Jamdo Marketing Blog

I see a lot of people in forums and blogs asking how to start out in affiliate marketing with $0. Well, I thought I would lay out a plan for what I would do if this were me.

If I was starting over again and I had $0 to invest this is how I would do it.

Goal 1 - Capital

You need money for URLs, hosting and marketing. It ain’t sexy, but the way I would do this is to offer my services as a writer at every webmaster forum I could find. I am a fast writer, so I could probably whip out 3×500 word articles in an hour. On the lower end of the spectrum, that should get you $20-30 per hour. At an absolute total bare minimum slave wage, that would still be $15 per hour. Put in a couple of big days and you should have $500 pretty quickly.

Goal 2 - Find a Product

Choose a product you know has a reasonable affiliate program and that you know something about. I’d probably choose something I knew about and something I could develop very specific keywords about. I’d also want something that paid AT LEAST $7 or $8 per sale/lead - preferably more. For argument’s sake, let’s say DVD Rewriters (probably a bad choice, but it will do for the sake of this post to demonstrate the point)

Goal 3 - Keywords

Next, you need a list of SPECIFIC keywords. The best keywords that are probably affordable in this case would probably be model numbers.

Samsung D537 DVD Rewriter
D5375 DVD
D5375 DVD rewriter

Also some price point keywords

Cheap DVD RW
Discount DVD Rewriter
Discount DVD Re-Writer
Cheap D5375

You should be able to get a good list together. If you are going after model numbers, then a few hundred keywords is easily possible.

Goal 4 - Find Out If It Converts

Next, I would set up a direct linking campaign with PPC and I would use SubIDs to track down to the keyword level so I know which engine and adgroup and keywords were leading to a sale. I would use Yahoo or MSN because their traffic is usually a better converter. Each ad group would have ONE of the keywords above and I would bid on phrase and exact match only. I would turn OFF content match (or at least put content match only in a seperate campaign).

You’re not trying to make an overall profit on this - you’re simply finding out if the product and merchant convert into sales/leads. If you make a profit at this stage, that is a bonus.

Goal 5 - Analysis

If the product is converting with a couple of sales, then I keep going. If it has no converions from my traffic, then I choose another merchant and product and repeat step 4.

If I am lucky, I should have a list of keywords that convert into sales.

Goal 6 - Website

Now, I would build a website around DVD rewriters, concentrating on the keywords that converted. Here the intention is to build a page for each keyword that converted. On EACH page is great content with a good presell for the specific keyword and product. Of course, each page would also have an affiliate deep link to the product on the merchant site.

Goal 7 - PPC

Next I would set up another PPC campaign to my new site from Yahoo, MSN and Adwords. Again, I would track it down to the engine, ad group and keyword level. I would link to the specific page on my site that coresponded with the keyword.

Hopefully my great new site converts even better than step 4 deep linking.

If not, I rewrite my pages with even better content and try again.

Goal 8 - Natural Rankings

If your website is converting ok on these products, then you should start to do some SEO on the site. Start building links etc. Submit it to Yahoo directory. Do some guest blogs with links back to your site. Try to get specific links to your internal pages. All of this will help your rankings in the search engines.

Step 9 - Rinse and Repeat

Note - you will probably only get past step 4 maybe 10% of the time (if you are lucky). If you are like 98% of people you will get discouraged at your second or third failure and give up which is great, because that means less competition for me.

If you get to your 20th failure and you are still trying to figure out where you’ve gone wrong, this is good news. It means you probably have the personality type to succeed in this business.

Share This

So I got some spam mail from the guys at SocialSpark inviting me to join their new social network for bloggers. I have no idea how they got my email, but it got through the filters and I opened it. It pissed me off enough to actually click on the link and try to figure out how they got my email.

Imagine my surprise at finding a very nice (and dare I say expensive) design on the offending website. So nice in fact, that I actually decided to try and figure out what it was all about.

In effect, SocialSpark seemed to be another PayPerPost type of service allowing both bloggers and advertisers to connect. Now, I did sign up with PayPerPost back in the day, but I never felt right about taking on any jobs there so I never actually accepted any jobs from them. They were pretty clearly designed to trick Google and they kind of got off on the wrong foot by not requiring disclosure straight from the beginning. It wasn’t the sort of company I was comfortable associating my blogs with and the recent Google slap against PPP and their network of bloggers pretty much confirmed my suspicions.

So back to the SocialSpark spammers and their offering. How was this going to be any different? Well for starters SocialSpark made a big thing on their site of requiring nofollow in any links (in fact they provide the linking code for links) and full disclosure about the nature of a paid post. This is heading in the right direction in my opinion, if you are trying to keep your blog nice and whitehat. It seems they care enough about their blogging partners to try to protect them from any slap similar to the one that PayPerPost suffered. In fact, it intrigued my enough to actually sign up in order to check it all out.

