Category Archives: SEO

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.

When EPC Isn’t The Most Important Thing…

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When affiliates first get into this industry, they are usually always in search of offers with the highest payout. They figure if the payout is higher then they will automatically make more money. Obviously that’s not the case, since people can bank with $2 gaming offers even harder than someone running a $50 free trial offer.

A much better metric to go by is EPC (earnings per click). If you are making $0.50 a click on an offer, that is much better than $0.25 a click, right? Seems simple enough. It’s true, EPC is a much better measurement of the quality of a campaign that simply going by the offer payout. But is it the absolute best method? Nope.

Here’s the problem. Even if an offer gets $0.50 a click instead of $0.25 a click, you might still want to run the $0.25 offer. Why? Because it may get more clicks. This is where eCPM (estimated cost per mille, or estimated cost per thousand impressions). This one can be a bit trickier to figure out than EPC, where you just divide earnings by the number of clicks. But if you are willing to do the math, eCPM will give you the most accurate picture of which offer makes more money.

Here’s how to figure your eCPM:

eCPM = (revenue/number of impressions delivered)*1000

This really works to find out which offer is working the best for you on a landing page with multiple offers, or if you are split testing two different offers on a landing page. It doesn’t really work if you are just direct linking, unless you are doing PPC and you want to count your ad impressions as the impressions, but that gets a little dicey. So if you are using landers, get calculating and see what you find out, you may be surprised by the results.

Case Study: Buying A Site on Flippa for Profit – Part 2

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It’s been about 12 days since I started this Case Study (check out Part 1 here), so I thought it was about time for an update. Unfortunately due to the holidays, I haven’t been able to spend as much time working on the site as I wanted to.

I really haven’t made many changes to the site itself at all, other than some small on-page SEO fixes. The main things that I have done are link building and social bookmarking. If you don’t have the time to do social bookmarking yourself (like me), I highly recommend Red_Virus’s $25 package. I have used Amit for several projects and he always does a great job. I’ve had a site get ranked just from these bookmarks alone.

Here’s what the traffic has looked like since I took over the site:

Case Study - Traffic Stats

Click to enlarge

As you can see, the site has a good amount of Pageviews and a decently low Bounce Rate. So the people that get to the site seem to be sticking around and browsing for a bit. I just need to continue increasing the traffic. The good news is the trend is definitely upward for overall visitors.

As far as monetization, the affiliate banner I put on it has failed so far. It gets barely any clicks and it has not generated a single lead. I’ll have to test out different banners or offers to optimize this. For AdSense, it’s averaging about $0.75 – $1.00 a day right now. So at this rate, if I leave it alone, it will pay back the money I spent on it in about 2 years. Obviously that’s no good, so more optimization will follow!

The next step is to start an email list so that I can capture addresses and send them relevant articles and affiliate offers on an ongoing basis. That’s all I’ve got to report for now!

Case Study: Buying A Site on Flippa for Profit

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Last month Stackman did a really cool post about buying websites on Flippa and optimizing them for profit. I have created tons of websites from scratch, but I’ve never tried to buy one before. So I took his advice, went over to Flippa and started browsing around. Here’s what I found…

There’s a bunch of crappy websites for sale!

There are good ones as well but you have to really dig through a bunch of crap to find the good stuff. I don’t think I was prepared for all of the retarded sites for sale at outrageous prices, but I got used to it. I ended up bidding on two different sites that I thought had potential.

Flippa

If you haven't ever been to Flippa.com, you should check it out!

The first site ended up being highly competitive, and went for $3,200. I didn’t want to spend that much my first time out, so I let that one go. The problem was it was already too far developed and had affiliate income already set up on it. Honestly I’m not sure why the guy was selling it, unless it had just been sandboxed or something… Anyways, on to the next one.

The second site had about 15 bids on it as well as a Buy It Now price of $500. After doing some due-diligence and researching the niche and the site’s traffic, I decided to go ahead and buy it. I’m sure I could have gotten a better deal by waiting for the auction to finish, but I’m pretty impulsive when I get an idea into my head so I just bought it for the $500 BIN price.

The reason I liked the site was that it had a lot of content already generated. It has over 2,000 pages in it. That saves me a lot of work on the front end so I can focus on getting it traffic and monetizing it. It doesn’t have a blog, so I will probably add one of those shortly and put some more content on it. It also had quite a few backlinks already going to it. It has a PR of 0, but the groundwork is still there. It should be fairly easy to get it up to PR 2 or PR 3 in the next couple of months.

AdSense was the only type of monetization on the site, and there weren’t very many ads at all. I went ahead and placed a 468×60 banner for an affiliate offer in the header, and spruced up the AdSense locations. I will most likely build an email list as well so I can mail offers to my users.

That’s all I’ve got to report for now. I’m excited about the project and hopefully it will be a good long-term source of income. It gets old doing the affiliate campaign grind after a while, so this has been a fresh breath of air.

SiteSnatcher Has Landed

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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

Easy Money with eBay Partner Network – Part 2

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By now hopefully you have had a chance to get your website up and running, and if you are lucky your EPN account might have even been approved.  Now there is only one step left to do: get out there and market your new niche website!  You are going to be marketing this website through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), not PPC.  It is the best way to get free traffic to your website and keep it going for months and years to come.

