Associate Programs Newsletter #210
Some good news and bad news…
The changes at Yahoo! are wonderful – IF you have the right kind of site.
On a sourer note, a fraud ring has hit Mark Joyner’s Aesop.com.
CONTENTS:
1. Yahoo! You’re No.1
2. Fraud ring hits Aesop.com
3. Quick profit from mini-site built in less than an hour
4. Rupert’s traffic and sales rise
5. Protect your digital downloads from theft
6. What to do about commission hijacking
7. Wz.com closing, offers assets for sale
8. Be Free’s Reporting.net revamp
9. Useful free resource: Web design course
10. Thought for today: It’s not too late
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1. Yahoo! You’re No.1
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Yahoo! has changed the way it displays search results – and we’re celebrating!
If you’re No.1 at Google, you’re probably now No.1 at Yahoo! as well.
Yahoo! directory results and Google web pages are now combined to provide new “Web Matches”.
Suddenly, getting a high ranking in Google is even more important than ever.
Danny Sullivan’s article explains it all:
https://www.searchenginewatch.com/sereport/02/10-yahoo.html
It’s terrible news for people who concentrate on tricks.
Many junky word-hyphen-word-hyphen-word.com sites that were created specifically to get a high ranking in Yahoo! have dropped like a stone – unless they also had a high ranking in Google.
Such sites will now have to try to improve their PageRank and the 100 other factors that Google says it takes into account when it ranks pages.
That’s right – 100 factors. Source: The just updated “PageRank Uncovered” report – https://supportforums.org/pagerank – by Chris Ridings and Mike Shishigin. It’s free.
The changes at Yahoo! are wonderful news for people like my assistant Rupert who use Site Build It! –
https://www.associateprograms.com/buildit – to create keyword-rich, genuinely useful, interesting web sites.
Rupert now has a whole bunch of new top 10 results in Yahoo!
However, the changes must be scary for some.
If you’re using any search engine optimization tricks that Google doesn’t like, such as cloaking (a Google spokesman interviewed in Mike Grehan’s new book – https://www.associateprograms.com/mike –
makes that very clear) you now stand to lose even more traffic if you’re caught.
If you’re dropped from Google, you’ll now lose traffic at Google, AOL and Yahoo!
Do these changes mean you should stop paying Yahoo! $299 a year?
No. It’s still useful to be in the Yahoo! directory, and being in Yahoo! helps your ranking in Google, which boosts your ranking in Yahoo!
If your site has fallen badly at Yahoo! and you want to get really serious about search engine optimization, the must-have book is Stephen Maheney’s “The Unfair Advantage Book on Winning The Search Engine Wars” – https://www.associateprograms.com/planet . It’s updated every month.
Subscribe now, and you’ll also get a free six-month subscription to the top-notch “Search Engines News” newsletter.
When you dig into the online archives, you’ll find Leslie Rohde’s recent article on link reputation. It’s fascinating, but don’t forget those 100 other factors!
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2. Fraud ring hits Aesop.com
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Mark Joyner’s Aesop.com, which has one of the largest two-tier affiliate programs, has been attacked by a fraud ring.
While Mark’s team sorts out the mess, some affiliates haven’t been paid for several months.
“Since the fraud is broad and occurs every day, it has affected quite a few affiliates,” Mark says.
Members of the fraud ring have attempted to purchase products in order to test credit cards for their validity and/or earn fraudulent commissions on sales.
“As a result, we have had to go through sales by hand to check their validity,” Mark told me when I asked for details.
“Until we are able to verify the validity of a sale, we are not able to pay a commission on it for obvious reasons. As sales are verified, checks related to those commissions are paid (that is, once all sales for an affiliate’s commissions are verified for a particular month, all of those commissions are being paid).
“We have discovered a way to dramatically cut down on the fraud and expect to be completely up to date on payments by mid-December. All checks from that point forward will be on time. Obviously, I can’t say what those measures are, because if the fraudsters were to hear, they would find ways to circumvent our fraud prevention.
“We are working with the Secret Service to collapse the fraud ring,” Mark says.
“This has been an extremely trying time for us, but we are coming out OK.”
