See you then.

John

PS> if you have any comments on the design as we go, please feel free to post them.

Go see it, start watching when the theater opens, and just keep watching till they close!

Later!!

You know there are so many directions to take online to produce income, that one can easily become lost. I have been one of those people. Recently I have started about 30 different sites to launch (more in a minute), bought about 100+ domain names, and have started chasing some new ad campaigns.

So I read an interesting story a few days ago about the United Football League! The result was, I purchased a ton of UFL dot com domains names and am going to put them on the market.  I haven’t really gotten into domaining but I have a ton of domain names that I have collected for numerious projects in the past that I want to sell, so I am starting to learn the ins and outs of domain selling. Interesting stuff, especially following a buch of articles like here and here.  I dont know if I will make a killing, but I will make a profit.

I have been working on a new site that is going to be a marketplace for web templates. It’s a cross between Handango and template monster. If you are interested check out Doctyped - buy web templates, sell your web templates.  I will be launching into beta soon and am looking for a few good web designers and affiliates. Yes I am opening it to affiliates too. If you are interested visit doctyped and signup.  I will be putting the majority of doctyped’s take towards online marketing. I think this is the best move to make in order to fast growth to the site and get sales. I will follow up shortly with a new post about doctyped.

I am also finishing up bbPressPlugins.com which will feature pluggins for the new forum application bbPress. This is a simple project in which I hope will get a popular site since I am launching it from the beginning of bbPress’s growth.

I also have started about 10 other projects in which I am hopelessly lost in finishing because I get sidetracked so easily. I hope to hire a programer and designer soon to finish those for me.

And finnally I hope I can get back into affiliate pro like I want too. I have missed writing here and have really let it go to waste. Sorry guys!

Till Next Time!

I don’t know how I seem to keep bumping into Google tests, but I have run into another one. I was searching for “Cross Stitch Patterns” when I noticed this. Ok so I was searching for cross stitch, but ONLY because I was reading Frank Schilling’s blog post SEM arbitrage and Keyword Domain Names It seems that Google is testing a new background color to their sponsored listings. Usually this is a light blue (RGB #e5ecf9).
I like the color and the change did get my attention to the ad, which brings to mind the thought that maybe Google is having problems showing worth in those top spots. Perhaps CTR is down overall and they are testing different color schemes to try to raise those CTR, thus making more money. In any case, they are up to something!

 So what are you thoughts? Have you seen these colors or others?

I was over at one of my favorite daily readings for copy writing when I noticed something interesting about the Google Ads on his site. Most of the ads on his site were not relevant to his content. Now, I am sure there are many blogs out there like this one where the ads are not relevant to the blog’s content. And I am also sure that many bloggers probably don’t care about those ads. Their goal isn’t to make a lot of money from them, perhaps just enough to pay for hosting. But even if this is not the main source of income (which I can bet it’s not), there are a few quick and simple steps anyone can take to increase their Adsense revenue.

The case for Copyblogger.com

Probably noted as one of the best internet copywriters, Bryan Clark has influenced many writers and non alike to write better copy and marketing text. His income is obviously not from the ads on his blog, but from his consulting service. But that shouldn’t keep him from making a bit more from the ads.

Context, Context, Context

I was reading How to Write Exquisite Subheads when I noticed the ads where not relevant at all (See screen shot below). In his article, he talks about how readers can become “scanners” and skim the content and read certain points like subheads and bullet points. On his site, he has the word scanner in a few subheads. Google reads this word and thinks it’s concerning computer scanners. The result is as follows;

I Don’t Want You

Google has a great tool that everyone should use when placing adsense on their sites. The Google Adsense Preview Tool allows you to right click on the web page and see what ads google will show. You can then view the “True” url used in the ad and add that domain to your Competitive Ad Filter in your Adsense setup.

I have a web site that gets about a 10% click through rate for Adsense on average. Now occasionally that rate drops (as low as 3%). And when it does, the first thing I do is visit my site and use the Google Adsense Preview Tool to see what ads are on the site and exclude ones that are not of the same context as the content. It only takes a few hours at the most after, that the click through rate goes back up.

Ignore This Google!

