Entries from April 2008 ↓

You know in the movies when they’ve always has this cool laptop with some program on there that seemingly lets him rule the world? You know, they can access whatever they want, hack into things and do cool-looking stuff. Well the little techno-control-geek in me has always wanted something like that, and I’ve got a built in sucker button for anything that looks remotely close.

Well I just got my very own blogosphere-ruling software. It’s called Woopra.

Woopra is the Chuck Norris of Site Analytics.

Woopra makes Google Analytics look like a old donkey pulling a wooden cart with square wheels.

Woopra is free. I am led to believe it is going to remain free as well.

So you’re asking yourself right now, what in the world could be so cool about blog analytics that elicits Chuck Norris-isms? Here’s a screenshot from the dashboard, and then I’ll explain a bit more.

What you see here is the live dashboard in Woopra. That’s right, I said live. You get to see who your visitors are, right then and there as they are reading your posts, in real time. You see IP, city, country, browser, OS, language, viewed pages, time spent on pages etc. You can tag visitors with nicknames, and you can even initiate chat with them! I tried this just now with a friend and it pops up a chat window in their browser. Very, very cool.

WARNING - If you’re reading this I might randomly start chatting with you!
Please be a good sport! =)

A couple more things about the screenshot above… As you can see at the time it was taken there were 21 people reading my blog, simultaneously. From the graphic under the 21 (to the right) you can see this all happened rather suddenly, and traffic was building at that point. In fact it ended up being about a 20 minute spike of around 45 people in total, nearly all from StumbleUpon. I’d like to know if I somehow made front page or something. So the graphic gives you yet another realtime measure of your traffic volume.

There is a ticker tape that runs along the bottom of the screen, displaying your current, once again, I’ll emphasize current, blog stats. It scrolls along quite happily, just like a stock ticker, giving you the key stats of the day, while also telling you if they are up on the day, or down, and by what percentage.

At the click of a mouse all sort of information is immediately available, and all in a very nice user interface. Popular pages, landing pages, exit pages, outgoing links, downloads, custom events and way more. Woopra even has a full screen mode, which brought out my little Mission Impossible wannabe ideas. It truly is fun to watch a full screen map of the world flickering with hundreds of dots (I’m optimistic) showing the locations of who is on your site, worldwide.

Woopra also has search functionality built into it, so you can search for pretty much any event or thing you can dream of that was recorded. With over 40 different statistics recorded in real time, this should be enough to keep you happy!

How To Install Woopra

Woopra is very easy to install. There is a tiny snippet of code, similar to the Google Analytics code we’re all so familiar with that needs to go into your Wordpress blog. To make it even easier, they have turned this into a plugin. So, install the plugin as you would any other, and configure it with your site ID. Now you need to install the Woopra software on your computer. They currently have beta versions for Windows, Mac and Linux, so no sad faces today!

Because the software runs locally on your computer it is very quick - no more logging in and then waiting for slow servers at Google to generate some report or other. Everything is instantly accessible, which adds to the fun.

The Way of the Future

I can only imagine the ways in which this revolutionary software is going to be used in the future. Webmasters can now respond to traffic spikes in real time. I know there must be many good uses out there, especially from a marketing perspective, to being able to initiate a chat with a visitor viewing a certain page. Plus, the sheer fun of being so in touch with your blog and your audience is much more stimulating, even for the average blogger!

If you’ve got a Wordpress blog - why not sign up at Woopra.com? It’s free!

If you liked this post, please Digg it, or leave a comment!

I recently read a post talking about how recession is going to be great for affiliate marketing. Although a bit shy on details, he did make a couple good points. The general idea is that merchandisers tighten up their marketing budgets going into the recession. So far so good. The traditional forms of advertising are becoming more expensive anyway, (print, TV, radio etc) so those dollars will naturally gravitate to he most efficient marketing method - the internet. This means a huge influx of marketing dollars all over the internet.

I would add though that supply and demand economics dictates a stabilization over time - there will always be tremendous marketing value in TV ads for example, and if they temporarily become over-priced, more dollars will flow to the internet, but eventually this will cause TV prices to come back to a  sustainable level. As long as there is value in any marketing channel it will never cease to exist, even though there may be large fluctuations in price or use.

I’ve been thinking about this topic a bit lately. One of my best affiliate offers is a loan product, and people sometimes ask me if business is slowing down. Fact is, I don’t really know, because I keep looking for new ways to promote it and it keeps growing. If it keeps growing, people are still getting loans in droves (personal loans).

