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.

The Road to StoreCrowd v2

October to Christmas was fairly slow, we didn’t expect Google to do us any favours within the first few months. Traffic started to pick up after the New Year, Revenue started to grow & we started building relationships with some key merchants. Exclusive coupons are the secret sauce in this business, if you can get a merchant to provide you with a coupon that no-one else has then you’re in business.

A few weeks ago I saw that Teenormous turned two & had done over $800k in affiliate sales. Brian had emailed me a few years ago & told me he was struggling to monetize the website, now look at what he’s achieved – quite incredible, they have built a great site in a fairly unexplored niche (Which can be easily replicated now, Teenormous is also built on Ruby ). Since I normally just track Revenue & the Commissions we make I hadn’t actually taken the time to check how much Revenue we’d sent to merchants.

Since launch in October 2009 StoreCrowd has driven over $1M in affiliate sales to our merchants & we’re doing ~70k uniques per month at this stage (without any PR). This is also not considering we get over 50% of our traffic & outclicks on non-affiliated stores, so I’m guessing that figure could be closer to $2.5M if you factor that in. All from a site that we hadn’t actually announced to the public yet. Consider this my first public announcement.

Did I mention that John and Myself both still work Fulltime & love our current jobs? Yes, this has all been done in spare time outside working hours.

In the last week we’ve relaunched v2 of StoreCrowd & also now have a presence in Australia. The new release focuses much more on the community & user interaction, something we knew we were lacking in:

1. Foursquare type functions – you can get hired & fired as the Boss of a Store
2. We focused on Email Alerts for new Deals & Coupons
3. A homepage that actually reflects the current popular discounts of the day
4. Laser targeted pages with good SEO Best Practices, Examples: Fabric.com Coupons, Register.com Coupons, Think Geek Coupons, Eastbay Coupons, Dell Coupons
5. Provide good tags/categories for different types of coupons, Examples: Car Rental Coupons, Travel Coupons, Tire Coupons, Restaurant Coupons
6. Users can now track how much money they’re saving with a specific coupon, they can also track if they submit something how much that coupon saves the rest of the community
7. We’ve broken out Deals to now include Store Sales & Freebies
8. We’ve broken out Coupons into Free Shipping / Printable Coupons
9. We’re really keen for users to Review their experience at Stores, so when you buy something we’ll ask you to review your experience
10. Heavy moderation – We want quality, not quantity. So new submissions go through a queue before they go live on the site. This helps us catch Exclusive Coupons & other things that we don’t want on the site.
11. A Bookmarklet – We have a Bookmarklet that auto parses store pages to make submitting product deals a breeze!
12. And heaps more!

We’ve got a fairly heavy roadmap & want to make StoreCrowd one of the premier sites out there for deal hunting. I thought now would be a great time to give you some insight into how we got here. I’ve always said in the past that Affiliate Marketing is becoming too generic, I think that if you can build a site that has a long lasting presence & provides value to your users you’ll make money without even trying.

Thinking about Starting your own Deals/Coupon site, here’s some tips that I originally posted on Abestweb

1. Try to avoid White Label solutions like WPCoupon etc, you’ll never keep up.
2. Keeping up to date with Coupons for us is a full time job for 2-3+ people
3. Keeping up to date with Deals needs 2+ people
4. Keeping up to date with expired coupons/deals can be problematic (no-one wants a site full of expired coupons).
5. Don’t underestimate the amount of work involved, especially if you’re not building efficiency with custom coded solutions.
6. Not to mention Merchant support & trying to get exclusives
7. Build a mailing list as early as possible.
8. Understanding SEO is a must title tags, internal linking are important.
9. You’ll need to know Adwords inside out if you plan to run PPC efficiently yourself
10. You’ll pull your hair out when you’re having killer days on CJ then all of a sudden your EPC drops 300% & they’re having “tracking” issues.
11. You’ll need to build authority & backlinks to even get a look in at high volume coupon searches (we began blogging a full year before we launched, generating over 10k natural backlinks). Most of which give authority but aren’t necessarily coupon related.
12. You’ll need a fair amount of time to contact partners & ask for backlinks. use Yahoo site explorer to generate a list of all your competitors backlinks (if they are linking to more then 2+ competitors then there’s a high chance they could link to you – could be a directory).
13. Have fun doing what you do, try & be unique. We’re putting our own twist on things & plan to expand into other areas that competitors aren’t looking at. These sites are all about building a community, without that you have nothing but search engine traffic.
14. Be mindful of Exclusive Coupons, don’t post your competitors exclusives (it takes hard work & effort to obtain these) – Here’s some other Coupon Websites to look at

