Beth Kirsch is the Director of Marketing for a powerhouse CJ advertiser, Lowermybills.com. Today on Revenews, she reveals the dirt on CJ’s Link Management Initiative and how it creates one of the largest user-behaviour monitoring systems on the internet. Once laid out, it is easy to see why ValueClick would want the traffic data of 68% of the people on the internet.

Mind-boggling isn’t it? As CJ affiliates and ValueClick publishers, we manage to reach the long tail of over two thirds of all internet traffiic. What company wouldn’t want to have that influx of data? By switching us all to javascript, they get it for free. Bargain of the century, I’d say– all it costs is a few noisy troublemaking affiliates that don’t want to put in a few hours of work to change link types.

Read the details and sign Scott Jangro’s petition to block the mandatory use of Javascript links.

Three separate times during the first CJU podcast describing the upcoming network changes, the hosts said that they realize how much work it will be for search publishers to comply with the new Link Management Initiative. Here is my response: It isn’t that we’re lazy, we honestly think this is a bad idea.

Sure, you’re giving publishers plenty of time to make the switch, but it isn’t about the time required. With my database-driven sites and product feeds, I can make the change faster than most; I won’t have to search-and-replace anything. The fact is that I will choose NOT to make this switch. It will be easier for me and better for my sites and the user experience if I look to other merchants and other networks that will still provide links in the proper format of the web (1.0 and 2.0) — and that is HTML. I listened to the entire podcast waiting to hear one benefit to me or my users… these are the best reasons they gave as to why they are making the switch and the benefits I, as an affiliate, might gain from it:

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While not as talked about as the big players, niche comparison engines create a significant amount of price-driven traffic and sales. Sites like www.findcontactlenses.com and www.healthpricer.com offer a more focused shopping experience than the large malls but they do not have the same ability to negotiate independent affiliate relationships as the major sites. Often these smaller companies rely on affiliate networks to provide them with datafeeds and to track their sales.

The 800-lb. Gorilla of the affiliate network arena, Commission Junction, sent out an email to all of it’s affiliates on Wednesday evening, and the policy updates outlined therein may have a chilling impact on smaller comparison engines that rely on the network to monetize their traffic. In the email, CJ alerted affiliates that in the upcoming year, all websites displaying the network’s links will have to do so using javascript to call the link remotely from CJ’s servers. What does this mean for the vertical comparison engines? (more…)

Congratulations to Commission Junction* for reaching a massive milestone in affiliate marketing. Somewhere between 3 and 5 AM PST on Wednesday, May 24th, 2006, Commission Junction logged it’s 500,000,000th transaction. Half a billion affiliate sales is quite an amazing task; if more than half were credited to the right affiliate, we’ll consider it a gift.

If you do some quick calculations on your own transaction IDs you can see that the volume they do is rather impressive. Over the average of the month (9 million in April), it appears to be about 200 transactions per minute. I’ve seen rates as high as 1000 transactions per minute on a Monday morning. (more…)

Three easy words: type of traffic

Are your visitors browsers or buyers? With Adsense and other programs that pay you per impression or per click, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to care what your visitor does after clicking the ad. Do they buy the product or not? It doesn’t matter– you’ll get paid either way.

With affiliate programs the obvious difference is that it matters what happens after the visitor clicks on the ad. It isn’t enough to have a high clickthrough rate (CTR) you must also have sales conversions after the clicks. Does the visitor purchase the product or not? Your income depends on that purchase. So what can you to do make sure the visitor does buy from the advertising merchant? Two things:

1) Pre-sell: since you are marketing a certain product or retailer with your affiliate links, you already know what products will appear in the ads. That is a huge advantage over Adsense and other “blind” ad servers that try and pick out what works best on your site. As an affiliate marketer, you choose the products to sell. With that advantage, you can pre-sell the visitor on the products. Make it natural! Nothing is worse for conversions than obvious over-the-top sales copy. You’ll have much better results with a mild, friendly sell pushed lightly on your visitors. Become their friend and tell them that you’ve had trouble with other products in the past, but this one is excellent…. [insert affiliate link here]

2) Change your type of traffic: target buyers and not browsers. With Adsense, and ole web surfer will do– the less savvy the better. However with affiliate marketing you need traffic that is ready to buy. They should have a credit card (this makes age important) and be one step from using it. How do you get buyers? Target buying keyphrases…

buy [productname]

discount [productname]

[productname] reviews

cheap [productname]

[productname] free shipping

Combinations like that indicate that the visitor is ready to buy. Perfect for an affiliate marketer.

The common belief these days, and rightly so, is that off-site linking controls the search engines. How many different sites link to yours and what text they use in that link are the strongest factors determining how your pages rank. However, I believe that we have seen some recent shifts in Google that turn up the dial for a few on-page factors. These “on-page optimizations”, or things you can do to your own site, are not as easy as adding meta-tags or some extra text in the footer.

