Google’s Quality Score Improvements

Yesterday, Google made a post on it’s Adwords blog about upcoming Quality Score improvements. Basically their changing two things:

Keywords will no longer be “inactive for search”

Minimum bid will be replaced by first page bid

Honestly I think replacing the minimum bid by a first page is a good move. This is likely to get you more impressions, and as far as I can tell by Google’s post, your keywords will now always run. So this might help affiliates who have been Google Slapped.

We have yet to see how the inactive for Search will turn out. Because as they say, keywords that previously were inactive for search aren’t likely to generate traffic. However, some traffic is always better than no traffic at all.

So why is Google making these changes ? Well this is a topic, definitely open for discussion, but I feel very strongly that’s it just to make money of the low quality ads as well. As they are now shifted to the secondary and even lower pages.

We’ll all just have to see how this is going to turn out, but as far as I can tell at this time. This might actually be a good improvement for most of Google’s advertisers..

Advanced Wordpress Themes

To be honest, I don’t think there’s any internet marketer out here that does not like WordPress. I love WordPress; I love it’s skin-ability, flexibility, the enormous amount of available plugins but most of all I love the WordPress back-end a.k.a. The Admin panel.

Actually up until now all of our sites are build with a WordPress admin panel, because it’s so easy to understand. We don’t need to write corporate procedures on adding new articles and that kinda stuff, because most of the people in our company which are involved with publishing have worked with WordPress before, and the ones that haven’t – they get it right from the start.

A couple of days ago I stumbled on a website called WooThemes. These guys create REAL premium WordPress themes, which expands the functionality from a WordPress Blog to a FULL WordPress Website. Their templates were made with the following purposes in mind; magazine website, news website, corporate website and portfolio websites.

While none of the above may have a direct purpose for you. Think about how you can use this for Affiliate Mini Sites. The cost of setting up an Affiliate Mini Site can go from somewhere around $1,500 all the way up to $4,000 or more, if you want something of quality. These templates go out for $70 USD for the Single User License (Which than allows you to use it for two websites) A Developer License costs $150 USD and is mainly for designers and developers who use this website for a client, but since this is the only license that comes with the original PSD files it might be worth the extra $80 bucks.

Alternatively you can sign up for a monthly subscription and get access to all of their themes starting at $50 USD per month.

We just purchased a Developer Licensed theme which we’re going to use on two new mini sites. WooThemes sent everything we needed to get the theme up and running and this not only saved us a lot of money in terms of designing and development but also a considerable amount of time. (Opportunity Cost). So next time you think of setting up a presale mini site. Check out what WooThemes has to offer before spending a dime or a minute on an individual themed site.

Best of the Web Local

This morning, BOTW announced the launch of “Best of the Web Local” which is a new local directory focusing on providing users with local business information, store opening times and movie time tables.

BOTW is one of the oldest directories on the web, and many SEO’s claim it to be very important for linkbuilding. We usually list all of our important domains in BOTW, but will now also pull some traffic in from the Local Directory.

We have some ideas on how to get targeted traffic from them, but more on that later.

If you’re interest in taking advantage from their current 50% discount offer: Go to BOTW and type in the Promocode: BOTWLOCAL.

Good Luck!

The Coming Adwords War

Over the weekend I was finally able to take some time out of my agenda to read “The Coming Adwords War” by Michhael Reining from MindValley Labs.

In his 52 page long document, Mike shares his journey into the internet marketing world and later his individual entrepreneurship. It was a fun but somewhat over dramatic read on skills and facts most of us already know.

According to Mike, the Google Adwords world as we know it, will cease to exist before the end of 2009. The theory his book thrives on is that because small businesses don’t have the money or manpower to build an automatic system that optimizes all the campaigns by accessing the Google Adwords API they don’t have a competitive advantage and therefore don’t compete. This is based upon the Adwords Optimizing system Ebay launched somewhat time ago. But how well did that turn out ?

I agree with Mike that competition is getting fiercer and the PPC landscape is changing, this was clear to me when AffiliateSupportTeam was at the Google Headquarters in Dublin, but let’s not get carried away: For now, and as it will be for a long time in the future the Adwords will still be based on a Quality Score based algorithm where CTR plays a big role in. And as I described in an earlier post: Adwords Quality Score is more based about incoming links to your site than anything else. And let’s be honest small and efficient business can do that just as well or maybe even better then the big corporations because they are very flexible.

While it might be true that those companies got a lot more financial power then you do, they are also limited to budgets. While it’s a lot easier for a small company to put in some extra cash once they see a campaign is profitable – hell most of the affiliate business out there get all the revenue in before they have to pay their Credit Card bill, a big company can’t easily relocate a budget. In my opinion flexibility always wins..

In “The Coming Adwords War”, Mike does share some techniques that have helped him get more out of his campaigns. Most of it is pretty obvious, but if you’re a newbie to PPC Marketing and Google Adwords, reading this document might help you get some good insights and avoid some mistakes.

Visit “The Coming Adwords War” website.

