an affiliate marketing blog about learning and earning online

Affiliates, is Bing sending you traffic?

Bing.com, the new search engine from Microsoft, has generated a lot of buzz. It has been sending me traffic, and I hear from others that they too like what they see. From a user’s perspective, Bing is certainly a heckuva lot better than Live Search, the search engine it replaced. Edward Baig, in USA Today, did a nice concise comparison of Bing and Google, so for more details read his piece.

Affiliate marketers should read Bing: New Features Relevant to Webmasters, Bing’s whitepaper discussing the key features of Bing from the perspective of webmasters and web publishers. Download from Microsoft here.

And take heed of the comments in the section “What do I need to do for SEO with Bing?”

If the MSNbot hasn’t already found your web sites, you can submit them to Bing here.

The big question for affiliates: will Bing’s cashback program over write our cookies? And if so, for how long? (i.e., is the cashback program a short-term gimmick or here to stay?) Something to ponder.

Sallie

Posted on 3rd July 2009 in Free Tools, Microsoft | No Comments »

Keep up with Google SEO via Matt Cutt’s blog

Matt Cutts has worked for Google since 2000 and writes a fairly impartial blog that’s mostly about SEO (search engine optimization) and Google but covers other topics as well. If you are new to creating web sites and learning SEO, you might want to read it from time to time.

Cutt’s blog is not an official Google blog, but it’s a good place to pick up information. For example, you may have heard about “page rank sculpting” as an SEO technique. For the past couple of years many webmasters have put a lot of effort into this. But in a recent post, Cutts writes, “it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.” (read entire post)

Once again, the importance of great content is emphasized, as is the importance of designing a web site that’s easy to use. So if you’re just getting started, that’s where you should put your energy.

Sallie

Posted on 1st July 2009 in Everything Google | No Comments »

The BANS guys are creating a new affiliate marketing guide

Kelvin and Adam, the creators of Build A Niche Store (BANS), recently sent out an email about a new product they’re developing, a guide to “affiliate marketing through content driven websites.”

These guys have been building niche websites monetized through affiliate links and contextual programs since 2004. As they say, “It’s how we got started online, it’s how we managed to switch from going to work to working from home, it’s how we learnt the majority of the practical internet knowledge we have, it’s what gave rise to the concept of BANS, it’s what enabled us through finance and understanding to move into more complex internet projects.”

They point out that BANS is simply a tool and that unless you understand what makes the model work, you can’t really expect to succeed. It doesn’t matter if you’re using BANS, phpbay, or something else.

Your goal (to slightly paraphrase the guys): connect consumers who research and buy products online with companies that sell (or facilitate the selling of these products) and have affiliate programs that enable you to make money by promoting these products.

How NOT to achieve that goal: “rapid development of poorly chosen, poorly planned, poorly built, poorly marketed and poorly managed sites.” At the other end, over-designing isn’t the answer either.

Research, relevancy, content creation, choosing a real niche and sticking to it – that’s what it’s all about. Not whether you use Joomla, phpbay, BANS, Wordpress, or your own code. Again, those are just tools.

One of Kelvin and Adam’s BANS sites is Game Improvement Irons. The content was outsourced, so it cost $500 to create. They say the site consistently makes between $200 (out of season) and $400 (in season) per month. No new content has been added to it in over a year, yet it has “sat there in prime position on Google and the other major engines for the last couple of years for many of its target keywords connecting golfers interested in Game Improvement Irons to different sets of clubs listed for sale on eBay.”

Do a Google search for game improvement irons and you’ll see its position. The site reflects the demand it was built to serve. Nothing more, nothing extraneous, just what’s needed to do a good job of serving the niche.

Since I first got involved with BANS I’ve had a good feeling about Kelvin and Adam and their approach. I’ve never met them, and maybe I’m wrong about them (hope not!), but they’ve never given off that aura of slime I find with so many people involved in the world of affiliate marketing. I intend to buy their new guide when it comes out (soon!), and I’ll certainly write about it here. If I like it, I’ll be an affiliate (and let you know that too).

And what of the future of the BANS program? Kelvin and Adam say they’ve taken development of the BANS tool as far as they want to (they are not software developers). Apparently other development teams have expressed interest in taking it over, so perhaps we’ll see further changes in the future.

Sallie

Posted on 30th June 2009 in Affiliate Programs, Build A Niche Store (BANS) | 1 Comment »

How do your niche stores look in other browsers?

Like most people, I’m a creature of habit. With the exception of an early, brief, and unsatisfactory foray into using Netscape Navigator w-a-y back in the day, I’ve been using Internet Explorer for what feels like forever. But in May I downloaded Firefox so I could experiment with the DevHub program (which now works with IE too). I like it pretty well, so I’ve been using it more and more lately.

Other than this blog, I hadn’t looked at any of my sites with a browser other than IE. It never occurred to me. But yesterday I discovered that one of my niche stores looks absolutely horrific in Firefox. Agh! All of the others looked fine, but this was my first niche store and graphically one of my favorites. I think the reason it looked so bad was because I did a lot of messing around with the template’s CSS style sheet before I really knew what I was doing. So now I’m working on getting it to look good in Firefox and other browsers. Even though the majority still use IE (the other browsers are gaining market share), I’d like any web site I create to look good no matter what browser someone uses to view it.

