The thick and thin of affiliate marketing often comes down to a trade-off between work and worry.

Work: The work and time it takes to build good authority sites with high visitor value and long lasting serps positioning.

versus…

Worry: The stress over when those quickly ranked machine gun affiliate traps, slick redirects and frame pages will get nerfed or even flagged as spam.

Whether you’re designing an affiliate internet marketing plan from scratch, or if you already have affiliates sites deployed, you always need more testing and feedback to monitor your conversion-path effectiveness. The most common ways to adjust are spinning and split testing pre- and post-click components like ad copy, anchor phrases, and landing page copy. But if you operate networks of thin affiliate sites you are very limited in how effective your spin-post-test cycles can be since the goal is direct injection into the sale channel from the initial search click.

Thin affiliate sites have minimal original copy and limited visitor value. It’s tough to bring them up the serps and get these kinds of pages organically ranked. No kidding right? No not really. The cause-effect relationship between value and organic ranking is made more difficult by the constant adjustment required to address ever changing search algorithms and ever increasing human-assisted page ranking.

continue reading "Thick or Thin Affiliate? Work vs Worry"

When you operate an Internet based business, all the world is your customer. The problem for most web-based businesses is reaching out to the world and getting your offer seen in a raging sea of competition, crowd noise, and surfer confusion. It’s critical to your survival to provide the best product or service, but it’s equally important to get the message out to potential customers.

No matter how good your lead generation, in-house marketing or list building efforts are, the key to adding zeros to bottom end of your bottom line comes from adding new buyers. New customers are the foundation of our entire future marketing effort. So it follows that the acquisition of new customers is the master key to your business success or failure.

It’s common for internet businesses to get stuck in a SEM or SEO sales channel and marketing strategy that leaves them in a narrowly focused competition pool. Here they fight it out with other trapped marketers vying for a share of a fixed volume of daily searches. Each competitor has their list of keywords and live or die over how many sales they can win from the daily available inbound search volume.

So how do we fish new buyers out of this stagnant pool of traffic? We reach outside of our fixed list of keywords. But not just any new keywords will do. We must find keywords that are returning traffic at levels we can pull fish, er potential customers out of.

Search Suggestion Tools

There are several ways to learn what people are searching for and to new build keyword silos to bring them into our network. We’ll go into content creation and keyword farming in later articles. Today we want to focus on a great way to find the missing link between what we think our market is about and what the public thinks it is about.

How do we do that? And what does it cost?

continue reading "Search Suggestion Tools: The Traffic Missing Link"

Still following the folks at Q-Based and this week they are unveiling their brand new version of the dermatechrx.com website. No longer an ecommerce site, now Dermatech has been retooled to be a free and comprehensive research center and media library covering all manner of skin ailments and research into cures for such things and carpal tunnel syndrome, scabies, skin parasites, arthritis, and more.

For several years DermaTechRx was the brand for Q-Based products. Now they have expanded into their All Stop line of products are making the best use of the newly designed DermaTechrx website to help people learn from their research and experience in skin related problems, topical pain relief, and human parasites.

You’ll find eGuides covering details and symptoms — complete with visual aides, videos, and charts to help you get the most of your visit. The developers also mention they are adding interactive flash presentations to help parents and educators in the classroom.

We’re excited by this new site and applaud Q-Based for giving back to the public.

Dwayne

So you have your own blog using WordPress and want to install a custom theme. It’s easy to do — depending on your web hosting platform and how it is configured.

The easiest way to do it is using cPanel control panel. If your host has this control panel it’s follow the instructions. If your host does not provide cPanel contact me and I’ll get you fixed up. As always, I’m At Your Servers at Gmail. 

Issues: Installing a new WordPress theme is a low impact process and at the most you may have a compatibility problem later if an update includes functions the custom theme does not support. In that very rare case you can revert back to the stock theme while you get a new custom one — or have it adapted for you.

