Inside Affiliate

Posts Tagged ‘google’

In 2010, I believe we are going to see some serious changes in the online world, and the affiliate industry.  There were definitely some changes brewing throughout 2009, both on the Affiliate side of the game (see the Oprah lawsuits) and the Advertiser side of the game (merchant account madness).  Neither of these are the death knell of Affiliate Marketing, but they certainly gave the impression that business would not just continue as usual in 2010.  Will Affiliates be looking for new offers to promote when all the rebills suddenly dry up?  Will the FTC be cracking down on Affiliate Bloggers for littering their posts with unmarked Affiliate links? Doubtful.  Every time this industry and its denizens have to comply or die, they find a way to do it and still make money, if not even more than before.  They are a very resourceful bunch.

Another big shakeup that is coming (in my opinion) is in the world of Traffic Sources.  Affiliates have complained for years now about Google’s terrible practices of banning its own Advertisers with no notice, killing profitable campaigns with Quality Score changes, and just flat pushing people around.  A viable alternative became very popular in 2009 with Facebook Ads, but that opened up a whole new can of worms.  Facebook has been just as fickle as Google about what types of offers they allow, and the approval process is bad enough to give full time Affiliates recurring nightmares of the DENIED status.

So what’s next? One word: mobile.  AdMob has been busy building the biggest mobile advertising network over the last couple of years, and although some Affiliates have tested it, there aren’t a whole lot of mobile-targeted offers to promote just yet.  But don’t worry, that is on the horizon and approaching fast.  Especially since Google just snapped up AdMob, easily taking a big piece of the mobile pie for themselves.  Also, in an interesting move, Apple has put it in a bid to buy Quattro Wireless.  Apparently they were interested in AdMob too, since many of the ads are served on the iPhone, but Google beat them to the punch.  It will be interesting to see how Apple handles the responsibility of running an ad network, especially in the tumultuous new field of mobile.

Will it be more of the same, just on a smaller device?  Will it be a revolution in marketing akin to the initial launch of Google AdWords and Facebook Ads?  Or perhaps it will open up new and expansive opportunities that our feeble marketing brains haven’t even thought of yet.  Whatever the case, 2010 is going to be an interesting year, and a brilliant start to the new decade.

Oh yeah, and Facebook is going down. That’s my doomsday prediction.

Google has just launched a brand new type of ad unit for AdWords that is now in Beta, called the YouTube Video Targeting Tool.  Every time there is a new ad marketplace that opens up, there is a massive displacement that can be taken advantage of by savvy marketers.  The people that jump in early are going to have a definite advantage in this game.

One of the coolest things about the new YouTube Video Targeting Tool is that you can get very specific with your targeting, right down to selecting individual videos.  You can also target by demographics, channels, and some other methods.

You can choose from two different ad units, InVideo Overlay and In-Stream Video.  The InVideo Overlay can be setup as Text Ads or 468×60 image ads.  The In-Stream Videos are a “15/30 second in-stream video + image companion”.  I’m not exactly sure what that boils down to, since I haven’t had the chance to actually put any ads live yet.

People have been marketing via YouTube for quite a while now, especially in the Ringtones space.  The tried-and-true method is to rip the music video of your favorite artist, put a watermark on it with your Domain leading to the Ringtone offer, and try to get as many views as possible through both natural and artificial means.  This method has become less and less effective as YouTube has been getting wise and closing some of the loopholes used to inflate views to videos and game the rankings.  This new Video Targeting marketplace could be a game-changer for people that have been looking for a way to have a sustainable business model on YouTube without worrying about the impending Account Bans and Video Bans that come with the old method.

The only odd thing I noticed when playing with the interface is that when I searched for some of the YouTube mega-hit videos like the “JK Wedding Dance” and the infamous “Leroy Jenkins” video, they didn’t appear in the list.  Also, most of the videos that were in the list seemed to have relatively low view counts.  I’m assuming that this is because the program is in Beta still, and hopefully the big videos will be fair game once the program has the kinks worked out.

So what are you waiting for?  Head over to http://google.com/videotargeting and check it out!

In the affiliate marketing game, you get thrown some major curve balls.  Usually these only happen once or twice a year, sometimes more in a really bad year.  It’s when the status quo gets shaken up.  Things that you took for granted are either gone or severely changed, and suddenly your income is taking a major hit.  Usually the curve ball happens when a traffic source dries up or gets wise to the ways that you have been exploiting it.

