Diorex

Surprisingly, I may be the only person in affiliate marketing who does not know how to program, write scripts, do HTML or even graphic design. I am pretty much just an ideas guy, but I do have lots of ideas.

I have literally tons of ideas that may or may not have huge potential, but I dont have the programming skills to make them work. I have money to invest in projects, but often times I want to run a trial balloon before I start spending money hiring people.

In the past I have worked with various programmers, but for a variety of reasons that has just not worked very well.

I was hoping for some feedback from you guys - what languages, books, websites should I hit to learn to program. I have particular interest in running scripts - scraping websites, manipulating data and then doing something new with that data.

Eventually I would want to do APIs and dynamic web pages, but I just want to start with some baby steps.

My goal is not to be a programming expert - but to understand a little bit more about what my IT guys are doing at the office and maybe to be able to spec out more complex projects for some outsourced projects and then be able to understand what I am paying to have built so I can tweak it without totally breaking it.

Ideas? Thoughts? Suggestions on where to get started?

Because I am mad at Google about something totally unrelated, I figured I would keep the post streak alive and moan about Google some more…

I was doing some searches on the Google Keyword Tool the other day and one of my search terms was a trademark term and I found it interesting that there were no related keywords, just the brand name itself.

Here is a search for Intel - which yielded just a result for Intel itself.

Whereas a search for Capital One shows lots of related search terms that a trademark bidder would want to use to piggyback on the natural brand traffic.

Interestingly, if you dive deeper and type in related keywords they will show you the volume of that particular search term, but they still protect the brand.

Why do some brands get protection and others dont? Does it have to do with spend? or lawyers? is this available to smaller trademarks? I saw no pattern or rhyme or reason to why some brands or companies had protection and others did not, but obviously some are getting preferential treatment and others arent.

Any ideas?

For those who have not heard, the Adwords tool is now giving approximate volume of searches.

I was prepared for this to be badly flawed like the volume estimates from the old Yahoo tool.

I was surprised by how accurate it was for many of the search terms I used, especially on the exact match setting. Broad match is always a little more hazy, so it was no surprise that my numbers varied, but even then it was not a dramatic difference.

This is valuable data Google is sharing, be sure to make good use of it when planning or expanding new adgroups.

On the other hand, the click estimate tool which guesses at volume and price of clicks received based upon a maximum bid is still badly flawed.

Just installed Xobni for Outlook this week. So far I am terribly impressed.

Xobni is kind of a personal assistant for Outlook. One of my issues with my email is that I long ago started creating folders for different tasks around the office. So I have a folder for my Google team, another one for Affiliates, another for IT, Creative etc. Then have folders for my direct reports and colleagues I email frequently.

Well this turned into a mess in almost no time. Say I had a creative for my Google team, but it was based on something from Yahoo and now we needed a little tweaking from IT. A single thread now ends up in maybe 5 different folders. Which means to do a search to find the attachment I am looking for, I might actually have to wait through outlook’s slow ass searches in 5 folders.

Then I need to find that itenarary on the trip I took in February to Miami, I flew maybe 15 times so far this year, and probably had 10+ emails around each trip - I basically had to open 15 emails to find the right one.

Or what about someones phone number - the way my interoffice addresses work, I actually have like 5 different contacts folders. I dont know how or why this is the case, but it is. With Xobni, I just type a persons name and it gives me their number - it does not even have to be something I saved, it can be from their signature - has yet to steer me wrong yet.

Xobni solves all of this and lots more. I can type in a persons name and it will show me every person with that name I have ever sent or received an email from, click the name, and I now see every conversation I have had, it even tells me what time of day they send me email, what the best time of day to get a fast response is and who I email the most with.

Today, I could not remember that sales reps name from something I renew every 3-4 months. Just type in a keyword that identifies that product and up pops a list of anyone I have emailed using that keyword. Click on the reps name, his phone number and email address pop right up - what used to be a frustrating few minutes of searching was a 5 second process.

The creative teams sends me no less than 10 attachments a day - finding the one from last week I need is always a nightmare. Now I can type in the name of the creative - or the person who made it or even the client it was made for and I get a nicely sorted list of attachments - which never fails to identify the attachment, I dont even have to open the email, just click on the attachment listed and it opens.

