Archive for category Affiliate Marketing
Quick SEO Tips: Taking Remedial SEO Action Using GWT
Posted by Lee in Affiliate Marketing on April 27, 2012
If you’ve got a page that’s not ranking and you want to use your own internal link juice rather than spend considerably more time getting external links, then pop over Google Webmaster Tools and check “Links To Your Site” (found under “Your site on the web”) and see which of your pages have the most links in and then establish if you could legitimately link to the page you want to bump up a bit – obviously not forgetting the relevant anchor text.
Then also check the “Internal Links” report and see which are the strongest pages internally and then leverage those pages too.
Obviously you’ll often find your homepage has the strongest link juice, but you can have some surprisingly strong internal pages which could be leveraged.
If you want to enhance this “strategy” you could use the mozBar and their Strongest Pages tool too.
But wait, there’s more ….
If you run a blog as part of a main site then you’ve got the weapons for mass destruction at your finger-tips. Have two browsers open. With your list of target keywphrases at the ready in the one search Google (and the other engines afterwards) for:
site:www.mydomain.com “target keyphrase”
in the other do:
site:www.mydomain.com/blog “target keyphrase”
[if that's the location of your blog]
this will give you a list of your strongest pages on your site for that keyphrase and the strongest in your blog. If your objective is to rank higher for the main site then use those linking opportunities in your blog to increase page rank and relevance (via anchor text) to that page.
Simples.
Are Malformed Links Any Good?
Posted by Lee in Affiliate Marketing on April 27, 2012
When I got interviewed last year by the Telegraph for this piece featuring my Easter eggs site I was over-the-moon. Who wouldn’t be? Then I was gutted to find out that they cocked up my link. After contacted them several times they still haven’t changed it. But I was still happy that I got the exposure.
But looking back, almost a year later, what have I got from it? Well I’d not really put two and two together until this morning.
Even with Easter a distant memory whilst people tried to enjoy the summer, get ready to go back to school, think about Christmas then actually enjoy it, I kept getting a good number of direct visitors.
I looked a the nature of the traffic and they were from a diverse array of cities – obviously with a London bias and there wasn’t anyone pinging the bugger out of the site looking at the network locations too.
Wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that people would click on the link, see they’ve encoded the link wrong and then rectify – just as I did? Seeing as I’ve done no email marketing for the domain since last Easter I think that’s fairly reasonable.
The only nagging thing in my mind was the large growth in direct traffic before the date, but looking at the previous month, it happened there too.
But what about link juice? Does Google et al follow mall-formed links? I’d probably say that they do when they’re caused by just adding non-alphanumeric characters to the domain extension when their can be no other domain extension it could be.
Another thought was that if MajesticSEO can find them, then so can Google – they did, found it, however because the domain was the anchor text too. I’m positive Google would pass on some weight from it.
Also I did have a nice growth in links after that date too. I did no link-building/acquisition after Easter last year so did I get links from people that read the article – it’d be difficult to tell. But this chart is nice:
How To Get More ReTweets
Posted by Lee in Affiliate Marketing on April 27, 2012
An awesome presentation, you may have to join the dots, but take a look at this analysis of retweets:
Some People Are Big In Their Own Bath Time
Posted by Lee in Affiliate Marketing on April 27, 2012
… let’s hope they don’t drown.
Over recent years I’ve come to believe that 95% of what self-proclaimed “guru’s” say is utter bullshit. They try obtain sycophants like Panini football stickers with the aim in having sufficient idolisers for adequately attended circle-jerks on request.
I couldn’t care less how many ‘friends’ I have on Facebook, I don’t need to write self-grandiose rubbish on my blog to please advertisers, I don’t feel the need to brag about the material things in my life. Thankfully I’m more than happy with the size of my penis and don’t feel the need to compensate in any way, shape or form.
I used to think that I was the only one that didn’t bow down in front of these Pied Pipers. But Chris Brogan in his book Trust Agents wonderfully sums up what I’ve been noticing for a while (pg:98):
“There are individuals in various segments of the online world who have risen to fame in their relative niche, have parlayed that fame into something a little higher up the social ladder, and have subsequently turned their backs on the very same community where they gained notoriety as One of Us. The fall is almost fast.”