One reason why it’s taking Aesop.com so long to sort out the fraud is the sheer size of its affiliate program. I’ve heard that Mark has more than 60,000 affiliates. How many more, I don’t know.
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3. Quick profit from mini-site built in less than an hour
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By Neil Durrant
(This is an expanded version of an article Neil published in his newsletter.)
This article outlines a site that took less than an hour to build and showed a profit by the next day.
Here in the UK the national telephone operator, British Telecom, used a novelty telephone in their TV ads. Within hours of broadcast the company received 50,000 calls asking how and where people could buy the phone. At the time they were not available – they were simply a prop for the ad.
However, the demand led to their manufacture. Then the “dancing chameleon phones” were used again in follow-up ads. Receiving this information from a diligent affiliate manager, I developed a quick mini-site promoting these phones.
The site itself is a single page. I already had the template from past mini-sites so it was simply a case of working up some appropriate sales copy and reducing some of the bloated images.
Never before had I used background music but as this product is somewhat tongue in cheek – the novelty factor of the phone was that the chameleon character dances to Boy George’s “Karma Chameleon” song – I simply couldn’t resist adding a background midi-file.
To aid search engine optimization I used my primary search engine keyword to register the domain KarmaChameleonPhone.com. I bought the domain from https://www.doteasy.com – for $25. Doteasy provides domain name registration and includes a year’s free web hosting. Although incredibly cheap, the hosting appears fairly reliable even if FTP access can be a little slow at times.
The site took less than an hour to build. You can see it at KarmaChameleonPhone.com
I then placed pay-per-click bids on Overture (UK), Google Adwords and Espotting, bidding on phrases that described the Karma Chameleon phone as well as a more generic “BT phones” keyword.
Espotting allows you to upload a company logo that appears alongside the listing. Rather than use a corporate logo, I cropped an image of the actual phone and reduced the file size using the online Gif Cruncher tool – https://www.spinwave.com .
Both Google and Espotting allow affiliate links direct to the merchant site, so for these two I simply created unique link codes for the different search engines enabling me to track the ROI (return on investment) from each advertising campaign.
(The phone retailer’s affiliate program is tracked by Commission Junction, which allows you to create multiple web sites and generate unique link codes for your different sites).
As well as the pay-per-clicks bids, I made basic efforts in search engine optimization. If you use View/Source to look at the page, you will see the title H1 and ALT tags contain my most important keywords.
Fortunately, I have another content-based site which benefits from a regular crawl by the Google spiders and after placing an appropriate link from there to the new mini-site I was listed in Google within a couple of days. In fact, as there was no competition for these search phrases I initially laid claim to the top position for all my primary keywords.
One point worthy of note is that even while I retained the number one search ranking for my keywords in Google – the Google Adword listings for the exact same phrases also generated sales.
The results?
Within a day of uploading the site I had generated enough sales to cover my domain registration costs. After three weeks I have generated $640 in commissions – not too bad for an hour’s work!
While I do not expect the site to have a life of more than a few months and I am wholly reliant on the continuation of the national advertising campaign to maintain momentum, I’m optimistic that the build-up to Christmas will show a lucrative return on my one-hour investment!
—
Neil Durrant built this mini-site based on intelligence gathered by networking with pro-active affiliates and merchants. Neil also publishes a marketing calendar to help affiliates identify or predict forthcoming search or consumer trends:
https://www.Affiliate-Intelligence.com
* For more detailed instructions on creating a stream of fast, low-cost mini-sites, the best source is “Mini Site Profits” by Phil Wiley. Phil provides specific details and case studies. He even tells you how to build them for less than $10 – including the cost of the domain name! Highly recommended. [UPDATE: No longer available.]
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4. Rupert’s traffic and sales rise
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Can you achieve a Google PageRank of 6 on page after page of your site? Rupert has…
Here’s a quick update on his progress with two niche sites he created using Site Build It!
Google PageRank…
Almost every page on both sites has a PageRank of 6 in the Google toolbar – https://toolbar.google.com . That’s a fantastic achievement. His goal is to achieve top 10 rankings for a wide range of keywords, and good PageRanks help him to do exactly that.
