Monthly Archives: July 2007

Eric Marcoullier Leaves MyBlogLog

5 Replies

Last Friday, blog social network MyBlogLog co-founder Eric Marcoullier posted on the official MyBlogLog blog his “So Long and Thanks For All The Fish” post, announcing he would be leaving the company with the most commonly displayed blog widget, a company which Yahoo! acquired for $10 million earlier in the year.

Every MyBlogLog blogger will have some relationship with Eric. After all he’s the default “friend” when you join the network.

eric marcoullier

With Eric’s departure, will new MBL members be greeted by Yahoo! Community Manager Robyn Tippins?

It was just a little over a month ago that MyBlogLog ran their ad on StandoutJobs to hire two wickedly good developers.

eric marcoullier todd sampson

In the video ad, Eric, seen with MyBlogLog co-founder Todd Sampson were talking about the atmosphere at the young company, and it’s a pity to see Eric’s departure.

He’ll be gradually phasing to becoming one of the bloggers in the MBL community, creating the moniker bpm140 and will be blogging over at marcoullier.com.

I’m thinking bpm140 could be an abbreviation for Continue reading →

PayPerClick Super Affiliate Launches Affiliate Radar

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If you’re an affiliate marketer, you’d know that PPC (or PayPerClick) generated traffic are the key to success toward Super Affiliate status (at least $10,000 a month in commissions), and it’s opportune that my friend and PPC Super Affiliate Mark Roth has launched Affiliate Radar.

Who’s Mark Roth?

He’s generated more than 1 million leads using Google’s AdWords PPC program.

mark roth google adwords

In the process of his PPC efforts, he had customized software and a management platform developed to facilitate his affiliate marketing and CPA marketing efforts.

With PPC and its associated databases of keywords and keyphrases, there is a significant amount of data management involved. While you can still track keywords on Excel spreadsheets up to about 1,000 keywords effectively, you’d be hard-pressed to go beyond that without automating your systems.

…Which is where Affiliate Radar comes in. Mark mentioned that it’s the same system he uses in his marketing campaigns. Here’s an overview of Affiliate Radar’s features:

affiliate radar

Affiliate Radar’s key feature is to manage your PPC and conversion tracking efforts from a central console. It currently supports Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter from a central interface.

Besides the ability to track Continue reading →

“The 8 Things You Wished Your Affiliate Manager Had Told You” Meme

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I’ve been tagged by Pepperjam Affiliate Marketing Director Robyn Martin (and soon to be Mrs Kris Jones) in the latest incarnation of the “8 things about me” meme. Instead of telling you more things beyond what’s already in my bio, I’d like to focus on 8 things I’ve learned about affiliate marketing.

Here are the tag rules:

Here are the tag rules:

  • Each player must post these rules first.
  • Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
  • People who are tagged need to write about their eight facts on their blog.
  • At the end of your blog post, choose eight people to get tagged, list their names, and link to them.
  • Don’t forget to contact them telling them they’re tagged. Also, point them to your blog post so they know what to do.

Here’re the my 8 “facts”:

  1. Payouts don’t tell the entire story. If an offer doesn’t convert, even at $150 a lead, it doesn’t do you any good.
  2. The Affiliate marketing big guns are using PPC (PayPerClick) traffic to drive traffic in great volume to their sites. Check out Gauder Chaudry’s PayPerClickFormula and blogs from PPC Super Affiliates like Shoemoney, Amit Mehta, Kris Jones and Geordie Carswell, Andrew Johnson, Shawn Collins’ Affiliate Tip and Aojon’s Affiliate Marketing Blog among others if you want to gain the competitive edge.
  3. Knowledge is going to be your biggest weapon and who you know is going to be a big part of it. I like visiting and more importantly, contributing to forums like the WickedFire Affiliate Marketing and 5Star Affiliate Marketing Forum. Once I get a number of projects off the ground, I plan to get more involved in ABestWeb. If you haven’t listened to ABestWeb founder Haiko De Poel’s “Affiliate Marketing Today” podcasts on WebmasterRadio from back in 2004 and 2005, you’re missing out.
  4. Join a quality CPA network. Do your homework, check network reputations with other super affiliates. Make sure you have a great affiliate manager supporting you. Besides giving you marketing tips, they can help bump your commissions once you start generating quality leads. I like Copeac (Danielle Iovino), AzoogleAds (Erin Hughes) and MaxBounty (Jessica Dagg). [If you join as part of my affiliate network through my links. Drop me an email and I’ll help you get started].
  5. Internet Marketing is more about “Marketing” than merely the “Internet”/tech side of things. You need to be able to establish rapport, build relationships with merchants, affiliate networks and fellow affiliates. If you’re a prima donna, you get relegated to the “has beens” once your numbers drop. Build bridges, create connections to key players in your market. Do whatever you said you’d promise to do. [Many marketers fail on this point…]
  6. Constantly add value in whatever you do. If you’re looking for the quick fix, or a shortcut to bumping your affiliate revenue, you can probably game one of the sites out there and get a blip on your commissions for the month, but it’s not likely to be long term. Focus on building a long term business and it’ll continue bringing you income even when you’re not tending to it (which was the original intent of starting a business, wasn’t it?)

