If you’re anything like myself, you probably pay very close attention to your quality score and are constantly working on improving it when your doing PPC with Google Adwords. Although, sometimes I think we fail to realize that Google’s Quality Score system changes over time and they require more and more things to get a great quality score.

Today, I wanted to bring to your attention one of those such things. Starting sometime around the middle of June of 2008, Adwords will be incorporating landing page load times into their quality score as a factor. Here is the except regarding this taken from the Adwords Blog.

In early March, we announced that we’d soon incorporate an additional factor into Quality Score, namely landing page load time — where load time is defined as the amount of time it takes for a user to see the landing page after clicking an ad. Now, we’d like to post with an update.

Starting today, load time evaluations will be displayed on the Keyword Analysis page, for your review. We suggest taking some time to evaluate and understand this information because, starting mid-June, landing page load time will be incorporated into your Quality Score.

So, if your landing page currently loads a little slow, you may want to start working on improving that before the middle of June hits and you take a hit in your quality score. Personally, I don’t feel this will any major factor in their quality score, but as most PPC affiliate marketers know, even the littlest boast or drop can make or break a campaign!

Popularity: 4% [?]

Writing with Passion is one of the most important things in affiliate marketing in my opinion. Passion can make or break a campaign! It can allow you to come up with keywords that will convert that others may not of thought of when doing their keyword research. It can provide you with the motivation to keep going even if the campaign doesn’t work out the way you thought it would at the beginning. It can provide you with the knowledge to continue writing about the niche for years to come! There are so many things that passion can help you accomplish in your career as an affiliate marketer.

Are you passionate about the niche that you’re promoting?

I receive probably 5 - 10 email’s a day asking me what niche someone should promote. They are 9/10 times completely new to the world of affiliate marketing. Normally the email will go something like this…

Hey Derek,

I’ve recently started taking a look at affiliate marketing and how it all works. I’ve read a lot on it and I think I’m ready to start my first campaign. My question is, should I start with Ringtones, Dating, or Payday Loans? I’m thinking I should start with ringtones because I see that a lot of people are promoting them. Do you think this is a good niche to start with? Thanks a lot!

My answer to the person every time is simply this…What are you passionate about? Are you really interested in cell phones? How they work, how to fix them, how ringtones and other downloads work, etc. Are you interested in online dating? Do you read about the online dating industry everyday? Do you have 10 blogs bookmarked on the subject of online dating?

The response I normally receive after sending my reply is No not really, I just know a lot of affiliates are doing it.

Let me ask you a question. Why would you want to write or build a site about a subject that you know absolutely nothing about or don’t care about learning about? To me this just seems crazy! How could you possible provide the right information and quality information that will keep people coming back to your site and referring their friends to for information when they are having a problem?

Passion is one of the simplest ways to come up with a niche when your starting affiliate marketing. What are you interested in? 99% of the time you can find an affiliate program for whatever it is your interested in. Let me give you a few examples.

I have a few hobbies which include: Japanese Anime, photography, saltwater fish/reef tanks, and ferrets.

Just by thinking for a minute about what I’m interested in gives me 4 different things that I could easily start a site or blog about! In another minute, I was able to find out that there are several affiliate programs out there for each niche that I could easily incorporate into my site or blog.

Now, since these are things I’m passionate about, I could easily think of things to write about. Also, since I know this stuff, I know all the different slang words and abbreviates used for each niche which will allow me to find keywords that someone who knew nothing about the niche wouldn’t find!

Also, when your writing about something your passionate about, your readers will notice. It will show in your writing! So the next time you’re trying to think of a niche to enter, instead of trying to find out what everyone else is doing, simply take a minute to think about the things you are passionate about!

Popularity: 14% [?]

If you’ve read this blog for any amount of time you’ve probably noticed that my main method of doing affiliate marketing is via PPC, however, what most people don’t realize is that I actually do pretty well using SEO to rank affiliate sites as well as using affiliate programs on content sites or blogs. I don’t by any means consider myself to be an expert in this field of affiliate marketing, but I figured that a lot of people may benefit from hearing the simple phrase that affiliate programs most likely can and will bring in more profits than Google Adsense (or other contextual advertising) if done correctly.

So, without further adieu, here are 10 tips to using affiliate programs on your blog or content site.