I am less than a week in and I am in love with this product! It may not be for everyone, but I probably get close to 90 emails a day and our company is pushing 70 people now - no way i remember everyones last names or can spell some of the really hairy ones.

I was honestly spending 15+ minutes every day just looking for old emails (or the spreadsheet with the results from the multivariable test we ran sometime last spring or was it summer). I can see how someone who gets lots of affiliate junk mail could put this to work. Looking for a new dating offer - just type ‘dating CPA’ into the search tool and voila all of the emails that had the hot new dating offer I never even read until I needed them.

Alright now that I have praised Xobni - what other Outlook plug-ins are there? What else can I not live without once I have it installed.  I have had it for 4 days and I would pay a monthly subscription to keep it.

Here is a screenshot of a page I found, but the images and my ramblings do not do the functionality any justice.

(sorry for stealing the image I got it from www.digitalhome.ca - but I am clueless as to how to take a screenshot and then upload it - I frequently amaze myself at what I cannot do online)

We have just recently started advertising in other countries, but seeing our competitors ad copies and landing pages has always been a hassle with having to change settings etc.

Dave Davis over at RedFly just released a really cool new firefox extension.

The extension lets you do a Google search then right click on the page and specify what countries or regions or zip codes or even IP address you would like to do the search from.

For those of you doing anything overseas, it is well worth you checking out.

Great work Dave, it should be installed on a few dozen computers in our office in the near future!

If you have not already read it, this is a follow-up to my original post about trying to get pages with no content to rank. Check that out first…

I tried 2 products
1. Domain Name Ager
2. Domain Embarking

Neither of my test domains ranks well at all…
Fort Worth Divorces ranked for about a week as high as the 8th page, but has since fallen to like 18th for the totally non-competitive term Fort Worth Divorces, where no other website has those words in the URL or in the Title, much less both, I should be able to rank for this pretty easily in my opinion. The other domain I tried with no links is still sitting in Google purgatory and does not even rank for its name…

My other test North Las Vegas Condo is no better off, my finger got tired before I found it for the search term North Las Vegas Condo, although to be fair, I was getting an absolute ton of results for Las Vegas Condo which is probably fairly well optimized, but what do i know. (about SEO - nothing)

One of my other throw away domains (out of 3 total) - Lewisville Mortgages which I had used Domain Embarking for has surprised the heck out of me. By my searching it ranks 4th in Google for the term Lewisville Mortgages, it also is ranking 2nd page in Yahoo for that term and in Google for Lewisville Mortgage. This with almost zero effort. (3-5 minutes to setup the URL and point the DNS)

I have subsequently started the sales process for this domain and have been offered what I think is a nice payout for something that was worth nothing 3 weeks ago.

I have subsequently started embarking a few other domains to see how they do. I suspect that these ranking may be temporary, but for the effort involved I will take it. The pages are ugly as sin and good luck getting a click, but I was after ranking.

For those interested in ranking without unique content (or effort) I would suggest trying DomainEmbarking.com. No idea how this will do long term.

(yes these links are affiliates, sue me, I made almost $30 off the last post about this…that wont even buy me 1/2 the bottle of wine I was drinking while making this post…)

I have been paying attention to content recently and it has really been paying off nicely.

One of the things I have been doing is making sure that my ads are prominently displayed on websites that are getting traffic for the keywords I am bidding on in the major search engines. So I was spending some time clicking the natural listings and then looking for adsense on them.

I was mentioning this to a friend of mine who we can barely talk to me without him suggesting a script or automating stuff. The amount of stuff I do manually drives him up a wall. So a few days later in my inbox I had this nifty little tool that basically allowed me to upload a list of keywords and then the script would automatically check the first few pages of search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN and then tell me which pages ranked for what terms and which pages allowed adsense ads.

I quickly fired it up and ran it for all my best keywords only to find that my crack content team already had us pretty much showing up on these placements. There were a few sites where we went and fine-tuned for better position or to show up on, but for the most part we were on top of things.

Then a few weeks later I was in a training class for some new hires and we were covering a list of words we are not allowed to bid on for competitive or legal reasons and one of the trainees mentioned it was too bad because we were probably losing a lot of profitable volume. A few hours later, back at my desk, I got an IM from my friend asking how his tool had worked out.

