Epic Fail! Google Deindexed Me

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I went to check on my Google Analytics stats last week to discover that my traffic had completely stopped. As in, there was NOBODY coming to the site. I know I haven’t posted much lately, but that seemed a little odd. I normally get at least 1500 visitors a month just from Google sending traffic to my old posts. So I did some more digging and discovered that around the end of June, my traffic took a nosedive and never came back.

Analytics Nosedive

I logged into Webmaster Tools, and found that my site mysteriously stopped getting crawled. Then came a couple of hours of wandering around forums and blog posts trying to figure out what happened. Something was blocking Googlebot from verifying my site, but what?

In the end, it was an issue with my .htaccess file. During some site speed optimizations, I inadvertently blocked all traffic from Google’s servers. Oops! That was a huge mistake… I’ve resubmitted my site to Google, updated my sitemap, and am waiting for the traffic to come back now. The moral of the story is, if you are working on your .htaccess file, be sure you know what you are doing!

 

Tired of CPA Offers? Try Promoting Shopify Instead

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You know the drill: Email submits; Dating offers; Rebills. We’ve all been promoting the same types of cost-per-action (CPA) offers for ages now. I’m not saying they aren’t worth promoting, but sometimes you need to try something different to get the creative juices flowing again. For example: cost-per-sale (CPS) offers. As opposed to CPA offers, CPS offers only pay out when the customer makes a purchase. While it does take a little bit more selling to get them to take action, the nice part is that you never have to worry about not getting paid for your traffic (which is a common issue with CPA offers). There are other benefits to CPS offers as well, such as the possibility for monthly recurring commissions.

Shopify Home Page

One of more interesting CPS programs I’ve seen lately is called Shopify. Shopify is an e-commerce service that creates online stores for their customers. They’ve got several different pricing tiers, targeted at small business and hobbyists all the way up to custom, enterprise-level solutions. If you are used to targeting consumers for your affiliate campaigns, Shopify will give you the opportunity to try your hand at targeting business owners instead. This is a huge niche right now, with sites like Etsy and eBay getting people interested in selling their wares online. Shopify is for people who want to take their online store to the next level.

There are several benefits to being an affiliate of Shopify:

  • They are a very well known brand in their niche
  • Campaigns can be targeted as B2B but also C2B
  • Unsaturated affiliate program and niche
  • All traffic sources are accepted
  • 2 commission options:
    • 20% lifetime revenue share on all customers (Recurring income!)
    • -or-
    • 200% of customers first bill. Per sale commission varies depending on what plan customer chooses (Up to $358 a sale)
  • Commissions can increase depending on volume

It would definitely be worth doing a split test to see if you make more money by doing the lifetime revenue share option or the 200% of the first bill option. Either way, it’s a very generous commission. For promotion tactics, I would try doing a review-style landing page. Perhaps you could compare Shopify to having an Etsy store, or the hassle of managing your own shopping cart solution. If you’ve ever tried to set up an e-commerce site, you know that it’s a lot of work. Your average mom that does knitting in her free time and wants to sell her wares online is probably going to be overwhelmed with something like that. There’s a perfect target for you.

With a little research, your potential targeting options and promotion angles are vast. Promoting a campaign like this could also be a good place to work on from the SEO angle. It’s hard to promote CPA offers with SEO because it is more of a long-term play than paid traffic. With a program like Shopify, you can have confidence that it is going to be around for long enough to reap the benefits of an organic search campaign.

Bottom line, give Shopify a try. If you spend some time getting used to the flow of a CPS campaign, you will find that it can be a great way to smooth out the ups and downs of your CPA campaigns. You can sign up to be a Shopify affiliate here. Let me know how it goes in the comments!

GTmetrix: This Is Your Site On SPEED

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It has been mentioned before on this blog that landing page loading time matters. Each precious second that you shave can mean more dollars in your pocket. I always thought that I did a pretty good job of keeping my landing pages fast. I used small, optimized images, had a good server, etc. But that was before my friend Rohail introduced me to GTmetrix.