I think a smart affiliate marketer will take advantage of whatever current market / economic trends are happening. Recession appears to be on the menu for the near future, so we might as well start evaluating to see how we can take advantage of it. People make money in market ups and downs - just a lot less people make money on the downs! If we’re smart we can be among the few!

Have you ever dressed your website up as a giant carrot? Probably not. If you have, please let me know ASAP because I’d love to hear that story!

Occasionally you hear about unique marketing methods that work really well. Someone comes up with a brilliant idea, and implements it. Often these ideas are quite cheap, but just require you to be unusual, which a lot of people aren’t comfortable with.

A good example is a story I recently read where a guy dressed up as a giant carrot, and started going to events around Saint Paul, Minnesota. His business, the Crazy Carrot Juice Bar, got a huge amount of free advertising in the newspapers, radio and even on TV. He quickly grew the company to 5 stores with 65 employees, and then sold it to Jamba Juice, presumably making a bucketful in the process.

Here’s the best part: the suit cost him $73 to make.

Examples of this kind of marketing are all over the place - the question is, how can you, in your business, make an impact? Chances are there is a way you haven’t thought of to really get your business the public attention it needs to become profitable. As affiliate marketers, we’re typically confined to the internet (not always though - that’s a different topic), but how can we use these concepts to promote our products? Viral videos can make a big splash, and blog contest giveaways can be huge as well. There are lots of ideas out there - which one will you use?

The other day I decided to try promoting a new affiliate product, as I hadn’t done anything new that way in a while. So I picked one from CPA Empire, which had a good network EPC (Earnings per click), and paid per lead. I’ve had good success with lead based affiliate programs in the past. I like the fact that there’s a very low level of commitment required of the customer  - they don’t have to make a purchase decision right then and there, and I still get paid!

Initially, I went to Google, because Google has traditionally been a great place to get a campaign up and running in a jiffy. Unfortunately, with affiliate marketing you don’t always have control over the landing page. I went to the landing page to check it out and it was one of these one page wonders. It is a very simple page, nothing wrong with it from a user’s perspective; however Google’s crawler clearly thought it was lacking. So only 3 of the 40 keywords I wanted went live, and only after I put my minimum bid up to $1.00 / click. When I looked into it further with Google’s tools they told me the landing page sucked. Uh-huh. Already knew that.

So anyways, I let the thing run, and managed to get one lead that day. Unfortunately I spent nearly twice as much on Adwords as the value of the lead. The extremely interesting thing was that I actually got clicks on keywords that were classified by Google as Inactive. Has anyone else seen this? Is it some sort of fraud, or is Google actually letting me get those clicks for some reason? I thought that was extremely interesting.

So I recognized this wasn’t going anywhere, so I thought for a second, then realized if the landing page was the problem, from Google’s perspective, then maybe I should try it out on a different engine that didn’t care nearly as much as Google does about these things. So I fired up my trusty 7Search account and plugged in basically all the same information as went into my Google campaign, and turned it loose.

The immediate difference: I was paying approximately 14 cents per click for second and third place positions on 7Search, whereas I was paying $1.00 per click on Google just to get active. I knew from the start that at least I wouldn’t lose my shirt if nothing much happened, 14 cents a click is a lot more forgiving than $1.00.

So that has now run for about 3 days on 7Search, nothing spectacular, but I have got 97 clicks so far, at a total cost of $14. Out of that traffic, I’ve managed to generate two leads, at $10 a piece. So I’m actually showing a very modest profit. That’s encouraging. Better than a loss, but still nothing to throw a party for. Now I’ve got to figure out how to grow that so it does that regularly and consistently.

Anyways, I guess the lesson of the day is that you need to look at the landing page you’ve got and then go from there; if it doesn’t have much text on it, chances are strong Google isn’t going to like it, and you might want to try it on a different engine first.

I got an email today extolling the virtues of a new service from my web host, Powweb, called TargetClicks. (I’d like to preface this post by saying that I love Powweb as a web host - I’ve been with them for years and they’re really top notch). I’ve copied in the main bullets of the email here:

WHAT THE TARGETCLICKS TEAM CAN DO FOR YOU
TargetClicks ensures that when people perform Google, Yahoo! or MSN searches on keywords related to your site, an entry for your Web site will be listed next to their search results! All you have to do is …
1. Fill out your site information. TargetClicks will determine your competition, target region and optimal keywords.
2. Pay just $1.75 per click. TargetClicks takes care of ad placement for you and eats the cost, even if the lowest bid price is more expensive!
3. Review your performance. TargetClicks provides easy-to-read e-mail and online reports that track your progress.