1. Know Your Audience!

Most people, while this is one of the most important things, ignore this when they start choosing which affiliate programs they are wanting to promote on their blog or website.  Just because you run a site/blog about birds doesn’t mean your visitors want links to where they can buy birds.  Likely bird food, toys, etc would do better.  Again, while this may seem like common sense it’s amazing how many times I see a site or blog trying to promote something their customers just aren’t looking for.

2. Research What Your Offering!

You readers aren’t stupid!  Assuming they are will only make an ass out of you!  Make sure you do some research on an affiliate program before using them.  Is the product(s) they offer good quality products?  Do they receive good reviews online at the different review sites out there?  This is something that is easy to find out with a quick search so DON’T be LAZY!!!

An even greater thing that will make your readers happy is to know that you yourself are using the product(s). If your not using them, why should your readers?  If you wouldn’t ever buy the product or service yourself then don’t promote it!

3. Don’t Send Your Visitors to Their Homepage!

Another common mistake I see users do when they are using an affiliate program is to link directly to the advertisers homepage.  This is a big no-no in my book and shouldn’t be done unless you absolutely can’t deep-link to a specific product on their site.  And if thats the case, I would start looking for a new advertiser personally.

The reason Google Adsense works so well is because the ads are relevant to what your user is reading about for the most part.  Why wouldn’t you then do the same when using affiliate programs?  When you link to a product don’t just send your visitor to the homepage.  Instead, link them to the actual product page of the affiliate programs site where they can easily read more about the product and buy it all from that page.

From all my personal experiences in this field, the less work (pages) your visitor has to go through to get to the buying point the higher your conversion rates will be!

4. Don’t Strictly Use Affiliate Programs

While I believe affiliate programs can easily allow you to make more than traditional contextual advertising, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use other forms of advertising.  I still strongly recommend using contextual advertising and direct ad sales along side of affiliate programs.

Most people tend to think one will take away from the other, but from my tests and most others, that is very rarely the case.  Different advertising attracts different people!  The people that normally don’t click on contextual advertising may very well click on an affiliate link!

5. Sleep Around!

If your only using or focusing on one particular affiliate program you could very well be losing out on the potential of making a killing using this form of advertising.  If your always promoting the same product or service, how are you advertising to your readers that have already bought that product or service?  You should be using several different affiliate programs on your site/blog.

On the flip side of that, make sure your not using too many affiliate programs at one time.  If every post has 2 or 3 affiliate links in it, chances are your writing content based on advertising instead of writing it based on your readers.  While this may seem like a good idea in your head, it barely ever works out to the best.  There are very few niches I know of that can do this and actually gain readers and increase revenues tremendously.  One of those such niches is in the Make Money Online niche.  I’m sure most of you have seen it and sometimes I think we get the idea that this works in all niches, however, it doesn’t!

6. Does it Sell Well Online?

Is the product or service your trying to promote sell well online?  Again going back to my bird example from one of the points above, assume that you have a blog/site about animals/pets.  Now while there are affiliate programs out there for selling pets online, is the market wide enough compared to something else you could be offering?

Now there are people that buy animals online and have them shipped to them, especially rare fish.  However, this doesn’t mean that allocating a link for buying a fish online instead of a link for buying fish good online is a good idea.  What is going to sell better online and potentially bring you in a bigger profit?  Just because there is an affiliate program for something doesn’t always mean its a great program.

7. Don’t Try to Hide it!

Trying to cover up that fact that a link leads to an affiliate program where you can potentially make money really isn’t necessary and in fact can sometimes hurt you.  Especially in a tech savvy niche where users realize what’s happening.

Most people don’t care that your trying to make money from your site/blog as long as your being honest about it.  However, a lot of people don’t just assume you are trying to make money from your site/blog so by trying to hide it, your visitors may very well think your trying to dupe them into buying something just so you’ll earn money from doing so.  Be honest about your income streams and if your using products that you would personally recommend to a family member, you won’t have a problem!

8. Track Your Results!

Tracking which programs are converting and which aren’t will allow you to realize better as to tip one which was know your audience.  If you know what products or services your readers are buying, then you know what to continue to promote.  It’s as easy as that!

If your not tracking your results, you essentially losing out on money.  We all want to increase how much we are making and one of the easiest ways to do this is to make sure your advertising correctly to the visitors you already have!

