Is there a silver lining in these slap-happy times? Of course. Affiliates who learn to roll with the punches and make the necessary changes to their campaigns stand to make more money in the long run.

Watch Our New Google Slap Video For Awesome Pointers!

To help you adapt to the changing landscape, we’ve created a short video covering the basics of what the Google Slap is, the criteria that govern it, and the different strategies you can use to avoid it.

This short video is tailored for affiliates in the digital product niche, with real-world examples of what to do and what not to do with your campaigns. The main goal is to communicate that providing quality, unique content on your sites is the most effective way to stay out of Google’s doghouse and build your business for the long haul.

You can watch the full video here and now right on this page, or scroll down to read the individual segment descriptions and watch the video in 4 parts.

Sign Up Now with RevenueWire to get your one-page summary of The Google Slap video and other great marketing support materials from our Tutorial Center.

Part 1. What Is The Google Slap?
Ever wondered what exactly constitutes a Google Slap? You’ll find out in the first segment of our new Google Slap video, anchored by RevenueWire Affiliate Manager Seth Hornby. Watch It Now >>

Part 2. Tips For Your AdWords
This segment covers 3 tips for how you can meet and exceed Google AdWord Guidelines, including Relevant and Original Content, Transparency and Navigability. Watch It Now >>

Part 3. Real-World Examples
Seth takes 2 real life examples of a Driver Product Landing Page and a Driver Mini-Site that have been blacklisted on Google. You’ll learn in detail the different page elements that can result in a Google Slap. At the end, Seth shows an example of a well-designed landing page to provide you with a clear idea of how your landing pages should look. Watch It Now >>

Part 4. Brief Summary
The Google Slap is not all doom and gloom. Seth shares a few positive changes that have come out of the recent rise in number of Google Slaps, including its beneficial effect on competitive keyword bid price. Seth concludes the presentation by explaining the long term advantages of building content rich web sites as promotional tools. Watch It Now >>

You can also watch the video in 4 segments in the Playlist.

WE HOPE YOU ENJOY THE VIDEO. IT WAS DEFINITELY FUN TO MAKE. MAKE SURE TO USE THESE TIPS AND STRATEGIES IN YOUR CAMPAIGNS!

Google is also operating under the assertion that if their search engine does not return the most relevant results, they could possibly lose both users and revenue.

They believe they could see a drop in their market share and in this competitive climate, that situation would be unacceptable. Both Bing and Yahoo! are positioning themselves with new offerings and partnerships, so the competition is now stronger than ever. Google’s solution to this competition is what is driving the new directive that we have all come to know as the “May Day Update.”

Defining The May Day Update

In the first installment we covered what the Google May Day Update is, and how it may affect you and your web sites. We provided warning signs that you can use to determine if your site has been affected and explained what Google is trying to accomplish by changing their algorithm in this way.

Overcoming The Algorithm Change

In the second installment of the May Day update articles, we explained what factors would cause your web site to lose ranking and relevance under the new Google rules. We provided some ways to help overcome the initial ill-effects and explained how effective back linking could help your web site. The provided examples illustrated what could possibly be done to get the ranking and traffic returned.

Improving Website Quality and Relevance

In the next installment, we demonstrated how to improve our web sites to catch the desired attention and ranking from Google.  We focused on website quality and relevance; two factors that are important to you in the post-Mayday update world. We applied effective strategies and provided some examples to illustrate how they are implemented to our benefit. Our clients not only saw traffic return but they even have seen traffic gains by following this advice.

Internal and External Link Building

Finally, we displayed some effective methods to improve our web site’s relevance through targeted and carefully executed internal and external linking strategies. We showed you how to reduce the link jumps, move products closer to the home page, and even encourage organic visitors. Changes of this nature will render your web site “algorithm proof” and even improve your end user’s experience. This will strengthen the relationship with customers and separate your legitimate web site from the fraudulent ones.

Cultivating Top-Notch Content

To overcome and even thrive under the new algorithm, we have shown how to develop content that is of value to your web site visitors, and explained how to focus particularly on deeper pages within your web site and specifically your product pages.

The content on these pages should always appear to be “fresh” and updated on a regular basis, so we explained how to keep your web site update labor minimized by making the best use of user generated content.  Keep in mind that good quality pages will be rewarded by better rankings in Google in addition to increased rankings for many “long tail” phrases. We described how this strategy will naturally develop some of the back linking we are all striving to create.