That was when I decided I needed to fire up the tool and look at my pretty extensive list of prohibitive keywords. Eureka! I was all of the sudden able to target dozens of websites that ranked for terms I would love to bid on and could not. These clicks came at bargain prices and converted really well.

Moral of the story… Look to the content network to pick up volume on keywords you are not able to bid on for whatever reason. Then doublecheck to make sure you are showing up on the sites that rank for those keywords.

First in a series responding to readers requests (if you have any requests/suggestions for discussion topics, please say so), lets talk about keywords.

First off, my philosophy on keywords is that anything can be valid as long as it converts at an appropriate rate to be profitable. So test even things that are just tangentially related to your field, who knows there might be a goldmine you have not yet discovered. If you are not tracking to the keyword level, then you are not paying very close attention. Tracking should be a major focus.

Second - match types. I start just about everything on broad match and then move the stuff that works to [Exact] match. I dont use “phrase” matching at all. I used to, but found it typically did not add incremental revenues. I set-up a report in Google to be sent at the first day of every month to show me all the match types from the previous month. I typically take the top 20-50 (depending on click volume) and make those exact match keywords.

Third - Number of keywords - I dont really care about many more than my top 30-50 keywords. Over time that number has grown steadily but it still relatively small. With spreadsheets and Adwords Editor there is almost no incremental cost to have 10,000 keywords vs just a few dozen. Keep the ones that work and kill the ones that do not work.

Fourth - negative keywords - use the monthly report from above to filter out things you dont want or that do not convert. I cannot sell my product anywhere other than the US. So searches for UK or Canadian or Austrailian “keyword” are wasted and I dont want to pay for them. Same thing with credit cards - you have to have one for me to get paid, so I negative match keywords like “no credit card” etc. Lastly there are some search terms that just will not ever convert regularly like “customer service” and “scam”. Get rid of what does not work for your over time. Save just a few dollars a day and that will add up to money in your pocket.

Five - iterations - dont forget plurals, misspellings, competitors brand names, URL’s and other things that will have lots of different ways to be searched for. (think www keyword com vs keyword.com vs keyword com and about 20 other URL variations some are obvious some will be seen through the monthly report)

Six - new keywords - I no longer pay for any keyword tools, they all pretty much were some variant of the overture tool or otherwise flawed in data provided. The overture tool is no longer anywhere as near as useful as it used to be. lately, the way I get keywords is to type in the premium keywords in a vertical and see the top 5-10 URL’s. I then go into the Google keyword suggestion tool and click on site-related keywords. Type in the URL’s of the big guys and be sure to check the box Include other pages linked from this site. Then just scroll to the bottom select all, rinse and repeat and save into a CSV. then wash against the keywords I already have in Adwords Editor and then hand check to make sure to eliminate the obviously wrong keywords. I can usually add 500-1000 keywords every time I do this. As Google’s tool learns it produces better results, so be sure to come back once a month. One account earns $500 a day from my Google Suggestions AdGroup and that excludes the keywords I have graduated out of there into other adgroups. Ignore Google’s volume, CPC and position guesses they are not even close both high and low.

Seven - Organization - I have Campaigns for broad match, exact match, misspelling, and Misc (google suggestions etc). In this way I can easily locate what I am looking for. Content always goes into its own Campaign. I dont mind putting related words in the same ad group, but anything getting any traction in the way of clicks gets put into a 1 keyword adgroup.

Eight - Match ad copy and landing pages to key ad groups - you can make subtle changes to landing pages that will barely touch conversion but that might significantly improve quality score and thus CPC. Try putting the keyword in the landing page title (not dynamically) or in the URL (either subdomains or interior URLs), or work it into the ad copy, even paying attention to plurals can make huge differences. Anymore, the little details are becoming more and more important.

That is everything I can think of in relation to keywords - a lot of rehashing and my personal opinion - your results may vary.

Ever since I got my Ipod late last year, I have been devouring Podcasts - especially those related to Search Engine Marketing or Entrepreneurship.

Here are a few I especially enjoy:

Daily Search Cast - Hosted by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land is a recap of recent events in search marketing. His unique insight into the trends of this industry is amazing. Not everything is useful, but he tends to be on top of things and if nothing else it is about the right length for my drive to work. I love when Dave Naylor co-hosts. Barry Schwartz and Darren from WMR are not quite as entertaining. (although I swear I get every single one of Danny’s off the cuff remarks that Barry never seems to get.) Would love to see more variety in guests. We saw it for awhile at the beginning of the year, but now it seems like mostly the three from above.