Google loves to throw curve balls in the form of “quality score updates” that destroy your campaigns and take up a bunch of your time.  The latest one was thrown by Facebook after the Techcrunch Scamville Post (sorry Arrington, no link love here) and the follow ups that have been the talk of the industry this entire month.  It’s one thing to hear about it on a blog, and it’s another thing entirely to have it affect your business in a very real way.  As a network owner, the Facebook shakeup certainly put a large dent in our bottom line.

But that’s where my favorite part of the affiliate marketing business comes in: adapting to change. The people in this industry have an uncanny ability to adapt and update their business models to deal with the ever-changing online landscape, and this is no different.  Sure things will be slow for a while, but unlike your Average Joe in a 9 to 5 job, we have power to do something about it.  When Average Joe gets sent a curve ball, like getting laid off for example, it is devastating.  Suddenly his income is gone and he is completely at the mercy of somebody else to get it back.  He has to find another company to hire him and demonstrate to them that he is worth the risk.  All affiliates have to do is reach inside themselves, grab the motivation it takes to get things going again, and get back to work.

That’s why I love this business.  Sometimes it takes a curve ball to realize that there is a whole new opportunity right around the corner, or an income stream that you may have overlooked when your steady campaign was rolling.  At the end of the day, you are in control.  It’s your business and you are the boss.  Even if you are working 80 hours a week for yourself, that’s better than working 40 for someone else.  Next time you are thrown a curve ball, remember the alternative.

During the last few months, there has been a rash of blog posts cropping up left and right about local affiliate marketing.  There have been good ones and bad ones and then all the guest posts by Dennis Yu.  All of that aside, if you are an affiliate blogger then you owe it to yourself to write one of these bad boys.  Here’s how it is done…

1. Tell your readers how there is a whole new world of affiliate marketing right in their backyard, where they can be their own boss and not have to worry about the big bad networks and advertisers scrubbing all of their leads.

2. Make sure to mention that Dentists, Lawyers, Massage Therapists, Insurance & Real Estate Agents and anyone else who commonly works off of referrals are the best worst possible candidates because they understand the value of a good lead.

3. Explain to them that this is going to take some good old fashioned salesmanship on their part, because they most likely have not harnessed the power of the internet yet. If that doesn’t scare them away, then mention that there will always be squabbles over what counts as a lead at the end of the month.

4. Bring up the fact that Google Voice is amazing and that you have been using it for local lead gen forever, even though 99% of your readers can’t get an invite.

5. Throw some massive numbers around, like how the keyword “San Francisco DUI Attorney” is going for over $20 per click on the search engines.  If you have the stones, substitute in your own keyword or niche to scare them away from competing with you.

6. ???

7. Profit!  Enjoy shooting fish in a barrel until the next wave of young pups learns what you have been up to and spoils all the ROI for you.

If you’ve read my other posts on PPV, you know I’m a fan of Media Traffic and their PPV network.  This is the place that 90% of the people I talk to start out with PPV.  That being said, there are other options out there.  A newer network that I heard about recently is DirectCPV.  Since I had a few people asking me about it, I decided to give it a test run to see how it stacks up to the other guys.

First of all, the interface may look familiar to you when you log in and setup a campaign.  This is due to the fact that DirectCPV is white labeling the CPView platform.  This does not mean that DirectCPV is the same thing as CPView, they have a different user base with the adware installed so it is a completely different network.

It is relatively simple to get a campaign set up with the interface, you put in your Landing Page url (affiliate link), give it a name, and then you add in at least one type of targeting (URL, keyword, or category).  I put in about 20 URLs from a quick Google search and decided to try out a couple keywords as well.  One thing to note here is that DirectCPV does not have anywhere near the number of adware users that some of the bigger networks have, so you might be a bit safer testing out new keywords here (keywords on the big networks can mean your whole budget gone in the blink of an eye).