If it were as easy as adding meta-tags, invisible to the end user, saavy webmasters would manipulate the system by stuffing the tags (as they did in the ’90s). To combat that, I believe page placement and visibility are important factors in how much relevance your on-page optimization contributes to your rankings. To put it another way, if you want to make major upgrades in your on-page relevance, you’re going to have to make it visible to the end user. These visibility factors include:

1. Title tag. The single biggest on-page factor that is the most easily modified. It should be original for each and every page on your site. The most important keywords are near the front of the tag. Don’t stuff; over 60 characters is likely a waste. Make it sound natural. OK, none of this is revolutionary in the least.
2. The second factor, and one that I believe has been raised in importance, is internal linking. Treat your internal links just as you would treat your external links. They should be keyword-rich and placed high on the page. Instead of labeling your Home button with “Home”, put your keyword or site title in there. If you have important sub-pages or extremely important product pages, try and link to them (keyword-rich) from every other page on your site. This tells the robots that the page you’re linking to internally is important and should carry weight.
3. Reduce the text fluff. If you’ve never used a robot simulator then you should try it out and see what your page looks like to the average search robot. In digging through various sites as a robot, I’ve found a few places where you can either trim the fluff or keyword stuff without much consequence — form select boxes. When you have a long list of <option> tags, the search spider cannot use the select box, but it still sees the option tags as text. What you do with them is up to you– if you need to place some keywords on every page but don’t want to clutter the page to the user, try and make them useful in a select box (going to categories of your products, for example).

And here is the trick in reverse… if you have a long list of categories in a select field, say at the top of the page, you will find that it is taking up the most valuable space on every page (the header) and it pushes your real content further down. Get rid of it with javascript! If you have javascript use document.write to spit out the options, it will be invisible to spiders, but still useful to your viewers. And you’ve done nothing illegal. I’ll demonstrate below…

An example of a category select box that takes up too much valuable space and reduces your keyword density on every page:

<select name=”category”>

<option> Aardvarks </option>
<option> Anteaters </option>
<option> Antelope </option>
<option> Bears (greatest threat to America) </option>
<option> Bumblebees </option>
<option> Cats </option>
<option> Dogs </option>
etc…

</select>

If your list is 100 items long, you are wasting space. To the search engines, your select box looks like this:

Aardvarks Anteaters Antelope Bears (greatest threat to America) Bumblebees Cats Dogs

To the robots, this looks like a meaningless keyword list without links. Reduce that waste with javascript:

<select name=”category”>

<script language=’javascript’ >
document.write(‘<option> Aardvarks </option>’);
document.write(‘<option> Anteaters </option>’);
document.write(‘<option> Antelope </option>’);
</script>

</select>

You’ve now removed an entire chunk of repeating text on every page– increasing the relevant keyword density– yet not affecting the user’s experience or doing anything wrong in the eyes of the engines!

Before you make any money on the web, you must have traffic. Of course, free traffic from the search engines is better than paying for your traffic. To keep your top rankings and the free traffic flowing, you must watch your positions diligently. Seeing fluctuations and trends in the datacenters allows you to react to changes in Google’s algorithms and rankings.

One indispensible tool for watching your Google rankings used to reside at McDar.net. That site has mysteriously disappeared from the web (and we all wish Caryl the owner well) leaving many search engine optimizers without their daily fix of DC watching. Here is a site with a replacement for the popular McDar Google Datacenter Watch tool that functions in nearly the same way:

KZAY Google Datacenter Tool

For website owners doing affiliate marketing or selling their own goods, generic contextual advertising such as Google Adsense should be an afterthought and not the focus of a site. Today’s review is an example of someone who aims to sell products online but they start mucking it up by sending users offsite through Adsense. I received a request from a Digital Point user, SFOD_D223, to review his site: Wares4Life. I didn’t ask for much information on it since if I’m going to tell someone how to fix their site, I better be able to figure out how it works and doesn’t work right now.

It took me a moment to figure out exactly how this site intends to make money:

The main feature greeting the first time visitor is the Google Adsense for search box! Is this a made for Adsense nightmare? No, I wouldn’t bother typing about one of those. It turns out this site is either a wholesaler or works through a dropshipper to find closeout goods and then markets them online. If the user does manage to scroll down on the index, they are faced with a nonsensical mashup of goods– everything from a decorative lamp with scrollwork and cherubs… to a pizza baking stone… to a home phone that looks like a cell flip phone. I was still puzzled as to what this site was trying to be.

I’ve never been a fan of huge online malls. If your name doesn’t start with Ama and end with Zon, I wouldn’t advise wasting your time trying to sell all things to all people from one site. If the user doesn’t recognize your store brand right away, the next best thing is to be specialized merchant that offers only a specific range of goods– that specialization imparts some degree of trust.

However, In an effort to fix what we have instead of start all over, I’ll offer up this quick blockup of what an mall site might look like:

The four columns of items (or even down to three columns) give visible separation and allow you to classify them into categories. Show that you have more lamps and more home lighting accessories. Show that you have other kitchen gear and a section for more baking items. This gives the impression of lots of stock rather than just a few items of random selection. And speaking of random selection, vary up the home page. Any programmer should be able to give you a solution in PHP or javascript that allows you to rotate what images and what items appear on the index. I don’t necessarily advocate rotating them on each page refresh but you do want to update them perhaps once a day.

The major thing I want to address about this site and the mockup is the simple point of wasted space above the fold. ‘The fold’ is a newspaper advertising term that refers to what people see without having to unfold the paper. On the browser– what does the user see without having to scroll down? With the current site, all they see is stock photography and a Google search box. That is a certain invitation to LEAVE the site as quickly as possible.

Get your products above the fold. Minimize the waste of space in the header as this is the most important part of your page. Above all, stop giving people a reason to click off of your site– you’re there to sell products, not push Adsense!

Nothing powers SE listings faster than getting additional backlinks from lots of varied sources. In a smart post at DP, Arizona Web Design makes an offer to all bloggers– review his site and he’ll pay you a commission. If you have a quality site and post an interesting review, you can get a bonus. That is a fast way to make a quick buck! For the new bloggers out there, it could double your weekly income with just a post.

Post a site review, make easy lunch money.