Fortunately, Metamend’s clients have seen no real negative affects as they have been following our recommendations for developing and improving their site for the search engine algorithm change.

In some of the more properly executed strategies, some clients have actually seen an increase in traffic compared to their competition, which have lost rankings during the May Day update. Google has given these unprepared competitors a low ranking for not accommodating the new requirements; many are still using the old systems like content farms and blog scrapers, to no avail. While these methods have had a good run, they are less effective now, especially since the May Day update.

Google’s attempt at improving the quality of their search results requires webmasters to also improve the quality of their websites. This requires webmasters to put in time and effort to improve their websites in order to position themselves for relevant keywords and to drive traffic. Many web site owners will now find difficulty in devoting these resources to achieve their goals and as a result, the top ranking positions will be held by those who are seen as providing fresh content on a regular basis. This does not have to be as labor intensive as sounds, as we demonstrated.

By following Google’s guidelines and developing a web site that provides value to the web site visitors, we will ensure that our own web sites consistently rank for keywords and develop the desired authority over time. Then by applying our strategies consistently, we can insure that these valuable sites are never negatively affected by any sort of search engine algorithm update.

To briefly summarize, we have demonstrated what the Google May Day update is, how to determine if your web site has been affected, and what you can do about it specifically with examples and strategies.

You are not alone in this issue, and we hope this article series has been helpful and informative. Remember that you have the ability to not only overcome the effects of Google’s algorithm change, but to actually improve your site’s rank and positioning with a little effort and some dedicated strategy.

Link Building Is Where It’s At

As we all know, search engines crawl your web site looking not just at content, but also at the number and types of web sites that are linking to your web site. The updated algorithms used in these search engines, like Google for example, are continually making determinations on the quality of your linking. Higher quality back linking will yield a much better result than a back link determined to be of lesser quality or no quality at all by the search engine’s algorithm.

Under current search engine algorithm rules, this becomes a question more of quality than quantity in the post- Google-May-Day-Update world. Given this new importance of properly formed links, let’s look at what characteristics make a link a higher quality back link.

What Makes A Link High-Quality?

Higher quality back links possess one or more of your web site’s keywords, especially somewhere in the anchor text. Back links with keywords located in the anchor text are generally viewed more favorably by search engines than back links without keywords in the anchor text. This is because it appears that the links are coming from sites with related information when the keywords are found within the anchor text. Therefore, the link appears to possess higher relevance to search engines like Google. Websites that appear to have a multitude of irrelevant incoming links will not be viewed as important by the search engine as would a handful of properly formed and relevant back links and keywords.

There are some beneficial strategies and techniques that we can use, and for clarity we will separate them into two categories: 1) Internal linking, and 2) Back linking.

1. Internal Linking Strategy

For internal linking strategy, we are looking to reduce the amount of “link jumps” which have to be followed to find affiliate product pages. These link jumps not only confuse the search engines, but they can confuse and turn off the customer as well. Consider the idea that wherever possible, you should link the pages and / or products that you wish to promote closer to the relevant homepage, or possibly closer to the featured products on the homepage. There are tangible marketing benefits to this strategy beyond the search engine ranking. The end user experience will be better and this can also encourage return visitors to your site organically.

In addition, keep in mind that it’s beneficial to ensure these links go to pages that have been updated with the type of quality content we previously mentioned. It pays to be thorough and consistent in this step. Again, the end user experience will be improved by taking these important measures.

When properly formed, optimized pages and links have the benefit of passing on your desirable page rank directly to your product pages, by featuring links to those products from the very same valuable pages. This is especially true of your pages with a high or “higher” Google page rank.

This will help increase the ranking for your product pages while simultaneously increasing your long tail traffic. This is especially true if the content requirements are correctly applied as we previously described.

2. Back Linking Strategy

Now that we have our internal links working correctly, we will look at back linking, and how to make this crucial step as beneficial as possible to your web site.

The goal here is to see continued increases in back links to your deep pages or the properly formed product pages. Then, we will want to make sure to keep the applicable content relevant and valuable. When something in your business changes, then make sure to update your content. While no one can update their sites on the fly all of the time, regular updates to what you have will keep your site relevant. This step alone, on pages of this nature, will tend to attract links over time.