Make sure you get your theme from a reputable site! There are many sites out there that do a shabby job of theme building and are only providing free themes so they can embed links in them to monetize your traffic — or worse. So use the WordPress theme directory or some other mainstream site to make sure it’s safe to download your dream theme.

Once you have acquired the zip file, upload it into your hosting storage area using the cPanel control panel. I recommend using the ‘File Manager’ feature of your control panel instead of an FTP client because the control panel application will unpack the zip file for you making theme installation virtually effortless.

Ready to rock? Let’s get started. Step by Step…

continue reading "Install a Custom WordPress Theme"

A client recently reported some strange entries in their website statistics referrer logs. The entry was from a bot probe by a nasty outfit that is up to all sorts of evil malware stuff. The issue did raise a good questions about the security of sites and what even novice webmasters can and should do to protect themselves from site compromise.

Bot probes from a slimy outfits are common. Properly secured systems will block offending IPs but the attacking bots switch IPs all the time. This form of vulnerability probe or referrer spam is very common — just like email spam. We do everything we can to prevent it but that does not stop the evil bastards from trying… all the time.

This is why it is so important to have a strong password and to change it every few months. You should also look around in your site file structure frequently for things that don’t belong — like .c files or .exe files or even php files that you did not install. I recommend you check your site once a week for this kind of activity.

Remember, no matter how secure our servers are, your website is an open door to the world and malware developers have a powerful monetary interest in gaining control of your server resources to make money. The days of malicious teenagers gleefully scrambling your home page and laughing through a mouth full of hot pockets is long gone. Hacking websites to install malware is serious (and big) business.

So it’s also up to you as a webmaster to make sure you don’t let these demons in the door.

By the way. Take care which backlinks you click on while scanning your stats reports. That is one way referrer spam works. The malware developer creates an attack routine and embeds it in a web page. Then they deploy botnets to spider websites constantly — leaving nice little fake ‘visitor’ entries in the log files and stats. Then if you click on the link to see who visited you the malware site hits your machine with a payload. Even though you may have a great antivirus / antimalware program, pages can be constructed in ways to overwhelm your computers resources and tie up your system as the payload is being installed.

It’s a jungle. And your website is part of the food chain.

As always we’re, At Your Servers

Dwayne

Man what a brand!

The folks over a Q-Based Healthcare have busted out their new All Stop brand. The brand is topped by their new logo (caduceus / Asclepius staff and forward leaning fonts). The colors are strong and keep the medical theme moving forward. I imagine it took a few heated marketing meetings to approve the bold red & green color scheme, but I have to admit it works! The new look speaks to power, knowledge, and vitality.

The new All Stop brand name is technically a rebranding of their flagship DermaTechRx product line. They do have a statement about this on their site at http://www.allstop.com/faq/brand_notice.html

So why All Stop?

Folks who remember the DermaTechRx product line know they worked great on various skin ailments. Q-Based has been selling relief for arthritis pain, scabies, lice, eczema, bed bugs, poison ivy and ringworm for years. The bulk of their business is done online and they claim nearly 200,000 satisfied customers. I have used their products and always been satisfied.

All Stop has become their new brand to signify the power of the products to STOP ALL the ailments they are designed to treat. They certainly can stop lice and bed bugs, and ringworm (oh my), but more than that; these solutions help thousands of people help themselves with affordable home treatment solutions.

Not everyone can afford to go to a doctor for non life-threatening problems. Smart shoppers have learned to leverage Q-Based ‘heathcare advisors’ (read customer service reps) to get helpful tips on saving money and using products wisely. Issues never more important than now; with a ragged economy and rapidly increasing food and fuel costs.

Smart Shoppers… Smart Marketers.

So the brand works well to express the product. All Stop products work for many common ailments and parasites. Need to treat bed bugs? They have that. Raging Jock itch? You’re covered. (With my sympathies).

