Archive for March, 2007
eComXpo Starts Tomorrow – Here’s Your Free Ticket!
Posted by AC Editorial Team in Affiliate Classroom Events and Products, Affiliate Marketing Monday, 19 March 2007 16:29 No Comments
I’m such an Internet Marketing geek! I attended a marketing conference in Dallas this weekend without even having to go to Dallas!
I watched it via a video stream direct to my computer. The one big thing I missed though, was being able to talk to the presenters and other people at the conference.
eComXpo doesn’t have this problem. We know that because the Affiliate Classroom has had a “booth” at this excellent ONLINE trade show several times. It’s virtual reality at it’s best! You can attend from your computer, and actually visit (via email or chat) with the people staffing the booths. I’ll be there, along with other Affiliate Classroom staff, to answer questions and chat with anyone who stops by.
eComXpo starts tomomrrow, and runs through Thursday, March 22nd. Use this link and Affiliate Classroom can get you in for free!
Here are some of the benefits of attending an online Tradeshow:
- 100% Online and Virtual
- FREE to Attend
- Has All the Benefits of a Top Tradeshow
- There will be more than 7,000 Attendees, 300 Exhibitors and 40 Presenters
- View 175 Archived Presentations at eComXpo University
- They are expecting over 8,000 attendees!
It seems like eComXpo grows by about 1,000 attendees every time they host the show, so obviously it’s a great show! If you’ve ever attended, we’ll see you there!
You only need to attend once to know that you would NOT miss this opportunity. And if you’ve never attended, you should – it’s THE best way to see the ENTIRE affiliate industry from one place.
The way it works is that as soon as the show opens tomorrow, you simply log-in using your free login (courtesy of Affiliate Classroom).
At that point, of course, the first booth you should visit is OURS! Then, after that you can visit any of over 300 exhibitors! These are all companies in the affiliate or search marketing world; you never know what connections you will make! Be sure to take note about the start times of the Presentations. There is a great line-up of speakers, as usual.
Find out what all the excitement is about. Register for free and plan to spend some time the next few days learning about all the companies and new things going on in the world of affiliate marketing.
March Issue Affiliate Classroom Available
Posted by Helen Montgomery, AC Magazine in Affiliate Classroom Magazine, Affiliate Marketing Friday, 16 March 2007 18:30 No Comments
[Editor's Note: I confess to some bias, but I thought this was worth posting more than once. Thanks, everybody! Jeff Perren]
Optimized copy is the theme of the March 2007 issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine.
Cover Story
SEO With Real People in Mind: Writing for both potential buyers and search engine spiders.
Keyword Rich Copy, the Key to Riches: A step-by-step lesson on how to write keyworded copy.
Affiliate Pre-Sales Checklist: Writing how-tos covering PPC ads to product reviews.
Use the Copywriting Methods of the Pros: How to incorporate the secrets of million dollar copywriters.
Remember, you can also brand the magazine with your affiliate links and give it away on your site. AC pays monthly commission on two tiers, so it’s easy to generate recurring income with our program! Click here to sign up as an affiliate and get the branding kit:
Cloaking, Good and Evil Explained
Posted by Matt Van Atta in Affiliate Marketing Thursday, 15 March 2007 15:45 No Comments
Intrigue and espionage play a role in Internet activity, including affiliate marketing.
It may not exactly be James Bond trying to get the goods on the the bad guy. (Although when I saw the movie “Casino Royale,” I couldn’t help but notice 007’s deftness with the laptop.) But, the world does have white-hatted good guys and black-hatted bad guys. Always has, always will. The Internet does nothing to change that. It merely provides another venue for the classic good-versus-evil struggle.
So what does that have to do with marketing?
Enter: cloaking. The dictionary definition is “to cover or hide with.” In the Internet context, cloaking prevents content or HTML code associated with a web page from being accessible to visitors. The term contains both bad and good connotations – sort of a double-edged sword.
Cloaking’s “evil” edge pertains to search engines. Those on “the dark side” can program their web server so that ordinary visitors see one kind of page content, but Google and other search engines receive entirely different content. These bad guys thus can distort search engine results to their advantage, lure unsuspecting web visitors into their traps, and take somebody else’s commission – possibly yours.
Cloaking techniques prevent Google from accurately providing legitimate search results. That’s why Google bans sites it catches using cloaking. If your marketing efforts involve Google, it’s best not to try this.
Now let’s focus on the “good” edge of the cloaking sword: link cloaking.