I’ve opened the comments for this one, feel free to ask any questions below!

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As you know, CTR is linked to your ad quality & also the price you end up paying.

AdRank = CTR x Maximum Bid

From my observations quality score merely dictates your minimum entry into the bidding. If you have a high quality score you can eventually bring you bids down to sub 5c, however if you have a low quality score then you might have to bid $5 just to show.

Two Examples of how CTR can Reduce Cost

Stuart is bidding on the same keyword & match type as Jenny. Jenny is bidding $10 with a CTR of 3.3%, Stuart’s maximum bid on the otherhand is $5 & his CTR is 10%. Who’s ad is showing the highest?

1. Jenny: $10 x 3.3 = AdRank of 33
2. Stuart: $5 x 10 = AdRank of 50

In this situation Stuart is bidding half of what Jenny is but his ad is much more relevant therefore he’ll end up appearing higher. This is the power of really tuning & testing to increase your CTR.

Tip 1 – Increase your Maximum Bid

Since we’ve already established that your maximum bid can have a huge effect on your positioning you can use this to you advantage. Simply increase your bid to position 1, watch your CTR build then slowly bring the bid back after a few days until your position starts to slide again. I’ve successfully used this method to stay in position 1 & ultimately pay much less than the person below me.

Tip 2 – Split test religiously

I always split test two ads at once, the reason behind this is if you test any more & 1 performs shockingly then it drags your overall performance down. There’s plenty of variations you can try, but simply start with 2 ads, then remove the underperforming one after a few days & rewrite it with your learnings from the previous test.

Tip 3 – Target your Headline

The headline is one of the most important parts of your ad, it’s probably what the user will see first. So try to make this as targeted as possible. i.e. if the user is searching for Health Affiliate Program then ideally that’s what you want as your title.

You can test with variations & also try adding calls to action in there like “Top Health Aff Program” (remember you can’t have more than 25 characters) etc. Quite often you can get away with abbreviations so don’t be afraid to try some.

Using official site in the headline also works well for increasing CTR:

Dell AU – Official Site
Latest Deals on Dell Computers
& Laptops. Buy Online Today!
www.dell.com/au

Tip 4 – Use Description to highlight your USP’s

Once your headline has grabbed their attention you really need to sell them with the description. Try to include the things that separate you from your competitors. This may be price, free shipping, money back guarantee or certain product features. Here’s an example of an ad that makes good use of the body text:

1/2 Price Broadband Sale
6GB for $19.50 for 1st 6 Months on
3′s $39 Mobile Broadband Plan!
www.Three.com.au/MobileBroadband

Tip 5 – The pyramid/arrow theory

You’ll notice that when you search for a keyword if it’s in your ad Google will highlight it. With the right positioning of keywords in your Headline, Description & Display URL it is possible to take advantage of this highlighting to create an arrow or pyramid that helps with drawing the users attention to it.

Instant Ringtones
Get Instant Ringtones
& Latest Rad Ringtones Online
www.Rebcell.com/Ringtones

When a user searches for Ringtones the ad above contains the keyword 4 times. Notice how when bolded the ad looks like a series of steps (or a pyramid), this is a proven method that subliminally attracts users towards your ad over all the others on the page.

Tip 6 – Test with the Search Network on & Off

The search network can have a positive or negative effect on your CTR, there’s really no way to tell how it will impact your overall campaign CTR. Make sure you test it on & off.