And I’m not the only one. Just taking one of the points from Aaron Wall (one of the 5% to be trusted IMHO) he states in his post “Why Many Successful People Become Jerks” that “some people forget where they came from and become arrogant“. But it’s this bit that is the crux of what I’m saying and hopefully you’ll consider when you decide who to listen to or idolise and that’s the view of Clay Shirky (Aaron summarises) who describes popularity “as basically being an imbalance between the attention you garner and the attention you can give the market.”
So if someone talks about themselves more than they talk about others, then find the “unfollow” and “defriend” buttons. Even seek out the “remove RSS feed” option, put to the back of your mind and seek out those people that add value, put the industry first and openly talk about their failures as much as their successes. And if they start trying to belittle their followers then roll your eyes and think “this isn’t the guru I’m looking for” and move on.
[Update]Doh! I should really put down a list of blogs that do add value:- Affiliate Stuff
- One Little Duck
- SEO Bullshit
- SEO Scientist
- SEOMoz
- Blogussion
- Seth Goding
- Top Rank Blog
- Blog Storm
Image © sneakerphotography
7 Things Affiliates Can Learn From Heatmaps
Posted by Lee in Affiliate Marketing on April 27, 2012
I just love Crazy Egg. If you’re not using it, and not taking heed of the information it provides, then you need a huge slap around the chops.
Here’s some quick insights from a couple of my sites.
1) Make It Blindingly Obvious What You Want People To Do!
It depends on what your goals are. Do you want to build a mailing list, or do you want SALES. Sales for me as I create specific, targeted campaigns to build mailing lists and 99% of my pages are sales-orientated. For my Easter eggs site, I want people in and out to the relevant merchants as quickly as possible (usually – I have other specific pages to build stickiness and increase the average time on the site). I make sure that I place the merchants with offers that are most likely to lead to clicks and sales at the very top of the page. I make them stand out so they cannot be missed.
I then create content that is either directly or very strongly related to those offers to draw people in. I might be writing about raw Easter eggs that a retailer sells but I won’t get any commission from. But if people want to also buy from Hotel Chocolat, Thorntons, Cadbury’s, Montezuma’s, Chocolate Buttons or Chocolate Trading Co., then I’ve got an offer for them.
I also try and make sure that I have a range of merchants that cross the whole spectrum of the niche (is that a bit of an oxymoron?) so I increase my chances of getting an affiliated sale.
But I don’t ram offers down the throat of people. I haven’t created a Made For Adsense site that has crap content (being objective) and surrounded it with “take a chance” advertising. I try and create meaningful content and place relevant adverts above it.
2) Advertise When You Deserve It
With my Chocolate Reviews site, I’m at a completely different stage, so I keep the advertising to a minimum. My objective is not to earn good levels of cash now, but to earn the respect of the community – the monetisation will come when the site deserves it.
I could try and monetise it to its fullest but as the site is not yet a year old and the diversity of links to it isn’t at a level I’d like and the amount of goodwill between the site, consumers, industry commentators and retailers isn’t sufficient; I’ll won’t even try rampping it up with even the smallest of banners in prominent positions.
This still staggers me today. Many affiliates jump on the banners bandwagon from day one. They don’t think about how that reduces the chances of getting natural links from unprompted, but relevant resources. To my mind advertising should be directly proportional to the perceived level of trust that others have with your site.
Nobody Clicks On Blog Roll Links, Right?
Wrong, you might think it’s a good idea to get as many links to your site as possible from blogroll exchanges. Bad Idea. Not only are they heavily discounted for ranking purposes but you leak traffic too from the reciprocal links.
I keep my blog roll links to a minimum and to the sites that I feel will drive relevant traffic. I also keep them to the one page on a site, and not every. My product reviews pages are there for a purpose and not to give other’s traffic. Keep that in mind when you set up your blog rolls.
4) Not All Visitor Types Do The Same Thing
The thing is, you might be thinking that you get loads of social traffic. But they might just be reading some lovely bit of bait you’ve written then buggering off. Do you know if they click to buy? Wouldn’t it be good if you knew?
5) The Devil Is In The Detail
Click on the “List” option. Get the data out and analyse it. It’s interesting that for my Easter eggs site, most people click on the Cadbury’s logo (5.4% of all visitors) but they’re not by best converter out of the list. The volume of sales I get from them is far less than 3 of the others up there. So what does this tell you? Yes, I need think about things a bit more (including more Cadbury’s content!)