Take the affiliate links on your website. They contain your unique affiliate ID, given to you by the merchant and enabling you to be paid on sales emanating from them. But the resulting URL can be long and complicated.
Some customers will copy and paste only the first part of the URL into their browsers (leaving out your affiliate ID). Dishonorable affiliate marketers can substitute their ID for yours and receive credit for the product’s purchase. Either way, you lose commissions.
But cloaking script helps by disguising the affiliate link. It replaces the original URL with a redirected URL that is streamlined and protects your affiliate ID. Many merchants provide cloaked URLs as part of their affiliate arrangements. Some websites (including EHosting4U.com, recommended by Affiliate Classroom) offer free or low-cost link cloaking options.
Search engine cloaking is unmitigated deception. But link cloaking is simply an act of self-defense – protecting you and your hard-earned commissions from the clutches of the dark side.
Laundering Your Web Code
Posted by AC Editorial Team in Affiliate Marketing, Content Creation Wednesday, 14 March 2007 20:37 No Comments
There seems to be a few differences of opinion on whether the code in the back-end of web-pages needs to be squeaky clean.
If you use Microsoft Word or FrontPage (like I do) to write your blog posts, you know that a lot of garbage is carried over when you copy and paste this information into your post.
In fact, there is so much extra code in some cases that when you paste it into Wordpress, it becomes a terrible mess! Cleaning up this code can take a lot of time – but is it worth it?
I read one report that said crawlers only read 150-250 words of a page, so if those words are filled with extra code, the crawler may not find the information you intended to be indexed. That being said, it seems like it would be beneficial to have less code in the back-end of your pages.
But not so fast!
WebProNews did an interview on this subject with Google’s own Vanessa Fox, in a nutshell, here’s her statement:
Code to text ratio!
This point I’ve seen crop up so many times, and each and every time I say – it does not matter! One of my first sites was created in Frontpage with absolutely shocking code and it ranks fine, even for searches with 100 million+ results.The good word = Google ignores code to text ratio.
So, was all that time I spent cleaning up my code wasted? My opinion; I don’t think so.
While Google currently accepts the dirty code that is input with some word processing software, I do not.
Cleaning up the code makes it a LOT easier to make updates in the future. Plus, we all know how Google likes to make changes. I’m not going to be the one that has to go through hundreds of web-pages and try to clean them up if Google ever changes their mind. I’d much rather do it “right” the first time!
What’s So Great About Email Marketing
Posted by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine in Affiliate Marketing, E-mail Marketing Tuesday, 13 March 2007 16:13 1 Comment
Notice, there’s no question mark in the title. That’s because, for me, there’s no question about it.
Everyone who has tried it knows all about the continual and continuing challenges entailed in email marketing. Getting a high percentage of delivery is still a high hurdle. Avoiding the spam filter is part of that. Then there’s the eternal dilemma: to target or shotgun.
Sure, it’s easy to go on all day about all the tough aspects of email marketing. But there are advantages that make it the perfect channel for certain personality types.
Face it, some people just aren’t website designers. If you look at many sites, you’ll see that the layout is poor. Navigation is non-existent. Finding products is tough for customers and buying them even tougher. All that isn’t necessarily a criticism of the designers; those things are very hard to do well and not everyone has the cash to pay to outsource.
None of those problems loom large in email marketing, though. With this direct form of contact — once you get into the Inbox and opened — you can easily present your product. No navigation involved; the reader just reads some text and clicks a link. No finding the product or descriptions; it’s all right there in front of him or her.
And, one of my favorite aspects:.it’s an active enterprise. Affiliate marketers make huge, and often ingenious, efforts to draw traffic to a site. With email, you go to the customer, you don’t have to get them to come to you. Of course, there’s still that little problem of getting the message to them and read. But, still, you’re reaching out, not waiting for them to come to you.
It can be frustrating to design the best website possible, buy PPC or acquire links, and then hope they show up. But with email marketing, you can stay busy for a long time building a list, writing copy, and delivering messages. There’s a direct ratio between your efforts and the reward that is sometimes missing in other channels.
Targeting
One of the first things to consider is targeting your audience.
However you acquired your list, not every message is for every recipient. Find out as much as you can about your potential reader and write for him or her. Even the same product can, and should, be sold differently depending on age, gender, hobby or interests, and a dozen other important variables.
The more you know, the better you can target.
Email marketing is not a complete strategy for most marketers. But as one leg of a powerful platform, it’s a dynamic way to reach out. Devote at least 25% of your efforts to this channel and you’re likely to reap more than 25% of your revenue this way.
