Watched an interesting screencast on increasing holiday sales at GrokDotCom yesterday and it prompted a few modifications to a shopping cart on our retail site today. Far from being just about holiday selling, the screencast could apply year ’round. The main topic/technique to improve conversions was something called “point of action assurances”.

I’ve been doing a lot of digging on cart conversion and abandonment lately and slowly tweaking to get the highest rates possible, and ”point of action assurances” struck a chord. The idea in the screencast is simple; at each point a shopper is called to action, they make a decision yes or no. Any anxiety may lead to a no, so if you can offer just enough assurance that yes is a good, sound and safe choice, you close the sale.

The holiday season example given was the idea of returns. The customer stares at the checkout button and thinks “If I buy this dress for my wife, and it turns out she was really hinting at the boots, can I return it?” They may or may not click that button, but if they saw a small message nearby saying “No restocking fees if returned within 30 days” they might be pushed over the edge. 

It’s a great example for the holidays, but the same type of logic can be true throughout the year. Customers worried about giving their credit cards online may need a security notice, customers worried about spam may need a short message on privacy, etc.

In looking over our cart I decided to add 3 small boxes to the side of the billing info form saying the cart is secure, we don’t share/sell customer data and offer a 30 exchange window for unused merchandise, as well as a message on the CC page stating that we don’t store customer credit card information. I am using Google Analytics’ goal funnel report to monitor conversion and cart abandonment at each step of the checkout process, so should have some interesting data when all is said and done.

Our existing rates are decent, but I’m curious if such minor edits can give us a few percent at each step. That could really add up over time. Will try to post results soon, if I don’t OD on turkey and cranberry sauce…

The phrase “content is king” has been kicking around web marketing circles since the old days. More recently affiliate marketers have debated the point to death, some citing sales sites as the sliced bread of affiliate marketing and some tooting the content horn.

My company owns a pile of domains, a pile of sites and a pile of content. We also run a niche specific retail site and a few other sales sites. While the retail site makes more dough than the rest (better margins and more opportunity to build the channel and brand), the content sites do shine from time to time.

A couple recent examples come to mind. One of our sites is wine related. It’s content driven and gets decent traffic. It does okay at being a minor authority in its niche, but makes very little money in terms of commissions. It doesn’t sell at all well, but since launching it I’ve received about 40 bottles of free wine from wineries all over the world (15 in the last few weeks), and not bad juice either. Most of it is good stuff and priced well beyond what I would normally spend on a bottle of wine.

Spending time writing good content made me an authority (if only a minor one) and being an authority means my opinion matters. Having an opinion that matters seems to equate to drinking really good wine. Not cash in my pocket directly, but it does save me money on buying the cheaper swill I might otherwise be drinking (color me frugal to the point of being cheap)…

Another content site of ours, an experiment that worked well, is about a specifc media product (by media, think of a tv show, album, movie, game, etc). We built the site as an experiment in both SEO and affiliate marketing. We had one target in mind. We registered a new domain and spent several days making the site, writing the content, trying out the SEO theory (don’t ask), etc. Within 30 days the site was ranked #1 for its target term on Google, has maintained that spot for several months and is currently converting at 5.95% on its main affiliate program!

I don’t care how much you make on pure PPC and datafeed sites, you have to admit that a content site landing #1 and converting that free traffic at 5.95% is pretty fantastic!

Neither of these examples answer the question posed in the title of the thread, but you can bet your boots we’ll continue the above mentioned experiment with several, several, several more similar sites around new targets, and that I’ll continue drinking good wine and posting my tasting notes. Who cares if content is king or even crown prince of janitors when you’re enjoying 5.95% conversion rates over a big ol’ glass of investment quality wine?

A guy going by the nick “sitemaker” posted the following list of link building criteria in this thread over at Webmasterworld. Here are the relevant bits:

I pay no attention to PR and especially Alexa

Relevancy is everything, you just got to make sure your links are on the right pages ie.

1) Title tag containing relevant keywords
2) Relevant keywords in the url (but not so important)
3) The general theme of the site is better than just the theme of the page, but I still exchange links if just the page is relevant.
4) Outgoing links all pointing to similar topics, not pointing to off topic subjects
5) Pages with limited amount of links not 100’s
6) Cached in Google, Sometimes I consider pages not cached and these still appear as backlinks within Google’s Webmaster area.
7) I generally stay away from directory pages listed as /YourOnPage234of ThisCategory.php

Following this, I can get sites on the first page with just 2 or three backlinks meeting the criteria above.

