Trev 3.0

Today I got an email from Affiliate Summit offering me a platinum pass and press credentials.   This will be the first time attending the summit with press credentials so I plan to actually try to get some decent sessions in and post some juicy info during and after the events.

In the mean time, if you aren’t signed up for Affiliate Summit coming up on January 11-13, then take my word and if at all possible, get registered and make it.  I more than QUADRUPLED my overall profit level after the first Affiliate Summit I attended because of:  a) finding new traffic sources b) being around and networking with the right people c) strengthening relationships at certain networks and with certain people.

Also, ASW is in Las Vegas, which is by far my favorite town for the conventions to take place in.  There is always something hoppin going on, and it seems to be the biggest (most affiliates/advertisers/parties) Affiliate Summit convention that takes place throughout the year.

Affiliate Summit has been kind enough to provide me with a 10% off promo code TREVOR10 for all of the readers here.

Sooo…….

If you haven’t signed up yet…

CLICK HERE FOR YOUR DISCOUNTED ASW PASS!

See You All There!

If you are having quality score issues in adwords and have tried everything under the sun….than I have a small tip that just may help you out.

First of all, stop throwing up these total shit landing pages.  Do just a LITTLE bit of seo.  Do your simple onsite optimization.  Get at least a few backlinks.  That right there is going to help you out a ton if your not doing it already.

Now…for a few little pieces of info you may not have heard before.

1. When I am setting up my landing pages, I generally name the images for seo purposes trying to fit the keywords in appropriately.  What I didn’t know is stuffing in to many keywords in the images on your page CAN in fact hurt your quality score. (Not that I was like…spamming keywords into my pages or anything)
2. I also learned that instead of "overly" keyword stuffing the numerous image names you should be using a number instead.
3. I learned that there are certain "stop words" that may trigger google to go back in and review your campaign a bit more thorough.

I imagine this may confuse some of you so let me give an example…

If I have up a weight loss landing page, I would be using short copy, often consisting of many images.  I would give almost if not all of the images names like greenteaweightloss.jpg, helpmeloseweight.jpg, etc.  In hopes that this would help please QS and get my keyword stuffed in just a bit more.

Now take that landing page, on the bottom of the page I have a button that says "Buy Me Now".  I would name this image… buygreenteapills.jpg or something similar.

NOT ONLY will google probably penalize me for naming almost every image something to do with losing weight, but they will also notice an image with the word buy in it.  That buy word is a "stop word" that very possibly could be triggering the adwords bot to call for a manual or more in depth review.  Free would be another type of stop word…Words that google generally don’t like.

Now to fix that scenario.  I would name images as relevant as possible and if its not going to HELP me out…I name it a number such as 1.jpg or 2.jpg or whatever.

This is one of those tips that you should keep in the back of your mind for that slapped campaign that you just can NOT figure out… It just may save it for you.

After a nice little gap of non-posting I am back for more! haha.

The main reason I haven’t been posting is simply that I have had so much stuff going on that frequently posting on my blog just kind of passed my mind.  I have been pursuing many different projects and opportunities and have spent a LOT of time testing out dozens and dozens of new companies to buy traffic from.  I have such a new view on different sources of traffic and how things work….its been great.  I have also learned many things in these ventures for virgin "untapped" traffic sources.

But all of that aside…which I will post about here in the near future…

I am REALLY posting to tell everyone a little "secret" weapon of mine.

I have been doing some testing on things in just my regular lifestyle to increase what I get done and keep me on top of things.  I want to stress to everyone the importance of keeping an ACTIVE WRITTEN to do list.  That’s right.  It has to be written with pen or pencil onto paper.  None of this keeping a to do list on the blackberry or iPhone…that just doesn’t cut it.

I am dead serious…

I have been testing this out for MANY months now and the only way I can keep track of things with my spontaneous lifestyle is to literally keep an index card in my pocket and constantly jot whatever needs to be done onto my card.  Every single time I finish a task I cross it off the list.  I think this is where it makes the real difference of having it written down.  Something about clicking the delete key makes finishing tasks seem like not as big of a deal as if you get to strike that sucker off the list of that piece of paper that you carry around and look at repeatedly throughout the day.  Its like a constant reminder that you are ACTUALLY getting things done.

If you really want to be a bad ass, at the end of every night (or right away when you wake up) you can transfer all your unfinished tasks to a new card.  Kind of put the impression of what needs to get done into your head before bed (or right at the start of the day).  Than you have a nice fresh idea of what needs to get done the rest of the day.

I know this seems like something extremely simple and it is very hard to believe a simple task like this could make such a big difference in your life, but try it.  It WILL be worth it!

If you do something similar to this, or decide to give it a try…please post about it, I would love to hear your opinions!

I gotta thank Justin Tsang over at CX Digital for this one.  I love all these internet marketing rap videos haha.

Just wanted to quick put this post out there for anyone thinking about promoting anything through Millnic Media.

DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT PROMOTE ANYTHING THROUGH MILLNIC MEDIA.

I setup a couple smaller campaigns at Millnic Media last year to test out the network and how they treat me.  Now unlike most people I don’t always care about the highest payout, I look more for things like great service for the affiliates, fairness, honesty.  Now it isn’t often you run into these companies, which is why I tested/test out many networks.  I can weed out the losers.

I can now say that Millnic Media is definitely one of those loser companies.  They have owed me a decent chunk of change for quite awhile and are always filled with excuses.  I have caught them in so many lies its not even funny.  However, to catch them in a lie you have to actually talk to them, which seemed like a nearly impossible task every time I attempted to talk to these guys.

Anyways what finally pissed me off enough to out them like this, is the fact that they claimed my SALES i was making for the advertiser weren’t backing out.  What they didn’t know is that I run this offer at another network where they are backing out just perfectly fine and have been since MONTHS ago when I switched it over from Shitnic Media.

