EzSEO Newsletter # 46
Andy Williams ez SEO
ezseonews.com
Hi again
I still have not created the PDF version of the mini site course we finished last week, but it is on my to do list so stay tuned.
Today we have a mixed bag of stuff. The main article is one that all affiliates should read. It may certainly explain why some of your Clickbank merchants are under-performing. If you have a marketing related website and want to reprint this article on your site, e-mail me for details.
This week:
1. Maria Veloso signed copy
2. Are Clickbank merchants ripping you off?
3. A great search site
4. Using Macros to speed up Wordtracker research
5. Question about links page.
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1. Maria Veloso signed copy on its way
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Good news to all those who purchased Maria Veloso's superb sales copywriting course. The eBook version is being withdrawn on the 7th September and the physical book is being released. Maria e-mailed me to tell me that all eBook customers will be getting their signed copy really soon.
You have two days left if you want to get in on this unique deal.
http://ezseonews.com/mv
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2. Are Clickbank merchants ripping you off?
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I see affiliates from two perspectives.
Firstly as an affiliate, I see myself as a business partner to those merchants that I promote. I send them traffic, and if I make sales for them, I expect to be paid for my efforts in the form of a predefined percentage or lump sum.
As a merchant, I see my affiliates as partners and value the traffic they send me. My utmost priority is to make sure that any sales that are made are credited to the affiliate that sends me the traffic. This is essential if my affiliates are going to trust me and put effort into promoting my products. This is essential if I want my business to grow!
Most of my own products that affiliates market for me are related to internet marketing and webmaster tools. Because of the nature of these products, those visitors are likely to be knowledgeable of affiliate programs and probably Clickbank as well.
Imagine this scenario:
Joe goes to Google and searches for "webmaster tools". Something caught his attention over in the Pay Per Click ads. It is an affiliate link to a product that promises to make link exchanges easier.
"Hmmm" thought Joe. "That looks like a great tool, let's have a closer look".
Joe clicks on the PPC link and is redirected to a sales page. Scrolling to the bottom of the page, Joe sees that the product is $97.
"I want this", thought Joe, "but $97 is a bit steep".
Joe searches the webpage for that magic link, and he finds it easily.
"Great" says Joe out loud. "A link to the affiliate program, and this program pays 50%".
After a few minutes, Joe has signed up for the affiliate program, created his own affiliate link, typed it into his browser, and revisits the sales page.
Joe's mouse clicks the buy link. He fills in his credit card details and clicks the purchase button. Closing his browser, he checks his e-mail. He watches as two e-mails are downloaded to his machine. The first is the download information for the new software he purchased, the second one is an e-mail with the Subject "Congratulations Joe, you have made a sale".
Joe checks his stats online for this new affiliate program and sure enough, he has made $48.50 commission on this purchase. In other words, he only paid $48.50 for the product.
OK, what is wrong with this scenario?
Is it fair that Joe used his own affiliate link to make a
purchase?
What about the affiliate who advertised this affiliate program at Google? That affiliate paid for the click, made a sale, yet did not get the commission. Is that fair?
What is going through the minds of merchants who place links to their affiliate programs on their sales page?
I would imagine that some merchants think about these points:
* I want to make $48.50 per sale minimum.
* If I offer it for $97 and give 50% commission to affiliates I will make my goal of $48.50 per sale.
* By adding an affiliate sign up link to the sales page, I can encourage people to sign up for my affiliate program, buy through their own link and get the software for the real price of $48.50, but the customer will be happy thinking they saved $48.50.
*Great plan!
I am sure that a lot of merchants don't see things this way - they just don't think hard enough about their affiliates.
A merchant that uses a link to his/her affiliate program on the sales page is using affiliate traffic as free traffic (whether they intend to or not). After all, the merchant does not need to spend time optimising pages or buying traffic - their affiliates will do that and send the traffic to the sales page for free. If an affiliate sends someone who becomes a customer, the merchant will make their money.
The big problem here is that being an affiliate is hard work. You do have to create content, buy and review products, possibly even pay for advertising. If YOU are doing these things as an affiliate, is the merchant you are promoting doing their bit by protecting your affiliate cookie and ensuring you get commissions on purchases made through your links? Unfortunately the majority of Clickbank merchants don't, and affiliates waste their time building pages and buying advertising top promote merchants who don't deserve it.
The bottom line
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If you are promoting products aimed at webmasters, the traffic you send will likely know how to "steal" your commission. In this situation it is vital to only promote merchants without the affiliate sign up link.