Let’s keep in mind that back linking should be an ongoing, continual process, as older links will decrease in value over time and fresh, relevant content will still draw the desired attention. For example, if your product offering is static, there is no reason that your descriptions and photos need to be that way. By changing the descriptions periodically and adjusting photos and comments, you can generate a level of freshness that will get noticed by the search engine.

In fact, by encouraging site visitors to leave comments or product reviews, the customer will actually do much of this work for you. Regular visitors leaving commentary can generate the level of freshness we require. We need to make our changes while keeping in mind that relevance is key for back links, not page rank as you might think. In fact relevance, not page rank, should be the deciding factor you use when acquiring links. The end goal after all is to get found by both the search engines and your customers.

One way to insure that you’re forming the back links properly is to consider each web page as a separate entity. Develop your links with that in mind and work carefully on a per page basis. This will keep the content relevant as your focus will be only the page at hand. These properly formed links will give you the traffic that you are looking for, and it will get the customers who are looking for you to their desired destination.

We now have some beneficial tools in our arsenal to combat the effects of future algorithm changes, like Google’s May Day update. By modifying our collective focus to enhance our internal linking and back linking, and changing our view of what is important from page rank to relevant content instead, we are prepared to keep our web sites highly searchable and, somewhat by default, the rankings will follow.

In the next and final article in this series, we will demonstrate how to tie all of this advice together to give you the necessary tools to properly adjust and overcome this May Day algorithm update and plan for any future updates.

The basic elements around this strategy to overcome the ill effects of the algorithm change are quality of data, freshness of your content, and the amount of “related” content that appears on your web site or web sites.

Build For Quality, Not Mediocrity

First, the quality of the data and content is a high priority on Google’s radar now, so you need to make sure you keep our content relevant. Be sure to consider in advance what you’re putting on your site and what the potential value to web site visitors will be.

The most effective technique here will be to use unique, original, and valuable content designed with the targeted visitors in mind. This will be of particular benefit to you, on your product or your affiliate pages, as these are currently the pages most scrutinized by Google.

Make sure that the content is properly formed, both grammatically and in context, and be sure to make use of a spellchecker as a final step. This one simple step could mean the difference between being a victim of the May Day update or benefiting from it.

The spellchecker tool is part of most software packages, OEM operating systems and even most e-mail clients and it’s almost always free.  Consider that a web site full of errors and incoherent content can give the user the sense that your site is fraudulent, and even possibly illegitimate.  This is what Google is trying to prevent with the algorithm change, and you could become an accidental victim simply by not proofreading your own content before publishing.

Also, keep in mind that any content on your web site that is not present on other competitor’s sites will give you an edge both in the search engines and for visitors to your site. Try to add content such as regular product reviews to your product pages, and other user generated content, which will bring the user further into the experience and keep them coming back for more.

Keeping fresh content of this nature on your web site will also entice the search engines to visit much more often. Content like this is most valuable to your visitors and ensures your site will remain relevant in the future.

Here are some tips to keep your site relevant:

1. Know Your Market And Your Competition
If you’re the “small fish” or even the “same-size fish” in the pond that’s “your niche”, then you need to do something to increase your search engine presence. If your site has relatively few pages and you’re a competitor in a somewhat competitive niche, then the obvious solution will be to increase the number of pages for your targeted phrases.  For example, if you’re selling engine parts and you have a page for Chevrolet parts and a page for Ford parts, and that is all for now, then you’ll have a fairly small footprint online.

To deepen your search footprint, if you could add extra site pages for Chevrolet v8 parts, Chevrolet v6 parts, Ford v8 parts and Ford v6 parts, you would see the resulting change in ranking and volume of traffic. You have the same parts as before, but you’ve made the searching experience more relevant and easier for visitors and the search engines to find.

By using the same keywords and properly forming the pages, you have essentially doubled the size of your online footprint. This change will get Google’s algorithm’s attention, and get you the traffic you’re looking for, and enhance the user experience all at the same time.

2. Develop Content That Is Focused On a Specific Subject
Make sure to write this content with a higher level of granular detail. Develop your “long tail” subjects a bit more, and this modification will contribute to increasing your page depth as well. Changes like these will make a much bigger target out of your site for the search engine to hit.

3. Differentiate Yourself From MFA and / or “Thin Affiliate” Sites
You can easily accomplish this feat by providing contact information for your visitors to use, and making sure you have a privacy policy in place.