P.S. On a little side note, I do think it’s pretty spectaculair that Mindvalley decided to move their business to Kualu Lumpur and there recruit people from all over the world. That stuff, to me is pretty inspirational.

Is linkbuilding important for PPC Campaigns ?

Yes. And the importance of this will continue to grow in the future. For several months we’ve been teaching the first AffiliateSupportTeam students the pillars to building stable and long-term Affiliate Marketing campaigns. And link building has always been an important aspect of the traffic pillar.

As we’ve always suspected, the biggest aspect of the Landing Page Quality Score is the Domain Quality Score. From our experience the domain name quality score is measured in a variety of ways but the two most important aspects are:

• Keyword Relevancy in the Domain name
• Incoming Links (Back Links)

Google predicts that in a period of time your website will generate a certain amount of natural backlinks. If that’s not happening your site might get flagged for manual review by their spam specialist team.

In a presentation at SMX San Francisco Michael Gray said the following, according to Bruce Clay’s website:

“Michael says the Landing Page Quality Score is a lie. It has nothing to do with your landing page. It has to do with your organic rankings. The better you do organically, the better your quality score will be. Learn how to break things.

He shows us his site for Sanjaya ringtones. His AdWords ad was disabled because he had a low quality score.

He shows another site. It has the same ad copy but it’s going to a different domain. That ad runs for 75 cents. On the other site the ad goes for 10 dollars.”

You can actually do some experiments with this yourself:

• Duplicate an excising campaign
• Rename it to “Test Campaign”
• Remove all ad groups except one
• Duplicate that ad group at least 4 times.
• Make sure all the ad copy is the same
• Change the Display URL for all 4 ads
• Choose some domains you think or know have a lot of backlinks, like Google.com or CNN.com
• Upload the ads.

As you are probably shocked to see, your Dog Training or whatever campaign receives a better Quality Score on CNN.com and Google then it does on an actually related domain.

One of our students is currently experimenting with running campaigns on authority websites like Squidoo, for some small campaigns. So far his campaigns have survived the latest Google Slap.

I hope I made the importance of backlinks for your overal marketing plan, and especially search more clear..If you’re not currently building organic links to your website, do it now.

Check your Old Affiliate Marketing Campaigns

When I need to take some time away from the computer, I try do some relaxation and read a book. Not just fiction, though that’s okay; but business associated books. I like to read up on the thoughts and mindset from the great business minds. One paragraph from Donald Trump’s book “How to Get Rich” really spoke to me: It was about Donald bumping into an old friend at a formal event, who was once a successful business owner but was now standing in the corner like he did not belong there. The Donald went over to talk to him and he asked him what was wrong. “I lost the speed” he said. According to Donald Trump and that good fellow, you need to launch one project after another to stay on top of your game.

I think it’s obvious to everybody how this relates to affiliate marketing. While Amit claims it’s all a numbers game, others say you gotta duplicate those campaigns that work. I tend to agree with both theories. There’s no doubt about it, that the affiliates that do good in this industry launch one campaign after another.

Now take a moment and think of how many campaigns you have launched over the past month.
… Got it ?
Now think of how many campaigns you have launched in the past 3 months .. or.. 6 months ?
My guess is that you’ve probably launched a lot of campaigns..

While I encourage all of you to launch campaigns in a rapid routine, it’s also important to take a look back at those campaigns that you though that initially had failed. Depending on the cookie length and the sort of product it might take a while before the traffic you have sent to the offer converted.

After reading that paragraph, my mind began to wonder and I checked up on some campaigns I had launched 3 months ago, and then paused a month later. It turns out that actually some of those campaigns were profitable – the sales just came in later. What kinda confusing was, that Google Analytics showed only a few added sales, but when I logged in to the affiliate network to check on the sales it showed almost 20% more than Google did. Just another reminder for you guys to never rely on one tracking solution

Now, do yourself a favor and check on some of your old campaigns. Those 10 minutes might just make your day..

SMX East is Coming Up!

As I already reported in our most interesting marketing conferences of 2008 post, Search Marketing Expo is a MUST attend for anybody who makes his living on the internet. I can’t imagine anybody not using search (organic or ppc) to target his or her visitors, so I’m not going to talk about why it’s important..

SMX East is being held in New York City at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center from the 6^th until the 8^th of November. It’s on Manhattan, (11^th west 34^th st.) right near Pier 78, where all the tourist helicopters depart from. Besides NYC always being a stunning location for business or pleasure, SMX is just one of those shows you cannot miss.

I’ve taken a look at the agenda and they really went out of their way to bring some great content table. Personally I’m very interested in the Video & Search session and the advanced Paid Search techniques. Fair enough most of our revenue comes through paid search, with Google (no surprise) counting for about 80% of that, however it may come at no surprise that SEO and PPC are now more tied together then ever before and as the search engines get smarter, these two will bond even more.

Just as we did with Ad-Tech Miami we will try to be there and bring you video coverage from the show, but more info on that later. Just want to conclude this post with: that if you can afford the time and money to be there.. Just do it, you’ll be happy you did.