It’s really not too tough, because the search engines are going to do all of the heavy lifting, you just need to make sure that your site is in the best position to get indexed.  The first thing that you want to do is make sure that you have a keyword list that you are targeting.  You probably came up with a decent list when you were researching what niche you wanted to create your website in, but if not, now is the time to create it.  You just need 20-30 keywords that are centered on your main keyword and slight variations of it.  For example, if you were selling Nike Running Shoes, your list could include Nike Basketball Shoes,  Buy Nike Shoes,  Best Nike Cross Trainers, Nike Air Jordans, Nike Socks, Nike Sports Shoes, etc.

Once you have your keyword list, you are going to put those keywords in your Meta tags.  You also want to make sure you write a good two to three sentence Description of your site to go in the Meta tags.  This will be the text that appears in the search engines under the link to your website.  You want to write something that gets people to click on it, such as “Get the cheapest prices on Nike Running Shoes on the planet.  Our list is updated daily, check it out today!”

The next step is to get some inbound links going to your website.  The easiest method is going to be to submit your website to free directories and social bookmarking websites.  The higher the Page Rank of the site, the more juice it passes on to your website.  Adding these links can be a little time consuming, but we are going to stretch it out.  You do not want to go out there and submit 100 social bookmarking links the day after you create your website, this will almost certainly get you penalized or “sandboxed” by Google.  I prefer to let the domain sit for a week or two and then start adding the social bookmarking links in groups of 3-5 per day, just like a site would grow through word-of-mouth or natural backlinks.  If you don’t want to do this grunt work yourself, you can hire someone to do it for a fair price.  This is definitely the way to go if you are cranking these sites out.

The next step is possibly the hardest one: wait.  It takes some time to get these sites indexed and ranking, but if you’ve done your research properly it should not take very long at all to get on to the first or second page of Google for your main keyword term.  Once that happens, the clicks will start coming in to your EPN account and with those, come commissions.  You are not going to become a millionaire with this method, but I have personally followed these exact same steps and made anywhere from $50 to $300 per month from a single one of these sites.  Once you have the first one done, crank out another one!  The key is volume.  $300 x 10 websites = $3,000 for month, and you are 100% profitable because there are no PPC costs.

Now go make some money.

Easy Money with eBay Partner Network

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There is no free lunch.  However, there is something I like to call, “A little bit of effort for a lot of return.”  eBay Partner Network is one of those opportunities.  You might have heard about the glory days of getting $25-$50 for free account signups back when eBay had their affiliate program on Commission Junction.  Make no mistake, those days are gone.  However, this does not mean that there is no money to be made with EPN.  On the contrary, it can be quite a nice little extra stream of income.  Let’s look at how it’s done.

Before we go any further, if you don’t have an EPN account, go here and sign up for one right now.  It takes them a little while to get around to approving you.  You can do the setup without your account and API key, you just need to have it before you go live with your site.

First of all, you are going to pick a niche.  There are many eBooks and blogs written just about picking a niche, but let’s not overcomplicate things.  All you are looking for is a small niche, something that gets around 20,000+ searches on Google every month, and it has less than 500,000 resulting pages when you search for it on Google.  To get yourself kick-started, I like to check out eBay Pulse.  The various Top 10 lists they have there for different categories are a great place to start.  If you can’t find anything small enough, then laser target even more.  Too much competition for baseball bats?  Zero in on one specific brand of baseball bats, a smaller brand even.  The more targeted the better, as long as there are searches for it every month.

Once you have picked your niche, the next step will be choosing the platform for building your website.  The most popular options here are phpBay and BANS, but these both come at a cost.  They are worth the money, but if you are looking to just start out with your first EPN niche site, I would recommend McJiffy.  It is a completely free open-source script, and I’ve used it for profitable sites myself.  The rest of this guide will assume that you are using McJiffy.  Once you have got your platform squared away, it’s time to set up your website.

You will want to buy a domain name with your relevant niche keywords in the domain itself.  You also want to have some type of value-based keyword in your domain.  Examples: CheapHuffyBikes.com, PaylessNintendoGames.com, etc.  I would recommend sticking with a .COM or .NET, stay away from .BIZ or .INFO, they look cheap and spammy.  We are going to be promoting our EPN site through SEO, so it needs to be relevant and easy to remember.

Finally, the last piece of the puzzle will be hosting.  It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, I’ve used Hostgator shared hosting for this, just make sure you get the Baby package with unlimited addon domains.  This way you can use the one hosting account to host all your niche sites.  Quantity is the name of the game with this tactic.

Now that you’ve got all the components, it’s time to put them together and build your first EPN site!  Unzip your McJiffy script, and upload it to your hosting account on the root of the domain that you purchased.  There’s just a couple of modifications that need to be made to the McJiffy site to maximize profit.  First of all, use Google Images to find a relevant header image for your website.  You can just leave the green default header in there if you want, but the image will make it look much better.  Second, you will want to write a description of your product and/or website.  Something like, “About Huffy Bikes”.  This doesn’t have to be 100% original, you can grab content from Wikipedia or even the company’s official website and bio, just make sure you re-write it in your own words so that Google won’t penalize you for duplicate content.  Try to keep this description/bio to around 300-500 words.  If you suck at writing, you can hire an article writer to do this for you for very cheap.  Just check around on the various forums.

All of these steps should take you several hours if you are quick, and a few days if you are taking it easy.  We’re going to take a break at this point to let you get started on your website, and pick up next week on Part 2: Marketing Your EPN Site.

Now go get to work!