I was skeptical at first, but it looked simple enough to try. All you need to do is put in your landing page URL and press go. So I did. GTmetrix analyzed my site in a few seconds, and it came back with a grade of C- for my page. I was surprised, since I thought it was loading pretty quick at 1.5 seconds. But the truly amazing thing about GTmetrix is how much detail they give you about how to speed up your site. They have it all laid out from the top factors affecting your speed down to the smallest ones. And everything that they suggest comes with more info about how to do it. For example, one of the suggestions for my site was to minify the javascript files I was using. All I had to do was click on the links for the minified code that it generated for me, replace my code with it, and upload it to my server. It took about 30 seconds to complete. They’ve also got a lossless image optimizer built in. If your images are too big, just download the optimized versions and upload them to your server. Simple. When I was done completing the high priority tasks that GTmetrix suggested, I re-tested the page. I was blown away! The load time was now down to 0.6 seconds. A few simple tweaks had cut my loading time in half, and then some.

GTmetrix Screen Shot

Looks like I’ve got some optimizing to do on this blog…

So how much does this tool cost? Absolutely nothing. It’s free. Bookmark it now and do yourself a favor. I use it on every single lander I do now, and it continues to amaze me how quick my landers are loading. If you take the time to read the info on how each tweak actually works, you will learn a great deal about better coding and web server best practices as well. I can’t recommend this site enough, and thanks again to Rohail for turning me on to it!

How To Set Up A Postback URL with CPV Lab

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CPV Lab has been my tracking platform of choice ever since it launched. Despite the name, it can be used to track just about any type of traffic, not just CPV/PPV. I’ve used it for PPV, Facebook, Media Buys, and Mobile. Recently I had a campaign that required a Postback URL (also called Server-to-Server Pixel) for tracking instead of the usual pixel. It’s basically the same thing, but instead of placing a pixel on the landing page that gets loaded by the user’s browser, your affiliate network’s tracking system itself will tell your CPV Lab that a conversion has taken place. This is the primary tracking method used for Mobile campaigns, where pixels often don’t work. It is also much more reliable for tracking correctly (at least in my experience).

There is nothing in the CPV Lab interface that tells you how to do it. I had to go searching for the answer in the CPV Lab help desk, so I figured I’d share it with you. It’s actually quite simple.

First you will need your Image Pixel URL from your CPV Lab installation. Just go to the Edit Campaign window (any campaign), scroll down and copy the code in the box labeled “Image Pixel”. It should look like this:

<img src="https://yourtracker.com/adclick.php" width="1" height="1" border="0" />

Now copy just the URL part:

http://yourtracker.com/adclick.php

Next we are going to add “?subid=” on to the end of it, so we have this:

http://yourtracker.com/adclick.php?subid=

The final step is going to depend on what tracking platform your affiliate network is using. They each have a “token” that will make the system place the subid value into your link dynamically. Below I’ve listed the tokens for some of the most common tracking platforms.

Cake: #s1#

LinkTrust: [=SID=]

HasOffers: {aff_sub}

HitPath: xxc1xx

To complete your Postback URL, just paste the correct token onto the end of your link. If you aren’t sure what platform your network uses, just ask your Affiliate Manager. Here’s an example using the Cake token:

http://yourtracker.com/adclick.php?subid=#s1#

That’s it! Now all you need to do is send your new Postback URL to your Affiliate Manager and tell them to place it for you. Be sure to tell them it’s a Postback URL, not an Image Pixel. Also, if you have the proper access, you can place it yourself in all of these platforms I’ve listed above. It depends from network to network and also offer to offer whether they allow you to place your own pixel.

Try it out, once you get it working you won’t go back to Image Pixels…

Affiliate Marketing Is Dead (Again)

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It seems like every year or so the topic of whether Affiliate Marketing is dead or not comes up. It’s usually started by someone that makes some sensational claims in a blog post or interview. I won’t name names, but there have been a rash of these lately, so I felt like a response was necessary.

So is Affiliate Marketing dead? In a word: NO!