Now, once you’re signed up, SocialSpark asks you to verify the ownership of your blog by placing some code on it. You can also opt to have some extra code that takes your stats into account so potential advertisers can see what they are getting. Hmm, not something I am usually interested in offering up, but what the hell? It’s a good metric for advertisers to measure the true value of a blog and I have nothing to hide. SocialSpark then does a human review of your blog to give you final approval (which is currently where Jamdo is at at the time of writing this post).

You can also put up your profile on SocialSpark and include information and tags about your niches, brands you’re interested in etc etc which is a good little opportunity to really sell yourself. This allows advertisers to know a little more about you. It also offers you the chance to presell yourself and get put infront of a wide variety of potential advertisers.

After this, you can browse through the offerings of advertisers who are looking to create some blog buzz. Some payouts seemed reasonable and others were pretty shabby. No big surprises there.

The thing that really caught my attention what that there were also jobs on offer where the payment was a return blog post ie. you blog about me and I will blog about you. That seems like a pretty good way to find other bloggers to connect with. The problem as I see it would be the quality of bloggers who you were connecting with, but SocialSpark seems to have thought of that too. Advertisers can leave feedback about the quality of the posts they receive, meaning you can also leave feedback if you swap posts with another blogger. A great way to build up (or destroy) your reputation within that community. I nice little feature as one of the main problems with PayPerPost was the absolute attrocious quality of posts that advertisers received. It really was the detritus of the inernet in many cases. At least SocialSpark seems to have realised that problem and gone some of the way towards solving it.

Members can also leave comments under each of the jobs. I guess if they get a reasonable community happening then this will help police the quality (especially of the free jobs and reciprocal blogging) of the listings as members comment on their experiences of the job.

There were also some charities asking for posts which I thought was a nice touch.

I also noticed that under each job posting were links to blog posts that were done for the job. This might be a good little opportunity for a (dofollow) backlink to your blog post. It can also give you a bit of an indication of what the quality of your competition is (remember, advertisers can leave comments on your post’s quality) so you can beat it and establish a reputation as a blogger who offers real value to advertisers.

So what’s the verdict?

Well, we really got off on the wrong foot with the spam message. I would really like to know how they got my email. Perhaps I was on the list for another of their services or something, but some indication of that would have been nice in the original email.

On the other hand, SocialSpark seems to really address a lot of the negative issues that I had with other pay-per-post services and the whole promotion of the “web 2.0″ and “community” elements of their site is not the usual hollow BS. In fact, it is done a lot better than I would have thought possible and actually has a practical reasoning behind it.

Now, I am going to give these guys a chance. An initial look at the site has me tentatively positive about its potential and I will certainly be looking at how other bloggers react to the service. I especially like the social element of possibly connecting with other bloggers and knowing enough from their feedback to know I can expect some quality.

In short, it’s worth checking out. I won’t make a final recommendation for a few months, but have a look and let me know what you think too.

NOTE: This is NOT a paid review and all links are DOFOLLOW.

Edit: I just read that the parent company (Izea) of Social Spark is also the parent company of PayPerPost. I guess that means they are reformed spammers! It also explains where they got my email address.

Share This

photo credit: racreationsJust thought I would quickly share a great little time saving plugin for Wordpress.

Photo Dropper save a LOT of time if you want to search and use images from Flickr.

It Even automatically puts in all the attribution and links that are required to use the photos legally (you are still restricted to using Creative Commons licenced photos for commercial blogs that stipulate it is fine to use them for commercial purposes.)

Anyway, it’s a great plugin and I will be using it a lot on some of my other sites.

Check it out.

Warning - as you can see above it will also put a link to the site that developed the plugin, though that doesn’t really bother me.

Share This

Getting people to click on your adwords ads can be pretty tough in some of the more competitive markets.

With click through rate (CTR) playing a roll in how Google ranks your ad, it is important to know some strategies to get those clicks.

Of course, you need to remember that the most important metric is profit, so writing ads that get high CTR a the expense of profit is pretty silly. Anyone can get a high CTR on their ads by making misleading and attractive claims, but such ads usually don’t convert to leads or sales. Even so, you can still get a reasonable CTR in most niches by writing ads that accurately describe your product or service (ie. don’t be misleading) and also by implementing some of the following tips.

1) Target Target Target - The more relevant your ad is to the keyword you are bidding on, the higher your CTR will be when people search for that keyword. If you are bidding on the keyword “green tables” then make sure your ad is targetted specifically to people looking for green tables. Having a generic ad will usually lower your CTR.