I’d love to hear any other suggestions you guys may have for using affiliate programs on your blog or site.  In fact, I’m sure all my readers would love to hear some more tips on potentially increasing the revenue they receive from their blog or website.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Most of you have heard of Tracking202 from Wes Mahler.  It’s a service that’s completely free to use and allows you to track which keywords in your PPC campaigns are converting and which ones aren’t.  This allows you to bid higher on keywords that convert and get rid of keywords that don’t.  Sound pretty simple right?  We’ll believe it or not, most affiliates have a very hard time tracking keywords and most new affiliates don’t have the money for a paid tracking tool.

Also, most people don’t like that idea of sharing which keywords are converting with these companies that allow you to track for free.  For example, Google Adwords Pixel, Yahoo’s Pixel, and even Tracking202.  This is where Prosper202 comes into play.

Prosper202 is a free PPC keyword tracking application from Wes Mahler and his crew.  It’s the same people that created Tracking202 only this tool (Prosper202) allows you to host the application directly on your hosting account if your not willing or are feeling nervous about your keyword information being out there on someone else’s server.

You can visit their site for more information about the product and all of it’s features, as I’m only going to touch on a few of the products features.

• Works with Every Single PPC Network Out There!
• Cloaks Keywords from Advertisers and Affiliate Networks keeping them a secret!
• Works with Landing Pages or With Direct Linking!

Again, it seems like a great tool, I’ve only been able to play around with it for a little while but I definitely think you should check out the service being provided by Prosper202 if your in need of a great keywords tracking application.

Also, just to give you guys a little recap and to give a little more insight on some of their other “202″ tools they have available…

• Tracking202 - PPC Keyword Tracking tool that is completely FREE of charge.  This application is hosted on their servers.  Good if you don’t have a server to put Prosper202 on and you wanting to use this program.
• Prosper202 - Same thing as Tracking202 only you can use this version on your own server thus allowing you to keep all your secret ninja like stuff from getting into the wrong hands.
• Export202 - Allows you to easily convert campaigns from one PPC campaign to another.  Currently works with Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN Adcenter.  Again this program like the other two is completely free to use.

Again, I think Wes Mahler and the team are doing a great job and I can’t wait to see what other tools they release under the “202″ brand.

Popularity: 47% [?]

A landing page or landing site is one of the most important aspects to an affiliate marketing campaign in my opinion. Your visitors can convert or leave based on your landing page. You control the conversion rate and can easily take a campaign losing money and turn it into a campaign that is a winner simply by your landing page. One simple way to do this is to split test your landing pages, however, unless you know what your doing wrong, split testing won’t do you much good because you won’t know what is causing the problem!

This topic will explain some common mistakes that people make when creating landing pages. Hopefully after reading this post you’ll be able to clearly understand the problems your landing page may be causing!

1. Your Call to Action is below the Fold - Your call to action is what causes your visitors to go from your landing page to the offer or service your promoting thus the reason it’s called a call to action. This could be a big red button that says sign up for free, or a list of features with a sign up now button, etc. So, why would you want your call to action below the fold when you automatically lose ~30% of your visitors if they have to scroll down?
2. Trying to Collect too Much Data - Trying to get a visitor to sign up for a newsletter is fine for future sales to an email list you put together, however, you may be hurting your conversions! The more information that you try to collect from your visitors the more likely they won’t end up completing the offer. Try to keep your data collecting to a minimum and only collect information that you truly need!
3. Missing Testimonials - Testimonials can greatly increase conversion rates and instill trust in your visitors eyes. They tend to help the visitor realize that the product/service your offering is worth their time in filling out any necessary information or even whipping out their credit card. If you can use testimonials in your niche, your only hurting yourself by not at least trying them out on your landing page!
4. Too Many Call to Actions - As said above you need to have a clear call to action above the fold. You shouldn’t ever have more than 2 call to actions on a landing page. Asking a user to sign up for an offer or service your offering would be one call to action, asking them to sign up for a newsletter would be another call to action. Asking users to subscribe to newsletters, subscribe to your RSS feed, give you a call, etc may sound like a great idea to get return customers and build up a great list, having too many can cause confusion and also end up making the visitor forget why they even came to your site, thus, you lose out on a commission!
5. Not Split Testing Landing Pages - Another mistake I see people commonly make is to not split test their landing pages. I recently wrote an article about split testing landing pages, how to do it, what parts of your landing page to split test, etc. If you haven’t check it out already, you need to as split testing can greatly increase your profits and allow you to find out which landing page(s) work best!

So there you have it, five reasons your landing page may suck! Get to work and correct the problems on your landing pages and immediately see the results. You’ll be amazed at what a few simple things can do to your conversions!

Popularity: 49% [?]