Okay, pretty basic, but there’s genius underlying its simplicity. This list clearly puts ALL the emphasis on relevance to your target keywords, and not just with link text and on-page criteria, but with careful analysis of the page you’re seeking a link from. 

The meat of the list is in 1 through 4. Let’s say I was seeking links to this page (I am, BTW. Feel free to send some juice my way.), what would be the best link I could get?

1. Offsite Page Title
   a. SEO Blogs That Don’t Suck
   b. Modern Link Building Strategies
   c. Directory - Online Marketing

2. Offsite Page URL
   a. blah.com/seo/link-building
   b. blah.com/directory/search-marketing
   c. blah.com/happyfunball/poo-pants

3. Offsite Primary Theme
   a. Halo 3 Cheats
   b. Copywriting for the Web
   c. SEO

4. Offsite Outbound Links
   a. Link building article at SEOMoz, article on Google PR update and its potential relationship to paid links at Searchengineland, link baiting thread at some forum or another
   b. List of several links to sites that broker text link sales, List of links to free to submit directories, list of links to automated exchange management software
   c. Links to DIGG, Reddit, del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, and the rest, links to blog announcement sites, link to traffic exchange and auto-surf programs

What combination of the above would offer the holy grail of inbound links to this post? Why no mention of PR or Alexa? What if the page only has 2 links pointing to it? Why don’t I get to the point?

b, a, c, a is the best damn link of the bunch. It’s the link I want.

Period.

[EDIT: All fixed, thanks to Jeremy Clark on the WordPress forums.] 

Okay, as a blogger I’m second to many. This is my first swing at using WordPress and you can probably tell. Unfortunately, something about this theme and/or the classes associated with it have made it even more obvious…

Yesterday I added a text widget called “For Merchants” over on the left. If the problem is still a problem, you’ll see it pretty clearly. One of these boxes is not like the others. One of these boxes is not the same. <— Anybody else remember Sesame Street’s weird conformity song?

Anyway, I wanted to link to AvantLink and Shareasale, two networks that do a pretty decent job as affiliate program solutions providers. I much prefer running indie programs, with teams of coders to do my bidding, but as networks go, these two are worth linking.

Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. This post is about the whacky issue with the textwidget class as displayed in the Talian 1.0 theme. How do I make the text widget not use the textwidget class? If it just acted like a fricking text area for me to type code into, this wouldn’t be an issue, but noooo, some smartypants said “Let’s give it its own class that nobody can touch. That’ll be cool.”

 I know some of you are WordPress geniuses, so any help would be appreciated.

I brought this up to Commission Junction nearly two months ago and held off posting anything to give them a chance to investigate before these creeps caught wind of the fact that they were under scrutiny. Anyone else owed money…?

Please forward to Publisher Support.

I have had funds related to InternetPayday.com (advertiser 1257161) on hold in my account since 2005. I am told it is unlikely I will ever collect, as CJ was unable to collect.

Weigh that against the fact that the same company has an active account under the name Cashadvanceman.com (advertiser 1202521), and I find the idea that CJ can’t collect a little hard to swallow.

Internetpayday.com and Cashadvanceman.com share the exact same program description, are registered to companies at the same address in Florida and further still, the “affiliates” link at the Internetpayday.com website links to a join page for the Cashadvanceman.com program.

These are the same company and I would like CJ to collect and pay me my sixty bucks so I can finally stop looking at the balance owed. I’m sure I am not the only affiliate awaiting payment from Internetpayday.com…

Please call me if you have any questions. ***-***-**** 9-5 PST

Thank you

There you have it. If you’re looking for a good payday loan or cash advance affiliate program, these are probably not the guys you want to do business with. If you have a balance owed, I’d encourage you to bug your CJ reps…frequently…

Cheers!

You might say PPC ad copy has a pretty simple job. You want it to attract the right eyeballs and get them to click, while filtering out the look-e-loos only interested in information. You’d only be half right.

There’s actually a lot more to writing effective ad copy than filtering and compelling. Yes, your ad copy is your second line of defense behind negative keywords, and just ahead of separate search and content bids, and yes, your ad copy is the pre-sell to your sell (or pre-pre-sell to your pre-sell in the case of affiliate sites), your ad copy has a couple other important roles - especially in Adwords.

Google prides itself on being clever. As such they’ve taken the simple “I’ll pay a dollar for that click, Bob. Put me up #1″ model, where the highest bidder gets top spot, and likely the click as well, and tweaked it. Chuck might bid a buck and Alice only $.80, but GoogleBob may send the click off to Alice anyway.

