John Battelle, who literally wrote the book on Search, believes Google's apparent media-company aspirations will one day come in conflict with its purist algorithmic history.
Mike McDonald and the WebProNews Video crew are in New York for the Search Engine Strategies Conference. Stay tuned all week for the latest developments in online marketing.
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My Uber Affiliate Marketing Guide was in much need of an update. So I figured since I was launching the new theme, I’d also go ahead and update the guide.
Due to Diorex taking down his blog, a pretty large number of article links were broken. He ran a great blog and provided a lot of great information, and this hit the blog. So I peppered in some relevant articles and guides of my own, as well as pulled different articles from around the net.
Check out the new guide and read any of the new articles that you may have not read before, it’ll take you one step closer to becoming an Uber Affiliate.
Adwords came out and introduced a new factor into rating a landing page’s quality score.
As part of our continuing efforts to improve the user experience, we will soon incorporate an additional factor into Quality Score: landing page load time. Load time is the amount of time it takes for a user to see the landing page after clicking an ad.
Why are we doing this?
Two reasons: first, users have the best experience when they don’t have to wait a long time for landing pages to load. Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business. Second, users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate.When are we making this change?
In the next few weeks, we will add load time evaluations to the Keyword Analysis page (we’ll notify you when they are available). You will then have one month to review your site and make necessary adjustments.After the one month review period, this load time factor will be incorporated into your keywords’ Quality Scores. Keywords with landing pages that load very slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.
In my opinion, this won’t make any difference on a good affiliates campaign; in fact I think it will help give them a higher quality score. I’ve said it before that load time is a very important thing, not because it’s now a factor in quality score, but because it plays a big role in conversion rates. Some of the crappiest landing pages have the highest CTR because the image quality is simple and very low sized. This makes the page load lightning fast, we have to remember that some people are still in the stone age and have dial-up connections. You only have so long to capture a visitors attention, and seeing a blank page certainly skyrockets their chances of leaving before they give it a looooong chance to load up.
So upgrade your hosting if need be, make sure your images aren’t 10MB a piece, and start using GIFs or compressed JPEGs. Now will load time not only increase your click through rate and overall profit, it’ll help your quality score as well.
So this is the launch post for my new theme, hope you guys like it a little better than the previous one. I wanted it to be as similar to the old one as possible so it wasn’t a huge change for my readers, but I did want a couple features changed and the whole thing touched up. I had Unique Blog Designs do this project for me, and I think they did a great job and would highly recommend them. They’ve done big time bloggers themes such as Shoemoney and John Chow. I worked with Nate and Matt, and they’re a great company to work with. They had my concept up fast, made revisions fast, and were always there to chat either via IM or email. If you’re thinking of starting a blog, or think yours needs a touch up like mine did, UBD ftw.
So now onto a few of the changes in the blog that I think are for the better :
Overall I think it’s a really nice little upgrade from what I had before. The previous theme I designed 100% by myself and I thought it was good and unique, but just a little choppy in areas and could use some improvement. Thank you Unique Blog Designs!
What really matters though is what you guys think, after all I’m writing to all of you, not myself. So let me know that you think.
It seems like I’m not the only affiliate who’s been affected by Adwords going nuts on a ton of accounts. I logged in yesterday to see a lot of my search campaigns slapped with $5.00-10.00 minimum bids. They must have done a quality score update, because people are getting slapped left and right.
For example, I’ve had one campaign running since November, so about a solid 4 months. CTR has been 14% lifetime for that campaign overall, and my quality score was great 100% of the time with $0.02 minimum bids. Spending was about $2,700/day on that campaign. Landing page was fine, links, content, etc. it was a functional site. Does this deserved to be slapped? I didn’t think so, but apparently Google did. They went on a spree or something, because most of my search campaigns on personal AND corporate accounts got slapped. I’m sure once I call up Google they’ll hopefully be able to do something about it and remove the slap, but it seems like they did some default automated action to go in and jack up everybody’s bids. There’s a discussion going on about this at Wickedfire, so you and I aren’t the only ones that have been slapped. Here’s a quote from that thread :
truth been told. This was my best site. Over 100 pages of unique content, blog posts excluded,
And I have been slapped 980 degrees around.
It seems that even those with huge content sites are getting slapped as well.
Am I no longer an UberAffiliate and going broke? Haha nooo, my income has taken a slight to moderate temporary hit, but things will bounce back and my accounts will be running fine soon enough. It just goes to show to definitely not put all your eggs in one basket. If you were making your living on one Adwords search campaign and this happened, you’d have no bread money until it got fixed.