If on the other hand you are promoting products to the general public, e.g. weight loss products, dog training eBooks etc, this affiliate sign up link poses less of a problem since most of the traffic you generate wont be affiliates themselves (most wont even know what an affiliate is) and wont have the necessary skills to sign up at Clickbank, create a link and purchase through their link just to get a commission.
What can you do?
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If you find a merchant that you want to promote and they have an affiliate sign up link on the sales page, contact them. Tell them about your concerns and that they should treat you as a partner, not the source of free traffic. Suggest that they remove this affiliate sign up link.
The usual reaction I get
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Merchant: "I get a lot of affiliate sign ups from this link,
there is no way I am removing it!"
OK, that is exactly my point. The merchant is getting a lot of sign ups purely to get a discount on the full price. For everyone who signs up as an affiliate to get a discount, there is one affiliate somewhere being robbed of his/her rightful commission. Think about how the people who sign up to become affiliates find this site - most are via other affiliates promotional efforts.
Most of the affiliates you get via a sign up link on the sales page are only signing up to get a discount, they are unlikely to ever try to sell that product. Therefore, these affiliates are no use.
The only affiliates who will promote the product, are those that buy the software, use it and like it. They see the benefits and can sell it well to their visitors. These are the only affiliates worth getting, and you wont get them from an affiliate sign up link on the sales page.
The best way of getting hard working affiliates is to protect your affiliates from this type of link hijacking, gain their trust and do everything you can to help them out. Build a relationship with your affiliates and most of all, make sure they are rewarded for the traffic they send. To this end, remove that affiliate sign up link, and when someone buys your product, send them an e-mail outlining the benefits of your affiliate program. Active affiliates respond well to knowing their merchants are protecting their interests.
A final thought
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If there are two similar products, similar price, similar commission, one sales page with an affiliate sign up link, one without, which would you prefer to promote? If you want to make money online with affiliate programs, take it seriously and start contacting merchants.
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3. A great search site
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In the past, I have recommended a site called Proogle which gives you Google results with PR value in the results.
http://www.webmasterbrain.com/prog/search
For those building Martell style sites where PR is important, Proogle can save you a lot of time. My only real complaint about Proogle is that you still have to do some work to get the number of backlinks.
This week a new site came to my attention. While it is slower than Proogle (because of the extra calculations), it does also tell you how many backlinks are present as well as the PR for each search results. Definitely worth checking out.
http://www.prsearch.net/
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4. Using Macros to speed up Wordtracker research
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I know that a lot of you bought my Keyword Results Analyzer (Wordtracker Version) (KRA-WT).
because of how easy this tool makes it to find profitable niches and design websites around them. In the "Niche within a Niche" report
I explain how I use Wordtracker. My technique uses a lot of manual clicking (deselecting check boxes) which is time consuming and open to errors. A user e-mailed me about a macro program that can help with this. Macro Express allows you to define macros (keystrokes that are repeated automatically when you want it to).
Macro Express can be found at:
http://macros.com/
To help, I have created a macro that you can download and install into the trial version of Macro Express (install as a playable macro):
http://kra.ez-search-engine-optimization.com/wordtracker.mxe
Then, when you get to the point in the process where you have to deselect 100 check boxes, select the first check box (make sure it is checked) and then hit your "hot key" combination to start the macro. 100 checkboxes are deselected for you automatically and quickly.
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5. Question about links page.
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Someone asked me earlier this week about the naming of a links page. They had been told by one webmaster (in response to a links exchange request) that pages with the word "links" or "link" in them are being targeted by Google and PR is not being passed on from them.
Presumably the idea is to stop reciprocal linking contributing to the PR of a site, since reciprocal linking has been largely responsible for under-mining the original value of PR.
Here is my own take on it. I know for a fact that links pages with the word link in them are still passing on PR. If I find that this changes, I will let you know. Thinking about this logically, penalizing pages with the word links in them is not really very sensible. As soon as webmasters find out that such a penalty exists, they would change the name and by-pass this penalty.
I believe Google are more intelligent than this. If I was working for Google and wanting to target links pages, I would certainly not choose the "child-like" solution mentioned above. I would look at the features of a links page and then design a filter to combat those features.
So what features would I look for? Well, probably pages with large numbers of outgoing links and very little content. Then it would not matter what the page was called, they would get caught. As an extra bonus, this type of filter could also catch a lot of affiliate datafeed sites as well as traffic equalizer style sites.
Perhaps you can think of legitimate uses of pages with a lot of outgoing links and little content, but there probably aren't many.
If Google want to safe-guard directories like DMOZ, then that could be done by not penalizing certain domains.
This as usual is my own theory and not necessarily fact.
Well that's it for now. Hope this issue made you think a little bit about the affiliate programs you promote.
Have a great week.
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