Google also provides the sectional targeting method to suggest what Adsense should focus on. You simply put at the beginning of sections you want google to target, and then end that section with . Google states that it will take this area as a suggestion only. I personally recommend you exclude certain keywords by the same method adding “(weight=ignore)” to it. Using ” ” around the word “Scanner” in the header would have kept those ads off his page. The google bot would have read the content on the page but ignored the area in the sectional ignore tag.

Not Finding What You Want Pays

Another simple way to increase the revenue on his site, is to advertise on the 404 page. Adding Adsense here will give you another opportunity to show ads and increase chances of click through.

Finding What You Want Pays Also

Add Google Adsense Search to your site to give yet another opportunity to get clicks. This can be done by simply using the adsense wizard code. Drop the javascript code into your pages and after the google bot comes to your site, your good to go. I wouldn’t worry about getting instant results in the search, but after a while Google will see how frequent you add content and will index accordingly.

Well theres a few tips for Copyblogger.com and for you also! They are simple to implement and quick. And if that wasn’t enough, here is a few more to get you going:

• Enable image ads on AdSense ads, use a secondary ad spot as an image only ad and you will get a lot of CPM ads [ads that you get paid per VIEW, not click].
• Ensure the ad unit that has the highest click through rate appears first
• Try with and without borders around your ads. Sometimes borders do better.

I didn’t get into ad placement, but besides that, what tips do you recommend?

You know after shoemoney posted earlier last year about his success in jumping on ringtones, the market got flooded with would be’s, wannabe’s, and all sorts of people jumping on the bandwagon. I am sure a lot of you made money from them, but it was funny to see how many people said ringtones were not pulling income. I also noticed a lot of silence about them too. I used ringtones in my experiment because I figured it was flooded and heavy in competition. I thought to myself, “If I can pull a profit from this, I know I can pull profits from other ventures using the same tactics”. So with my $200 dollar MSN adcenter credit, I set out to take on ringtones. I bought a nice ringtone domain and even built a custom landing page that blended with the offer I was pushing. I surfed the web for good advertisers of ringtones and grabbed their keywords list using KeyCompete. I produced a list of about 8,000 and stopped because I was getting bored (Very low attention span). Well anyway’s, I imported my keywords and setup my campaign in AdCenter and sat back and waited. I am happy to report I doubled my money. So I made $400 in return. As far as business goes, that’s great. Anytime a business makes a 100% increase in profit, they are very happy. I knew I could actually do much better because I really didn’t do much in the first place. I can really chase the longtail with the keywords and produce a list of 20-30,000 keywords. Adjust all those keywords in AdCenter and use dynamic insertion and dynamic url’s to convert better. I can also probably do better with Yahoo and Google. But for this purpose, lets just say that I will make a 2:1 return every month with Adcenter, and we will start out with 200 dollars in Jan. Now one thing I love about Azoogle is that they pay on the 15th of the very next month So I can run ads Jan 1-30th and get paid for that on Feb. 15th. So lets look at some speculation on what the numbers should look like this year if I re-invest every time I get paid.

Jan:Spend $200 Make $400
Feb.:Spend $400 Make $800
Mar:Spend $800 Make $1600
Apr:Spend $1600 Make $3200
May:Spend $3200 Make $6400
Jun:Spend $6400 Make $12,800
Jul:Spend $12,800 Make $25,600
Aug:Spend $25,600 Make $51,200
Sep:Spend $51,200 Make $102,400
Oct:Spend $102,400 Make $204,800
Nov:Spend $204,800 Make $409,600
Dec:Spend $409,600 Make $819,200

So in December, you have a profit of $409,600 dollars. Now one issue with this number is that I don’t believe that MSN will be able to spend so much money in one months time, so lets say you cap at about 25,000 in spending. These numbers are only for MSN and with only a 1:2 return on the investment. Now if you think this is stretching it, then lets look at someone else in the industry who is a success at this; Shoemoney.

In shoe’s recent post “2006 Was The Year Of Ringtones - 100,000 Ringtone Leads” he stated he had 1,503,351 Clicks that converted to 79,391 leads for an EPC of .65 cents. So lets look at these numbers. If he paid an average of 6.5 cents, as he stated, for his cost per click. Now he also said only about 50% of his traffic is from pay-per-click, but for fun, lets say all of those 1.5mil clicks were from pay-per-click ads. So lets do the numbers!
.065 x $1,503,351 = $97,717.82 in cost.
Shoe also stated he gets about 15 and above for payout from ringtones and I know that’s probably right because of the numbers he has done and the ability you get to negotiate higher payout when you produce such numbers. So lets say he gets $15 a conversion and converted 79,391 visitors. And once again lets look at those numbers:

79,391 x $15 = $1,190,865 in return
Return $1,190,865 - Cost $97,717.82 = Profit $1,093,147.18
That’s a 1118.67% Increase or a 1:12.19 ratio!