I do believe this was just one of the infamous Quality Score slaps, and it has something to do with my landing pages. I have some creative ideas on how to fix this issue so I don’t get slapped again, so I’ll be sharing them if they work out. My landing pages weren’t simple “bridge pages” with just a Continue button and no content, I had a lot of unique content, links, all that jazz. Kinda sucks though because I actually have to sit down and do some work, haha. I’ve been lazy though and busy with getting my house etc, so a good kick is what I needed.
Thank you Google.
EDIT IN : Some people think that I’m trying to scam money and use this to scam you guys for tax breaks. I’m really sorry, but a couple hundred dollars is not doing to put even the smallest of dents into what I owe for taxes. I just wanted to think of a creative way to give to charity.
It’s time to start the first of hopefully more projects to help give back to others less fortunate than we all are. We are all very lucky (and smart) to be in this industry, and I think we’re all able to give 1/100 of what we do back to those who need it. So here’s the announcement of Charity Check Tuesday. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a while now, but wanted to wait until I had a decent readership to do so.
What is Charity Check Tuesday?
Well, the biggest motivation behind this comes from Shoemoney’s Free Shirt Friday. Basically companies send him shirts, and he’ll post a picture of himself with the shirt on and give the company some link love. I think it’s a great way to involve different people in your blog, but I wanted to do something with charity (unless you want to send me a pimp cup…which is sweet haha).
So what I’m asking is that instead of sending me t-shirts, I’m asking that companies send me checks. Every Tuesday I’ll post a picture of me holding a check that’s sent to me and do a little writeup on the company (or person) that sent the check. What I’ll do is every month have a poll, and you guys will vote for the charity of the month. Then at the end of the month, I’ll combine the checks and write one big check to the charity that you guys choose (I’ll take a picture of me holding it so you know it’s not fake). I’ll give it a week or two to let some checks come rolling in before I start to post up pictures. Why Tuesday? I have no idea…
The minimum check amount must be $15. If it’s lower than $15, it won’t be posted on this site. It’s not that I’m trying to get more money out of you, but I can’t go in and cash a hundred $1 checks every week, the bank would kill me and I think I’d kill myself. If a company decides to be awesome and sends a huge check, it will get posted priority before other ones. Other than that, they’ll all be posted as they’re received. In the memo of your check just put your website URL so people can see it on the picture and so I know what to post about as well. You can attach a small note about your company/website as well to help me out a little more. You’re getting some decent traffic and helping a good cause…who could ask for more?
Sound cool?
Mailing Information : if you want to send a check for Charity Check Tuesday, write the check to Paul Bourque and then use this as the address you send it to :
UberAffiliate
P.O. Box 81
Niagara Falls, NY 14304
One of the goals I’ve set for this month is to get started with affiliate marketing again and make some small profits (like 250EUR before the end of the month). If successful I’ll try to scale it up and develop it onto a new income stream that supplements my current income. My online business generates a relatively nice chunk of income but it’s not really diversified, the growth is stagnating and I’m kinda worried about the sustainability. Since the holiday season is over income collapsed by 30-40% and the freefall of the dollar isn’t doing me much good either.
To feel a bit more secure I’m going to try to make money with European affiliate networks so I don’t have to worry about the currency exchange. After some market research I’ve decided to start with Flemish affiliate campaigns and later I’m also going to try to target the Netherlands. My decision to focus on these target groups has some advantages but also some disadvantages:
+ Less competition. In the US you have competition from affiliate marketers from all around the world but that’s not the case in my country. That should make my job a bit easier and I think advertising costs will also be lower here because there aren’t as many advertisers.
+ No language barrier. It’s not always easy to advertise in another language if you aren’t a native speaker.
+ It pays out in euro. More diversification and less reason to worry about the dollar going south.
- Affiliate networks and programs aren’t as developed as in the US or UK. At first sight there don’t seem to be a lot of good programs.
- Smaller population: 6 million in Flanders and about 16 million in the Netherlands vs 300 million in the US.
My experiences with affiliate networks are pretty mixed. About 1.5-2 years ago I had a very successful affiliate campaign running that made shitloads of cash with free traffic but after a couple of months it peaked and after a while I had to pull the plug on it because the returns were getting too small for all the hours I had to put into it. All my other attempts to make cash with affiliate programs made use of AdWords but most of these campaigns didn’t give a positive ROI.
Hopefully I’ll do better this time. Right now I’m still in the “analysis, learning and reading” stage but my first new affiliate campaign should get off the ground soon.