Having these “Privacy” and “Contact Us” pages as separate and unique entities will also greatly assist your search engine efforts and increase your searchable online presence.  Any addition that demonstrates to Google and to visitors to your site that you’re here to stay, and not fraudulent, will increase your impact on the search engine ranking as well.

The overall goal is to show both visitors and search engines that your web site is truly legitimate and is “in it for the long haul.” Keeping live email contacts, working phone numbers, actual physical addresses and any permanent items will prove that your site is not a scam.

We need to keep in mind that Google has stated that the May Day changes were made in an effort to keep content fresh and relevant. If you follow the suggestions made here, you should be able to keep your relevance and improve the overall user experience in your favor.

Next week we will talk about linking and how with some strategy and careful implementation, we can recover or boost our page relevance. Also, by taking a few proactive steps, we can make it possible to enjoy some traffic increases and even encourage return visitors.

If it has in fact affected your site, the next logical question on your mind will probably be, “What exactly about my site may have caused it to be affected by the change?” To answer that question thoroughly, the first thing you’ll want to do is review the actual content on your website(s).

Content Is Still The King

As we’ve all heard so many times before, and rightfully so, content is king. The first thing you should do is take stock of your web site’s content and evaluate whether or not it’s offering something useful to your web site visitors, or, if it is engaging in deceptive practices, intentional or otherwise.

Content Audit With A Fine-Tooth Comb

Pay especially close attention to your web site’s affiliate program. Ask yourself if this part of your business is simply mirroring other websites instead of providing unique, useable content for your visitors.

In addition, you’ll want to review your content from the perspective of an outsider looking in, because that’s basically what Google is going to do. Ask yourself if the content you’ve posted is engaging to the viewer, or if it’s poorly written and nonsensical in places.

Does your page or pages content read as if it would make people want to stay on your site for a longer visit, or simply hit the back browser and look somewhere else for the answer to their query? If you notice a degree of stagnation or incoherent writing, then you should consider updating it with some fresh, engaging content. Your aim here is to make the visitor stay long enough to really read what you have to say.

The Fall Of The Blogger Automatons

Prior to the Google May Day update, using auto blogger software had been an effective way to generate fresh content; many sites simply used content scrapers to populate their web site’s updates. This practice was an extremely effective way to generate fresh content while using minimal labor, time and expense.

Unfortunately, after the Google update, any articles that are not written by the original publisher of the content will most likely be seen by Google now as being of lower authority and will not return the ranking and traffic benefits that this practice once used to.

While this is not always going to be the case, it is what Google has stated as a primary goal of the update, and we are all painfully aware that they update the algorithm regularly. If they missed it the first time, chances are they won’t miss it a second time.

Don’t Forget Your Product Pages

It will also help to make yourself aware of any of your product pages that could possibly be viewed as unrelated or having inadequate content. Pages that fit that profile will not assist in ranking anymore. Site depth is one of the stated factors that Google is weighing heavier than ever, which is to say you should make sure everything appears as correct and as fresh as possible throughout your site, not just on the upper layers.

The Appearance of Authority

In addition to automated scraping, and reproduced blogging and content, your website’s “appearance” needs to be authoritative and legitimate. It needs to present itself as being a serious, “real” business. Google is now reducing relevance for web sites that appear to exist simply to convert visitors to a sale. That is not to say that Google is anti-merchant, but the effect will be that web sites perceived as being of that “conversion only” nature are going to be ranked lower under the new algorithm change.

Some websites that are known as “Thin Affiliate” sites, which to Google may appear to offer no additional value to site visitors beyond a sale, will see a drop in their rankings as well. These changes have affected a great number of businesses, and in a very significant way.

Internal Links and Back-links

Other factors for you to consider are your internal links or “internal linking” as Google sometimes calls it. A web site’s obvious lack of links to deep pages, for example any product pages coming from the homepage, are going to be devalued under the Google May Day update. It doesn’t matter whether this is intentional or not. The absence of links to deep pages can and will have a serious effect on your traffic going forward.

Lastly, take a hard look at your site’s deep linking or back-links. The May Day update reduces relevance for sites displaying a lack of links into the deep pages. When landing on your site, if your content appears to have all links which seem to point to the homepage, regardless of what is stated on each individual link, then you are probably one of the web sites feeling the effects of the recent update.

