SocialSpark

It s a real pain in the ass when some affiliate networks ( usually running DirectTrack ) don t allow international affiliates to view merchant pages due to their geographic location... An English affilaite is just as capable of driving US traffic to a US offer as a US affiliate... It is a real time consumer for affiliates who don t live in the same geographic area as the offer they are promoting... Luckily there is now a dedicated affiliate proxy service and so far it kicks ass... … View Post »

Sometimes I am an idiot and miss something completely obvious and this may well be one of those times.
So I have a direct linking campaign happening in Google Adwords pointing to a .com.au merchant site.
Yet all of my ads keep getting declined for having an incorrect destination URL.
I have checked and rechecked. I have resubmitted.
Still they are all rejected!
Any tips or suggestions much appreciated cos I am about to crush a butterfly in frustration!
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I see a lot of people in forums and blogs asking how to start out in affiliate marketing with $0... Goal 1 - Capital You need money for URLs, hosting and marketing... It ain t sexy, but the way I would do this is to offer my services as a writer at every webmaster forum I could find... I am a fast writer, so I could probably whip out 3 500 word articles in an hour... Goal 2 - Find a Product Choose a product you know has a reasonable affiliate program and that you know something about... For argument s sake, let s say DVD Rewriters ( probably a bad choice, but it will do for the sake of this post to demonstrate the point ) Goal 3 - Keywords Next, you need a list of SPECIFIC keywords... The best keywords that are probably affordable in this case would probably be model numbers... Samsung D537 DVD Rewriter D5375 DVD D5375 DVD rewriter Also some price point keywords Cheap DVD RW Discount DVD Rewriter Discount DVD Re - Writer Cheap D5375 You should be able to get a good list together... Goal 4 - Find Out If It Converts Next, I would set up a direct linking campaign with PPC and I would use SubIDs to track down to the keyword level so I know which engine and adgroup and keywords were leading to a sale... Each ad group would have ONE of the keywords above and I would bid on phrase and exact match only... I would turn OFF content match ( or at least put content match only in a seperate campaign )... You re not trying to make an overall profit on this - you re simply finding out if the product and merchant convert into sales / leads... If it has no converions from my traffic, then I choose another merchant and product and repeat step 4... Here the intention is to build a page for each keyword that converted... Of course, each page would also have an affiliate deep link to the product on the merchant site... If you are like 98% of people you will get discouraged at your second or third failure and give up which is great, because that means less competition for me... … View Post »

So I got some spam mail from the guys at SocialSpark inviting me to join their new social network for bloggers... I have no idea how they got my email, but it got through the filters and I opened it... It pissed me off enough to actually click on the link and try to figure out how they got my email... In effect, SocialSpark seemed to be another PayPerPost type of service allowing both bloggers and advertisers to connect... Now, I did sign up with PayPerPost back in the day, but I never felt right about taking on any jobs there so I never actually accepted any jobs from them... They were pretty clearly designed to trick Google and they kind of got off on the wrong foot by not requiring disclosure straight from the beginning... It wasn t the sort of company I was comfortable associating my blogs with and the recent Google slap against PPP and their network of bloggers pretty much confirmed my suspicions... So back to the SocialSpark spammers and their offering... Well for starters SocialSpark made a big thing on their site of requiring nofollow in any links ( in fact they provide the linking code for links ) and full disclosure about the nature of a paid post... This is heading in the right direction in my opinion, if you are trying to keep your blog nice and whitehat... You can also opt to have some extra code that takes your stats into account so potential advertisers can see what they are getting... Hmm, not something I am usually interested in offering up, but what the hell?... That seems like a pretty good way to find other bloggers to connect with... The problem as I see it would be the quality of bloggers who you were connecting with, but SocialSpark seems to have thought of that too... Advertisers can leave feedback about the quality of the posts they receive, meaning you can also leave feedback if you swap posts with another blogger... I guess if they get a reasonable community happening then this will help police the quality ( especially of the free jobs and reciprocal blogging ) of the listings as members comment on their experiences of the job... Perhaps I was on the list for another of their services or something, but some indication of that would have been nice in the original email... On the other hand, SocialSpark seems to really address a lot of the negative issues that I had with other pay - per - post services and the whole promotion of the web 2.0 and community elements of their site is not the usual hollow BS... I especially like the social element of possibly connecting with other bloggers and knowing enough from their feedback to know I can expect some quality... Edit: I just read that the parent company ( Izea ) of Social Spark is also the parent company of PayPerPost... … View Post »

photo credit: racreations Just thought I would quickly share a great little time saving plugin for Wordpress... Photo Dropper save a LOT of time if you want to search and use images from Flickr... It Even automatically puts in all the attribution and links that are required to use the photos legally ( you are still restricted to using Creative Commons licenced photos for commercial blogs that stipulate it is fine to use them for commercial purposes. ) Anyway, it s a great plugin and I will be using it a lot on some of my other sites... Warning - as you can see above it will also put a link to the site that developed the plugin, though that doesn t really bother me... … View Post »