So if I am doing only a 1:2 return, and am pretty positive I can do more, do you think based on this information that Ringtones are dead?

So here are the simple rules! (Got to have some sort of order!).

1. Only 1 domain per person, please.
2. Use an email in the comments you check often, I will email you a excel file with up to 1000+ keywords in it! I will post a few keywords in the comments for all to see. But you will get a larger list.
3. Please reply with thanks or whatever in the comments after you received your files. Great testimonies may get an extra keyword-y-ish bonus!
4. Keep in mind you could do all this for yourself for only $19 bucks! I just thought I would help those out who need a bit of help for the holiday.

Ok, so you got this list, and your not sure what to do with your keywords?
Well, MSN AdCenter is still giving away Free advertising cash, so you setup an AdCenter account. You will also need to setup an account with an affiliate network like CJ, But honestly, I think you will be better off setting up a CPA Network account like AzoogleAds (ask for Fraser for a Rep!) or MaxBounty. For example, Azoogle is hosting an offer now for a supper hot toy in high demand this christmas. The payout is $25 dollars! And people are jumping on these ads left and right!

So if you ever wanted to get the Google Adwords list of your competitors, here’s your chance to do it!

UPDATED NOTE: For the protection and privacy of others, you may email me at john at affiliatepro dot info with your domain request.

What if you could use your “competitors” knowledge and gain access to their keyword list? Do you think that would be useful, you bet! I was able to build a list of 10,000 great keywords for my campaign from other advertisers within a few minutes. My intention was never to try to steal these, but I came across this in a panic to launch a campaign in a tight deadline. Because it the Christmas season, I thought it would be nice even to get a small bit of extra cash for gifts, giving, etc… And since AzoogleAds pays on the 15th of every month, I figured I could whip up a campaign and get it going before Nov. 30th so I could get some of that cash for the 15th of Dec. So on Nov. 29th I started working on picking an offer to use in MSN and talked to my Azoogle rep ( I will introduce you to Fraser in a upcoming post) about my experiment. I originally implied that perhaps the Santa letters might be a good offer, but surprisingly so, they are not doing so hot. So Fraser talked me into using ringtones for this test. I usually am against ringtones because they can be very deceptive to the consumer, but the offer he recommended me takes extra steps to let the user know what they are paying for and the cost. Plus its payoff is about $12ish per signup!

So I purchased a .com domain from godaddy and made a single gateway page. This page had the different carriers on it and I made it to match the offers landing page. Then I basically took the carriers that the offer allowed and linked them to the offer and the rest linked to another ringtone offer. One more thing to note is that I did not put my azoogle affiliate link in the page but instead created a 301 redirect link (a 301 redirect link is on that looks like http://mydomain.com/somelink but actually redirects to http://myazoogle.com/affiliatelink). Ok so I had all the stuff ready for a simple campaign, except the keywords and ads!

Now this is really what you want to know. How did I get my keywords with so little work. I started with a bunch of key phrases of items I could think up myself. But that wasn’t going far, plus it was taking a very long time to build anything up. After only about 400ish key phrases and keywords, I was thinking how far from my goal I was. So I started searching for list and ringtone lists. That’s when I did a search for something (I am really sorry but I don’t know what it was, because it about 1am at night), when I came across KeyCompete! KeyCompete is a service that basically allows you to plug a competitors domain name and see what keywords they use in their marketing! This was amazing, I entered a domain of one of the advertisers I saw on MSN and low and behold KeyCompete brought back a downloadable excel file of over 2000 keywords for that domain. I did this a on a few domains and in no time, I had a complete keyword list of over 10,500 keywords and phrases for my ad campaign!

Now, yours and your competitors keyword list is all available anyways, but it takes a lot of programming and api use that is just a pain. Plus most of us do not have the resources and time to go after keywords like this. KeyCompete just gives us an easy avenue to do this with. This tool takes all the work out of keyword building for you!

