Archive for December, 2009

Afilliate Programs 101

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

Mike Evans from Search Marketing Standard posted an interesting blog about Affiliate Programs and their function in a struggling economy. The ad network is responsible for finding and managing the affiliates, and for checking to make sure that the affiliate is a reputable person who is running clean traffic to your offer. The ad networks also manage payouts to affiliates and add roughly a 20% fee on top of whatever the affiliate receives as a commission in exchange for getting their affiliates to run your offer and managing the technical details involved in tracking your offer and payouts. Mike goes on to discuss merchants, multiple ways to drive traffic and the possible drawbacks in his blog post below.

The great thing about an affiliate program, especially in these hard economic times, is that if an affiliate doesn’t produce any sales, there’s no cost to you.

Another function the ad network performs is staying on top of your sales to make sure they back out. Having sales back out is the process of making sure your customers are happy and are not submitting a large number of credit card charge backs. One of the main functions of the software run by affiliate ad networks is to give them (and you) immediate notification if a particular affiliate is running bad traffic that does not back out. The network will speak to the affiliate and shut them down if their traffic is not backing out.

Now, all of the above sounds great, so here’s the not-so-good news. You have to structure your offer in a way that is attractive to an affiliate. You need an offer that has sufficient demand on the Internet, and you need work with your ad network to create the highest payout you can, with attractive, high-converting landing pages.

As a merchant, have to understand that the affiliate is using his time and money to promote your product. The affiliate has thousands of other offers to choose from, and for him to run traffic to yours; you have to make it worth their while. If the commission you expect to pay is only pennies, no one will run your offer; you have to make sure the relationship formed between you, the ad network, and the affiliate is mutually beneficial. Your ad network will guide you in this.

One of the second most popular ways affiliates drive traffic is through email. Many affiliates develop an opt-in email list in specific niches. There are affiliates that specialize in every niche out there, including yours. An opt-in email list is one where a consumer has chosen to receive information about a particular topic. In our baby-blanket-related example, an affiliate might offer a free newsletter on the latest ways to help your baby go to sleep. Consumers opt-in to receive the weekly newsletter, and the affiliate then sends your offer to his email list.

There are many, many other methods affiliates use to drive traffic. These include buying banner ads to advertise your product, making simple websites that provide consumers information, writing articles for blogs, making videos and posting them on YouTube, making product review sites, and posting classified ads.

Thatcher Michelsen, a super affiliate with over ten years Internet marketing experience advises, “Merchants need to believe this is real. Many SEO marketers don’t believe at first that it’s actually possible to get other people to pay to advertise their products. The Internet is not like print or TV. Everything on the Internet is trackable, and that’s why affiliate marketing works. There’s no risk for the merchant at all, they just need to make sure they have a good offer.”

According to the 2009 AffStat Report, a document put out by Affiliate Summit (the industry-leading affiliate advertising convention), 80% of affiliate programs use a revenue sharing or Pay-Per-Sale method, nineteen percent use a Pay-Per-Lead lead method, and the remaining programs use a custom solution.

Don’t think this is easy money however. Successful affiliate programs require work and maintenance. But in these times, any additional sales, especially those with no up-front cost, are a welcome addition to your bottom line.

While affiliate marketing has benefits, there are, of course, drawbacks. For instance, you’ll be sharing your profits with an outside party. And if an affiliate uses unscrupulous means to drive traffic — email spam for example — you’ll have to exercise some damage control on your reputation.

Okay, so we’ve covered the good and the bad. How do you get started? Using a hosted solution is often the best way to start. This means you use a third-party affiliate management company to set-up your offer and promote it to their affiliates, using their servers and infrastructure.

Ultimately, I believe that every business will have to at least look at the affiliate model to promote their product. The ability of the Internet to track all of these sales allows the affiliate model to work and continue to grow at an amazing pace. Affiliates are, in effect, an extended sales force for your business. By using them wisely, you will be able take your company to heights you always imagined possible.

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Measuring SEO Campaign Success

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

by Jonathan Marshall

Hamlet Batista for Search Engine Journal had an interesting take on ranking metric for Search Engine Optimization. According to Hamlet, after considerable experience using multiple SEO tools as well as extensive research into tools that check or track keyword rankings, we should not solely rely on metrics for measuring success of SEO campaigns. There are advantages and disadvantages to every measurement tool, and that is what we should accept before moving forward with any SEO campaign.

One of the points discussed in Hamlet’s post is that keyword position should not be the ultimate goal of SEO campaign, therefore it shouldn’t be an SEO process success metric. I would like to touch on that point a little bit more. I’ve outlined the pros and cons of the three most popular (at least in my mind) SEO measurement tools below:

Keyword Ranking:

Advantages – Much easier to define, analyze and visualize in the form of an SEO report. Keyword ranking is much easier to explain to the client, which we all know can be a hassle in general when dealing with SEO. Keyword ranking is also considerably easier to aim at.

Disadvantages – High rankings don’t mean conversions – ranking should not be the end goal of any project. Rankings can move up and down naturally and this fluctuation might be hard to keep track of as it changes.

Search Traffic Rise:

Advantages – Again, this is the easiest aim to achieve and keep track of.

Disadvantages – Traffic doesn’t mean more sales or customers (the quality of traffic is what really matters).

Conversions:

Advantages – In the end, each customers ultimate aim is to make sales or convert in any other way (subscriptions, clicks, etc).

Disadvantages – This aim can only be achieved if you are delivering full service (SEO, PPC, usability tests, etc).