Is anyone else chomping at the bit to get signed up? I saw $1.75 per click and nearly laughed out loud. Then my brain kicked in, and I started thinking about it. I realize they’re really targeting the people that have no clue about pay-per-click or internet marketing, and would just rather pay someone to know for them. That is fine, there are things that I don’t really care to know much about and would rather pay someone to do, such as fix my car for instance. Are you an ad mechanic? If you don’t like getting under the hood, perhaps a program like this fits your ticket.

Thing is, I do happen to know a thing or two about pay-per-click ads and the $1.75 seems pretty high. Apparently though, one gets coverage on up to 30 PPC networks, which is definitely a big time saver. My guess is their incentive to create a good campaign is the more they get costs down, the more they get to pocket. The other thing to keep in mind though is what kind of quality are they delivering? I could setup a campaign for $1.75 a click and send thousands of visitors through all day long; but how targeted are they? Seems to me the disadvantage of this setup is that there is no relation to profitability.

At the end of the day, this is what makes a successful affiliate marketer; being able to advertise and get a targeted customer ready to purchase for less than the value per action so he can pocket a profit. If you’re just sending traffic down the pipe for a set fee, there will never be any accountability on quality.

Just my two cents.

To succeed in business on the internet, you need to pick a niche and specialize. There simply isn’t a lot of room for more eBays and Amazons out there. There will always be a few of these uber-players in the game; ingowever the vast majority of successful businesses on the internet are specializing in a niche.

I’m going to assume that I don’t need to convince you of the merits of choosing a niche; it is one of the most talked about things in internet marketing. Instead, I wanted to focus on some concrete ways that you can go about identifying a market niche that is going to work for you. This process is well suited to those who are looking to develop a product of their own, though it will work equally well if you’re planning on building a site promoting affiliate products.

Researching a Market Niche

1. Brainstorm. Take a piece of paper and start writing any market idea that comes to mind. The conventional brainstorming wisdom applies - don’t discard any idea - just write it down! Even if you don’t think it is any good, write it down!

Think of your own hobbies or those of your friends. Think of a common problem in people’s lives - is there information out there, or a product, that can solve it? If you absolutely can’t think of anything, go to the public library or a good sized bookstore and have a look at their magazine section. Magazines represent topics people are interested in; topics that people are willing to pay money for more information on. Once you’ve got 25-30 topic ideas on paper you can move on to the next step.

2. Research Keywords. You don’t have to come up with an exhaustive and comprehensive list at this point of every keyword you’ll ever use in the niche. Rather, use this step to get a feel for the highest traffic keywords in your niche. Try to pick around 5. Go to SEOBook.com and use their free keyword tool. Type in what you think is the main keyword for the niche, and see what you can find out. There are likely other common variations or sub-niches you haven’t thought about.

3. Assess the Niche Potential. Ultimately, you want to be able to deeply penetrate your chosen niche. Go through your list and consider whether each niche has the potential for additional products. Would it be possible to create a home study course around it? A membership site? Something you could upsell your customers on after the initial product? How about a monthly newsletter? Is there sufficient depth that people are likely to pay for additional products? Is there a good selection of affiliate products available for that niche? Checkout the usual culprits for this: Clickbank, PayDotCom, CJ, LinkShare, etc. You might need to search around in your niche market to find some good products, then google those products + “affiliate” to see if there are affiliate programs available.

4. Understand the Niche. Now that you’ve hopefully narrowed down your list somewhat, take it to the library and see what kinds of magazines and books exist on your subject. What topics are they writing about? Are there sub-topics that have product potential? Keep your eyes open for complementary niches as well. Once you’ve developed a list of customers, people who have purchased your main product, you’ll want to be able to continue to use that list to sell your customers other related products in the future.

Another idea is to go to Amazon.com and type in your top 5 niche keywords from step 2. See what products come up. Amazon can show you a ton of useful information about your target niche. You can see what people thought of competing products (ie what they liked and disliked), as well as additional products that they purchased. Try to get a feel for the price points as well.