Ok, I better add 2 personal “bits” to Continue reading →

Seth Godin’s Social Marketing Strategies

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’d have seen news reports that marketing guru Seth Godin‘s Squidoo social networking site has been Google slapped in recent weeks. My friend, black hat marketer Howie Schwartz, interviewed Seth and in the process elicited a number of nuggets for social marketers from the Internet Marketing community.

In recent weeks, there’s been news coverage from the likes of TechCrunch that some Squidoo pages have seen as much as a 75% drop in traffic, due to lower rankings in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

With a Google PageRank 6 and Alexa 493 traffic ranking, Squidoo is among the Internet’s most popular sites. [You can see my earlier: Squidoo review]

The reason? A number of marketers have been using Squidoo lenses as a parasite host for hosting pages for spam marketing purposes. [The Squidoo team lists their anti-spam measures]
With the drop in Google’s SERP positions, a number of marketers have since moved their pages over to Hub Pages (PR6, Alexa 3,220)

But does adopting a “nomadic” approach of shifting to another authority site solve the puzzle of generating a continual stream of traffic?

It seems more like a “slash and burn” forest clearing measure. You forage in an area, turn it into a wasteland, shift to the next plot – slash the trees, burn it to the ground – and move on.

Sure, there are a lot of “forests” on the Internet, but if we were to take the “Live Earth” idea of a sustainable, long-term and long-tail approach to Internet Marketing, wouldn’t it be better to master the dynamics of social networking and build a brand AND a business from there?

Howie’s interview with Seth provided a number of insights. If you’ve read Seth’s works like Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, the Idea Virus and All Marketers are Liars, the interview will reasonate with you and you’ll see the principles put into action.

seth godin

 Master Marketer Seth Godin

If you’re not familiar with Permission Marketing, Seth provides a good illustration of the evolution of marketing from disruptive to a permission-based model:

“Marketing has become a consensual process. In other words, you can’t yell at people (on TV, on the radio, on the web) and hope that you can earn enough to yell more. As a result, the most successful marketers are the ones who have a product that people are eager to use and talk about (think iPhone). This is great news for people who have useful information to sell, because human beings are drawn to insight and knowledge and things that help them succeed.

Like Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds had mentioned at Affiliate Summit East, building a site optimized for humans, rather than search engines will bring you the biggest returns.

You may detect a bias towards “content development” and “content sites” in recent posts, but that’s only because “content IS king”.

As Seth skillfully illustrates:

Like the booth at the carnival that has a great barker outside bringing people in, but not much in the tent, at least as far as I can tell.

So SERP rankings can bring you so far, but you’d need Continue reading →

Creating Content For Traffic Generation and Profit

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An interesting discussion arose over at PPC Super Affiliate Amit Mehta’s blog: Is it easy to create content, which ultimately drives traffic and generates profits, at an attractive price?

Amit and I are in obvious agreement that niche sites can be very profitable. As Amit notes:

Yes, $1k-$2k/month is fairly typical for the amount of revenue that I generate from my content sites just free traffic. Small compared to what I make from PPC from these site, but it’s a great source of long term revenues & profits, especially if you continue to add content and get backlinks to your site.

That $1k-$2k/month can grow to $1k/day, I know one affiliate who have done this in 6 months by ranking high in Yahoo and MSN.

Certainly, niche sites can provide nice long tail income, especially if you’ve built a critical mass of niche sites.

Amit’s experience of talking to one super affiliate: I had a chance to speak with some other very successful super affiliates. I talked to one guy who was running 500 affiliate offers at one time, making $20-$50/day from each one. WOW!

Is fairly typical of a number of Super Affiliates I’ve worked together with.

But the one limiting factor, especially if you’re not already doing this regularly is:

How do you generate original and more importantly “sticky” content.

Tim notes in the comments to Amit’s post:

Thanks for addressing the issue of content creation. I’m curious to know where you are finding writers who work for $5 a page. Most of the eLance article writers I have seen who actually have a good command of English and write well charge a lot more than $5 a page. Maybe I’m not negotiating enough.

It would be great if you could share your “insider strategies” on quality content control and selecting the right people to outsource to. I’ve found some great people on eLance, but they’re not insanely cheap not do I want to insult them by nickel-and-diming them down to nothing. I think what Amit has said is that if you find someone good, expect to pay them well because they’re in pretty high demand.

–

The reality is that you will get what you pay for. Proven quality costs.

A workaround is to Continue reading →