Average daily visits so far this month…
Site A: 476
Site B: 658
On Tuesday, Site B hit a new high of 791 visits – without paying for any advertising. These visitors are the best kind – people who are going to search engines and directories and actively typing in the names of the products we’re selling.
Total sales…
Site A: $25,303
Site B: $41,661
TOTAL: $66,964
We earn a percentage of those sales. It’s not a million dollars, but it’s not bad for a guy who knew NOTHING about affiliate programs, search engine optimization or Internet marketing.
What’s more, he worked part-time on these sites and he works from his own home, unsupervised – just like the average affiliate.
His main coach is the Action Guide that comes with Site Build It!
What’s even better is that these sites still have LOTS of potential. They don’t have newsletters and so far they don’t have many links to them.
If you’re struggling through the following path…
Getting a domain name, finding a web host, learning HTML, FTP and maybe CGI, learning search engine optimization, building a web site, submitting to search engines, checking your rankings…
Take heart. There really is a wonderful shortcut. Let Site Build It! handle the technical stuff for you.
The brainstorming tool even helps you find profitable keywords – ones with high demand and low supply.
Site Build It! makes the job easy for Rupert. No wonder it has more than 3,000 happy users.
It’s a fabulous tool.
Learn more here…
https://www.associateprograms.com/buildit
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5. Protect your digital downloads from theft
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If you’re selling your own products, you’ll be interested in this.
Mark Idzik has launched a new script that helps protect digital product downloads from theft – a problem that seems to be growing daily.
“The depth of the problem became apparent when one of my subscribers emailed recently to tell me she found her product download page listed in a major search engine (with a high position ranking of course!), along with other well known online marketers’ products, all available to download with a click or two – free!” Mark says.
The product, called Digital Order Guard, generates a protection script that you copy and paste into your current product download page and you’re protected … all in just a few minutes.
“It works with both Clickbank and PayPal and includes a nice affiliate link generator for ClickBank merchants as well.”
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6. What to do about commission hijacking
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It’s good to see that scumware, thiefware, parasite-ware, stealware, commission hijackers, whatever you choose to call them, plug-ins that divert commissions away from affiliates are getting more publicity.
Ralph Wilson has done a sober, thorough analysis of this serious problem.
He explains how scumware (he doesn’t call it that) deprives affiliates of hard-earned commissions, and describes how affiliate merchants can suffer, too.
He also explains why the software makers’ arguments are wrong.
Ralph offers excellent advice for affiliates, providing email addresses you can use to complain, and lists four things affiliate merchants should do:
https://www.associateprograms.com/hijack
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7. Wz.com closing, offers assets for sale
===============================================
Audri Lanford has shocked affiliates by announcing that the highly respected Wz.com is closing down.
Reasons include “economic factors, changes in market conditions and financial considerations”, Audri says.
Wz.com expects to pay affiliates for all sales made through the end of October 2002.
“We will most likely be selling our various Wz.com assets, such as our ebooks, ezines, and other programs. If you’d like us to send you info about the products we’ll be selling, please send an email to special AT wz.com with ‘Please send me asset info — Affiliate’ in the subject field,” Audri says.
[UPDATE: Wz.com died.]===============================================
8. Be Free’s Reporting.net revamp
===============================================
Whoops! The report in the last newsletter on how Be Free has revamped Reporting.net said:
“I wanted to see which particular products I was selling in one program. However, I couldn’t find that info…”
In fact, the information on individual product sales IS there.You just have to look hard enough.
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9. Useful free resource: Web design course
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Search engine optimizer Michael Wong has created a 260-page free online Web design course. It teaches you how to create user-friendly Web sites.
https://www.great-web-design-tips.com
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10. Thought for today: It’s not too late
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“Has every song been sung? Have all the books been written? There are millions of restaurants, clothing stores and gift shops in the world. Isn’t it too late to open another? It’s rarely, if ever, too late to start anything.”
Rosalind Gardner, super affiliate
You can read all about Rosalind here..
https://www.associateprograms.com/rosalind
All the best
Allan Gardyne