Along with the rebrand, their website has also undergone some effective retooling work. Now their sites are SEO compliant. The structure follow logical tree flow and their URLs are really search engine friendly. In the last week they look to be adding some link building features. With the new design they could easily move into the social networking traffic cloud.

Check out a corporate page at www.allstop.com or a sample affliction landing page at: http://www.allstop.com/lice/head-lice-treatment Pay close attention to the new packaging. More facelift work here. I suspect these folks are going retail shelf any day now. I’ll post updates as they grow. It is very interesting to watch a young growth company like this in its early stages.

One of the most common tasks clients ask me for help with is how to paste Youtube or Google video into their Microsoft FrontPage website. It’s really a snap to embed videos but there are a couple of foundation principles you must know to do it.

You’ll need to know how to use your clipboard to select, copy, and paste. You will need to be able to look at, copy, and insert (paste) html code into your page HTML. Now don’t get nervous…HTML is just some formatting that makes the page appear in your visitors browser. Normally FrontPage isolates you from working in HTML. But this is going to be easy, so follow along. Let’s get started!

The best way is to start a new page for this to practice on so you don’t mess up a working page while practicing. So open up FrontPage and make a new page in your site.

Notice in FrontPage at the bottom of the page editing window there are tabs for Normal, HTML, and Preview. If you click the HTML tab it will show you the HTML code of the current file. So if you started a video.htm page for example you can look at the code of that page. Now go back to normal view and put some text on the page. Just write a couple sentences, then go back to HTML view and see the changes. Now minimize FrontPage and go to your Web Browser.

Now go to YouTube or Google Video and locate the first video you want to embed. Both sites have embed code they create for you on the video page. Find the video you want to embed. Locate the the embed code on the video page and select and copy it to your clipboard. Then go to FrontPage and look at the html code of your page again. This is where you’re going to ‘paste’ this embed code. (Please note that some publishers block embedding so if you can’t find the embed code try a different video.)

Switch to normal view and locate the spot where you want the video to appear. Put your cursor there. You may need to hit a carriage return to put the cursor where you want it below the text. Once the cursor is there, hit the SPACE bar a couple time to make a couple blank spaces on the page. Then select these blank space with your mouse, or you can hold your SHIFT key down and hit your left arrow key to select the blank space. Either way, all you need to do is highlight the space. (This is basically creating a bookmark in the page you can see in the code.)

Now switch to HTML view and you’ll see the highlighted section that corresponds with the selection you just made in normal mode. Now if you followed the steps so far you should still have the video embed code in your clipboard so you can ‘Paste” the code into the html area where the highlighted spaces are. (A quick shortcut is just to hit CTRL+V on your keyboard to paste the contents of the clipboard. This should insert the code into the page for you.

Now go back to normal to keep working or save the page and use Preview to see how it looks with the video. Once you do this a few times, you’ll be a pro at it so have fun and start embedding video!

…

Well the talks are off for now.

Tempers flared, ties loosened and negotiations abandoned…at least for the weekend.

Let’s call the whole thing off shall we?

The proposed Microsoft purchase of Yahoo! may make for good theater, but it’s more disaster film and corporate drama. When two 800 lbs gorillas try to dance, someones banana always gets stepped on. The latest snag Friday was an insurmountable + $4 share demand that Yahoo! won’t budge from and Micro$oft wont meet. So get ready for banana splits all around this week.

This is one time I say, ‘Can’t we all just NOT get along?’

Microsoft buying Yahoo! will be just another super merger that makes the web smaller. The bigger these monsters get, the more narrow the public data pool becomes.

No, I’m not wringing the anti-corporate crying towel here folks. I’m Mr. Marketing remember? Hey let’s all get so rich we can buy Bill Gates breakfast, or better yet buy Bill Gates! However, my short hairs get stiff when the mega-powers start bowling for eyeballs at this level.

The only thing worse than Microsoft is Yahoo! — powered by Microsoft.

Get your spoons ready…

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