Deep linking is probably the most time consuming of all the solutions for the May Day update, but the easiest to make. Those links need to go somewhere, and unfortunately, all links pointing to the homepage won’t earn you any points with Google. If you have products to sell, consider modifying these deep links to go to new products or offerings. This is the equivalent of “killing two birds with one stone” as far as the Google update is concerned, and you should see some of your ranking or relevance return, and quite possibly even see an increase in ranking in certain areas.

For example, instead of linking: www.yoursite.com, use something like www.en.yoursite.com/new/product if you have multiple language pages. Even an URL like www.yoursite.com/julysalepage may be more effective for your purposes. The idea here is to differentiate these links from simply reflecting 10 links on your site that read www.yoursite.com but are hyperlinked elsewhere.

Spell Out Your Sell

Spelling out what you’re selling is beneficial in more ways than just the obvious; it will get you traffic from Google as well.

In general just keep in mind that these changes, while frustrating, are actually good for your business in the long run. Furthermore, you can be encouraged by the fact that there are multiple solutions and ways available to you to ensure a positive outcome for your business.

Next in the series, we are going to take a hard look at how to improve your web site’s quality to combat the effects of the May Day update, and we will make a few recommendations to get your traffic back, and in some cases, even improved.

***This article is the second installment in a five part series brought to you by our partners at Metamend, the Search Marketing Experts. Since 1998 Metamend has been widely recognized as one of the leading search engine optimization firms in the industry. Providing advanced organic search and Internet marketing searches to clients in over 60 countries, Metamend works to bring pre-qualified visitors to their clients’ websites and to convert those visitors into long-term commercial relationships. Metamend’s search and Internet marketing methods follow the best practices outlined by the major search engines, and its staff maintain strong personal relationships with others at all levels of the search marketing industry.

This update is part and parcel of Google’s “caffeine” modification, which returns data that’s 50% fresher than what was yielded in past searches. This increase in the volume of fresh data rendered is now made possible by Google’s switch to processing data in “pieces” rather than in “layers”, which was standard practice prior to the update.

Schizophrenic Algorithms

It might not come as much of a shock, but each year Google changes its algorithm anywhere between 350 and 500 times. What often happens as a result of these changes is that people who get too focused on exact ranking factors see their site drop when Google releases these algorithmic tweaks.

Minor Quakes From The May Day Update

On the face of it, the May Day modification is simply a rankings change, not a crawling or indexing one. That said, it has still had its effects on some websites. For some it has resulted in a decrease in traffic volume, even though their pages are still getting indexed. After the update the pages seem to not rank as high as they did before, and this is where the stress comes from.

Google’s changes seem to be primarily affecting “long-tail” traffic stemming from the longer search terms that more sophisticated searchers use. When you calculate the net effect of those searchers per site, it adds up fairly quickly, given that long-tail searches convert at a higher rate.

The algorithm change also seems to be affecting very large sites with “item” pages, such as e-commerce sites. Pages of this nature usually don’t have many inbound links, and the links they do have are usually buried within the site. Chances are also very high that these types of sites don’t have substantial amounts of unique content.

The Importance Of Unique Product Descriptions

An important observation to make is that it’s beneficial to keep unique product descriptions for anything you’re selling on your site. To date, the sites that only use a manufacturer’s generic product copy could suffer the most from the May Day update, experiencing a heavy loss in direct traffic to their product pages.

Provide The Freshest Content Yet

Products aside, having relevant content that addresses the search terms that you’re trying to rank for is always a good idea, and the main search keyword is just the start; Google looks for synonyms, uniqueness and strength of the linking profile.
***Looking for original content? Check out our friends at www.constant-content.com

What Is Google Trying To Achieve with This Update?

The goal of the May Day update is to universally improve search quality and user experience. Google has openly stated its intent to ensure when you search for something, you’re provided with the highest quality content on a per search basis. Basically Google trying to make search more helpful and weed out any content duplication, as well as minimizing the impact of what it considers to be lower quality websites.

What Types Of Websites Are Being Affected By This Update?

The hardest hit by the Google Algorithm change are auto-generated pages and content farms. As already mentioned, the May Day update is basically engineered to improve search quality.

This is a good reminder for affiliates that you should always be providing the highest quality content for your consumers. A recommended tactic is to provide content not available anywhere else, and ensure that it’s helpful; also,  avoid scraped, generic and low quality content whenever you can.

