EzSEO Newsletter # 73
by Andy Williams ez SEO
This week:
1. Pulling Affiliate Links Apart.
2. What to promote?
3. Search engine conflict of interest?
4. Other News.
Hi again,
Sorry this is late. I got up at around 8am to write this newsletter, and at 9am, the power went off. We were going out to a barbecue at 2pm, but I thought I could still get this finished and sent once power was returned to normal (it usually is within an hour). 90 minutes later my laptop battery gave way, and I was forced to stop writing.
The electricity eventually came back on at 5 minutes to 2, just as we were heading out the door.
1. Pulling Affiliate Links Apart.
For those of you involved in affiliate marketing, the most important part of your business is the links you put up on your site. After all, it is these links that will be responsible for ensuring that you get the commission on anything that is sold, once your visitor clicks to go and visit your merchant.
Your merchants may give you a straight forward URL, or something slightly more complex that also has link text and possibly a description.
Some merchants only provide banners, and banners really don't convert very well. This means that if you want to use that merchants affiliate link maybe as a text link, you would need to extract out the URL part.
This is something that can be confusing for beginners, and one of my SEO Website Builder users asked me how to do this. It really is quite simple when you know how, so let's look at some examples of merchant affiliate code, and what each part represents.
A word of warning: Always test and make sure your clicks are tracked after playing with merchant links.
At Commission Junction, there is a wide range of different linking formats. Here is one piece of code (I replaced my own affiliate ID with xxxxxx:
Animaniacs Adult T-Shirt
The very first part of this code is:
That is the HTML tag to start a link. If you look at everything in the double quotes after that tag, you will have the affiliate link URL.
In this case the affiliate link URL would be:
http://www.kqzyfj.com/click-xxxxxx-10280984?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wbshop.com%2Fcatalog%2Fproduct.xml%3Fproduct_sku%3DANIGTTA%26referral_id%3DCJP
After the quotes, you see the closing part of the link tag:
target="_top" >Animaniacs Adult T-Shirt
The first bit target= "_top" tells your browser to open the link in the top window. You can replace "top" with "blank" if you want your link to open in a new window.
The next bit (between the > is the link text. That is the text that will be shown for this link. The just closes the link tag.
The next part of the CJ code begins with
This is the start of an HTML tag which places an image on your web page. Everything between the double quotes after this tag, is the URL of the image to be displayed.
There is a little more code after the quotes, but this just defines some of the images properties. In this case, the image is a one pixel by one pixel tracking image. It means that CJ can track when this image has been displayed on your webpage, so that they can accurately monitor impressions, and clickthrough rates.
If an image is not set as 1 pixel by 1 pixel, it is likely to be a product image. You can always check by copying the image URL into your browser address bar.
Not so difficult was it?
See if you can work out the affiliate URL from this BeFree code. Also, is the image a product or a tracking image?
Accessories
And finally, have a look at a Linkshare affiliate code:
This one has two images, one a tracking pixel, the other a product image. Can you see which is which?
Note that they include image properties in the starting section of the image tag, but the principles are the same.
Using the general guidelines above, you should now be able to successfully extract the affiliate URL from your merchants code.
2. What to promote
OK, time to try to answer an email I received this week:
"Hello Andy
I am starting to get really annoyed. As I look
through people selling information on how to make
money on the web site for instance Cory Rudl and many
others too. I look to see the success stories to see
what they have to say about that product. What I have
notice is everyone seems to have a web site about SEO
in some sort, web sites about back links and so on.
Can someone still make money on the web and have a
comfortable living without selling information about
SEO or some sort. Were are the people that aren't
trying to sell how to books about SEO and stuff? Is it
the only way for me to make money is to sell how to
information on SEO? God I hope not I believe that the
web has way to many of them as it is. Sorry for
babbling but can I make money selling else them web
site seo promotion.
Keep up the good work I enjoy your letters..
mike"
I think that this email has two parts:
1. Where are success stories?
2. Can you make money promoting things other than "money-making schemes".
Let's consider the first point.
I am sure this is something a lot of beginners ask themselves.
Well, the success stories are there, but they are few and far between (John Evan's Success Alert book had a number of success stories).
Most sales pages do contain success stories, so why is this question being asked? My own thoughts are that a success story has no credibility unless it is accompanied by the URLs of the websites that make the success story a success. Does that make sense?
