blog a while ago, I did the exact same thing. Note where I said, nevermind the “hit and run” visitors, look at the loyal 20-25%.

This table shows us something interesting. While 75% of the visitors barely skim the site (maybe its the big fat smileys on top that deter them, but who cares…) we have a loyal percentage of ~20% who are definately reading the posts, and when we factor in the repeat visits from the other tables, we see that they do so often.

Please note how I completely ignored the bouncers, and focused on my loyal readers right from the start. Someone might say, what, you cut out 80% of the visitors! Are you crazy?

Well, yes, I am, and apparently I am also right. Why? Because we don’t give a shit about the “hit and run’s”. I have an internet marketing blog, that does not care to appeal to everyone. Those that actually like it, stick around long time, because they recognize the real value in this. Those are the guys I want, not the visitors from random sources. A skim through the keywords that brought in traffic for me shows these irrelevant ones:

  • “what is the best seo tool”, I should redirect these guys to either a dickroll or a 7$ ebook…
  • sensational.com affiliate, no I am not. Nothing to see here, move along.
  • avatar james cameron torrent, WTF?
  • boobs that we can see, do boobs come out in the invisible version now?
  • wholesale glowsticks, just proves my point.

No, I don’t need those visitors. But the more visitors you have, the better, right?

Wrong. A visitor is a liability, unless he “converts”. At the time of conversion, he turns from a liability into an asset. Until that time, he only wastes bandwidth. A conversion in my eyes can be a lot of things, here are some:

The visitor converts when:

  1. He clicks an ad
  2. He buys a product
  3. He downloads an info product
  4. He registers and becomes an active member
  5. He posts a useful comment
  6. He becomes a loyal reader
  7. He subscribes to RSS or email updates
  8. He blogs about something I said
  9. He links to one of my pages
  10. He recommends my content to others through other media like word of mouth or msn link sharing or whatever
  11. He completes a poll/survey
  12. He builds brand awareness (this one is for big time guys, you just need to grasp it, not use it)

Note that not all of the above points can be directly tracked, but most can. We can track 1,2,3,4,5,7,11. Indirectly, we can track 6,8,9. Please note that I did not include “click the digg button” on purpose.

Do you see now why I wrote in my analysis, screw the others, the 20% is the one that matters? That 20% represents any and all of the above list. That is why I care more about time spent on site, repeat visits, frequency of visit, and RSS readers. And while, yes, chaos theory does prove that the visitor who came in looking for “boobs that we can see” could be a 16 year old computer geek, who will jerk off on boobsurfer, wipe himself, take note of the Wickedfire banner, click it, have a revelation the likes of “omg I can make monies on the interwebs”, spend 200+ hours reading and posting stupid questions and get dickrolled an average of 5 times (actual statistical data), and then rise up in 2 years  as the next internet marketing genius to become rich, powerful and famous, nevertheless, I HIGHLY DOUBT IT.

Another reason why social bookmarking traffic sucks big time is this.  Do a tracking experiment, and see how many visitors with social site referrers slide into any of the spots above. Very few usually. And while you may see RSS subscriber numbers going up, it will deflate as fast as it came. Most of the time, social traffic is a big waste of time and effort.

In summary, focus on your loyal readers, on the active members of your community, on those people that are real assets to you. It takes hard work and lots of time, but the rewards are huge. Focus on what matters, and create a little part of the world that is your own little tribe. It is the apotheosis of being an alpha male.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , ,

Nov 25

AdBrite introduces Cost-Per-Click Auction for graphical ads

Doodling, Internet Marketing, Mind over Pixels, Moniez, Sold! To the man clicking, WebWriMo challenge 1 Comment »

AdBrite has launched a massive cost-per-click (CPC) auction for graphical banner ads. AdBrite advertisers can now pay for graphical banner advertising in the same way they pay for search placements and text ads– paying only when their ad is clicked.

CPC auction pricing is a significant departure from traditional CPM (cost per impression) rates paid by most advertisers for graphical banner ads.

When direct-response advertisers pay per impression, they assume the full risk of impressions that may never convert into clicks or sales. In AdBrite’s CPC banner auction, display advertisers pay only for clicks. This lowers advertiser risk while increasing performance.

In addition to advertiser benefits, CPC pricing rewards AdBrite’s high-quality publishers by compensating them for the full benefit of their contributions to each advertiser. Many AdBrite publishers will see a significant increase in revenue.
 

More affiliate industry news. I should get out more. In summary, advertisers could only bid cpm for image banners in the past, now they can bid ppc.

Why should I care, you might ask?

This move is very interesting in many ways. First of all, this will reduce publishers revenues. Why? Because all the smart affiliates used adbrite as an easy way to get cpm ads. I know I did. I used adbrite graphic only banners on my funny pics and video sites, because they were so crappy, the cpm networks did not approve them. And many other affiliates did. Now, from experience, those banners actually do get clicks, so that might counteract the lost revenues. The clicks are mainly due to Adbrite’s slack in incentives, deceiving graphics and all those “CLICK HERE” and “YOU WON”.

On the other hand, Adbrite has a general reputation for being crappy converter for advertisers. This move will draw more advertisers to the marketplace, thus increasing the available ads and general bid prices through competition. So, that way publishers might see higher bids and more ad spots getting filled up.

Apart from hearsay, Adbrite does infact have a huge partner network. I know for a fact that this was a great place to get cheap clicks for Crush and IQ crap offers. Maybe now Adbrite will turn into the next option after MSN and Yahoo.

If you are in any business for enough time, you know that there is a load of cash to be made on new stuff, when you dive in early. Take a dive.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , ,

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