This week is going to be really busy as I’ll get flooded by tons of news from CeBIT - this is a European tech show in Hannover, Germany. Most major computer and tech firms will present all their latest products at CeBIT, just like at CES in Las Vegas two months ago.
Hannover isn’t really close to where I live so I can’t bring my own coverage from the show but I hope I’ll get my driver license soon so I can go check it out next year. Posting volume on DV Hardware will go up this week as I’ll try to post as much as possible about all new products and if I find some free time I’m also going to finish a couple of reviews that should have already been published a couple of weeks ago..
Within two weeks there’s also an interesting conference for SMBs in Brussels called Ondernemen 2008. Normally I wouln’t be interested in this but I received an e-mail from Google last week that they’re going to do some AdWords workshops at this conference.
It’s called Google University and there’s a beginner and advanced class. The beginner workshop focuses on the latest trends in online marketing, how to setup an AdWords campaign and how to optimize your campaign. The advanced workshop will offer tips on how to maximize your ROI, best practices to improve your reach on the Google network and tracking and analysis. People who attend the workshop will receive a AdWords cheque of 50EUR and a toolkit with AdWords tips.
Initially I was planning to go as it may help me to get some affiliate campaigns started on AdWords but then I discovered that Google has published the presentations online. You can check out the beginner and advanced presentations at Google’s website.
As oil jumped over $100 per barrel and gold reached new record heights of over $960 the U.S. dollar reached a new record low yesterday. For the first time since the euro was found in 1999 the U.S. dollar crushed the psychological barrier of $1.5 per EUR.
Analysts believe the Fed will further cut the intrest rates to fend off a recession in the U.S. and that’s causing the dollar to drop.
“The euro is trading above 1.50 against the dollar for the first time since the eurozone came into existence in January 1999,” said Global Insight economist Howard Archer.
“This is primarily a consequence of the dollar being undermined by further weak US data heightening concerns over the US economy and reinforcing expectations of additional interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve.”
Analysts said the euro was boosted by the prospect of favourable interest rate differentials between the eurozone and the United States.
Speculators generally prefer to invest or hold currencies in countries where interest rates are rising or expected to rise in the hope they can increase their potential returns.
Soaring oil prices have diverted petro-dollar revenues into the strengthening European single currency, according to ABN Amro analyst Melinda Smith.
“In addition to the fresh widening in interest rate differentials, one of the key drivers of this move appears to be the surge of oil prices as petro-dollars are channelled into the euro,” Smith said.
When you take a look at the purchasing power the dollar is highly undervalued. According to an article I read in the newspaper today a euro is fundamentally worth only $1.1 to $1.2 instead of the $1.5 it’s currently trading at. I hope the dollar will rise again but it doesn’t really seem likely in this market.
Google’s stock took another big hit today on fears that it won’t be able to meet Wall Street’s expectations. Market research firm comScore published a report today that indicated that the amount of paid clicks on Google’s search engine dropped 7% month-over-month in January and remained relatively flat with the same period last year.
In its fourth-quarter financial results, Google indicated some concerns in this area, though at the time the company blamed the slowdown in paid-clicks to technical changes designed to reduce the number of accidental clicks by users.
Analyst Lee Westerfeld of BMO Capital Markets slashed his price target on Google’s shares to $590 from $690 in response to the comScore numbers, along with maintaining a market perform rating.
“The issue relates to the degree of multiple-compression risk under revenue- decelerating circumstances,” Westerfeld wrote in a report.
Robert Peck of Bear Stearns noted that the click-through rate was the lowest since comScore started reporting this type of data.
“While this is one data point for domestic google.com only and from one source, which may or may not be accurate, it is a concerning data point and somewhat reflects what we have heard from [search engine marketers] — that they were not seeing a high volume of clicks from consumers possibly due to the economic slowdown,” wrote Peck, who rates Google as outperform with a $650 price target.
Some analysts weren’t quite so worried. Marianne Wolk of Susquehanna Financial Group noted that Google is taking steps to improve the quality of its links and click-throughs, which may result in some lower revenue in the short term but improve the business in the long term.
A drop from December to January might be normal due to the holiday season but the fact that there was no growth compared to a year ago is pretty disappointing.
There could be several reasons for this:
- comScore’s data may be wrong.
- Google is trying to improve click quality to boost advertiser’s conversions which may eventually lead to higher bids per click
- A change in consumer’s behaviour due to the economic slowdown in the U.S.
- Companies may be reducing ad spending.
- Web users may be developing a text link blindness, just like with banner ads a couple of years ago.
Or it could be a combination of all five reasons. GOOG is currently trading around $457 which is one of its lowest levels since April 2007.