6) Sometimes You Can’t Over-ride User Intent
On my Tesco Easter Eggs most people actually clicked on the link to Tesco link, and not the options at the top.
7) People Will Search When They Get There If They Think Your Site Is Relevant
As can be seen by the image – make sure you make the most of it. I’m changing the blog from Blogger to WordPress partly because I have more control over the search pages. I’ll be able to better monetise them and leverage them for SEO purposes. Your internal search pages are very powerful, don’t forget about them. Also make sure you know how many people actually use them!
We’ve all been told to forget the phrase “build it and they will come”. But we should also forget “build it and they will click”.
Big Brother Google I Like
Posted by Lee in Affiliate Marketing on April 27, 2012
Don’t you bloody hate it when you send someone an email but forget to send the attachment? I’ve done it countless times and its a pain in the arse when its a proposal. Thankfully when I did it today Google stepped in:
Yep, I put some words in the email, which they scanned and then saw that I didn’t have an attachment. Good work.
I just get so fed up with all this privacy bull shit. People just want something to talk about, to create some “buzz” (excuse the irony) so they can get more links and visitors to their blogs.
I’m just bored with all this Google bashing. Blog about something useful to help people attract transactionary visitors please. (bugger! there’s some hypocrisy in this post!)<
A Long Overdue Update…
Posted by Kirsty McCubbin in Affiliate Marketing on March 20, 2012
Oops, well you will see from the tumbleweed and other signs of decay and abandonment that I’ve not been around these parts much in recent months.
Try not to take it personally, to be honest I’ve not been doing much in the world of affiliate marketing at all since the start of October last year. First of all we had my parents visiting with us for a month, followed by Duncan’s folks for another month. It was around that point that I realised that I was heavily pregnant and exhausted and resumed working, but only for about 2 hours each day. By the end of December my definition of exhaustion had been upgraded and I ended up spending the rest of my pregnancy in my bedroom watching TV and playing on Facebook from a reclining position!
So On Feb 4th I….
Had A Beautiful Baby Girl!!!!!!!!
In typical me style the birth was very dramatic complete with Hollywood style sudden water breakage followed by tyre squealing trip to the hospital. Duncan has now passed his advanced driving test which much to his surprise involves very fast motorway driving combined with someone trying to break all the bones in your left hand. His emergency park / car abandonment in the hospital ambulance bay completed his exam which he passed with flying colours.
And here is my little affiliate drama queen, Eilidh Eve McKenzie
That’s her meeting her Grannie for the first time, and as you can see she was a teeny bit poorly when she was born and also very petite. She was a whopping 5.5lbs and to give you a scale – that’s a facecloth draped over her.
After a very short stay in special care she was A-OK and is now thriving away nicely. Since then it’s been no sleep and nappies all the way with not a space in my mind for any affiliate marketing beyond that essential hour every day to make sure nothing has collapsed in a burning pile of cinders!
What Next?
Well, it’s almost time for me to start work again. Not full time of course, but at least a couple of hours each day somewhere in between the various fine arts of parenting.
Long term readers of this blog will know that I’ve always extolled the virtues of a highly structured working day / week to ensure maximum productivity. Clearly that system is now about as much use as me planning to sleep 10 hours each night – it’s not up to me any more! I’m in for an interesting time considering how I’m used to working and judging when it’s OK for me to stop working. The pull of chronic workaholism combined with the demands of a fast growing mini affiliate might just clash a teeny bit 
Thanks To Google…
I’ve got some serious ground to make up too… like many affiliates Google Panda has had an unpleasant effect, but I’m fortunate enough in that I’m still motoring along nicely revenue wise thanks to a wide spread of traffic sources and some well placed gap plugging.
I have many plans for moving forward with my current sites and some new projects. My various experiments with Google organic search have given me a path forward from here. As far as timing goes it’s needless to say that Google sucks for perpetrating this just when I had a child. To see 3 years hard work flushed down the internet lavvy is distressing to say the least – but that is Affiliate Marketing in a nutshell. You never know what might happen and have to be prepared to reinvent yourself constantly. So that’s what I’ll do.
Reinventing The Affiliate Wheel
The way forward? Some mini sites, a bit of work tarting up and replicating the structure of sites that didn’t get affected combined with the tapping of some revenue / traffic streams I’ve known about for a while but haven’t had time to exploit.
