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 Google Adwords is a ppc program whereby site owners pay Google for clicks generated on their ads. It is a cost effective way to market your products and services. To make the most of Adwords, you need to implement some strategies. These strategies wil enable you to generate more visits, avoid wasted clicks and reduce your overall advertising costs. 

Choose keywords that relate to your visitors’ search. Keywords that are relevant to your site will generate valid or relevant clicks. Visitors who find your ad persuasive or talking about their needs will visit your site. Avoid the use of business names in your ads if your business is not well known like 3COM, XEROX or Motorola. Try to use keywords that people generally use when shopping for the item you want to sell. One way to do this is to find out about your competitors and determine what keywords they use to drive traffic.

Be sure that any keyword you use in an Adword ad actually shows on the resulting page, or the price of the click will go up. Same goes for misspellings of keywords, which is a popular strategy.

 You should be constantly monitoring your ads and testing formats. Sometimes a change in wording, sentence length or capitalization can make you get more valid clicks. The Adwords panel allows you to see all visitors that have been directed to your site and their statistics. Use these statistics to assess the success of your campaign and make amends accordingly.  Ron Davies

Technorati Tags: Google Adwords

The first day of the Affiliate Summit expo welcomed thousands of affiliates, agencies, vendors, merchants and networks all converging at the Rio in Las Vegas for a jam-packed day of discussions, face-to-face meetings, and conferences. Some of the great benefits of the event for all those involved were:

Putting faces to emails: Being in the affiliate marketing industry, the majority of our communications with partners, merchants and networks is done via email and phone. In some cases, we have worked with partners and networks for several years, without ever meeting face to face. However, with the Affiliate Summit, AMWSO had an excellent opportunity to meet a variety of our long-standing partners and networks in person and put actual faces to the emails we contact virtually every week, such as Vinny Lingham CEO of Synthasite, Dan Foster, Account executive with Performics and Michael C. Jones, COO of Pepperjam Network.

Meeting new affiliates: A vital part of growing AMWSO programs is bringing new partners to our merchants and while many affiliates tend to be a quiet, rather secretive bunch, it was refreshing to have the chance at the Affiliate Summit venue to meet new affiliates in person in a wide range of verticals, who are looking to expand their revenue streams and bolster their commission incomes with the more than 35 merchants AMWSO manages.

Seeking new partnerships with CPA and up-and-coming affiliate networks: Another value from participating at Affiliate Summit is investigating new opportunities for AMWSO merchants that are not exclusive to their affiliate network, to reach out and expand their offering into the rapidly growing CPA and affiliate network space. Some of the interesting CPA and Affiliate networks at the event were Canadian Sponsors, an affiliate network focused on the Canada market and Revenue Loop, an affiliate network emphasizing transparency, and Affnet, a CPA network centered around financial and diet offers.

Regarding the conferences taking place at Affiliate Summit, one of the most exciting and interesting presentations was that of Will Reynolds, CEO of SEER, who talked about “How to Futureproof Your SEO Efforts”. Here is a list of the helpful and mostly free tools that were recommended during the presentation:

SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Tool
Use this tool to start small and stay realistic in your SEO efforts.

MSN Ad Center Intelligence keyword research and optimization tool with Excel 2007 plug-in
Use this to create pivot tables and research popular terms with actual search volume numbers data and seamless integration with MS Excel 2007. (Note: the plug-in won’t work on older versions of Excel such as Excel 2003)

Google Trends
While Google trends doesn’t feature actual search and click volume numbers, it is a good start for identifying what people are looking for on SEs and what kind of content you can create to acquire new traffic sources.

Tube Mogul
One of the key advice from the presenation was to develop a “Digital Asset Inventory” such as videos. Use this tool to upload your video and distribute to many sites at once.

Yahoo Search Assist
This is a great tool on Yahoo results pages that include the terms and phrases you are looking for anywhere in the query. For example if you type in “Football” into Yahoo search assist, it will automatically suggest “Fantasy Football” because that is the most popular result clicked on for the term football.

Google Suggest
While not quite as intuitive as Yahoo Search Assist, because it orders suggestions based on the first keyword typed into the search box, it also can offer keyword directions for your SEO research.

Touchgraph – Google browser
Use this tool to see how your site is doing in relation to competitors on Google

Quantcast
Use this tool to identify keyword volume on brand names

Copernic Tracker
Although one of the only paid tools recommended, the price point of $49.95 is relatively reasonable considering it allows you to track changes in code on any competing website.

One of the very first affiliate marketing companies was Gillette, yep, the razor people. The Internet was not even really started at that time, but still these visionaries knew affiliate marketing would be the way to go. 

You can almost think of each affiliate marketing effort, including those with ClickBank, Commission Junction, etc., as tiny “JV’s” or Join Ventures, the only difference is that in these JV’s, you never meet the partner you are doing the venture with, because the intermediary, such as ClickBank, does all the orchestrating for you, you just put the right code on your site.  

Everyday, we encounter affiliate marketing on the internet. If you have ever clicked on a text ad or banner, you may have patronized affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing provides an avenue for both the advertiser and the publisher to make money. The publisher displays the ad to get the visitors’ attention and the advertiser makes a sale from that display and pays the publisher.  

Visitors are more interested in what a site provides that we may give them credit for. If you sell sporting goods on your site, visitors might click on your ad for a Hockey School. You may ask why. The reason is simple.  Website visitors find anything that pertain sports on the site as relevant. In fact, this habit of website visitors is the entire basis of cross selling – a marketing effort in which users are presented with collateral or matching offers.

For example, if someone buys a computer, you show him a printer as one complements the other. 

In affiliate marketing, it is imperative that you track ad performance, such that you are able to tell what is working and what is not. There would be little point in puting a ladder against a wall if you didn’t know which wall you were going to paint. There are many softwares and tools to help you track the performance of your affiliate efforts but no matter what the tool, you are looking at how customers are referred to your site and how they got there. Tracking information will help you to decide on efficient or effective marketing campaigns.

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, ClickBank, Commission Junction, Join Ventures, Hockey School, ad performance

Whether you use traffic exchanges, email advertising, newsletters, autoresponders or blog, writing good quality ads to get your affiliate traffic to visit the vendor site is paramount.

It is second only to writing effective SUBJECT lines, particularly when it comes to email and newsletters. This is because if the subject is not provocative enough to get someone to click on the email to open it, your hard work goes to the delete bin before ever getting read.

Since subject lines are short, it is even more important to get a call to action to your reader to get them to open your email to read further, or to continue reading your web page.

To get people to do anything at all, we must appeal to their emotions, intellect, or sense of empathy. This has just been made much simpler than it sounds by the good folks at Advanced marketing Institute, who along with some courseware offer a number of excellent free tutorials and tools on basic and advanced copywriting.

One of my favorite tools there is the Headline Analyses tool located at http://www.aminstitute.com/headline

This free tool will analyze your headline to determine the Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) score.

Again, reaching your customers in an deep and emotional way is a key to successful copywriting, and your headline is unquestionably the most important piece of copy you use to reach prospects.

Your headline will be analyzed and scored based on the total number of EMV words it has in relation to the total number of words it contains. This will determine the EMV score of your headline. In addition to the EMV score, You will find out which emotion inside your customer’s your headline most impacts.

Try to think of the best headline you can. or even a great one you have seen in your own inbox and paste it into the tester. Rick and I have had a lot of fun with this tool, and believe it ir not we have achieved scores of almost 70% : )

Ron

Technorati Tags: ad copy test, free ad analyses, free ad headline checker, headline testing