How Can You Determine If Your Site Is Affected By This Update?

The best way is to check on your own around the time between April 28th-May 3rd. This is when a lot of sites notice a loss of 5-15% of their normal long-tail traffic. Furthermore, if you check your search referral traffic between April 28th and May 3rd you may have seen a drop in these statistics as well.

Check to see if the change is in the number of referrals, or the number of pages getting traffic. A drop in traffic to your bigger terms probably is not a May Day effect, but drops in search referrals could be. Also, if your index or crawl stats changed suddenly, this could indicate you were hit by the update.

To be certain, check any links to your child pages across the site; these pages may have suffered a May Day relevance drop. If you don’t have unique content, even on your less important pages, you may have seen a dip.

In part two of this five part series we will cover in more detail what factors cause the site to be affected, and in subsequent articles we will discuss what improvements can be made and what you can do to minimize the impact of this algorithm change.

The May Day Update Part 2
The May Day Update Part 3

***This article is the first in a five part series brought to you by our partners at Metamend, the Search Marketing Experts. Since 1998 Metamend has been widely recognized as one of the leading search engine optimization firms in the industry. Providing advanced organic search and Internet marketing searches to clients in over 60 countries, Metamend works to bring pre-qualified visitors to their clients’ websites and to convert those visitors into long-term commercial relationships. Metamend’s search and Internet marketing methods follow the best practices outlined by the major search engines, and its staff maintain strong personal relationships with others at all levels of the search marketing industry.

The EU Court of Justice (Europe’s highest legal authority) ruled that companies using competitors’ names as Internet advertising keywords are not infringing European trademark laws. It further allowed that customers of Google’s paid-for Adwords service may choose whichever words they want, within reason, without infringing trademark law.

You can read more details about the case and its effects here:

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=B1FB02FD-1A64-67EA-E4153A0926DAC5EF

A similar ruling was also recently handed down in a Canadian BC (British Columbia) Court:

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5104/135/

The decision means the Courts are taking a more laissez-faire approach to the issue, allowing advertisers to duke it out in the PCC world, but ultimately putting the onus on consumers to an independent and informed choice about the ads they click on and the products they buy online.

What do you think about the ruling? Drop a comment and let us know!

If You Build For Quality, The Conversions Will Come.

This is probably the biggest topic in affiliate marketing today. Affiliates have to change the way they think about their business. Gone are the days where you could tack up a flimsy download button-crazy landing page stuffed with slimmer than trim content, and still make bang for your buck.

Nowadays, the game has changed. The role of the landing page has morphed. It’s become the final step in a much larger process watched over carefully by Google’s quality administrators, instead of the be-all and end-all of the online sales funnel that it used to be. The landing page is now just one critical component in a much larger structure that’s driven by the need to provide consumers real value.

Affiliate marketing’s new gold standard involves building out rich, relevant content sites around highly-targeted landing pages that are designed for the sole purpose of closing the sale. The new industry buzzword is “pre-sell”, rather than “hard-sell”. Today’ s affiliate has to do the legwork. They have to run as much value-selling up front through their site, so that when the consumer gets to the landing page they’ve already inspired them with an unmistakable commitment to the highest standard of customer service.

Build Topic-Related Sites With Authentic Content.

The art of the pre-sell is about loading up the front end of your sales funnel with original, useful content and trust building elements that aren’t directly related to the product you’re selling. The content you offer is directly related to the larger problem or need your customer has, and the product becomes the natural solution to that problem rather than the focus of your site. In other words the product becomes an adjunct or aside to the primary goal, which is to provide the consumer with the best solution, i.e., the perfect answer to their search query.<

Creating a site with a Home Page, Features Page, Contact Info, Testimonials, and an authentic Blog is necessary and best way to tackle this pre-sell method. It's also the key to staying alive in the affiliate game. The content on this type of site has to have true value. It has to be relevant to the solution your product provides, and give the customer precisely what they're looking for when they go from one of your PPC ads to your site or product landing page.

Say No To Black Hat.

Shady landing pages don’t last as long as they used to. The industry has definitely tightened its chops. And since Quality Score doesn’t allow you to start fresh with every new campaign or new content type – any bad history you’ve made follows you to your next destination. Having bad history also means you’ll pay a positioning and cost-per-click penalty foe stepping outside the lines.