In fact, I would venture to say it’s the best it has ever been. The sheer amount of opportunity out there is staggering, and it’s only growing on a daily basis (not shrinking). People like to talk about “the good old days” when things were easier. But they have been doing that for years. It’s always last year that the money was made, and now we are all doomed because Yahoo / Google / Facebook / MSN changed their policy. Funny though, the next year, we’re all still here.

Marketing methods do come in and fall out like the changing of the tide, but the whole point of being an affiliate is to be creative. If the big ad agencies had the patience and ability to try all of the new traffic sources and creatives that affiliates do, then we might be in trouble. But they aren’t doing that. There will always be a place for creative individuals that have a talent for optimizing campaigns. That’s essentially what we are: optimizers.

You can call it whatever you want, but as long as I am making money from the internet by placing ads and getting paid for my sales or leads, then I’m a happy camper. Stop worrying about whether or not the industry is dead. The people that are making money aren’t sitting around reading these blog posts anyway. They are setting up new campaigns and laughing all the way to the bank.

Which would you rather be, worried or rich?

Getting Paid to Play

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Yesterday was my 8th anniversary of being married to my amazing and beautiful wife, Amanda. We’ve been through some trying times lately (see her blog for more info on that), so I wanted to do something really special for her to celebrate the occasion. We had a wonderful dinner at the same restaurant that we went to on the night we got engaged, and we followed it up with a horse-drawn carriage ride through downtown Denver. To cap the evening off, we stayed in an amazing suite at the Hotel Monaco (which was where I asked her to marry me 8 years ago) and had Champagne with fresh strawberries for dessert.

Our suite at the Hotel Monaco

Our suite at the Hotel Monaco

Champagne & Strawberries

Champagne & strawberries for dessert

So what does this have to do with Affiliate Marketing? Everything! Not only did I have an amazing night of relaxation and celebration with my wife, I also made enough money to pay for whole thing while I was doing it. You can’t put a price on that. It’s that type of freedom that makes this business the best one in the world, and it’s nice to get a reminder every now and then of what the rewards are for all of your hard work.

Successful Affiliates Create Their Own Luck

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I’ve been reading lots of books lately about success, and I always look at them from the perspective of Affiliate Marketing. I’m still convinced that this business is the best one in the world, and I won’t be doing anything different any time soon. Even so, when you read inspiring stories of how people created success, you can always find nuggets to pull out and apply to your own business and life.

Luck

The only one of these posters that I would actually put on my wall.

The best tip that I have found lately that I think can be directly applied to Affiliate Marketing is this: successful (read “wealthy people”) create their own luck. For many people, when they look at someone like Bill Gates, they look at him and say, “He got lucky.” Same thing with Affiliates. They look at [insert name of most popular super affiliate at the moment] and think to themselves, “Man they got lucky. If I could have jumped into this business when they did and had that big campaign fall into my lap, then I could be making bank too.”

Not so.

The successful campaign, the “big one”, the huge moneymaker that sets the men apart from the boys in this industry, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. That’s just the visible part. These guys didn’t wake up one morning and stumble across that campaign by sheer dumb luck. What you don’t see is the hours spent setting up campaigns, the days testing campaigns, the weeks tweaking them, and the months trying out different offers and traffic sources that lead to that massive success.

Affiliate Marketing isn’t easy. You can’t logon to your laptop, press some buttons for 30 minutes, and expect money to come falling out. Are there people who make a good income spending only 30 minutes a day on it? Yes there are. But they didn’t get that way by spending 30 minutes a day. They most likely worked 12 hours a day on those campaigns until they got them to the point where they could be maintained at a high level. Also, if you are resting on your laurels while you’ve got a big campaign running, you are just asking for a world of hurt when it dies (and it will someday).

My point is, don’t waste your time wishing that you were as lucky as somebody you know that is banking it with Affiliate Marketing. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. If you just got into this business when a massive campaign fell into your lap, you wouldn’t even know what to do with it. It’s the time spent learning that will let you maximize opportunities when you see them and take the money to the bank while you can.