“Sorry Chuck, I like the look of what Alice has in mind for my click.”

The ad copy has a lot to do with Google’s decision.

It’s October. The leaves are falling and Halloween is fast approaching. A lot of marketers and affiliate marketers are also scrambling to toss together last minute PPC campaigns pushing every costume under the sun.

One approach would be to come up with 80 million keywords, long-tail this, other buzz word that, and write three or four ad variants all pointed to a single page. A smart marketer would also track not only CTRs, but conversion and so on for each variant. They may even get clever and append the spiffy Google vars for determining if the traffic came from search or content, what ad variant and what keyword. If they get super spiffy, they may even use some multi-variant testing to see if the jack-o-lantern landing page works better than the wicked witch with ”Happy Halloween” speech bubble.

This approach will generate sales, and you’re welcome to, especially if you nail that magic word that everybody else missed, but there’s a down side. A week into the campaign, anywhere from 10 to 20% (or more) of the keywords will be deactivated, many of them good keywords, and there will be a little message next to each saying “Increase quality or bid $x to activate.”

Yes, this is Google’s way of extorting more money out of you, but it is also where your ad copy’s other important role comes in.

Google’s “quality score” is a key factor in where your ad ranks among the ad results AND how much it costs you for clicks from that spot. 

Let’s take a good long tail Halloween keyword like “maid in the usa halloween costume“. Aside from being evidence that my wife isn’t home, it’s a good, obscure little keyword. It’d certainly be included in the huge list of 80 million Halloween keywords above, but a smart PPC marketer could not only get the clicks cheaper, but also get more clicks!

Say I was an affiliate pushing PierreSilber.com and I wanted to maximize my Halloween costume sales. Rather than pointing everything - halloween costumes, halloween costume sales, sexy halloween costumes, pirate wench costume, cat girl halloween costume, police woman costume and maid in the usa halloween costume - to a general Pierre Silber page with a few ad variants as described above, I’d break it all down into specific ad groups and maid in the usa would be one. This is where ad copy really comes into its own as a factor in quality score.

Long story short (or slightly less long) my quality score will be higher if my keyword matches the ad copy and the landing page, so the following:

Keyword: maid in the usa halloween costume

Ad Title: Maid In The USA

Ad Copy: Sexy Women’s Halloween Costume, Maid in the USA For Sale

Pointed to: http://www.pierresilber.com/maidinusa.html

Would have a higher quality score, and thus rank better among ad results at less cost per click than the following:

Keyword: maid in the usa halloween costume

Ad Title: Adult Halloween Costumes

Ad Copy: Sexy Halloween Costumes For Adults On Sale Now

Pointed to: http://www.pierresilber.com/

So, while I’d try to do 80 million Halloween keywords, as well as multiple ad variations per ad group, use the Adwords vars to track search vs. content, do separate bids for each and use multi-variant testing on my landing pages, I’d also break the words down to as specific of ad groups as I possibly could. This is why I said “last minute PPC campaigns” above.

It’s almost too late to start any effective Halloween pay per click. You can throw some spaghetti at a wall and see if it sticks, probably even make some money, but the smart PPC money started a month ago and probably has their campaigns quite a bit tighter than yours. Unless, of course, they missed my blog…

Gah! Comment SPAM drives me a little nuts. It’s a waste of time and lately I’ve been inundated.

Nice part is, by its very nature comment SPAM is pretty easy to detect. It’s automated after all, so the same comment has been posted elsewhere, 100+ times. A simple search in quotes can usually highlight a somewhat vague, but legitimate sounding comment as pure SPAM.

The following are recent examples of comment Spam. They sound like they could be real, but the number shows how many times the exact quote shows up in Google results. In some cases you may need to delete a random word before or after the main sentence, but you’ll quickly see how rampant comment SPAM really is:

220 ”I do think you right on the spot with this post, i could use a lot a struff for my new study thank you very much.”

25,600 “I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting” (tipsdrill.com has SPAMMED me a few times with this one lately. tipsdrill.com is a worthless made for Adsense pile of crap, but their bot is working overtime)

520 “Do you know how to make money from AdSense automatically?” (okay, that one’s obvious)

170 “In my RSS-reader i found this text”

853 “Oh wait. Yes, I have. I’m sorry, but I just don’t have it in me right now to type it all out again. Besides, it was just ramblings anyway. You didn’t want to hear me go on and on about this, right?”