So, you may wonder, how did I do on the trial. Well that part is interesting too. I started to late in the month (on the 29/30th) so It only spent 5 dollars before pausing my funds. This is because of how MSN works, and is supposed to be to protect you from blowing your campaign money. Anyways, for the 5 dollars I spent, I made 50 dollars from azoogle! Not bad for not doing this before! I know this is small change here, and I am sure the 10:1 return will go down significantly, but it was exciting having that kind of return. I later jumped into my account and was changing my base price when I accidentally forgot to put a decimal before the number and was bidding about 50 dollars a click! So when that went through, I wasted a few bucks on some outrageously high clicks. But I quickly changed that back. Now its back to normal. I will give an update on my next post when the campaign is done running through, on how it all went.

1. Make sure you are signed up for a CPA (Cost Per Click) affiliate network. I highly recommend AzoogleAds, or Maxbounty. I have a good relationship with my Azoogle rep [Fraser], and I will help you expedite your signup request for you if you comment bellow.
2. Select a good ad to run with - here is a good example; Holiday Offer - Santa-Letters.net - Letters from the North Pole! This offer pays out about 12ish dollars per someone ordering. Normally I wouldn’t go for something that requires a purchase, but this is one of those things people are looking for now. Now really good offers are ones that pay well (the higher the better), but only require the user to add their email address. Ringtone offers do this, you will find great offers on azoogle that pay out over 10 bucks just for someone putting in an email address on a form. I personally won’t go for the ringtone market because its pretty flooded, but you get the idea.
3. Make sure you “Mask” your affiliate url. This is important more for google adwords, but you might as well get into the habit of doing it. Plus, if the offer comes to a stop for some reason, you can change the redirect on your end to point to something really similar without a lot of work. You mask your affiliate urls like this; Lets say your url from azoogle looks like this [http://x.azjmp.com/063f9?sub=affiliatepro], you don’t want that in the ads, so you use something to redirect it so now your url looks like this [http://www.affiliatepro.info/go/santaletters] and all it will do is redirect someone to the earlier url.
4. Do your research on the demographics of users who would be prime subjects for your offer. In this case it would be 30-55 year old women with children or grand children. Find terms that fit that demographic and subjects related to the offer. I use wordtracker for my keyword search lists. It’s probably the best tool out there, but I can say Nichebot is quickly catching up! Get you a good list of keywords.
5. Ok, now all you need to do is, setup your campaign in adcenter and load up your keywords. Work on your ad copy, because that will play an important roll, now run your campaign and watch the 200 convert! Keep your eye on the $200 limit because it will charge you if you don’t!

Now keep in mind, this isn’t easy and a lot of people fail the first few tries, BUT eventually when you get the hang of it, then that’s where the big bucks is!

Here is some good reading on this subject. Take note that shoemoney didn’t do so hot the first couple of times, but he learned and check out the payoff at the end!

I wanted to tell you all about a new feature that I have added to affiliatepro.info that you might enjoy. On our front page there is now a box titled “Industry News and Interesting Finds”. This is a daily posting daily new links to news, post, and articles from all types of sources that will benefit and help in marketing your site. There is links for topics covering search engine optimization, copy writing, affiliate network news, affiliate programs, and stuff that generate buzz in the industry. Plus I have given its own RSS feed so that you can subscribe to it and get the edge over your competitors in affiliate marketing.

A Request

I do have one request, I would love to get a list of resources/blogs/news etc. that you would like to see listed here. If you have a site and want to have a chance to get listed, please post it in the comments. Also what do you think about the name “Industry News and Interesting Finds”? I was thinking of renaming it to something like “The Marketing Affiliate Edge” or something more trendy or catchy? I would love to hear your suggestions on this too!

And Finally

If you notice we are still going updating the site and tweaking the design. I hope to have it finished shortly, but have been delayed because of a remodeling going on at my house that is taking my time (Contractors can be stressful). But if you have any comments, critique’s, or suggestions, I would love to hear them! Lay it on me. One thing that I recognize when you do your own design, is that you can get tunnel vision-ed with it and miss out on some issues. I consult on usability design and accessibility on a regular basis with clients and find that I lack the same things I teach and do for others on my own personal stuff!!! So have at it and feel free to jump in!

Till next post
-john