Simple Keyword Research

A lot of people always ask what kind of “secret” tools we’re using for our niche campaigns, and what tools they should purchase. While that is conversation for later.. nobody EVER asks for the simple handy tools.

Even though a lot of the good stuff comes from what they call “up here” I sometimes just quickly want to look up a few variations for a general keyword. Here’s what I usually do:

I quickly go to Yahoo.com and type in the first few letters of the keyword I’m looking for. Since a few months you immediately see more specific searches on the topic of your keyword. If you don’t see anything, make sure you switch “Search Assist” on. Scroll through Yahoo’s suggestions and write them all down.

Now go to Google Suggest and check out their variations on your topic. Alternatively you can scroll down to the bottom of the page, and see what Google thinks is related to your search: (Affiliate Marketing in this case)

Of course, when it comes to campaign research you should go MUCH deeper, but we’ll get into that a little bit later. Hope you enjoyed this quickie

Investigating your PPC Conversions

I’m sure everyone of us sees differences and fluctuations in their conversions. One day it can be 200 sales per day, and the other day it can be 170. This is only a difference of 15% but it’s still a substantial number of sales. Now part of the conversion difference might be on the merchant side, but there are factors on your PPC side as well that influence the conversion rate and the conversion amount as well. Let’s see how we can find them shall we..

• Go to the reporting tab in Google Adwords.
• Click “Create a New Report”
• Click “Campaign Performance”
• Set the View to “Daily” and select the last two weeks, to get a good idea of what is happening on specific week days. You can also choose a different period of time, but two weeks gives you just enough data to get a clear view on the current trend.
• Click “Advanced Settings” and select from the “Conversion Columns” the following items: conversion cost, cost/conversion, conversions and conversion rate.
• Click “Filter your Results” and set Ad Distribution to Search Only
• Name your report, and where you feel the need, set it to run weekly
• Click “Create Report”
• Open your report from the Reporting Tab
• In the upper right corner right below the range date you can choose what you want to see the graph for. Choose Conversions
• When you take a look at the graph below for a very small campaign you’ll notice that on week days the conversion is much lower then in the weekend, where it is high.
• With this data in mind, go and take a look at the following items: average position, number of clicks per ad group or even keyword, click through rate.

You’re probably going to find out some differences that are worth taking into account when your optimizing. Imagine what a small change can do on a yearly basis. If you can’t find anything, e-mail your account manager with your findings and have them do an investigation.

Premium Subscribers:
Our Premium members can find this tutorial and some more advanced examples in the Education section. A video tutorial is also available from the Video Tutorials tab.

Google HotTrends for Niche Research

So you’re looking to get into a new niche, but you have no idea where to start: well, I’m glad I can help. Although I think the best ideas come at spontaneous moments, there are a substantial number of great tools out there. My personal favorite has actually been around for a while now, but it doesn’t look like a lot of people are using it. The tool I’m talking about is Google HotTrends.

Google HotTrends shows the top 100 of fastest rising search terms on Google and updates every hour. As you can see in the screenshot below, I checked the Hot Trends for today and I found a term “clean air gardening”. Clean Air Gardening is actually a garden tools manufacturer but I didn’t know that before I checked the results.

Gardening on its own, might be a great niche to get into. I’m sure you can make some money in that area. But what diving into it a little deeper, and get into garden tools alone or reel mowers.

But it gets even better. When you click on the search term, you can even search where the term was mentioned in news articles or blog posts. So you immediately know where you want links from and get some great additional keyword ideas.

The possibilities with this tool are endless actually. Google even updated their tool with an extra layer of information today. As of today it’s possible to perform a search on a domain name, and compare it with others. See which websites are also visited by your readers, and find great places for one-way-links and extra (free) traffic.

I’ve generated a reminder in my outlook agenda to check Google Trends every other week, to keep spinballing ideas. I recommend everybody to do the same

The Best Affiliate Marketing shows !

As we talked about earlier, networking and visiting conferences is an essential part of your business. Don’t be just a ref code: be a name, be a face!

As you can see in our last (and first) field trip broadcast we went to Miami for the annual Ad-Tech show, and got some great information and opportunities out of it. It’s a great chance to meet fellow affiliates, internet marketers and the people behind the companies you work with. I don’t know yet, which shows are going to be next. But I’ve assembled a list of the best and most interesting shows that are ahead of us:

SMX Local & Mobile – San Francisco – July 24 – 25, 2008
SMX is one of the leading Search Marketing Expo’s. There’s a lot good information here and definitely worth the admission price.

Ad:Tech Chicago – Chicago – August 5^th and 6^th 2008
Missed the last big Ad-Tech show ? Or if this one is closer to your home. Visit this Ad-Tech for more new business opportunities.

Affiliate Summit East 2008 – August 10-12 2008
Meet and talk with the people that really get you and face the same problems and opportunities you do.

Affiliate Summit Social Media 2008 – October the 5^th 2008
Definitely something new here. If you’re not doing social media advertising you should check this show out for sure.

SMX East – New York City – October 6-8, 2008
Similar to the one above, but than in the best city in the world!