5. Check for a Community of Interest. Go to Google and type in your niche keywords and the word “forum” and see what comes up. Click on a bunch of the results. Are people talking about your niche market, or is it dead? If forums exist on the topic, check them out and see how many active users there are on the relevant threads. Try to get a feel for the topics they are discussing, and the level of participation. Take note of the best forums, as you’ll want to come back to these later on to participate and promote your own product.

Another idea is to go to blogsearch.google.com and search for your niche in there. See if blogs come up on the topic, if so, check them out for content and try to get a feel for their traffic volumes. Are people actively commenting on the posts? Identify the best forums and blogs, as you’ll want to come back to these later to participate and promote your own product. You can also look for article directories.

6. Check out the Competition. Run searches on the main keywords for your niche and see what paid ads come up on Google and Yahoo. What products are being promoted? What are they doing well that you can emulate, and what are they doing poorly that you can do better? Checkout the organic listings as well. Read their squeeze pages and sales letters. Do they have newsletters available? Sign up for them; see what they’re talking about. Keep your eyes open for products you could partner with in the future.

7. Don’t Slack Off! This might seem like a lot of work, and it is. Choosing a niche market is possibly the hardest part of the whole process, and arguably the most important. Put your head down and slog through it. Once you’re established later on you’ll be happy you did.

I’ve been working through Rob Benwell’s Blogging to the Bank 2.0 and came across his 5 Blogging Commandments. I thought I would paraphrase them here for you (somewhat heavily), as I think they’re a useful reminder for us all.

1. Imitate Nature. People don’t naturally write with 20% keyword densities! Write naturally, on topic, and don’t stress the SEO too too much. The search engines are looking for real content that people find valuable, and as long as you’re producing that, one way or another, sooner or later you’ll be in them.

2. Add Some Visitor Value. Each post should provide a reader with some value. It doesn’t have to be mind-bendingly brilliant each time, but it shouldn’t be drivel either. Make it something people are interested in reading, even if it is short. RSS vomit is not that something. Make it interesting, and make it you.

3. Make it Sticky. Give people a reason to come back over and over. Make your RSS signup easily accessible, give them something to read, and over time you’ll build up your readership.

4. Don’t let it Die. Update your blog, even with short posts, from time to time. Dont’ let it stagnate because traffic will as well. Posting every day or week isn’t necessarily necessary, but posting never is a guaranteed recipe for failure.

5. Market = Profit. If you’re out to monetize your blog, make sure you pick your market. Preferably pick one you’re interested in, (that will make writing a much much easier chore) and also pick one with good sales potential.

Some quickie ideas for market research (more in a future post):

Research keyword search traffic on SEOBook.com. Research available affiliate opportunities (ie on Clickbank). Find out whether people are talking about your niche online (search google for your topic + “forum”). Check Amazon to see if the market is selling products like hotcakes, and if so, what complimentary products are those customers buying?

Recently I’ve come across a few cool SEO oriented plugins for Firefox. Honestly, until recently I naively didn’t even know plugins existed for Firefox, so this was a pleasant surprise, and since then I’ve been trending away from IE7 towards Firefox. Anyways, I thought I would share these three SEO plugins with you as I’ve found them useful.

SearchStatus Plugin

* Google PageRank
* Google Category
* Alexa popularity ranking
* Compete.com ranking
* Alexa incoming links
* Alexa related links
* backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN

SEO For FireFox (seobook.com)

This plugin has a big long list of cool things, including PR, Age, Links, .edu links, .gov links, del.ici.us, Technorati, Alexa, DMOZ, Bloglines, WhoIs, and more.

Rank Checker (seobook.com)

Checks your sites for rankings on user-specified keywords on Google, Yahoo and MSN. You can customize this to a certain degree as well. There is a detailed how-to on the page.

I’m on a TON of mailing lists. In fact, a while ago I setup a separate email address specifically for this purpose. I did this for a couple reasons: a) because I have actually purchased quite a few of the best affiliate marketing products, thus I’ve naturally become part of these lists, and b) because I like to see how other marketers do their thing. Every now and then examples come through my inbox of great sales letters, and I like to keep those for future reference. It becomes a sort of “best of the best” toolkit for an email / affiliate marketer.

Anyways, this post isn’t really about my toolkit - today I wanted to rant about the amazing number of underground, previously unknown, rejected by all, newly arrived on the scene gurus. You probably know the ones I mean. “Straight from the underground” and all this jazz - doesn’t anyone else look at this as being merely the default marketing tactic to use if you’ve got no experience on the affiliate product launch scene? Can’t these guys come up with something more original?