So needless to say it literally pays to do it right from the very start. If your paid search advertising is opportunistic and inconsistent, or attempts to mislead or deceive users, you’re business will suffer in the end.

Build Your AdWords Accounts Sequentially.

When starting a brand new account, you should build sequentially. First add keywords and ad groups with a tight and narrow focus to your landing pages and give them enough time to earn a good Quality Score (6 at least) while giving the account some history of good performance.

It’s speculative to suggest the ‘right’ size or period of time, but a few weeks with keywords numbering in the dozens or low hundreds seems to work. Equally important is amassing click histories in the hundreds or even thousands – enough data for Google to truly evaluate your performance.

Conserve Your Top Performing URLs.

This one might seem a bit counter-intuitive, but after a little explaining you’ll see why it makes sense. While the precise impact of the historical CTR of a target URL is unknown, it makes sense that Google would give you the benefit of the doubt with any URL that produces consistently strong Quality results.

With this point in mind, you might want to lean on the conservative side with how you use those ‘big ticket’ target URLs. It’s a bit like what a coach goes through in sports when he has to decide how many minutes his star players should play. He doesn’t want to burn out his franchise go-to-guys before they get a chance to win the game, but at the same time he wants his best players on the floor as much as possible to give his team the greatest chance of winning. It’s a balancing act – and the same goes for your PPC campaigns.

Try to give your big URLs a rest in situations where you’re working with unknown performance variables, such as new PPC ads. Google tends to give less leeway with new niches and keywords i your text ads than with historically proven ads, so you don’t want any potentially poor performing campaigns hurting your QS on a landing page that is a proven winner. Try to use your best performing URLs as an anchor for your continued success.

What do you think about the way affiliate marketing is changing? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Post a comment and let’s get the discussion rolling!

No matter how you look at it, it’s inexorable. The thirst for MORE is always THERE, looming, chomping away silently at the back of your brain. And it’s the skilled marketer’s profession to tap into that state of mind and set your conversion neurons on fire.

Go Play In That Traffic

Our innate desire to acquire also applies to the analysis of your website traffic. It’s The Third Law Of The Dynamic Internets. Online marketers are constantly striving to drive more traffic to their sites. You might call it an obsession. Make no bones about it, driving more and more web traffic is definitely an awesome obsession to have. It’s also a necessary one if you want to attain any measure of online success. To prosper online, you straight up have to be able to draw the big crowds.

Get Your Full Monty On

The other half of the money equation is Quality. The traffic that hits your site or sales page has to be grade-A targeted in order to max out the odds of clinching each sale. Actually getting people to your site is the job of your emails, videos, and PPC and content network ads. Once they arrive, however, your site has to deliver on the message you’ve supplied.

You can create this “site stickiness” with streamlined design, succinct and compelling copy, and an efficient site architecture that divinely radiates trust and quality. To get his site luster, it should be planned out and executed to the hilt from day one, not just thrown together pell mell. Why? When it comes to making money on the Web, you simply can’t afford to leave your visitors in the dark.

Mind The Conversion Gap

Think of it this way. Say you get a thousand visitors to your site per day. Not bad, right? But how many of them found what they were looking for? Was the site and product/service what they wanted? Did it inspire them to take action? Did they buy something or leave you an email address for lead generation? Or did they just drop into the abyss of cyberspace, never to be seen or heard from again?

Aye, that’s the crux. You have to drive the traffic AND close the sale. If you only do the former, you’ll walk away vacant handed pushing a cart full of broken dreams.

“Hey Man, You Got a Drizzle In Your Speed Boat”

If a boat has a hole in it, it takes on water. More and more water. Until it sinks. The bigger the hole, the faster it goes down. If your site has holes in it, your business goes under. It’s elementary. It might not fail right away, but eventually it will tank L-A-R-G-E. Solution? It’s not rocket surgery. Fill the holes already.

This brand of fix is easier than you think. First identify where the ship is taking on H2O. Where should you look? One of the most common places to find leaks is in the disconnect between the ad the visitor clicked on, and what they actually found when they landed all boggle-eyed onto your site. Tons of affiliate sites serve up campaigns like this, where the ad message and the offer or site content don’t match. They’re conversion path is riddled with gaps in the sales funnel, like someone took a Tommy Gun and shot up the hull. (Leaking money like a tanker).