In the midst of all of this I wondered if there’s a way to see how web sites look in different browsers without having to download all of them. I discovered there are a number of web sites out there that let you look at a web site through the eyes of various browsers. I tried several and decided that the one I like best is BrowserShots.

Browsershots is free and easy to use. You can choose from more than 90 browser possibilities (including IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc.) and four operating systems, plus you can choose various options pertaining to things like screen size, color depth, java, flash, and javascript.

From hereon out, I won’t consider any of my web sites “done” until I’ve made sure that it looks good in other browsers.

Sallie

Posted on 29th June 2009 in Free Tools | No Comments »

Want to get accepted by the eBay Partner Network? Start here.

The other day I read 7 Tips for Getting Accepted into ePN – eBay Affiliate Network and thought the advice was pretty good. Now the eBay Partner Network (ePN) has come along and given creedence to that post by mentioning it in an ePN blog post yesterday, Understanding the eBay Partner Network Approval Process. If you are contemplating joining ePN, or if you can’t figure out why ePN has rejected you, read this stuff. It’s like I’ve said before — content is queen!

Sallie

Posted on 25th June 2009 in EPN/ebay Partner Network | No Comments »

An experiment to see if BANS is dead

In his recent post Is BANS Really Dead? Lets Experiment! Ben Johnson writes that he’s going to conduct an experiment to see if, as some have said, BANS is dead. Johnson has been using BANS for some time, but had gone on to use Wordpress and other affiliate tools.

Now he’s taking a “clean” site and going to design it so that all of the BANS “footprint” attributes (I assume he means things like the removable “Powered by Build A Niche Store” link) are taken out. He will be providing updates in his blog – should be good reading.

I’m one of those who haven’t given up on BANS. Yes, I think there are programs out there that are in some ways easier to use, but I would not get rid of any of my BANS sites because they are performing for me. BANS is just a tool, like WordPress or phpbay, and how you use it is, I believe, what makes the difference. No matter what tool you use, if your web site is garbage the tool won’t save you. If the web site is good, BANS, phpbay, and other tools will help you earn affiliate revenue.

Good luck Ben!

Sallie

Posted on 22nd June 2009 in Build A Niche Store (BANS), EPN/ebay Partner Network | No Comments »

Your niche demographics: who are those people anyway?

Like many people, I sort of “fell” into becoming an affiliate and kept on going from there. Although I did plenty of research (keyword, product sales, etc), and even though I have a fair amount of “corporate” marketing experience, I never really took a good look at the people I hoped would buy the eBay, Amazon, and other products available through my niche web sites. I guess I’ve been somewhat lucky that people have been coming to those web sites and buying stuff.

What sort of people am I trying to attract with my niche (or micr-niche) web sites? I want real people, of course, who are interested in my niche. They need to have credit cards (or a PayPal account, at least), and should be sufficiently affluent to buy what I’m selling. These are the folks who are most likely to become customers.

Recently I learned about Microsoft’s adCenter Labs, which offers a number of free tools that can give people like me at least some basic demographic information I can use in making decisions about creating new niche sites (or ending them). You might want to have a look and try the tools.

The first tool I tried is Demographics Prediction, and I used “query” for the input. Results (based on search queries and web page views) for the term “affiliate marketing” indicate that users of that term are most likely male (63%) with predicted age distribution of 32.65% for ages 25-34 and 30.61% for ages 18-24. Certainly old enough to have credit cards or a PayPal account.

I then used the tool again, this time with “URL” as the tool input. I entered this site, http://affiliate-marketing-adventure.com, and had similar (but not identical) results: 60% male, 22.45% ages 25-34 and 21.34% ages 18-24.

Next I used the Detecting Online Commercial Intention tool. Using the query “affiliate marketing” I learned that 83% of those searching that term have non-commercial intentions and are looking for information. On the other hand, when I used the URL of this blog, the probability is that 67% of you are looking for information. (The other 33% of you – please let me know what you want to buy! LOL).

adCenter Labs offers a number of other free tools – give them a try if you need information.

Sallie

Posted on 20th June 2009 in Business Resources, Free Tools, Microsoft | No Comments »

Liberated from my eBay store but enjoying eBay more

After almost 5 years of operating a successful eBay store, I closed it on June 15th.

The store was doing fine, although it would have been doing better if eBay hadn’t screwed their stores in eBay search. I didn’t have to close it (I wasn’t losing money). I simply figured out that, given the relatively small volume of listings I run, eBay’s current fee scenario works better for me when I run auctions and 30-day fixed price listings. And eBay has given sellers some tools that previously were available only with eBay stores.

Now I’ll have a lot more flexibility – if I don’t feel like listing for a while, there will be no fees to pay (unlike the monthly store subscription fee). It’s different for really big powersellers, of course, but that’s something I’ve never aspired to be.

At first it felt peculiar to login to eBay and see no store symbol in My eBay, but I’m over it now. Practicing “non-attachment” as it were. And enjoying eBay much more….

Sallie

Posted on 18th June 2009 in eBay | No Comments »