I hope to have time to talk about them all on here with you guys, but with a baby around the house and my new freeform “who knows?” work methodology the updates are likely to be irregular. It’s often been said that affiliate marketing is the ideal job for a stay at home mother. Is it? Well… I’ll let you know.
It’s been pretty good so far. Despite Google Panda it’s looked after me since last October without a huge amount of input. That bit works well. The bit where I actually have to do something? That’s for me to find out very soon
See y’all around!
What’s that? Another baby picture?? Glad to comply… here’s one from the last couple of days. Hasn’t she grown?
This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK
Tracking outbound clicks with Google Analytics
Posted by Fraser Edwards in Affiliate Marketing on March 1, 2012
Stable tracking is fundamental to the affiliate business model, without it we wouldn’t be able to operate. From the starting point where you need track the source that your website users arrive; all the way to relying on the tracking that your affiliate program uses in order to report sales to generate your commission.
The divide between your tracking from your own website and the affiliate programs has always caused me problems, I don’t just want to know that I’ve sent them a click which converted, I want to know the player journey, all the way from arriving on my site to visiting theirs, in order to help me optimise my marketing strategy and target converting sources more aggressively. This led me on to discover how to track my outbound clicks using Google Analytics, something which has helped me massively over the years.
I’ve provided a guide on how to track this and then use the information below.
How to add tracking:
- To start you need to navigate to the site profile which you want to track clicks from and then enter into the settings section. This is done by clicking the cog in the top-right corner.
- Now you’re in the settings section you should go to the ‘Goals’ tab. Choose which goal set you want to use (entirely based on your preference) and then click the ‘+Goal’ link.
- The last step in Google Analytics is to fill in the goal information which you want to be tracked. You’ll find the following fields to fill in:
Goal Name: This is what you want the goal action to appear as when you look at your reports. In my case I want to check the users who click through to SuperCasino, so I’ve set it as ‘SuperCasino Click Through’.
Active/Inactive: Make sure you select ‘Active’.
Goal Type: Ensure that you have selected ‘URL Destination’.
Goal URL: This section you can customise based on your ordering preference. I personally break it down into goal set and then an indication of the target destination. So in this case it would be:‘/G2/supercasino/’
Find whatever works for you here.
Match Type: Select ‘Head Match’.
Case Sensitive: Leave unchecked.
Goal Value: Unless you can assign an exact value to each outbound click, for example with a CPC deal, then you won’t be able to use this. I sometimes work out an average click/revenue figure, however I prefer to leave this blank.
- Now you’ve set up Google Analytics to report you’ll need to edit your outbound links to report the information you’ve set via JS. This is done by adding the following to your hyperlink code:
onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview("Your Goal URL");So in my case, based on the information I entered in stage 3, that would leave me with the following URL in order to track SuperCasino click through rate:
a href="http://www.supercasino.com/" onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview("/G2/supercasino/");"All the outbound Castle Casino links that you have added this to will now track as a goal conversion.
How to use the tracking:
Now you’ve started tracking outbound links you can start to analyse the data in order to improve your websites conversion rates.
The first and most obvious way to use the data is to correlate the click through rates that your affiliate program software gives you and that which Google Analytics reports. For example if I see 431 clicks to SuperCasino last month, but the software has only reported 200, then I know that something has gone wrong and I can conduct further tests to make sure data isn’t going missing.
Now the data starts to get a little bit more fun. We can break it down further to see the click conversion rates that each traffic source has provided us. This can help you work out the sources which actually convert for you, rather than just send you numbers.
As an example, previously I could only see that websiteA.com has sent me 5000 visitors in January and websiteB.com only 500, therefore I’ve always assumed that I should be focusing on getting a better listing on websiteA.com. However with this data you can see the actual conversions, and the visitors from websiteA.com only went through one of my links 25 times, whereas websiteB.com visitors went through 75 times as the traffic is a lot more suited. From filling the missing tracking link like this I could re-allocate entire my marketing efforts for the better!
As the above traffic sources images shows, most of our affiliate sites traffic come directly from search engines. But we want more information than that, so let’s break it down once again and find out how much each keyword converts for me. By doing this I know which keywords I should be targeting more aggressively, effectively changing my search strategy which was based just on volume.