Keep setting up campaigns, keep trying, keep failing, learn from your mistakes, rinse and repeat. That’s how the pros do it.

Why Landing Page Loading Time Matters To Affiliates

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This is a guest-post written by Kate Carpenter, the lead designer over at the web-oriented design and development studio, Fireworksable.

What are page loading times?

I assume that simply by reading the phrase “page loading times” most of you understand what it means, but for those who don’t I’ll elaborate:

The page loading time is the time it takes for a web page to complete loading of that it’s content in a visitor’s browser. The time it takes to load a page increases as the file-size’s of the it’s content increases.

Making sure that page loading times are optimized should be a key concern of developers, however when you hire a cheap freelancer from Digital Point or Elance to put together your landing page or website, it’s often not taken into account, ultimately at your own cost.

 

So, why exactly do page loading times matter to me as an affiliate?

 

If you don’t take into account how fast your page loads, chances are you’ll experience a higher bounce-rate and lower conversion-rate than you would had you optimized properly, due to:

Impatient visitors, which tend to make up the majority of us.

In this day and age, we’re used to getting stuff done very fast. That’s why when we visit a web page that appears to load slowly, even if it’s just by that tiny little bit, we’re very much inclined to hit the back-button.

Google and it’s various algorithms.

Google search now takes into account the loading time of a page when ranking pages, so if you get a lot of visitors from organic search, you could see your primary source of traffic start to slip away.

It also plays a part of your “Quality Score” if you’re using Google AdWords as an advertising platform to run PPC campaigns (NB: I think I read it only effects the search network and not the display network, but I’m not entirely sure).

What can I do to improve my page’s loading time?

 

Here’s two things you can do to improve the loading time of your web pages pretty significantly without diving too much into the technical side:

Compressing those images of yours.

 

Images are by far the biggest contributor an increased page loading time, as they tend to make up the majority of a page’s content in terms of file-size. Compressing an image allows you to remove unnecessary little bits of data from it, and reducing it’s file-size.

For the average affiliate whose not too technical, the best way to compress images is by using Yahoo!’s SmushIt, image compressor.

“Minifying” any JavaScript you’ve got.

 

Often JavaScript files can contain additional comments, white-spacing or code indentation that pumps up their file-size. Removing these additions is called “minifying”.

 

Again, for the average affiliate whose not too technical, a great way to “minify” JavaScript files is by using Google’s Closure Compiler.

 

Some final words on the subject of page loading times…

You can also calculate your page loading time on a scale of 1 – 100 by using Google Page Speed, as well as advice for improving loading time, specific to your page.

In all seriousness, I really recommend that you check out the resources I’ve mentioned in this guest-post, as it shouldn’t take you much longer than 10 or 15 minutes to compress your images and “minify” your JavaScript, and while the impact won’t be a 200% increase in conversions, it will certainly be worth far more than the time spent doing it.

To Direct Link or Not To Direct Link?

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It’s one of the oldest questions in Affiliate Marketing: to direct link or not to direct link? Google made their stance on the issue pretty clear when they all but banned direct linking on AdWords. Now they don’t even like so-called “bridge pages” which lead to affiliate offers with little content on them.

But still, traffic sources such as Facebook and PPV still allow for direct linking. I get asked almost every single day whether you should direct link a campaign or create a landing page for it. Unfortunately, there is no hard and fast answer. The truth is (and has always been) that some campaigns work better direct linked and some work better with landing pages. Neither method works better all of the time. You need to test it out.

That being said, a strategy that I have seen work well for affiliates is to direct link a campaign to quickly evaluate whether or not it has potential before they go to the trouble of building out a landing page. Especially if it is in a brand new niche that you have not promoted before, where you don’t have any creatives or landers sitting around ready to be used.

It’s easy to throw together a direct link campaign on PPV or Facebook. Run some traffic to it, and if you are getting enough conversions to break even, or even just under, it’s a good sign that the offer has some life to it. That’s when you can buckle down and put together a landing page to bring the ROI into the black and start making money.