The sad part is, all of those listings in the search results are approved comments sitting on real blogs with links right to the spammers’ websites. Why do people use comment SPAM? Well obviously, because it works…

Turn off auto-approval and check vague comments in the search engines. It may work, but it doesn’t need to work so bloody well.

An Affiliate Marketing Plan for Beginners

First, this is not intended to be an end to end course in web marketing, nor is it meant for anyone who has been at this a while. What it is is some free advice on how to do it right WITHOUT some lame e-book pitch at the end.

Simple success online always comes down to a very basic formula, something to the effect of:

Offer * (Traffic * Conversion) = Revenue

You put your offer in front of people and close the sale. The more people you present your offer to, and the better you are at closing the deal, the more money you make. It’s simple, but important to keep in mind.

Actually, screw it. I’m going to show you how to do it by doing it right along with you. I’m going to take this idea and turn it into a series of posts following a new project designed to make me some cash. We’ll go from concept, to implementation to promotion and hopefully cashing checks. The whole thing may blow up in my face, but these blog entries may keep me on track and we all may learn a thing or two in the process. Heck I may even make a few bucks…

Step 1, have a concept that doesn’t suck.

You can’t just build willy nilly and you can’t just copy what you’ve heard works. Create something.

My concept is simple. I’m going to build a site that caters to beer drinking fat men, who paint their bellies blue and slave over hot barbecue grills in parking lots outside stadiums all over the country. I’m building a site centered around tailgate parties. I just registered ParkingLotWarrior.com

Why does my concept not suck?

I’m not passionate about tailgate parties. In fact, the only party, in a parking lot, outside a stadium that I’ve ever been to was after a Dead concert. Something about attractive women, dancing and alcohol…

Contrary to popular opinion, it doesn’t take passion about a topic to build a profitable website. It takes passion for building your business, but a site concept just needs money making potential, which mine has.

Consider for a second the people who throw tailgate parties. Often they are, among their circle of friends, the ones with the biggest gut, the biggest truck, the biggest RV, the biggest BBQ grill, the biggest big screen television, the wife with the biggest hair, etc. They have money they aren’t afraid to spend, and friends they likely encourage to spend money too.

They buy crap to support their teams - lots of crap and I think I can build a site for them and sell stuff to them and to their friends. Imagine a place where Parking Lot Warriors can find grilling info, RV tips, drink recipes, water balloon launcher plans, etc - imagine the ultimate tailgater website, or at least something passable…

I’m sure there are bigger money concepts, but this one is simple. You can build a whole new Myspacey thing for folks in need of credit repair, with built in anime file sharing and picture rating if you really want to, but personally, that sounds a lot like watching paint dry through a Crazy Straw. It’s complex and boring.

Keep it simple. Keep it fun.

You’d also face stiff competition. Credit repair is not for the feint of heart, and not for the beginning affiliate marketer. Take on a concept with at least a few pieces of low hanging fruit in the search space, a few good long tail keywords that haven’t been bid to death, etc. Take on a concept you can succeed at.

Anyway, I like my concept. Now it’s your turn.

Next time we’ll tackle some initial planning. Hope you have a good concept by then.

It’s common knowledge that text links kill when it comes to converting potential customers to affiliate commissions, but why, and more importantly, how? Some would say banners get ignored or that surfers know to click on blue text, etc, but I guarantee that slapping a bunch of text links on your pages will not see those higher conversion levels that pull up the curve. The reason text links convert so well is not that they’re text, but because savvy affiliates have learned how to use them effectively.

Text links placed within and as an integral part of targeted content can be extremely effective (obviously) because they’re active links. Banners sit around flashing and shouting “click me, click me”, but aside from the shout, they’re passive. Sharp affiliates have learned to merge content and marketing in a way that actively engages the potential customer, gives them a nice boost of consumer confidence and sends them off ready to buy.

An affiliate recently asked me for some marketing tips for a specific merchant and I suggested adding targeted and effective content and gave an example to illustrate what I was talking about. My example was to write a page about Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas that promoted a book called Fee Mining Adventures in the Eastern US. Okay, writing a whole page dedicated to pushing a single book may sound silly, but the page could just as easily incorporate digging equipment, maps, area hotels, other travel related books, etc. The book and subject mentioned are just an example of the perfect product/content combination.

Why is it perfect?

