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Add me on SphinnJust a couple random things I’ve learned through testing and experience, maybe they’ll help you.
- There’s nothing wrong with using dashed domains like This-Affiliate-Site.com. Everybody seems to like to tell people to stay away from them, but I’m using them now and it’s been perfectly fine for me.
- A cool domain “trick” when registering stuff. Register www-yourdomain.com. Note the dash after www, users can just overlook it and think it means yourdomain.com. You can snag some really good looking keywords that way and just redirect the www traffic to straight http://, so you can have things like http://www-dentalinsurance.com.
- I continue to make landing pages with little to no content on them and Google seems to not care. I haven’t been slapped at all lately knock on wood, so just letting you know it’s still possible to do well with thin pages.
- The whole “bid high and your bid prices drop naturally and position remains the same” isn’t always true I’ve learned. I’m some heavily oversaturated niches, you’re not going to see that much of a drop in CPC no matter how long you tough it out up there. At that point you just have to man up and accept the lower position and less clicks, unless you can do something to you page to get that EPC way up.
- I can’t stress enough how testing all different types of landing pages is so important. Test single pages, review pages, blog-style pages, news article pages, and test out all different setups. Landing pages can totally make a seeming bust campaign start rocking.
- Track the clicks you get to an offer. If you find a difference in the clicks you have vs. the clicks networks show, complain to the network and demand you be compensated. Sometimes the click differences can be huge and it’s money you’re missing out on that can ultimately destroy the campaign.
- I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again; keep your mouth SHUT when it comes to affiliate managers. AMs between networks are friends a lot more than you know, and they blab to eachother and disclose information that they are certainly NOT allowed to disclose. I know because it’s happened to me more than once. Cloak everything, and be as discreet and resistant to tell your affiliate manager anything. I don’t care if they want to help you, chances are you’re better at affiliate marketing than them anyways. You never know who they could tell. They can directly tell their affiliates to run this offer like that, or tell other affiliate managers who tell their affiliates, or tell AMs on other networks that then go and tell their affiliates. An affiliate manager of mine a couple weeks ago asked to see what my ad copy looked like and I just said “No”, and he was like “…uh what? I don’t get it”. They don’t have to get it, just zip the lip.
September 9th, 2008 at 7:16 am
solid-pointers, I liked the first two suggestions!
September 9th, 2008 at 7:36 am
Good Pointers Paul
September 9th, 2008 at 7:46 am
Yea, for PPC dashes don’t really matter in the domains IMO. For a long term (SEO driven) website I’d still avoid it.
I’ve seen that domain trick used in the past but forgot about that. Thanks.
As far as landing pages with little to no content on them, dynamic keyword insertion works wonders. :)
September 9th, 2008 at 8:02 am
I totally agree with the AM statement. That’s true in any business really. Most are pretty decent people and still share intel, but at the end of the day, money talks and they’re going to make the most they can, though I don’t blame them for doing do.
September 9th, 2008 at 8:24 am
The last point is the bitter truth. Infact, it happend with me, once my affiliate manager really told me how to run a particular offer (what sort of landing pages to use and with what sort of keywords) and it worked. Thanks to him , but yes the information should be coming from some other guy.
September 9th, 2008 at 9:28 am
How do you register those domains?
September 9th, 2008 at 9:51 am
You are technically registering http://www.www-greatdomainname.com, so you register it just as you would any other domain name, just add www-. You redirect the http://www.www-greatdomainname.com traffic to http://www-greatdomainname.com so to the unobservant eye, it looks like they’re on a legit top level domain. Pretty awesome idea.
September 9th, 2008 at 9:55 am
I’ve always used domains with -’s, easyier to get readability domains with keywords…
September 9th, 2008 at 9:56 am
Oh and I totally agree with the AM statement…
September 9th, 2008 at 10:46 am
the dash domian seem to work fine for me too.
niche-affiliate-marketing.com
Gagan
September 9th, 2008 at 11:26 am
useful info :)
September 9th, 2008 at 11:40 am
Thanks Paul..I will definitely be using the www- tip for sure.
September 9th, 2008 at 11:57 am
Thanks for the tips…your last few blog posts have been full of good content. Keep it up mang!
September 15th, 2008 at 1:18 am
Indeed, about time :O
September 9th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Appreciate your info… I’m off to golfing to get some fresh air.
September 9th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Good tips. Will add them to my list when I start to get started in affiliate marketing.
September 9th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
great domain trick ;)
September 9th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
www- domains are usually taken
September 9th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Nice Tips. Im seeing dash domains and aged thin landing pages / sites working rather well..
September 9th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Cool that you’re getting decent QSs with little content. Doesn’t always make sense what Google says they do and actually does.
If QS becomes an issue though, i think a root domain with a SILO structure driven on wordpress is the way to go. Add a ton of content. (stuff your PPC visitors will never see).
Then all the landing pages can be run from subdirectories using PHP or Lpgen to add relevancy. I’m looking for WP landing pages. (looks like an LP, but is actually a WP page/blog). Anyone have any recommendations?
September 9th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
I second this — I always wonder how people use WordPress as a landing page, when usually it’s used as a blog.
September 10th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
It’s pretty simple really. Get a nice looking theme with just one sidebar, or strip a theme so it has no sidebar. Modify a theme so that it looks the way you want it, then make a landing page by having the first page shown on your home page…be a page.
If you edit a theme so it makes a nice looking landing page, you can save it and just upload it later, modifying the content so it matches your offer.
But then I make under $300 a month doing affiliate marketing, so I’m pretty much an idiot.
September 15th, 2008 at 1:18 am
I make $500/month and agree with you, so yah.
September 9th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
please forgive this really basic, newbie comment, but how do you cloak your urls? is there an article you can direct me to? tx!
September 9th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
Cloak your links…there are tons of ways to do this, but here is one of the quickest and easiest methods.
1. Create a .php file and in this example call it link.php and put the following code in it.
2. Change the sample link in the file to your own link, rename the file whatever you would like with a .php extension.
3. Upload this file to your web server. In this example say it’s a domain called http://www.money.com
4. Now you can use the link http://www.money.com/link.php to call the affilate link that you placed in the simple php file.
September 10th, 2008 at 7:19 am
Definitely don’t tell your affiliate manager your secrets about where or how you get your traffic. I’ve worked for affiliate networks, and I can promise you that knowledge is used to boost all their other affiliate or their friend’s affiliate sites.
You’d be amazed at how many awesome secrets affiliates were willing to give away about how they were making so much profit. I guess they just wanted to gloat, and that was their downfall.
Always keep your mouth shut and stay on topic when talking to affiliate managers!
September 11th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
Here’s a trick to catch asshole affiliate managers with big mouths:
http://www.jordankasteler.com/utah-seo-pro-blog/guest-superstar-2/
September 23rd, 2008 at 9:55 pm
[...] of the greatest tips and today I found one. Earlier this month, Paul Bourque made a post giving snippets of knowledge. One of his amazing tips included the WWW- domain name trick. I know you are probably asking [...]