An example of keyword goal conversations, with the keywords blocked, has been given below:
Out of the hundreds of ways to use this information, I’ll give you on final nugget. Breaking this down into geographic regions shows me which countries prefer which advertisements. For example I can see that visitors from the United States didn’t like the SuperCasino ad, so maybe we can serve them something else. On the other hand players from Spain loved it, so I’ll change the page layout to promote it more prominently.
I’m sure after all this you are seeing my point, the data allows you to break down conversion rates like never before, all using a tool most are familiar with. Take a few and install it, you may be as surprised at the results as I was!
About the Author:
David Merry is the Director of live casino CastleCasino.com and affiliate portal operator Right Casino Media; he initially started his online career in search engine optimisation.
For more information on joining the CastleCasino.com affiliate program please visit http://www.castleaffiliates.com.
Another Reason to love Paid on Results
Posted by Fraser Edwards in Affiliate Marketing on December 21, 2011
Hi,
On the 06th December a visitor to your website clicked on an Affiliate URL
for a Merchant who has closed its Affiliate Program with Paid On Results.The visitor was shown our Expired Links page, and given several other
related Merchants they may be interested in. This visitor followed one of
our related links and went onto make a purchase with Find Me A Gift.Normally the commission due would just be added to your account, however
in this case you are currently not an Affiliate of Find Me A Gift. In
order for us to pass the commission onto you we first need you to join the
Find Me A Gift Affiliate ProgramYou can do this as normal though your Affiliate Control Panel, once you
have joined and been approved for this Merchant we will add the commission
due to you into your account.If you have any questions please let us know.
Best Wishes,
Paid On Results Support Team.
Great use of technology to do something to reach a good outcome from an expired link. When the other options are sending the visitor through anyway or landing them on error page actually putting a solution in place that allows me to earn and another merchant to make the sale is fantastic. 
ThirstyAffiliates Plugin – Josh Kohlbach Interview
Posted by Fraser Edwards in Affiliate Marketing on December 1, 2011
A while back Josh Kahlbach got in touch to show me the ThirstyAffiliates WordPress plugin. I’m using it on one of my sites now so I sent Josh back some questions and here are his answers…
Tell us a bit about yourself?
Hi, I’m Josh Kohlbach, I’m a programmer from Brisbane, Australia. I’m the creator of ThirstyAffiliates affiliate link management plugin for WordPress as well as a handful of other non-premium plugins.
A bit about me?… Hrm, I’ve been into programming since I was about 13 years old (now 26), I have a degree in IT, and I’ve been studying business and marketing in my spare time for about the past 3 or 4 years.
What’s the idea behind this plugin?
The idea behind ThirstyAffiliates is quite simple and I’ve designed it to be a helpful and un-intrusive part of your affiliate marketing workflow.
I came up with the idea of an affiliate link manager after getting frustrated with having to create reviews for a computer hardware review site I was making and not being able to really track where my affiliate links were being used.
After a few times of needing to change one of my affiliate links and tracking down where I used that link in the past I finally did something about it.
Why your plugin and not others which have similar functions?
When I created ThirstyAffiliates I was actually looking for a plugin similar to mine to purchase. But everything in the industry was just so focused on cloaking and being deceptive by keyword link generation all over your blog. It just seemed like there was no tool that really focused on managing the links like assets.
My tool puts the focus on managing affiliate links in one place and providing a really great interface for getting those links into your posts and pages.
I’ve actually crafted a specialised link picker tool just for that. Most other plugins just give you a list of your links to insert or a nasty shortcode to remember which is absolutely useless once you have 100+ links. You really need a proper tool once you’re getting serious about affiliate marketing with more than the odd link here and there.
My plugin also does importing and exporting using the WordPress importer tool which means that you can setup your links once and import them to new websites you’re creating, saving hours of setup.
What other wordpress plugins do you recommend for affiliate marketing?
There are some really great review website plugins out there. If I was making a dedicated reviews website again I’d definitely look into purchasing a premium review plugin. Especially one that gets the social side of things going with user reviews.
Also, not really a plugin, but there’s heaps of great integrations with mailing list providers like MailChimp and Aweber. Drop in their plugin and activate a widget – building a mailing list doesn’t need to be difficult, but it’s something every affiliate should be doing as the engagement on that platform is a lot higher.
Thanks Josh