1. Crater of Diamonds is one of the few places in the United States where visitors can, for a fee, dig for diamonds and keep anything they find. Anyone searching for Crater of Diamonds is expressing an interest in both fee mining and the geographic area covered by the book. Searches may be specific to the single location, but digging for diamonds is a vacation activity and vacations generally involve several stops in a specific area. A guide covering those potential stops is a likely purchase (if the customer only knew it existed).Here you have the type of activity they’re interested in and where they want to do it. At that point simply closing the page with “For other places to dig your own gold and gems in the Eastern US, pick up a copy of Fee Mining Adventures in the Eastern US” should nail it.

2. You’re providing authoritative content. The visitor, through your coverage of a subject they’re interested in, now trusts you as a wise old salt…err…something like that. In any case, they trust you because you know your stuff. If you now suggest a product or merchant that will be of further assistance, they will trust your advice and likely make the purchase or at least bookmark the site for later.

3. Crater of Diamonds shows up regularly on the Travel Channel, in the news, etc, so people, interested in that sort of activity will search for it. I’d wager there’s a spike after every airing of one of those shows, so there’s potential traffic out there.

4. You can rank for it. Good, authoritative content about a specific “informational” subject is often easier to rank for than sales focused product content. Not everybody agrees that content is the holy grail of affiliate marketing, but I think we can all agree that good content isn’t all that hard to get indexed and ranked.

Sum all that up and you have highly targeted traffic ready to take your advice and buy. Better than a banner?

The above example is pretty elaborate, but the concept is what’s important. The idea is to use content to target potential customers, gain their trust and actively market select offers integrated into the content. It’s all pretty obvious, but so rare in practice that you’d think it was reserved for Mensa members only.

A lot of affiliates, when they first start out, are really keen to promote big brands or hit the big money industries. New affiliates hear how much money is spent every year in online travel, or that adult topics are more highly searched than any other, or than education, insurance, gaming (last year anyway), forex trading, etc are big affiliate money-makers and they go off half-cocked.

Most soon realize that the competition in these sectors is highly skilled, well organized and entrenched up to their teeth - in short, they’re already dominant in the market. PPC bids are high on every keyword variation and organic SEO is just as tough. Making any headway at all is not for the feint of heart.

Taking a step down from the cat and dog fight of the big money, big competition sectors are the countless middle ground programs. Books, games, consumer electronics, clothes, mainstream consumer stuff. Competition is still stiff enough, but it’s a big drop from auto insurance to sporting goods.

In this article I’d like to go even further, down into the obscure, never heard of that, Ripley’s Believe it or Not, “…affiliates are making money on what!?!?” niches.

In my last article on Nov 1st I talked about seasonal affiliate marketing. In the article I mentioned SteakBrands, a program I had just signed up with. One of the reasons I listed for choosing them was that they were new, with a product line I’d not seen covered by other affiliate programs. Would you believe I made over $1000 off the program in December alone?

That’s what this article about. I didn’t promote home & garden, I didn’t promote pool & patio and I didn’t promote cookware - I promoted branding irons for meat, faced little to no competition and did well with it. I didn’t get rich, but that’s only one program. How many odd little niches with no competition are out there?

Okay, here’s a shameless plug, but another good example. I recently set up an affiliate program for a retail site I own. The site sells gold prospecting supplies. This is a market that is so far off the radar to most affiliates and marketers in general, that in just a couple short months I’m seeing top 10, even #1 organic search spots for relevant keywords - and making sales.

Before I launched the retail side I played with a content site. I couldn’t find any programs that fit the site, so ended up with an odd assortment of Adsense, auction listings on eBay, specific products that fit from totally unrelated programs, etc. Anyway, I only finished about 10 pages of the site and never promoted it, but I started seeing Adsense clicks (one was over $5) and actually made some money on the eBay links. How much competition could there be if I could make money without actually marketing?

A fellow over at ABW, an affiliate forum, has been talking about promoting suspenders for years and I bet you he still has no competition in that market. That’s the beauty of these odd little niches. Even if you tell other affiliates there’s money in it, you’ll still likely be left alone in the market to earn your commissions unchallenged for years on end.

There are 1000s upon 1000s of odd little niches like this!

Don’t buy it? Look at some of the programs at Shareasale. There are programs for everything from baby shower games to garden fountains to the steak brands and mining programs mentioned above.

Unless your name is Ace SEO Guru #1 (even if it is), I guarantee you’ll have an easier time ranking for “baby shower games” or “gold Panning kits” than you will for “online poker” or “New York hotels.”

This is essentially an old concept; picking the low hanging fruit, high grading, path of least resistance, etc, but I think way too many newer affiliates never even consider these hidden gems, bite off more than they can chew and subsequently quit trying. The phrase “don’t quit your day job” comes to mind.