Ad-Tech New York – NYC - 4, 5, 6 November 2008
The best Internet Marketing show in the world. Very corporate atmosphere, but a great place to get in touch with new networks and people that have traffic for sale.

SMX London – London – November 4 – 5, 2008
Missed all the other ones, or if you’re from Europe. Check it out !

Pubcon Las Vegas – Las Vegas – November 11^th to 14^th, 2008
Another great SEM event, by the guys from WebmasterWorld. Good for networking and a lot of information there!

Affiliate Summit West 2009 – Las Vegas – 11 – 13 January 2009
A New Year, new opportunities! Be sure to check this one out.

Yeah, that really fills up your agenda doesn’t it ? if you really want us to visit any of these show make yourself heard below We’ll announce the once we had in mind in a couple of weeks. Btw, Kieron has a great posts on what shows to visit in the UK.

Adwords tips for Hispanic Campaigns

So, in the AffiliateSupportTeam fieldtrip broadcast we already encouraged you to expand your campaigns to Latin America because overall, you can generally you can acquire your sales at a much lower CPA than in the U.S. market where there is much more competition.

At the 2nd day of Ad-Tech we scheduled a session with Google, where they gave us some tips on how to expand your campaigns to Latin America and what to keep in mind. Unfortunately Google didn’t allow is to videotape the session so it’s going to be just text guys

• Have Spanish Campaigns with Spanish landing pages. In addition to a boost in quality score, this will boost your conversion rate.
• Make your Spanish landing pages just as high quality as your English Landing pages
• Split test your Hispanic landing pages. There might be user behavior difference between the Hispanic users and U.S. users. Even if it’s just 0.50% better, that’s going to mean big bucks annually.
• Facilitate easy switching between English and Spanish.
• Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion
• Use more straight forward language
• Use images on your landing pages of Hispanic people - Not Caucasian.
• Build a whole new campaign for your Spanish traffic and separate this from your English campaign (can be in the same account) then negative match the Spanish broadmatch keywords in the Spanish account with the English translations. Also do this the other way around. Google’s broadmatch algoritm still translates and broadmatches the English keyword for the Spanish translation, and you want the highest CTR possible so don’t have your Spanish campaign run on English keywords or the other way around.

AffiliateSupportTeam already has two successful Affiliate Marketing campaigns in the Hispanic Market and will continue to expand their campaigns to Latin America in the coming months. We will keep everybody posted..

Premium Subscribers Note:
Premium Members can contact the Spanish and Portuguese translators from the Guru’s tab, to have their keywords and ad copy translated.

Testflight your Press Release

Submitting Press Releases for your website is an effective way of creating and building backlinks to your website. For our most high volume affiliate websites we send out about 2 press releases every month. That’s how fast we introduce new features to the websites.

There are a couple of things you have to keep in mind when sending out Press Releases; Contact Information, Internal Links and Word Clouds can be specifically important when writing Press Releases. Hubspot recently created PressReleaseGrader.com, a great website where you can actually rate your press release to see how you did.

Ad-Tech Miami 2008

As announced at the end of May, AffiliateSupportTeam would do its first Official Fieldtrip Broadcast in Miami. Ad-Tech Miami, to be exact. We really went out of our comfort zones to bring something new to the table in the Affiliate Marketing community, and have learned a lot of stuff from it. (Perry will follow up later this month with a Start Guide for shooting your own video content – so stay tuned)

Anyway, Ad-Tech was a blast – and more than anything else: extremely informative. Visiting shows is one of the key elements for being successful online. Both for the incredible amount of information and the networking opportunities. ..Well I could ramble on like this for hours, I think it’s best you just watch our video…

Enjoy !

If you like it, share it with your Friends ! To view in HD click below.

FireFox 3 Download Day !

Wanna help set a world record ? Today is officially FireFox 3 Download Day (Jeeej!!) and the Firefox Team is attempting to set a new world record ! The Official Record name: Most Software Downloaded in 24 Hours. I’m currently working from our Dutch Office, and it’s already the 17th here but it looks like they are waiting for Pacific Time to Launch. Some people even went overboard and created a FireFox 3 Countdown Add-on. Well here at AffiliateSupportTeam we’re properly waiting for the new and official release and fully support the attempt for a NEW World Record !

More Efficient Linkbuilding

Linkbuilding is great for all kinds of purposes and for your long term Affiliate Sites it’s a key segment you just cannot leave unmanaged.

Two great tools at your disposal are the new Google Blog Search and Google News.

When you perform a Search Query on either one of the sites, you’ll be able to filter by last hour, last 12 hours, last day, last week and even last month.

Clicking one of the results in the SERPS will take you to the blog or news article where you can comment on it. Commenting on somebody else’s post with your own link in your username or even as an extra link in the post will not only give you some extra FREE traffic but also count as a backlink to your site. I am well aware that most of the blogs will script everything as a nofollow link, but there has been no evidence AT ALL that these links don’t count for something. So until proven otherwise, just do it!

And now for the best part.. when you subscribe to the RSS feeds, you’ll be able to keep track of every new update on this keyword! For those of you who are using iGoogle, the feed can also be added to you iGoogle home page.