Aminology

… is when you least want to. It makes you a much stronger writer.

Or you can simply outsource.

I’ve been dripping with infinite wisdom lately.

If you’re promoting a product as an affiliate or even as a product owner, then make sure you continue targeting not just the well converting keywords, but also the actual URLs that are displayed on the organic search results from these high converting keyword searches. Many people still mistakenly enter a website url into a search box, and since many web users set Google (and still Yahoo) as their home page, it would be a waste to not actually bid on competitor URLs as keywords.

This technique is particularly effective for ‘product review’ sites. For example, if a user searches for www.guitarguide.com, then an advert for a review on the actual product would typically yield a high CTR and healthy conversion rate. You will of course need to create many ad groups, with each ad group targeting a different product.

You don’t even have to be an affiliate to do this.

If you own the URL in question, then go ahead and set up an ad campaign targeting the site. My recommendation is to go with a (seemingly) independent review site, as opposed to sending the user directly to your site as they intended. This is because sending visitors through an intermediary site which strongly endorses the product (while appearing as neutral as possible) greatly increases the conversion rate, increasing the possibility of a sale or lead.

If you haven’t signed up to a CPA network already, I strongly recommend you try NeverBlueAds . The interface is excellent (much better than Copeac and CPAEmpire in my opinion), the offers are categorised and listed how they should be, and you get a top Affiliate Manager too.

What I like in particular about the network is how they call up each new applicant, it’s their way of making the affiliate/network relationship more personal.

So there I was, chilling for a bit on Facebook, when I noticed a ‘tooth whitening’ advert on the usual Facebook ad spot.

Being the curious marketer that I am, I clicked on it to see how exactly the blog was being monetised. The link took me to a blog, which although looked fine, had a strange post on viagra. And literally a second after I noticed this, the page automatically redirected to medsmaster.com, a viagra site.

What’s interesting is the way in which this advert passed Facebook’s manual ad review. It seems like the marketer first waited until their innocent teeth whitening help blog was approved by the Facebook mods, and then inserted a redirect script into the main index page taking visitors to the viagra site.

Shady.

Content can be produced relatively cheaply these days. Articles are charged per word, and are priced not on the originality and value of the article as a whole, but on the uniqueness of the content. For online marketers, any content which contains a good distribution of their targeted keywords and doesn’t get flagged by the big G as ’spam’ or ‘duplicate’ is good enough.

This approach is pretty standard for content that is published on the web for free in order to generate CPC or CPS revenue for the online marketer. I’m sure many online marketers still continue to buy cheap content, monetise it with adsense ads or affiliate links, and earn peanuts for their efforts. And if you are one of those guys and already pay for low quality content, you might as well go all the way and start churning out bot generated scraper content on a massive scale.

The point is this: if you’re going to have real, unique content produced by a real writer, then make sure it’s quality and don’t just give it away for free. Don’t hire any content writer to write you generic, keyword rich articles on a topic simply because you want to post it on your content site to help it rank higher in the SEs for the purpose of generating more money from ad revenue. If your site sells an actual product and receives affiliate traffic, then SEO articles help. But otherwise, don’t publish cheap content for free.

Instead of spending $100 on 20 cheap articles written by a cheap, foreign content writer, spend $100 on one long article written by a certified professional on your topic and turn it into paid content to be added as an addition to a bigger project you may have started working on. Invest money on content not so you can drive traffic to the page you post it on for the purpose of making affiliate sales, but to create something which has a much greater perceived value and as a result is appreciated and valued much more for the simple reason that it’s paid and therefore quality as opposed to free and therefore cheap.

There is far too much ‘free’ content on the web, free content which has been written for the sole purpose of having the site it is published on ranking in the search engines and generating ad / affiliate revenue. And believe it or not, the average web user isn’t looking for generic content or even better, bot generated content. They want real content to provide them with real value. And while more and more online marketers focus on churning out as much cheap or bot generated content as possible, there will be an even greater demand for high qualiy information - which is why online publishing will continue to thrive and web users will be more than willing to pay for access to high quality information.

If the niche is good enough for you to make money from ads or affiliate links, then it’s good enough for you to start charging for the actual content. More on this later.

Kudos to ‘the Cakes‘ for this reminder. I actually received an email from my Affiliate Manager about the offer (Instant Action Games), but needed a good kick up the backside to actually do something about it.

I started promoting CPA offers on Facebook back when they had just launched their CPC model. At the time the mods were acting like schmuks and banning pretty much every campaign which involved zip/email submits, which just happened to be the best converting offers. Anyway, I got tired of having my ads rejected so I left it there, until now.

I’ve been running this offer for an hour now and not only is it converting decently (7:1 click to conversion rate at the moment), but I’ve actually had the ads manually reviewed and approved. If you want more specifics on running the offer check out this post.