Tip 7 – Split out Broad, Phrase & Exact into their own Adgroups

I generally won’t do this for every single keyword in a campaign but for the high traffic / top converting words this really allows you to tweak your ads to best suit the match type. For example the ad that works for an exact match on the word “free ringtones” might not be as effective when you start broad or phrase matching because you’ll be triggering on keywords like “free ringtone downloads” which you’re not targeting in the Headline or Description.

Tip 8 – Test Keyword Insertion

I try to stay away from keyword insertion on the most part but it’s useful when you’re trying to get a campaign up & running quickly. It’s great for CTR since it’ll substitute the keyword into your ad.

Be careful though because keyword insertion can backfire (check out this search for “buy kids online” for example):

Online Kids Buy
Find Over 10,000 Offers From Major
Retailers Online Today With Lasoo!
www.Lasoo.com.au

Tip 9 – Run content campaigns separately

Whilst the content network doesn’t affect your overall search CTR it can confuse you when trying to evaluate your overall CTR for a campaign. I usually split them into two campaigns just so it’s easy to get an overview. I also find it easier to view & evaluate conversion data better by doing this.

Tip 10 – Curiosity killed the cat

People are curious creatures & you can play to this when writing your ad. This works incredibly well for product based searches. For this example lets use the term “arbitrage conspiracy”. Chances are that if you’re searching on this term you’re looking to buy the book.

Arbitrage Conspiracy Lie
Check Out This Shocking Truth About
The Flaw of Arbitrage Conspiracy!
ShockingReview.com/ArbitrageConspir

Tip 11 – Tweak your Display URL

There’s a few ways of tweaking the Display URL, this can have a moderate to large effect on CTR:

1. earnersblog.com
2. www.earnersblog.com
3. EarnersBlog.com
4. www.EarnersBlog.com
5. Keyword.EarnersBlog.com
6. EarnersBlog.com/Keyword
7. www.EarnersBlog.com/Keyword

I usually tend to go with option 6, but in some cases I’ve seen option 1 blow it out of the water. It pays to test the variations to get an idea of which display URL’s work best with your demographic.

Tip 12 – Play with Scheduling

I’ve seen scheduling used in some quite ingenious ways to build up history. For example initially only having your ads active for 1 hour during the day (around 8pm at night) to ease your way into a new market without your competitors spotting you & adjusting their bids up too quickly.

Scheduling for your industry may reveal that people are more click happy & night when at home or it may be the opposite, they may click less at home but more at work. You can use this to your advantage if you split test it.

Tip 13 – Use Trademark Symbols

Using trademark symbols for products can increase CTR by insane amounts, (something to do with people thinking that ad is the official site).

Conversions always rule over CTR

Just because an ad has a better CTR doesn’t mean it will convert better. I will always choose an ad that converts better or has a better ROI over one that has a better CTR.

So now you have 13 things that you can test, find the winning combination & take you Adwords Campaigns to the next level.

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I was browsing through the serps recently for a new project that I’m about to launch here on Earners Blog which relates to the web hosting niche. This niche in particular really shits me, it’s as bad as the MMO (Make Money Online) niche – millions of idiots all promoting products because of their commissions rather than the value of the product to the client/shopper. But, everyone’s gotta make a buck…right?

So I stumbled across a networks of sites recently that has started dominating this niche quite well, it just so happens that it’s for all the shitty hosts that pay good commissions but provide a terrible service (how ironic?).

In this post I’m going to take apart his network & show you the things he’s done it & also the mistakes he’s made along the way (without directly linking to the sites).

The Network

Lets firstly look at one of his sites. It’s the #1 SERP for the term Bluehost Review.

Just by looking at it you can tell it’s WordPress with the iTheme, lots of categories & using the site: operator we can see there’s around 172 pages indexed.