2) Captilise The First Letter Of Every Word - This really helps people clearly see the words in your ad. Look at the following examples.

get cheap widgets online
Get Cheap Widgets Online

The second example is just that little bit easier to read so it’s worth taking the time to capitalise every word in your ad.

3) Use your keywords in the ad copy - Very much related to the first point, but if someone is searching for “green tables” and your ad has the words “green tables” in it once or twice, then you are far more likely to get the click when you are competing with other ads that only mention “tables”. It’s even better if you can get the keyword into your title as well as the copy.

4) Social Proof - People like knowing that others use products that they are interested in. If some well known individual or group uses a product that you are promoting, then don’t be afraid to mention it. All things being equal, who would you rather hire - a “personal trainer” or a “personal trainer of the Miami Dolphins”? What would you rather buy - a “wrist watch” or a “wrist watch as worn by Pierce Brosnan”?

5) Left Right Left - Here’s a little visual trick. When someone types in a keyword into Google and that keyword is in your ad, it will be shown in bold. That is an opportunity for you to use a strong visual element to draw the human eye to your ad. By using the keyword at the beginning of the first line, the end of the second line and the beginning of the third line, you create an arrow that draws the eye to your ad. Here’s an example, if someone were to type “Omega Seamaster” into Google. Your ad would look like this:

Omega Seamaster Online
Cheapest Online Omega Seamaster.
Omega Seamaster as Worn by Pierce Brosnan
www.YourSite.com

Notice how the bolded words form an arrow that points to the right? Like >>. That can help draw the eyes from the left of the page to the right where your ad is. Hopefully it helps you get a slightly better CTR too.

6) Captilalise keywords in your display URL - It’s difficult to read keyword rich URLs. But if you can allow your audience to easily see the words in your URL, you are at an advantage. So rather than having a display URL that is www.mygreatsite.com, change it to www.MyGreatSite.com so it’s easier to read.

7) Put www in the display URL - People just seem to trust it more. Having a www before your display URL draws more clicks. www.MyGreatSite.com beats MyGreatSite.com

I don’t really know why. It just does. I suppose more people associate www with the web and so are more trusting of sites that begin with it. But really, I am just speculating on a reason.

Put your keyword after the display URL - If you are writing seperate ads for targetted groups of keywords, then I have found that putting the keywords in the display URL helps CTR. For example if the keyword you are targetting is “gree tables,” then www.MyGreatSite.com/Green-Tables will get a higher CTR than www.MyGreatSite.com in most cases.

9) Copy your competitor’s ads - There are times when you want to compete in a crowded marketplace. If you are competing in an older and established market, then chances are that the big guys have already done some of the hard work for you. If when you type in your keywords, the ads that show up at the top are all basically the same, then there is probably a reason for it - those ads make the most money. Don’t be afraid to borrow what they are doing and split test it with your own ads.

A key point to remember here is that these tips are general guidelines. They won’t work in every scenario, but they are a good starting point to split test with your other ads.

Share This

As many of us know, Michael Gray of Wolf-Howl.com doesn’t like it when people make sweeping accusations against SEOs. Hell, most of the time I agree with him. For example, Calacanis’ repeated attacks on the SEO industry are pretty lame and ill-informed and Michael’s responses to them were fair enough in my opinion.

Michael’s general message in his defence of the SEO industry is that there are good SEOs and bad SEOs, just as there are good mechanics and bad mechanics.

The “few bad apples” argument.

Fair call.

Presumably Michael would like to be included among the “good SEOs” and most people would regard him that way - certainly his blog is one of the most respected in the industry.

But recently, Michael has gone a little beyond the limits of cool.

Last week, the hapless Christina Warren of Download Squad was unfortunate enough to make some throw-away remark about the SEO industry. Michael Gray got upset about it.

This is the specific sentence that Michael quoted and the part he had a problem with:

There’s lots of talk within the tech community, especially the blogosphere about using SEO and how it’s GOOD for bloggers and doesn’t negatively affect readers/searchers/regular users. This is a lie. Instead of Search Engine Optimization, SEO should really stand for Search Engine Opportunism, because that’s what it really is.

Fair, enough. I would probably have a problem with that if I were a professional SEO too.