Net Income - hosted by Shoemoney. This show is entertaining and can be a good source for ideas etc. Shoe seems to use a ringtones example every show which is always pretty funny. Lately, it seems like it has had a little too much product placement though.

SEO Rockstars - Mostly like listening to 2 old hands talking in the booth behind you at the bar. Some shows ramble on about nothing and others are packed full of good stuff from the start. You never know what you are gonna get from these 2 and unfortunately lately, we have been getting nothing at all.

SitePoint - Dave Naylor’s show for the European audience. Dave usually says something he should not have which is reason enough to listen. His co-host is overly technical and not nearly as much fun. This show you can usually listen to 10 minutes and turn off if the topic does not interest you.

Rush Hour - Neil Patel, Cameron (no even gonna try and spell that name) and CShel host this show dedicated to social marketing. Like SitePoint, this show is either great or an hour long drag. Some of the best segments are when Cshel asks seemingly stupid questions, but then Neil and Cameron spend the next hour spilling the beans on social marketing.

All of the above shows can be found on WebmasterRadio.FM

Here are 2 shows about being an entrepreneur that I really enjoy.

Calacanis Cast - Hosted by Jason Calacanis. This controversial and successful entrepreneur has some great guests and some awesome insight into starting and growing a company. Whatever you think of him personally, this podcast is worth listening to if for no other reason than to get motivated.

Venture Voice - Hosted by Gregory Galant. This show is a series of formal interviews between Greg and CEO’s of different companies. If you are looking to start a company or working for a young start-up there is incredible wisdom about the entrepreneurial mindset in these episodes. Have not been many lately, but well worth hitting up the archives to listen to everything they have done.

What shows are you guys listening to? My ipod is just about empty and I would love to find 2-3 more search or entrepreneurial related shows to help fill my commutes.

Today while looking through the Tools section of one of our accounts, I noticed something that I had been waiting for for a very long time. IP Exclusion!

The ability to exclude IP addresses from viewing and therefore clicking on my ads. As a marketer the ads I click on the most are the ones of my competitors, not from any fraudulent intent, rather I want to know if and when they are testing new landing pages, what their landing page ad copy looks like and what colors and formats are or are not working for them.

Without even thinking about it I can visualize everyone of my competitors best of breed landing pages. This is helpful when I see a new landing page, as it might enable me to learn something without paying to test it. I assume (perhaps mistakenly) that a competitor is not going to choose a new control unless it outperforms an older version. So I might be able to quickly adapt based upon their findings. I am not saying a blatant copy, but working their learnings into my new tests.

I also assume that competitors are doing the exact same thing to my ads and my landing pages. Sure I probably pay $500 or so a month across various competitors doing competitive research and I am glad to save that money, but I much prefer to be able to not have to publish my findings for the whole competitive community to see. In the past I have found great new ad copy, only to see my competition blatantly copy it. I have also run landing pages to see similar set-ups from them within weeks of my determining what works. Competitive intelligence is a 2 way street after all.

Now I can just remove my ads from their listings. This will protect my ideas longer by making it inconvenient to do research on my ads and landing pages. At least a few of these companies will be too lazy to bother to check from home to see what I am doing.

Other immediate uses of this in my mind would be to block affiliate networks from my ads. I am not an affiliate of these networks, but they do not know that. In some verticals, the affiliate networks are ruthless about clicking ads to make sure everything is compliant. Take 5-10 affiliate networks across a few dozen keywords and that is a lot of clicks I am paying for them to do due diligence. (One other Darker Hatted idea would be to use this as an opportunity to run landing pages with the word “Free” for Ringtones or otherwise violate T&C I am not suggesting this, but it will likely be done…)

I would suggest parsing server logs and eliminating IP blocks that are low converting with frequent clicks. Unless you have lots of repeat customers, I would suggest a long timeframe to look at this. Don’t just add blocks that get lots of traffic or else you might turn off AOL or a company or university that is sending good traffic. It is also important to use conversion data in this exercise or you are going to cut off legitimate clicks that you want.

For those who want to know how to do this, it is under the Tools menu of your account. In the left column and it is called IP Exclusion. Directions for doing it are pretty self-explanatory.