Now this particular affiliate is using three tactics that work incredibly well:

1. Calling the domain the exact SERP he wants to rank for. In my testing I have noticed that if you’re getting backlinks with an anchor text that matches the name of the domain name it’s less likely to trigger anchor text penalties (because that’s what your domain is called).
2. Hiring people to write content on every bluehost related search term there is. If you don’t use the Adwords Keyword Tool then you’re crazy.
3. Interlinking this bluehost review site with all the other sites in his network. Giving each site anywhere from 9k – 14k Yahoo! Backlinks.

The Layout & setup of WordPress is pretty stock standard. Plenty of categories with optimised title tags & listing them all in the sidebar. I’d personally normally list the posts in the sidebar but if you can include some unique content on each category page using wordpress conditionals (or excerpts) then this method works well too.

Notice how the header of each single.php also has the same Bluehost offer right at the fold line. This is a great technique for grabbing the attention of the reader (after all with these types of sites the content is secondary, you want them to see the offer).

Mistakes

1. All of his sites are using the same template (iTheme for WordPress), if anyone is manually reviewing these sites say goodbye.
2. I can easily find out who this guy is using this search & seeing that he calls himself charlesgan on forums. It appears he calls himself the same on all forums. It also appears that he spends a large amount of time buying & selling links on digitalpoint (& also hiring content writers for Web Hosting Articles). If I can find this sort of stuff out in about 2 minutes I’m sure Google can too.
3. Interlinking each & every site seems to be working in the SERPS but it’s also very easily spotted. If someone decides they need to take the whole network down for manipulating the SERPS it leaves Charles in a very unfortunate position & 2 years of hard work down the drain.
4. No mailing list, whilst this isn’t a big thing Charles could potentially build a large mailing list of subscribers (after all someone doesn’t stay with the same host forever), this could turn into quite a nice recurring revenue stream.

Things done well

1. Whilst I don’t endorse doing this Charles has provided fake whois info for the domains. Which could possibly be helping him in resisting any automatic interlinking penalties with Google. He hasn’t gone as far as setting anonymous nameservers with someone like easydns but that’d probably be the next step.
2. The layout & organisation of the content is done very well. Plenty of topics all covering all the questions someone might ask about Bluehost. Mysql, WordPress, Server Speed all that stuff.
3. He has over 50 domains dominating this niche, quite a bit of work for one person. So I’m guessing most of the content is outsourced.
4. Charles also interlinks the sites well within the content of the posts. Using keyword rich anchor text. There’s a few plugins for WordPress that you can set to do this automatically.

Conclusion

I’m guessing that this network is making some pretty decent money, if you consider some hosts pay up to $150 for a signup. This shows that sticking to your guns & focusing on a particular niche can really pay off in the long run. However it does also have its consequences, in that if the network is detected you risk losing everything.

My tip is to diversify, don’t rely on a single network to build your income, but at the same time don’t ignore the potential rewards for putting the hard work into building one. If you can outsource the creation & content you can still work on your other projects. Also be transparent with your readers, provide real web hosting reviews, or try to provide value instead with web hosting coupons.

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Major thanks to all the guys over at SLHost for their support in solving any issues fast. If you ever need to get your hands on a decent VPS you really can’t go far wrong.

In the meantime, if you have any great Guest Posts that cover any affiliate marketing topics send them through to earnersblog@gmail.com & I’ll sort through the best ones

Thanks for your support.

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I sit here on a Sunday morning watching Channel 7, eating Breakfast & indulging in one of my favourite types of TV shows – “Australia’s deadliest Animals.”

However, Australian Sunday morning TV is notorious for the number of ad breaks, & who else would advertisers target at this time of the week than Children.

Every break for the past 60 minutes has contained 90% content related to Ringtone Offers. Now, Whilst I normally don’t have a problem with Ringtone subscriptions, these ads are clearly being very Deceptive:

1. Guess which animal is making this noise (you hear a lion roar in the background) text to this number & win $4000
2. Which cup is the ball hiding under, text to this number & win $4000

Then written in tiny text at the bottom of the screen the terms & conditions (which only appears at the start & end of the ad), which happen to mention the subscription side of the bargin, which mind you, is still hard to read even on my HDTV.

