Adwords Marketing Blog - Affiliate

Directly linking from Adwords to a Clickbank sales page

Admin! — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:39:55 GMT

For good quality scores, your landing page must be targeted to your keyword. The Google robots that crawl the landing page determine this. What do they look for?

a domain with all pages relevant to the main topic
keywords in the domain name
keywords in the page name / url of the page
keywords in the title of the page
keywords in the keywords meta tag
keywords in the description meta tag
keywords in the "h1" heading tags on the page
a keyword density of 2-5%

Robots also like content. They don't like html, css, javascript or other code. Robots can't tell html from content in most cases, so lots of the html just dilutes the keyword density. I've had people run their pages through the tools at google.com/webmasters/sitemap, and google tells them the only keywords that google sees ranking highly are html codes!

What is the bottom line? A good sales page often makes a bad landing page for Adwords quality. It's sort of a double edged sword. A good sales page and lots of html, images, javascript, flash scripts, eye catching layouts and colors. A good landing page for adwords has nothing other than content targeted to a single keyword. In other words, a very boring page to look at.

How you find a middle ground between these extremes? Personally I like to use frames or iframes. I use these techniques to insert one page inside of another. So, my outer page is the high quality landing page, while the inner page is the sales page. The robots see the outer page when evaluating the landing page. The customers see the inner sales page when they link to it.

Here is an example of a landing page using frames...

<html>
<head>
<title>KEYWORD</title>
<meta name="description" content="A sentence or two about KEYWORD."></meta>
<meta name="keywords" content="KEYWORD"></meta>
</head>


<frameset rows="100%">
<frame src="INNER PAGE URL"/>
<noframes>
	<body>
	<h1>KEYWORD</h1>

	KEYWORD RELATED CONTENT GOES HERE

	</body>
</noframes>
</frameset>

</html>

The robots will read the "no frames" part of the page. Customers using modern browsers will only see the Inner Page in the frame. This way you give both sides what they want.

I recommend the following instead of direct linking to a clickbank sales page.

Obtain hosting (free or paid) and domain name related to your topic
Create a landing page using the frame technique described. I would optimize it for a single keyword as recommend in my free Adwords guide.
point you Adwords ads to the new landing page.

You should see a boost to your quality scores by doing so.

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PotPieGirl Finding a Niche Market and Keywords

Admin! — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 01:22:45 GMT

The following is an email I sent to Marshall Alder who has been having trouble with One Week Marketing from PotPieGirl.

I think the methods may work, but you really have to get into the long tail keywords. Did you get the Bum Marketing course from Travis? It talks about finding the right long tail keywords which I think is half the battle.

http://www.bummarketingmethod.com/

I agree with Travis and before I ever read his materials, I was using The Google Keyword Tool and plain old Google Search Results to conduct my research. It's all free. In a nutshell here it is...

1) Find a product. PotPieGirl says find either a market or a product, but I personally start with a product. I do think cb-analytics.com is a good place to go, because clickbanks marketplace is hard to navigate. I also like CommissionJunction.com, but let's stick with ClickBank.

Now, I think the product has to have some gravity. Gravity indicates that somebody is making sales. That means there is a market. Plus the sales letter has to be doing its job if other affiliates make money. Of course too much gravity may mean there's already a ton of affiliates out there. I'm really still trying to define a good gravity point, I'd recommend 50 for now.

http://www.cb-analytics.com/

2) Take a main keyword for the product or the primary market and go to the google keyword tool, and pull up all the related keywords. Look for keyword that have about 1000, maybe even 2000 global monthly searches. Any more than this and there probably too much competition. Of course, you never know until you look, so give a few higher volume ones a try. Find ten long tail keywords that you will research further.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

3) go to plain old Google.com and search for your ten keywords. Wrap each one in double quotes, do a search and see how many pages returned there are (this is called "phrase" match). Travis says you want keywords with less than 1000 competing pages. I agree.

Hopefully, 5 of your 10 keywords fit the 1000 or less competing pages rules. If not, go back to the keyword tool and get another 10 keywords, and look at the competition for them.

4) After you have 5 low competition keywords, start building your Squidoo lenses, writing articles, everything PotPieGirl recommends.

Again, I think if you put more into the keyword research, you get more out.

Are your Adwords ads too expensive? Slash your Adwords costs and get more traffic with the FREE Adwords Strategy Guide. Get your copy now.

Outsource Your Affiliate Marketing Dirty Work

Admin! — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 05:03:02 GMT

Outsource Your Affiliate Marketing Dirty Work

The Ultimate Plug & Play Turnkey Clickbank System. Clickbank Pirate works on a simple principal. Outsource all of the time consuming, labor intensive tasks and concentrate on marketing.