I was always told that Millnic eventually fucks over everyone….I’m just glad I found out so quick and terminated everything with them.  I hope all of you do the same if you are running anything with these guys.

If you don’t know which networks are worth signing up at, networks that WON’T screw you over, check out my recommended CPA networks.  These are all networks that have paid me on time every time, so you won’t have to worry about a thing.

Anyone else have any horror stories with Millnic or are these guys a nobody network that I should have never tested out in the first place?

Just packing up to take off for Affiliate Summit East 2008 out in Boston.  I leave early morning and will be out in Boston around noon tomorrrow (Sunday).

Looking forward to meeting up with a lot of guys I’ve been working with the last 6 months or so.

If you’re going to be out in Boston get ahold of me.  Either IM me, email me, or call my cell (if you have my digits )

See you all out there!

After finding some weird results in some SEO work, I had come to notice that underscores in urls didn’t seem to be treated as "word separators" in Google.

Although I had never actually done any sort of a study to confirm my suspicions, that is just A-OK, because I found a test done here that is worth reading and goes over the exact information you need to know.

To sum it up, google treats dashes (-) as a word separator, however google treats underscores(_) as nothing….just treats it as part of the word.

I have been browsing around for a good solution to use for private registrations on all of my domain name purchases.

Everywhere I had checked out before charged a bit of cash for the service…HOWEVER….I ran across a way to get this service for free…along with some other small perks!

First, go to Google Apps Domain Registration page and check out all the information they provide for you on this process.

Once you begin the process of registering your domain, you will be brought to a page where you choose between eNom and GoDaddy as your domain registrar.

Google provides this information as to WHY we are using eNom or GoDaddy to register the domains.

Google doesn’t register or host domain names. We’ve partnered with a few domain registration partners (registrars) that offer these services because it’s a lot easier to set up a Google Apps account this way. Continue with the pre-selected company or choose another one of our trusted domain registration partners to fulfill your request. Your new domain will be pre-configured to work with Google Apps so that you won’t need to manually modify your DNS settings.

So Google is using GoDaddy or eNom to register the domain, and then they point the dns to their servers.  This is how everything is already setup for Google Apps to work (which btw is a pretty nice service).

I strongly urge all of you to check out this method of obtaining FREE private registrations with all of your domain purchases!

If you know of any great ways to get cheap or free private registration on your domains, leave a comment and let me know!

Note: If you are trying to use private registrations to game Google for PPC or SEO purposes, this is probably not the route you would want to take.  I would assume they could very easily see your "private" registration information since they are the ones acquiring it.

Sorry about the long delay in posts.  I have been working on two HUGE projects that required a LOT of my time.  I will be back posting quite a bit more and have a lot of great info for everyone the next coming months!

Anyways……Not to long ago, I noticed Gauher Chaudhry started having a regular spot in CX Digital’s weekly newsletter.  After reading the first couple tips I noticed that everything he was writing was PRETTTTY geared towards beginners.  Which, of course, makes sense.  Nobody that advanced is going to be reading these types of emails really since they already get flooded with offers they should be running and expiration notices and the 10 million other emails you get a day.  Beginners WOULD be scouring through this info trying to pickup any tips they can get their hands on.

However, today I checked out the tip of the week:

TIP OF THE WEEK

By Gauher Chaudhry (Author, Pay Per Click Formula)

Statistics indicate that capitalizing the first letter in each word of a domain results in better conversions.  This is because the user can better read the display URL that may encourage better click-thru rates.  For example, the display URL"www.FreeRingtones.com" will generally result in a higher click-thru rate than simply using "www.freeringtones.com."

After reading this, I thought I’d quick critique this tip.

First of all, I have looked and never actually found any study done on this so I would love to see which statistics Gauher is talking about.  Gauher, if you see this, comment and let me know.  I’m not calling you out, simply would like to look at this data.

Second of all, this tip works great for any of the results on the RIGHT hand side of the page. 

HOWEVER, for the top spots which show up above the natural results, I show a much better CTR with no drop in conversions by using ALL lowercase JUST like how it would be displayed if it was in natural search results.

So instead of using www.FreeRingtones.com like Gauher suggests, I would test www.freeringtones.com, freeringtones.com, www.freeringtones.com/  Destination url’s that are ALL lowercase.

One of the larger impacts I found on increasing your ctr is the destination url, so I usually split test a few different destination url’s right off the bat.

Something else I have found to work pretty good at times (but not always) is to use a call to action in your actual url.  For instance buying the domain clickherenow.com, and using subdirs off that clickherenow.com/for/ringtones

You can also switch that up a bit and try freeringtones.com/clickhere/fordeals …I’m sure you get the point.  It really comes down to split testing.  If your not testing everything that can be tested, than your not really doing your job.

If you have any questions or any other pointers leave a comment!

I know it has been a few weeks since I have updated my blog and I am really sorry about that.  I actually have been gone for the last couple weeks on a few "mini" vacations and should have made a post informing everyone beforehand.

I should be back home within just a few days and can start pumping out some good quality posts for all of you guys!

Until then…I would like to share with you a coupon to attend Affiliate Summit in Boston this year FOR FREE.  That’s right. FOR FREE!  I have already registered myself but was sent these coupons to pass out to anyone who may be interested.

Enter the coupon code ASE08JUNE11 when signing up and you will get the pass completely free but you MUST sign up today!

I highly recommend going to the Affiliate Summit conventions.  I would be more than happy to meet up with anyone at the convention or afterwards to just have a good time in Boston.  Get a hold of me if interested!

Register for Affiliate Summit East in Boston Here!