Names of Companies doing this: Blinck & Maxitext & Let’s do the math:

Blinck: $4 per text x 6 text per week = $24/week or $1248 / year

Maxitext: 3 Text per week = $10/week or $520 / year

I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid I certainly didn’t have access to that kind of cash & that (for me) is the major problem.

Kids are naturally the most susceptible to these kinds of offers because they tend to overlook the “fineprint” especially when the ads are on in between children’s cartoons & programs. And who ends up footing the bill?

This is one of the reasons why I have never felt comfortable promoting ringtones & ringtone subscriptions. I do agree that driving PPC traffic is much much less deceptive (depending on how it’s done), especially if you’re bidding on artists (i.e. Lil wayne Ringtones).

CBS News in America posted a story this week about about Ringing up Big Charges for “Free” Tones & we all know that Azoogleads recently got hit with a $1 Million Dollar lawsuit over “Free Tones.”

It seems however, that certain Australian advertisers are still allowed to advertise “Free Tones” even though they’re clearly not. The TV networks also don’t seem to care much about the deceptive ads.

What’s your views on Ringtone subscriptions, do you have a problem with promoting them & how do you feel about deceptive TV promotion?

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Are you wanting to get your service or website in front of over 50,000 Affiliate Marketers a month?

I’ve just freed up some advertising spots on the blog & I’m giving them away as discounted rates. It’s first come first served.

1. Three 125×125 banner spots available for at $180 for 90 Days.
2. Five 468×60 Rotating spots available for $90 for 90 Days
3. Exclusive Banner & Text Link in RSS Feed (2,100 Subscribers) at $300 for 90 days.

Simply use the contact form to contact me.Link Building Automator

I’ve had loads of email about the link building automation service, it’s currently in beta testing & we’re in the process of trying to automate as much of my current link building guide into it, as well as some features to help you track rankings.

The service will be limited to 50 spots in the initial phase at a discounted rate (for life) so make sure your name is on my mailing list if you want to get in there first.

More info soon.

Earners Blog Exclusive Affiliate Forum

This is another service that’s currently in beta testing & content development, but I aim to have launched within a month.

This will be an exclusive private affiliate forum with new techniques & twists on existing techniques. With a sole purpose of helping people achieve success in Affiliate Marketing.

There will be a minimal yearly access fee, but nothing that’ll break the bank.

Let’s put it this way, why would you pay $97 dollars for a shit ebook that gives you outdated techniques when you can get access to a wealth of knowledge for less? Exactly.

Ebay Affiliate Marketing Technique

I’ve had about 10 emails from readers who are now easily making over $1,000/month using this technique. If only I got paid for second tier ebay referrals.

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1. I felt like the old design somehow was holding me back, it wasn’t clean enough & didn’t really give me any room to expand.
2. I wanted to regain a better sense of community around the blog with features that would benefit the readers.
3. I wanted something cleaner, that loaded faster & was easier to navigate. The old site didn’t really do anything to promote any of my older content.
4. I wanted to move away from any Adsense & offer affordable targeted advertising solutions that weren’t intrusive & didn’t drive my readers away.

So without further ado I present the new look, I’m very much still ironing out lots of things but I’m 100% certain the theme is usable & fully functional now. Here’s what’s changed:

Quick Overview of New Features

Top Content

On the homepage you’ll notice the Top Content Box which gives a brief overview of the top & featured posts on the blog, as well as the most commented, programs & recommend & a few other features that should be live soon

The panel uses the ever so useful domtab javascript to hide the content via CSS into a nice presentable table with tabs. Very snazzy.

Top Commentators & Trackbacks

In an effort to make commenting & linking to Earners Blog more enjoyable the top commentators for the month will appear on the front page & the trackbacks to each individual post will appear in the sidebar meaning that if you make a comment about a particular post your blog should get decent exposure too.