It’s a funny thing, marketing to marketers. On the one hand, we’re all supposed to see through the hype because this is our world, right? Wrong. Apparently we’re just as susceptible as the next person - perhaps more so! The very fact that affiliate marketing products are simply everywhere is testament to that fact. Not a day goes by that I don’t receive at least 30 affiliate offers in my inbox. Most are marketing related. My spidey sense has to be on DEFCON 1 all the time, or I could easily buy more of them than I have time in the day to implement all their tricks and tips! I’d be curious, if someone could omnisciently discover the truth, how many affiliate marketers have in fact spent more on affiliate marketing products than they’ve actually earned by using them! Maybe I’m wrong, but I imagine there are masses of people out there who have purchased tons of products and never actually implemented them to their potential.

It seems like everything has to have more hype than the last - each email is more spectacular, each conference has a more amazing lineup, each product launch has more amazing giveaways and bonuses, etc. The sad thing about marketing is you simply can’t sell anything by saying “Another product from X - please buy it.” We all subconsciously crave that hype, knowing that the product we just bought is better than all of its competitors, and knowing that we now have an advantage over our own competition because of it! We made the right choice! This is the ultimate product, and I should be proud for having purchased it!

Yay me!

I realize by posting this absolutely nothing is going to change, and in fact I’m working on a sales letter of my own right now, and no doubt it will contain some of this language. Fact is, that’s what works. It’s also what people expect to see. If they don’t, they somehow become suspicious. I’ve walked away from some perfectly good products because the sales letter didn’t “wow” me. Others do too.

However, this post will not be in vain if the next time you read an uber-hype sales letter you pause, for just a microsecond, remember this post, and consider your motivations. Then feel free to dive back and in hit “Buy Now!” as quickly as possible.

Heck, you didn’t expect me to say don’t buy it did you? It might be one of my offers you’re reading!

In three days I have nearly quadrupled my inbound links (110 to 482 on Yahoo), and it all came from 30 minutes of easy work. More to the point, all of these links are linked to my homepage with the keyword phrase “Affiliate Marketing Tips.” Wanna know how I did it? I used a remarkably fresh new method by Michelle MacPhearson, called “30 Minute Backlinks.”

So now you’re wondering what kind of black-hat stuff I’ve managed to dig myself into right? SEO is grueling, hard work right? Nobody gets quick results with a puny amount of work, right? Well I can tell you the whole thing is completely legitimate. The basic idea is to take advantage of web directories that have high PR, yet are virtually unknown to the majority of webmasters! How can this be you ask? They are software directories!

Software directories… I can hear you laughing already. Like what is a software directory going to do for me? Well what if I told you that Michelle lays out no less than 5 different ways you can create your own customized, branded, software in less than 30 minutes? The beauty of this system is it doesn’t even really matter too much if nobody ever uses your software… though it would be nice of course. The trick here is that you’re getting your software placed in the directories with the keywords you choose as the linking term, coming back directly to your site. These are all one way links coming from good PR sites!

I’ve only used one of the five examples that Michelle discusses - so far I’ve made myself a toolbar for FireFox and Internet Explorer. You can check it out here if you want - it’s got some cool tools on it for affiliate marketers. The best part was, I didn’t need to know a single line of code to produce this toolbar. If you can spell your name and type in your internet address, you can be a programmer!! Well, not quite, but you get the point.

So basically she lays out five different ways to make a cool bit of software, targeted to your niche, which you can then upload to hundreds of sites around the internet - sites that want your listing- even crave your listings! You see these guys want to have the biggest, hugest link directories out there because that is their reason for existence.

The best part is, it is completely free and takes very little time to implement. (The video series itself costs a bit, but it is very reasonable). Anyways, I don’t want to make this too “salesy” - really I’m just kind of stoked that I managed to triple my backlinks with so little effort, and I wanted to share that tip with you. Check it out, and let me know how it works for you!

(UPDATE) As of today (April 9) this domain is up to 631 inbound on Yahoo. I’ve done nothing additional since this posting aside from leaving 3-5 comments on some other blogs.

(UPDATE) April 10 - Yahoo now shows 785 inbound. This is the gift that keeps on giving!

(UPDATE) April 19 - My backlink tool appears to be dead, I now have 0 inbound from each of the big 3! Can anyone recommend a better link checking tool? Argh.