With Clickbank Pirate your only goal is to get visitors to join your email list. The program recommends asking for an opt in in exchange for free information. That is all you are asked to do.

Your email list is then automatically handled by the Clickbank Pirate team. A complex system of autoresponder emails kicks in and starts emailing affiliate offers to your list. The emails are designed by professional marketers and writers. You don't even have to choose which products, the system does that for you. They guarantee a maximum of 200 Clickbank Pirate members will ever promote the same affiliate product.

The program also creates the landing pages for your affiliate offers. They are hosted within your subdomain at Clickbank Pirate. You don't need separate website hosting. The landing pages are also designed by professionals, offering a very new user experience and high conversion rates.

You don't need your own website hosting for $15.00 a month. You don't need a domain name for $9.00 per year. You don't need an email autoresponder like aweber for $19.00 a month. When you add up everything you'll save, you'll save money being a Clickbank Pirate member over running everything yourself. Don't forget the money saved having professionally designed and written emails and landing pages.

Clickbank Pirate is the closet thing to an affiliate turnkey system that I have ever seen. It does all of the hard work for you.

Get Clickbank Pirate Today

Are your Adwords ads too expensive? Slash your Adwords costs and get more traffic with the FREE Adwords Strategy Guide. Get your copy now.

Cookie Stuffing and Affiliate Fraud

Admin! — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:40:45 GMT

Cookie Stuffing is a dubious method of generating Affiliate sales. Affiliates who use cookie stuffing are hoping to get commissions on sales they did not make. It is a method of affiliate fraud.

Marketplaces like ClickBank exist to help merchants promote products. The idea is that an affiliate marketer will promote a product, and in return for his expense, time and effort the merchant gives him a percent of the sale. ClickBank makes every effort to protect the effort of the affiliate marketer. ClickBank has a policy that if a consumer visits an affiliate marketers website and leaves, the affiliate will still get credit for the sale if the consumer comes back to purchase the product in 60 days. The affiliate will get credit if consumer makes the purchase up to 60 days after the initial contact. This protects the affiliate since many consumers do not make purchases on the first visit.

ClickBank has to track the consumer for 60 days to enforce this policy. It is done through a cookie. A cookie is a piece of information stored on the consumer's computer. The cookie is written to the consumers computer when the affiliate website is browsed, and the "hoplink" is clicked. The cookie records that the affiliate was responsible for the sales lead. The cookie remains on the consumer's computer for 60 days. Should the consumer return and purchase the product, the cookie is read and the original affiliate receives credit for the sale.

The presence of the cookie is what has lead to cookie stuffing. The premise is to write ClickBank cookies on a visitor's computer without the visitor's knowledge. Should that visitor happen to purchase a product in 60 days, the affiliate will get credit for a sale.

For example, imagine a blog comment or a forum post where an affiliate has managed to place an image tag that points to his hoplink. The affiliate wants these image tags to be on pages with high amounts of traffic. Every visitor who views that page will see a broken image tag. Behind the scenes, the ClickBank cookie with the affiliates code has just been written to the visitor's computer. Any high traffic website will do. The more people that view the page, the more cookies will be written. Should any of these visitors happen to purchase the product in 60 days the affiliate will get the credit for the sale.

The affiliate marketer simply has to spam as many websites as possible with his image tag (or javascript popup or iframe tag). The more people that end up with his cookie, the more sales he'll get credit for.

All affiliate programs are vulnerable to this type of fraud. ClickBank and other market places will ban affiliates for this practice. However, it may take some time before the fraud is noticed. In addition, cookie stuffers constantly find better means of hiding their tracks.

Are your Adwords ads too expensive? Slash your Adwords costs and get more traffic with the FREE Adwords Strategy Guide. Get your copy now.

What is Cookie Stuffing?

Admin! — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 05:12:35 GMT

Cookie Stuffing is an illegal method of generating Affiliate sales. Affiliates who use cookie stuffing are hoping to get commissions on sales they did not make.

ClickBank has to track the consumer for 60 days to enforce this policy. It is done through a cookie. A cookie is a piece of information stored on the consumer's computer. The cookie is written to the consumers computer when the affiliate website is browsed, and the "hoplink" is clicked. The cookie remains on the consumer's computer for 60 days. Should the consumer return and purchase the product, the cookie is read and the original affiliate receives credit for the sale.

Are your Adwords ads too expensive? Slash your Adwords costs and get more traffic with the FREE Adwords Strategy Guide. Get your copy now.