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PPC Campaign Optimization…

Friday, December 11th, 2009

Many advertisers run a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign with one goal in mind — they want to send as many visitors as possible to their website. It may feel like you are going against the grain if you set up a PPC campaign and you are not concerned with conversions or the quality of your traffic, but at times you may want to defy the common methodology. If you plan to make traffic your number-one goal, there are a few things you should know when it comes to setting up and maintaining your PPC campaign.

First of all, let’s talk about the type of advertiser who needs an optimized-for-traffic PPC campaign. For publishers selling cost-per-thousand (CPM) ad space or advertisers measuring revenue-per-visitor (RPV), traffic may be all their business needs to be successful. Publishers in this situation want to drive up the overall impressions their website is getting, as cheaply as possible, so they can in turn sell more ad space to their own advertisers. PPC advertising is still one of the best ways to accomplish this goal. Advertisers measuring RPV are looking for insight as to how much revenue a marketing program contributes to their bottom line by visitor.

Next let’s take a look at the keywords you should target. Any /localized-ppc-package-180-clicks.php“>SEO Professional will tell you — depending on the type of website you have, you should buy the broadest terms available within your vertical. If you run an e-commerce site, then buy early — buying cycle keywords like MP3 player, cell phone, shoes, etc. For a lead generation site, buy high-volume keywords that are not fully defined, like marketing, diabetes, dentist, gold, etc. Publishers will want to buy a rotating set of keywords based on new headlines and popular culture. Also target the content network. Even though over 90% of web traffic begins at the search engine, over 90% of all page views are non-search pages.

Finally, your ad copy must be optimized for a high clickthrough rate (CTR). The best way to do this is make sure your keywords are in your ads. Make separate ad groups for all of your highest volume keywords so those ads will be highly targeted. You can also use the dynamic keyword insertion tool here. Remember that Google bolds a keyword that is placed within an ad. Another way to gain an extremely high CTR is with high-interest ad copy. Using words like Free, Learn, and Sale are great ways to grab attention and clicks.

By making traffic the main goal of your PPC campaign, you go down a different path than most PPC marketers. Goal setting, keyword research, and copywriting have new meaning within this type of PPC campaign. By employing these optimization techniques, you will be ensuring you are getting the most out of your PPC campaign and its integration into your overall business success.

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Small Businesses CAN Brand themselves with a budget… online that is…

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

People often associate branding with money. Lots and lots of money. Most of the time, if you try to run a branding campaign you think of companies like Nike, companies that will have to pay for intense and premiere campaigns. But small business owners don’t have that kind of money to brand themselves in similar fashion. Fortunately, there are online methods to brand your small business.

Many SEO experts would conclude that a full-scale SEO or PPC campaign is the only way to brand yourself online. SEO can play a role in branding, but you can engage it strategically so you’re spending less time and less money while still building brand recognition.

What are you branding?

First you need to know what it is you are branding. Is it your company name? Your products? Your services? Your personal name or online handle? What is it that you want people to remember?

If you’re a blogger your name is definitely important. So is your blog name. If you’re a business then your business name will be important, as might be your products if they are exclusively yours. The point is, before you start spending money to brand yourself you first need to determine what you have that needs to be branded. Now you have your starting place.

How to use SEO for branding

SEO is a great way to brand your business, products, services or blog. Since you’re not going after high-volume keywords, the cost of using SEO for branding is relatively minimal. The idea is to make sure you come to the top of the results when someone searches for whatever it is you’re trying to brand. The goal here is to make sure your brand is prominent in the results so you begin to build that brand recognition.

The easiest way to do this kind of branding is to simply edit your title tags to include your brand name. If it’s your company name, then put your company name first and foremost in your title tag. If you’re branding own name, put that there. Most SEO professionals will tell you not to put your business name in the front of your title tag. If you’re targeting non-branded keyword searches I fully agree. However if your focus is on building brand name recognition, then you’ll have to sacrifice some keyword real estate for your brand.

The goal here is to make sure people see your company name, or whatever it is you’re branding, whenever your site comes up in the search result. This will also help ensure that when someone does a search for your branded name they’ll find you up top. It will still be important to optimize your site for non-branded keywords, however. The more keywords you rank for on the first page, the more opportunities you have to build brand recognition.

Look for opportunities to optimize for your pages for some of the long-tail keyword phrases. Being ranked on those often generates more highly targeted visitors so branding to that audience is even better.

How to use PPC for branding

Another thing you can do to brand yourself is to buy cheap ads through Google, Yahoo and Bing. You can do this for your name, products or even specific keyword searches. When going this route you’re not competing for top spot, or even for a lot of clicks. Instead, you’re looking to appear on a search result page where you’ll be seen for as little money as possible. Don’t compete. Find keywords that have low click cost or more expensive keywords where you can rank further down the page. Again, the point here is just simply to get eyeballs to fall on your ad–and your brand name–not necessarily to get the searcher to click on your ad (though that’s never a bad thing.)

PPC ads are a great way to get visibility for incorrect or alternative spellings of your brand. Bidding on most variations of your brand name will cost you next to nothing on a per-click basis. You can also run your ads on dozens, or even hundreds, of low search volume keywords. These will get very little traffic, and therefore cost very little, but it gives you yet another opportunity to get your name in front of searchers eyeballs. Lots of little exposures often dwarf the benefit of a few big exposures.

I’m fully convinced that there isn’t a company in the world, regardless of size, that shouldn’t be working on branding itself in some way or another. Branding for your web site or company name is usually the easiest thing to do as most web sites inherently come to the top of the results for those types of searches. But taking it a bit further, expanding your reach can be significantly rewarding, even allowing you to be a little brand in a big commercial pond.

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