Better styled comments & subscriptions

The comments & trackbacks are now separated as mentioned previously. Comments are also styled so that my replies stand out. You now also have the option to subscribe to a particular conversation & get email updates when I reply to your comment.

Review Section

This is the part I’m most excited about, it’s still in beta & is getting tested but I aim to have all the major Affiliate Programs & Affiliate Networks reviewed with as much detail as I can get (possibly including interviews with the Founders of the company). Readers will be able to add their own reviews & so on. This section is going to take the most work, but it also has the most promise to become a really useful resource for Affiliate Marketers.

More Clearly Defined Categories

My categories before were all over the place, they’ve all been tidied up & more appropriate ones have been added. I also plan to add tagging for company names & other general terms (kinda like Techcrunch).

Easier Social Media Sharing

It’s now easier than ever to bookmark the posts you like & even email yourself a copy for future reference. I’ve only kept the main Bookmarking Services that most of you use so it should make things easier.

Better Contact Options

I’ve added more contact options & more clearly defined tabs at the top depending on what you want to contact me for. I really want to start featuring some guest posts so you know what to do A forum is also on the way.

New Ideas

I’ve come up with lots & lots of new ideas for user generated content, one of which should be kicking off within the next month. I’m always open to suggestions so don’t be afraid to shoot me an email.

So thanks for hanging around, I always get surprised when I see how many of you there are subscribed to the feed. So don’t be shy, come on over & leave a comment.

Stuart

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• If a technique or campaign is posted it’ll become saturated within days (or weeks). Which will probably end up costing you money & have you thinking that you suck at Affiliate Marketing (I don’t want that).
• I don’t want to hold your hand or balance you on your bike, I want help you to ride on your own.

So this got me thinking about various types of posts to get lined up that would provide lots of value but would help you reapply things learned in your own interesting ways. Like the Make $200 a Day post, I’ve seen lots of great ways that people have modified that technique into something even better.

Other types of Step by Step guides that I think would provide much more value like:

1. PPC Campaign & Adgroup Setup (Adwords, MSN & YSM)
2. Managing PPC Bids
3. Choosing the right Offers
4. Split Testing Creatives & Conversion Points
5. Keyword Research

I want to create guides that help you all think outside the box & nail a campaign that has no competition. Instead of competing against the next guy.

So I wanna hear from you guys. What types of guides would you like to see? Drop me a mail or leave a comment.

There’s lots happening behind the scenes at the moment & Earners Blog will be relaunching with a new, cleaner theme that promotes much more user interaction. Along with guides & recommendations for specific areas of Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Networks & Guest Posts. So stay tuned for that.

A final question too, if I created a forum that allowed you to discuss techniques. Would you use it?

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The Summer Slowdown is almost officially over & there’s some exciting things happening behind the scenes here, all will be revealed soon enough. Over the next year I hope to have many more real life examples of how you can actually turn a profit online, I also plan to delve into more things like Domains, Website Flipping & more short term profit makers rather than the long term affiliate model.

Highlights of the Past 12 Months:

1. Avoid Make Money Online Ebooks
2. Blog SEO Series: Part 1 – Organic Traffic | Part 2 – Referral Traffic | Part 3 – Paid Search
3. Make $200 Every Day
4. 5 Tips to Increase Adwords Conversions & Lower Costs
5. 20 Free SEO Tools
6. 10 Ways to Increase your Feed Subscribers
7. Adult Friend Finder Image Rotation Script
8. Apple Iphone Traffic Surge & Forthcoming Technology
9. Integrating Online & Offline Marketing
10. Finding Profitable Niches with Adwords
11. Free Resellable Ebook Package
12. 1c Clicks from Google Adwords
13. 10 Easy ways to Increase your Textlinkads Income
14. Diggproof & Speed Up your WordPress Blog
15. Becoming a Digg Power User
16. Ultimate Guide to Affiliate Website Link Building
17. Stealth Link Building – Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
18. 11 Tips for the Perfect Online Press Release

As a Birthday present from you all, why not take the time to write on your own blog if Earners Blog has helped you achieve anything within the past 12 months. If you don’t have a blog, just drop a comment or an email

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His post made me take a quick look at my Feedburner stats (not something I do very often) & much to my suprise this is what my graph looks like:

I really didn’t expect to hit over 1,200 subscribers when I started blogging back in September. So big thanks to everyone that takes the time to read & especially those who also take the time to comment. I know I’ve also got a big backlog of emails to get through (since moving house) so don’t panic.