He also has a problem with this partial sentence:

we do object to gaming the system and using loopholes

But here is the entire passage in context:

There’s lots of talk within the tech community, especially the blogosphere about using SEO and how it’s GOOD for bloggers and doesn’t negatively affect readers/searchers/regular users. This is a lie. Instead of Search Engine Optimization, SEO should really stand for Search Engine Opportunism, because that’s what it really is. Look, we certainly don’t object to gaining revenue from ads or page-views on a web site, that’s why we are able to do what we do; we do object to gaming the system and using loopholes to insert web sites into search queries that really have nothing to do with the content. Techniques to make sure your relevant content shows up in corresponding searches is one thing — inserting back-door code that is aimed at getting higher page ranks and more page views, regardless if the targets are actually correct, is another.

Taken in context, those three sentences together in their entirety represent a reasonably balanced view of SEO.
Christina is pretty clearly aiming her attack at “bad SEOs” and ones who would attempt to insert irrelevant results into SERPS. (We’ll just ignore the flagrantly out of context second quote that Michael cherry-picks).

That is hardly a revolutionary sentiment by Christina.

Michael reacted to the cherry-picked sentences (60 words out of a 620 word post) by writing a blog post entitled “Christina Warren of Download Squad is a Clueless Idiot” (while quoting only the sentences mentioned here in isolation).

He then asked his readers to link to the post.

Now anyone familiar with even rudimentary SEO will know that writing an article on a well established blog with lots of trust and then getting a few inbound links to a that specific post will mean that the search engines will rank the post highly for the keywords the post was aimed at - especially if the terms are not so competitive.

At the time of writing, Michael’s post is ranking 9 in Google if you search for Christina Warren.

Now I am totally open to correction from Michael here, but this seems like a pretty clear attempt to get this post to rank well for Christina’s name.

As far as I can tell, it is an attempt to damage her online reputation.

Any future employer who looks up Christina in Google will be confronted by the assertion that their potential employee is a “clueless idiot.”

To add cowardice to insult, Michael has closed comments on the specific blog post, meaning Christina (or anyone else) cannot respond to his opinion on Christina at the source.

Michael seems to have decided that Christina deserved to have her name dragged through the Google mud and there isn’t much anyone else can do about it. Not many of us have either the knowledge or the influence to compete with him or rein him in and to top it all off, the victim is even unable to respond directly to the post regarding the accusations.

This might be called character assasination for the digital age.

Now let’s put aside the question of whether Christina deserved this treatment. I don’t think she did, but others might disagree. Whatever. There is a more pressing concern raised with this scenario.

Who exactly, is Michael Grey to assume he has the right to use his mini-celebrity and knowledge as an SEO to damage the reputation of whoever he deems deserves it?

Please Michael, tell us some more about “good SEOs” and “bad SEOs”. For Example, which one are you?

Is it ok for an SEO to rudimentarily take a disliking to someone online and take vengeance by publishing nasty things about them and getting those accusations to rank well in the search engines?

And to people who work in the industry, do you regard this as acceptable behaviour?

If it is fair enough to you as an industry, do you really not see why other non-SEO people might lose respect for your industry?

Now I am sure there have been far worse abuses than this example, but when a high-profile representative of an industry starts heading down the slippery slope of arbitrary online persecutions that have a very real effect on other people’s on and offline lives, isn’t it time for that industry to stand up and say enough is enough?

Share This

Ok, so something about the DoFollow blog movement is really starting to irritate me. Blog newbies who see any one of the hundreds of blogs that are on any one of the hundreds of “DoFollow Lists” and rush out to post a meaningless comment so as to get a free backlink.

DoFollow, of course, is that  little wordpress plugin that removes the “nofollow” tag from blog comments and passes link juice to people who comment on your blogs. It’s basically a way for the blogger to thank their community for taking the time to add some value to that community by making meaningful contributions via commenting.

Jamdo has been part of the DoFollow movement for quite a while.

But I have to admit, if I get too many more people who add a generic comment like “Yeah, that’s a great insight into [INSERT BLOG TOPIC HERE]” then I will start to think a lot more about removing the plugin and reverting to the bad old days of nofollow.

So too people who make their username (and thus anchor text for their link) some keyword they are targetting like SEO, or Database or something like that. Nothing screams spam like that.

Now, the thing is while the above behaviour is irritating, I would happily accept it from longer term readers who had already proven their worth with meaningful comments. After all, there can be some give and take in building a community.

But if you have never commented on a blog before and are unlikely to return, then making a spammy comment with a spammy username, even if done manually is STILL spam. It is rude.

So don’t do it.

Use your common sense and make a few meaningful comments that are longer than 10 words. Join the conversation of a blog. Show the blog owner that you have taken the time to actually read the whole post and not just the title. Add an insight and anecdote of your own.

Your comment and link will have a lot better chance of not being deleted.

And you will be going a lot further to building COMMUNITY - which after all is the whole strength of blogging.

Technorati Tags: spam, wordpress, dofollow

Share This