Well who in their right mind would say "Hey, World. Come and see these sites that make me $10,000 a month". Would you?
If someone was silly enough to do that, I would be that within weeks, a number of copycat sites would spring up, with identical content, and just the affiliate URLs changed (I have seen some copied sites where the thief was not that clever, and left in the original URLs, copyright notice etc).
I think that James Martell found this with his own sites. He openly shared his 1st-in series websites with his customers. Go to any one of his sites, select a paragraph and copy it. Paste it into the advanced search box at Google to find sites containing that paragraph, and you will find several sites have blatantly copied his content.
Do you see why most people don't give out their URLs?
So, can a success story be a believable success story without a URL to back it up? Probably not. And that is the problem. Successful people want to fly under the radar and remain undetected by site copiers and thieves who don't want to put in the work to build their own successful sites. I cant say I blame them. Next time you are on a forum, and someone asks you for your URL (which is the height of rudeness in forum etiquette), just say NO.
This first point really answers most of the second point. Yes, you can make money promoting any range of stuff. Don't let a lack of success stories put you off starting your web business, just do it!
Sure there is money to be made in selling "How to start an online business" type product, but it is an over-crowded market, and ultimately, it will be those who have built up trust, and actually proved their credentials that will win in this market. With thousands of niches out there, it is better to get away from the pack, and do your own thing.
3. Search engine conflict of interest?
I have actually received two emails on this same topic. Here is one of them.
"Hello Andy,
After reading your most recent newsletter #72, I got to thinking about Google and "spam" that appears in Google's serps. It seems to me there is an inherent conflict of interest for Google (as well as for other search engines such as Yahoo that run their own PPC ad networks): They will be more than willing to serve up spam to people searching for information IF that spam means more clicks on Adsense.
In other words, if you search for "garbage cans" and the first several pages in the serps are merely pages with Adsense PPC listings, then more people are going to click on those Adsense ads, creating money not only for that webmaster but for Google as well. Therefore, Google will happily serve these "PPC directory pages" because they make more money for everyone.
And another troubling impact is that Google may NOT show webpages that display a competitor's PPC Service (such as Overture) because they are in essence missing out on revenue if they show a page with Overture PPC ads. And of course likewise, Yahoo might also penalize webmasters who serve
Adsense on their pages. I find this conflict of interest very troubling."
If you were answering this email, what would you respond to it? Think about it for a minute or two before reading further.
OK, my opinion on this.
I personally don't agree that the search engines are happy with the level of spam. I do believe that they want to get rid of it. Let me explain why I believe this.
Firstly, I still believe that most searchers look first at the main search results (non-PPC ads). They select results from the top 10 to go and visit. If they find page after page of rubbish, do they return to Google and then click on the paid ads on the right? Probably not.
I think that what goes through their mind is something like this: "Hmmm, Google doesn't seem to have anything of interest, just this rubbish, let me go to Yahoo or MSN and search there instead".
Even if they did click on the PPC ads on the right, there is no guarantee that those links will lead to anything better. It is the advertiser who decides what keywords trigger a PPC ad to be shown. Therefore quality is not assured.
In my opinion, Google are looking at the long term. They want their organic search results to be the best they can, to get people coming back to Google, and not losing them to Yahoo or MSN (which I believe is already happening). Only if they can keep their searchers happy, can they expose those searchers to more PPC ads (at Google) in the future.
4. Other News
The niche blueprints for March were released in the last week, and the "secret niche" blueprint quickly sold out. There are, however, a few of the other Niche Blueprints still available. If you are interested, visit
http://niche-blueprints.com
and click the link in the top right. You will need a username and password. These are:
username: contact
password: vision
As mentioned last week, Andrea Thomson of Golden Pine Cone
http://niche-blueprints.com/ready2go
released some templates for use with SEO Website Builder
http://ez-search-engine-optimization.com/seo-wsb
Her first template set was for the latest niche blueprint, and it has been a big hit with SEO WSB users. You can see her template in action on a site I use for testing purposes:
http://website-builder.ez-search-engine-optimization.com/
She is releasing more templates for SEO WSB soon, and a range of graphics add-ons so that you can use her templates in many different niches.
For Frontpage and Dreamweaver users, she also provides a range of templates suitable for you.
Well, that's it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online at:
http://ez-search-engine-optimization.com/blog/index.php
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives at:
http://ez-search-engine-optimization.com/archives
Have a great week!
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