I let it run for a few days and when I came back to check my stats (using Prosper202) I was pleasantly surprised that my campaign was profitable right off the bat.  It wasn’t a home run, but it did make money.  I decided to make a couple of minor tweaks at that point.  The first thing was checkout my Prosper202 to see what URLs were converting.  As is often the case, all the conversions were coming from one URL.  I noticed that some of them were coming from the Keyword that I had put in instead of the direct URL.  The problem with that is that the bid price for the Keyword was 0.08 (8 cents) and the bid for the direct URL was 0.01 (1 cent).  Simple fix there, I paused the Keyword and added the URL to my targeting.  After that the profits were decent.

The main gripe I have about the DirectCPV interface is that you have to click “Check Bid” on each URL individually to see if you are in 1st position.  Other networks have done this better, but you can take some of the hassle out of it by setting the bid mode to Auto and then setting it at 1st position.  This will automatically increase your bid if somebody is above you.  Also if you want to Geo Target your campaign, you have to do it after the campaign is setup, you can’t do it during the campaign creation.  This stumped me the first time.

Final word?  I like DirectCPV.  I think it’s worth a shot especially if you have a profitable campaign on another network that you are looking to expand.  It can also be good for testing out a new campaign to if it converts without blowing your budget since there is a smaller installed user base, there is less competition, and the bid prices start at 1 penny (at MT it is 1.5).  It doesn’t have as much traffic as the bigger guys, but from what I saw it can definitely be a good source to add to your repertoire.

If you signup through my affiliate link here you can get a $25 credit by using the promo code “BR25″.

Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/5

If there’s one thing that Internet and Affiliate Marketers can’t get enough of, it is tools & shortcuts.  Every process that can be automated gives us more time to focus on being creative and the next big idea.  A good friend of mine launched his own set of tools this week, and it is called SiteSnatcher.  I immediately signed up and gave it a test run, so I thought I would share my first impressions.

The first tool I tried was the Blog Commentor.  When you are trying to get a new site indexed and get some link juice to it, one of the easiest ways to do that is to comment on related blogs using your URL to link back to your site.  The Blog Commentor will take any keyword that you choose, such as “golf”, and come up with a bunch of direct links to the posts that you can comment on.  It also has a built in iFrame so that you can just load the blog inside of SiteSnatcher, submit your comment, then hit “Next” and it loads the next blog into the window.  This makes the blog commenting process a breeze, you can knock out 100 comments in short order.

Next I tried out the Site Targeting Tool.  This is designed for PPC guys that are looking for specific sites to target for the Content Network in their niche.  One of the best ways to make the Content Network profitable is to site target instead of just letting Google do it for you.  This can be a tedious process of searching for sites in your niche that are running AdSense so that you can target them.  This tool does it all for you.  Simply put in your keyword, hit go, and it will grab anywhere from several hundred to 1,000 sites in your niche that AdSense on the page.  This can also work as a URL scraper for finding sites to target with PPV.

One thing I will mention is that you need to wait a little bit for the results to come in.  These tools are doing real-time scrapes of lots of data, so when you hit go it can take anywhere from 10-15 minutes to see the full results.  It is all designed to run in the background, so you can set a couple different tools to run, or just work on something else and come back later.

The pricing is based on how much you want to use it.  On the basic package, you get 50 “credits” per day.  As you see in the screenshot above, the Site Targeting Tool take 25 credits to run.  You can run it (or any other tool for 25 credits) twice per day on the basic package.  I think it’s a cool way to test it out without spending a ton of cash.  If you start using it a bunch on a daily basis, then you can get a bigger package with more credits.

All in all I think that this is definitely going to turn some heads.  I don’t recommend products or services very often on this blog, so take it from me, this is a solid service that is only going to get better.   If you do PPC on the Content Network, or PPV, or if you do any type of SEO including the EPN / McJiffy / BANS method, then SiteSnatcher is a tool you will want to check out.

P.S. If you click one of the SiteSnatcher links above, you will go through my affiliate link.  If you don’t want to use my affiliate link, just go to http://sitesnatcher.com.

Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/5

There has always been an element of mystery to bidding for keywords on Google AdWords.  Finally, Hal Varian from the mighty Google speaks out on our behalf with this clear and concise video to explain exactly what happens when you bid on a keyword and how the ads are ranked.  If you haven’t seen this video yet, you need to take the 9 minutes and 12 seconds it takes to watch it.  If you spend any money on Google AdWords at all, it will be worth it.

See, I told you so!  Now go make some money.