Getting people to click on your adwords ads can be pretty tough in some of the more competitive markets... Of course, you need to remember that the most important metric is profit, so writing ads that get high CTR a the expense of profit is pretty silly... Anyone can get a high CTR on their ads by making misleading and attractive claims, but such ads usually don t convert to leads or sales... Even so, you can still get a reasonable CTR in most niches by writing ads that accurately describe your product or service ( ie... 1 ) Target Target Target - The more relevant your ad is to the keyword you are bidding on, the higher your CTR will be when people search for that keyword... 2 ) Captilise The First Letter Of Every Word - This really helps people clearly see the words in your ad... get cheap widgets online Get Cheap Widgets Online The second example is just that little bit easier to read so it s worth taking the time to capitalise every word in your ad... 3 ) Use your keywords in the ad copy - Very much related to the first point, but if someone is searching for green tables and your ad has the words green tables in it once or twice, then you are far more likely to get the click when you are competing with other ads that only mention tables... It s even better if you can get the keyword into your title as well as the copy... 4 ) Social Proof - People like knowing that others use products that they are interested in... All things being equal, who would you rather hire - a personal trainer or a personal trainer of the Miami Dolphins?... What would you rather buy - a wrist watch or a wrist watch as worn by Pierce Brosnan?... That is an opportunity for you to use a strong visual element to draw the human eye to your ad... By using the keyword at the beginning of the first line, the end of the second line and the beginning of the third line, you create an arrow that draws the eye to your ad... Here s an example, if someone were to type Omega Seamaster into Google... YourSite.com Notice how the bolded words form an arrow that points to the right?... That can help draw the eyes from the left of the page to the right where your ad is... 6 ) Captilalise keywords in your display URL - It s difficult to read keyword rich URLs... So rather than having a display URL that is www.mygreatsite.com, change it to www... Don t be afraid to borrow what they are doing and split test it with your own ads... … View Post »

As many of us know, Michael Gray of Wolf - Howl.com doesn t like it when people make sweeping accusations against SEOs... Hell, most of the time I agree with him... For example, Calacanis repeated attacks on the SEO industry are pretty lame and ill - informed and Michael s responses to them were fair enough in my opinion... Michael s general message in his defence of the SEO industry is that there are good SEOs and bad SEOs, just as there are good mechanics and bad mechanics... He also has a problem with this partial sentence: we do object to gaming the system and using loopholes But here is the entire passage in context: There s lots of talk within the tech community, especially the blogosphere about using SEO and how it s GOOD for bloggers and doesn t negatively affect readers / searchers / regular users... Look, we certainly don t object to gaining revenue from ads or page - views on a web site, that s why we are able to do what we do;... we do object to gaming the system and using loopholes to insert web sites into search queries that really have nothing to do with the content... Techniques to make sure your relevant content shows up in corresponding searches is one thing inserting back - door code that is aimed at getting higher page ranks and more page views, regardless if the targets are actually correct, is another... Christina is pretty clearly aiming her attack at bad SEOs and ones who would attempt to insert irrelevant results into SERPS... Michael reacted to the cherry - picked sentences ( 60 words out of a 620 word post ) by writing a blog post entitled Christina Warren of Download Squad is a Clueless Idiot ( while quoting only the sentences mentioned here in isolation )... Now anyone familiar with even rudimentary SEO will know that writing an article on a well established blog with lots of trust and then getting a few inbound links to a that specific post will mean that the search engines will rank the post highly for the keywords the post was aimed at - especially if the terms are not so competitive... Now I am totally open to correction from Michael here, but this seems like a pretty clear attempt to get this post to rank well for Christina s name... This might be called character assasination for the digital age... Who exactly, is Michael Grey to assume he has the right to use his mini - celebrity and knowledge as an SEO to damage the reputation of whoever he deems deserves it?... … View Post »

Ok, so something about the DoFollow blog movement is really starting to irritate me... DoFollow, of course, is that little wordpress plugin that removes the nofollow tag from blog comments and passes link juice to people who comment on your blogs... It s basically a way for the blogger to thank their community for taking the time to add some value to that community by making meaningful contributions via commenting... Jamdo has been part of the DoFollow movement for quite a while... So too people who make their username ( and thus anchor text for their link ) some keyword they are targetting like SEO, or Database or something like that... Nothing screams spam like that... Now, the thing is while the above behaviour is irritating, I would happily accept it from longer term readers who had already proven their worth with meaningful comments... So don t do it... Use your common sense and make a few meaningful comments that are longer than 10 words... Show the blog owner that you have taken the time to actually read the whole post and not just the title... And you will be going a lot further to building COMMUNITY - which after all is the whole strength of blogging... … View Post »