The affiliates who own these type of sites typically build their ship for No.1 rankings on a favorite-flavor keyword, then, when they actually lock up the number one spot, they panic because it’s not earning the money they expected. In a wild knee-jerk response, they start chasing more search terms to grab more and more traffic. They’ve missed the point. What they should’ve done first and foremost is find the leaks before its too late.

YO YO! SHARK ALERT!!!

While sales might increase by continuing to drive larger volumes of traffic, it’s totally unsustainable for individual affiliates in the long term. Competition for top page rank combined with rising bid prices make it difficult to maintain as a viable strategy. To solve the problem, you should really be focused on improving bounce and abandonment rates and then worry about any secondary tweaks you want to make.

A Full Shock Of Downloads

The best way to increase sales is to audit your site and test to see how it actually works. Scout where the gaps are at, then close them up good and tight. Along with some spinal-tapping SEO work (meta-tags, title tags, keyword selection and density), you should also scan your entire site with the following points in mind:

• Make the navigation clear
• Include prominent, can’t-miss, compelling calls-to-action
• Include a company profile page
• Make the checkout process easy to navigate
• Make the offers clear and prominent
• Provide and promote SAFE online transactions
• Offer added benefits such as subscriptions to newsletters

Let’s go back to our previous example for a minute. Say you have a 1000 visitors a day and out of those you make 10 sales. Just by fixing the gaps in your site you can easily add 10-20 sales a day, depending how much like Swiss Cheese your sales process is, all without dropping a red penny on bids.

How Many Mistakes Can a Marketer Make?

Here’s a list of the most common mistakes affiliates make when they create their websites and sales pages:

• No profile or bio page (this offers the visitor reassurance)
• Site doesn’t display correctly in Internet Explorer or Firefox (always check your site in both browsers)
• No privacy page
• No testimonials or reviews
• No trust badges or security seals
• No customer service contact info
• Confusing terms of service
• A lack of call to action
• Underwhelming sales copy
• Badly designed contact forms
• Poorly designed landing pages
• Unrelated or inappropriate images or stock photos
• Lack of a subscription strategy

Fixing any one of the above listed glitches will help you cut down on your bounce and abandonment rates, and immediately juice up your online revenue. If you have the mettle to repair them all, you’ll come out of it all with a rawkin’ e-com juggernaut and a bank account stacked to the brim.

Bing Gains Momentum

Recent data suggests that Bing has around 28% market share, making it a slice of the pie that’s unwise to ignore. With its recent acquisition of Yahoo! Search you can expect this percentage will continue to grow. So, if you’re having problems getting listed or staying listed with Google, Bing is an eminently viable place to look as a revenue-producing alternative.

The Search World According To Bing

As far as Bing is concerned, “Ultimately, SEO is still SEO… it benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content and website design.”

That being said, the majority of the standards laid out by Bing pertaining to SEO are straight up basic. For example, things like using unique titles and meta-descriptions, consistent data structure, and an XML sitemap are key.

The Myth Of “Meta-Descriptions Nevermore”

If you hear someone talking smack about how Bing search engines don’t bother to spider meta-descriptions, be sure to chew on a grain of salt while you listen. This will protect you from their seriously antiquated conjecture.

While there was in fact a time a few years back when the major search engines started disregarding meta-description tags due to search engine spamming, recent algorithms have improved for identifying tags that don’t sync with their respective page content, making proper meta-tag insertion important again. The lesson? USE META-DESCRIPTIONS.

BTW! The biggest mistake to avoid with your meta-tags is using the same one for every page. That just screams duplicate content. The best thing to do is create a unique tag for each page, or else don’t use meta-tags at all. The same goes meta-descriptions on Google.

Quick Tips For Advertising On Bing

The rules on Bing seem less stringent compared to Google, especially in the manual review category. Bing doesn’t yet have the heavy policing standards, making it an opportune time for affiliates to start incorporating it into their marketing campaigns.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind for Bing campaigns:
*Make sure each page has at least 350 words on it, not including typical page elements such as menus and titles
*Use inbound links with keyword rich anchor text

*Put keywords in your URLs
*Building quality outbound links to reputable sites (e.g., merchant site)
*Microsoft also offers the Bing Webmaster Center where you can troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your site, submit sitemaps and view statistics about your sites. There’s also this document “Bing – New Features Relevant to Webmasters” (PDF)

Bing is definitely a legitimate contender. If you’re getting pinched on Google, it might be time to diversify.