On the 24th Feb did you notice a serious dip in traffic to your affiliate sites? Then you’re not alone, Google rolled out a new algorithm update designed to improve the relevancy of their search results by reducing the number of “content farms” or “low quality websites.”

The change however has had a catastrophic impact on a large number of websites (including affiliates) across the globe. I’ve personally seen some of my sites US Google traffic plummet by ~40% but seen an increase in others.

What do we know about this change?

A lot of what we initially know is based on speculation using the limited data that we’ve seen, Matt Cutts & Vanessa Fox have give some details out but the best summary of what Google is looking for in terms of quality can be found in this SMX Summary

There’s a number of things that still don’t add up for me with this update:

1. Why weren’t a lot of the major content farms actually hit? eHow is a prime example here.
2. If you have “low quality content” on your site Google treats your whole site as low quality. One would have thought Google would be able to assess quality on a page by page basis.
3. I’ve seen a number of shopping sites hit badly like theFind, yet others such has Bizrate remain unaffected.

Read More…

Hard to believe it’s been 18 months since I wrote a post here, some of you will probably remember that I was looking for a ruby/rails developer back in Feb 2009, then mysteriously I haven’t posted much since then. Well I thought this would be the perfect chance to update you on what I’ve been up to & also give you some insight into the last 18 months.

Back in December 2008 I was fairly annoyed that Coupon Websites were stealing from affiliates. I would say that in the last 18 months my view on this has changed quite considerably, however I still stick by my initial comments in that I disapprove of sites using Fake Coupons or using a “click to show coupons” link without having any valid coupons to show. Either way, I was noticing a serious shift in a lot of my affiliate activity, especially with PPS merchants that users were looking for Coupons & I was losing out on the sale. I knew I had to start offering Coupons otherwise my PPC activity was starting to become less profitable.

The last 18 months has been a whirlwind to say the least: I moved house, got a dog, got married, have almost had a baby (3 months to go) & also launched StoreCrowd twice. I also didn’t post here at all.

StoreCrowd v1 was Born

Initially I had to find a technical co-founder to work with, this proved fairly difficult & frustrating. A lot of the submissions I had were from the US, however after some time I felt like I needed someone locally in Melbourne to share the vision with. This proved harder, developers are fairly sceptical about you going to them with ideas as they get pitched to all the time. I emailed & met up with a fair few including heading to the local Ruby meetups to get an idea of who the gun developers were. Eventually I met a Java developer who was just learning Ruby, he was currently working for Microsoft & had a good grasp of not only the development side but also Front End/CSS/Javascript trickery (I found this to be extremely important).

It took us roughly 7 months of design/development to get an initial Alpha prototype up & running (we went through around 4 design iterations), this includes a fair about of backend integration with affiliate networks, deep links etc. I also started some pretty heavy blog posting over on the StoreCrowd Blog (notice that it’s not on a subdomain), I’m a fairly big believer that blogs in subfolders attribute much more authority to the root domain than those on Subdomains.

We learnt quite a lot of important skills during the initial Release:

1. There are a LOT of websites in this space & it’s not easy.
2. That if you spend time doing something manually, a developer can always automate it. For example we use the Analytics API to pull in data from the Top Content report & assign it to a particular store. That way I can focus on the Stores we generate the most traffic for.
3. A fair amount of Photoshop Trickery, I ended up doing all the designs & prototyping – it was too much of an annoyance trying to convey ideas to an external designer
4. Server setup & optimisation – Nginx/Memcache/JS Compression/CSS Sprites/Load Balancing/MYSQL Optimisation
5. How to convey development ideas into reality – this is a tricky one, you need to be able to explain exactly what you want & how you want it to operate
6. How to work with the Development API’s for all the major affiliate networks (Most of the API’s are fairly lame, Merchants don’t give you expiry dates etc)
7. There’s thousands of stores to keep updated & thousands of coupons come through the Affiliate API’s all the time. Automating this was key.
8. Learning to respect our Competitors & the way they do things, coupon websites go to great lengths to secure exclusive coupons with merchants. We need to ensure that these never end up on StoreCrowd.

We silently launched V1 in October last year & quickly started working on v2. We knew we were missing a large amount of features (we still are), but I was a big believer in getting a “minimum viable product” out there to see how we went. It was clear after a month or so that out conversion rates just weren’t cutting the mustard so it was time to start experimenting.

We initially experimented with “click to show codes” on coupons that we were making money from, we were using ClickTale to record user sessions & I could clearly see that a large number of users weren’t clicking or copying coupons. They were just reading them off the screen.

This almost doubled our click to conversion rate on coupons (notice that almost 40% of people who visit StoreCrowd end up clicking out to a merchant) & ensured that if someone was using StoreCrowd to find a coupon we would get the credit for the sale. If they found a non-working coupon for example they’re quite entitled to go to a competitor & activate their cookie instead. We keep a fairly close eye on non-working coupons via a real-time stream to try & keep things as fresh as possible. Read More…

We all get link requests, most of them are automated garbage & some are legitimate. Some are also too good to be true.

If it’s the latter then I advise you to look a bit closer at what is being offered as recently I came across a interesting Recropical Link Cloaking tactic.

Don’t think this is a new tactic either, this has been going on for a very very long time.

Setting the Scene

You get an email similar to this one:

Hello,

As I was surfing around Google , I discovered your website: http://www.earnersblog.com/ I am trying to add as many informative websites as possible to my site. Which in turn will benefit my users as well as provide you with relevant traffic to your site. I have a website with about 5,000 – 7,000 people on it per day who fit the same demographic as your site.

If you follow this link, http://www.widgets.com/?pg=2eC4L you will see that I put your link on my homepage.

Some website owners do not like when other sites link to them so I thought I might ask for your review.

Please get back to me when you have a chance, to let me know if the link I have placed suits your needs.
Also if you would like a custom Title for it just send me a email and I will get it updated.

Have a good week

Read More…

If you’re on there, add me here

Follow thousands of people

Pretty straight forward, just follow as many people as you can. If you’re interesting enough a certain percentage will follow you back, I’ve noticed a 10% ratio here, a bit higher if you’re a ‘beautiful woman’ *coughs*

Tweet famous people

There’s a lot of famous people on twitter now with A LOT of followers. If you can somehow get them to tweet back at you then you’ve got a lot of potential traffic hitting your twitter profile. Creativity is the key here. Read More…

Came across this today & had to share it. Major shopping retailer here in Australia.

Someone introduce them to Google Webmaster Tools please?

Hey guys, I’ve scoped out a new project & I’m looking to partner with a Designer/Developer to take things to the next level. My aim is create a team that is building a constant stream of affiliate sites that provide a useful purpose for people & share the profits.

The kind of person I’m looking to partner with:

1. Experience in building web applications with a focus on user experience
2. At least 2 years experience with Ruby/Python
3. XHTML & CSS is a must
4. JQuery knowledge
5. Data mining & Mysql
6. Experience in designing user interfaces

So if you’re keen to potentially get involved get in touch. Please note, this will not be a full time paid position it’ll involve equity in the business.

How to apply

Rather than taking your word for how good you are I’d like to put forward a quick test, I want you to create a quick skeleton site that performs the following:

1. Has a search box that allows a user to type in a url (i.e. www.earnersblog.com)
2. When a user hits submit I want you to create a page around the URL in the format (http://www.yoursite.com/www.earnersblog.com)
3. On that page I want you to pull a screenshot of my site, the meta description & show the last 5 posts below (not by parsing RSS).
4. If you can style this & make it look pretty then that’ll earn brownie points also
5. Once complete drop me a mail at stuart [at] earnersblog.com or leave a comment in this post.
6. I’ll test the system with another URL to check it works.

If you can do the above in another language other than Ruby/Python give it a shot I’ll not rule out other coding languages.

Cheers guys & good luck!

Welcome to the one stop shop for link builders looking to utilise social networks & other forms of dofollow link building techniques. I aim to keep this list as an up do date resource that grows over time, so please don’t hesitate to let me know if:

1. There’s sites/resources I’m missing
2. One of the sites I have listed goes nofollow

Current Total: 95 Sites

Social Submission & Voting Sites

These sites are the bread & butter of social bookmarking. The idea is to submit your site/posts & let the community vote. Not only do you get the initial link from the social site, really sticky content has the ability to go viral & generate a much larger range of links from relevant blogs / forums & websites. Remember, submit your best content. Read More…

You’ve probably seen me harp on about the power of Aweber before, I use it to build lists for every campaign I run & also on almost every affiliate product based website I have.

I’m going to share with you a small secret that will help you triple your profits on landing pages in three different ways. This technique works best with product reviews, but I’m sure you’ll find a way to make it work with your niche.

Capturing Data

This technique works by capturing the customers data before you send them on to the purchase/presell page of the product that you’re reviewing. By far the easiest way to do this is to offer them a bonus download (worth $50 – $100) that is related to the product in question.

Here’s a brief example I found that uses this technique with Ebooks:

Read More…