I’ve also recently just moved jobs, for those of you that asked I used to work at Hitwise in Melbourne as part of the SEO team there, which gave a lot of insights into many things such as Affiliate Marketing, Niches & Keyword Research (If you can afford the packages I definitely recommend it). I had the chance to work with many big corporate clients, but in the end I got very frustrated with the slow pace of SEO Implementation. As you’ve probably guessed, I’m a much more hands on type of guy.

I now work for a much smaller company managing their whole SEM (including Affiliates), the rewards are higher & the position is much more challenging. It’s also in the Adult Space. Another realm I’ve not dabbled too much in.

So from here on in I guess the blog may end up giving more insights into how to manage Affiliates, execute PPC Campaigns on a large scale with Adwords & Panama plus any other tips I’ve found along the way to make your lives easier. I’m currently helping my new employer with a nice 400% ROI & all I can say is, you now have more reason than ever to stay tuned & keep subscribing.

Cheers Guys

Stuart

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So my question to you guys is this.

Have any of the techniques on Earners Blog helped you earn anything? If so, which techniques & how much did you earn.

If you have a personl blog post about the technique, how much you earnt, if you adapted things a bit & which affiliate programs worked well for you. Then link back to this post or drop a comment.

I don’t expect anyone to give away their niches but I’m very keen to see how many people (if any) have managed to increase their earnings

Provided I get some responses I’ll post some links or write about what people have been up to in a few days.

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This one hopefully looks a bit cleaner & easier to read. I’ll be tweaking things over the coming weeks so suggestions are welcome

I plan to try & revamp the categories & make things a bit more streamlined so information retrieval is much easier too. Thanks for your continued support & welcome to Earners Blog v2.0

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Thansk to all that participated, there were some good reviews & obviously some reviews that were just in it for the link.

I plan on doing some more contest in the future so keep reading

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If you’re using WordPress however, there’s a few tricks you can use to help make ads more relevant to the in post content. Obviously the more targeted your ads are to the content of the post the more likely you are to get a conversion.

One of the tricks I use on a few WordPress blogs is to target the ads to the theme of the category the post is in. So for example if I used auctionads on an Ipod blog & one of the categories was called “Ipod Skins” I can easily target that keyword by using a dynamic category insertion string from WordPress.

auctionads_ad_kw = “”;

This the the code that allows you to add which keywords to target. You may want to target ipods:

auctionads_ad_kw = “ipods”;

However maybe not all sections of your blog are about ipods, right? Lets say I make a post in the affiliate marketing category of this blog, I can dynamically insert the words “affiliate marketing” into the keyword string, thus targeting very specific ads:

auctionads_ad_kw = “<?php foreach((get_the_category()) as $cat) { echo $cat->cat_name . ‘ ‘; } ?>”;

This will return the category name into the field & you’ll not only increase your clickthroughs but your earnings too

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But for those of you who contribute I’ve installed a plugin that gives a link back to the top 8 commentators each month in the sidebar so hopefully it’ll help generate some traffic & subscribers for you. Enjoy.

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• New Layout, Design & Features

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Please bear with me incase there’s any unforseen problems with the swap over I plan to have everything sorted asap

When everything is finished hopefully you can enjoy a faster Earners Blog.

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Then submit the URL on my Contact Page. Whenever I recieve 10 reviews I’ll post about all the sites that have reviewed Earners Blog & give you props, this will hopefully increase your readship & subscriber base.

The best review of Earners Blog will also recieve $25 via Paypal & an SEO Audit of their website with recommendations & thoughts.

So what are you waiting for, get reviewing

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Oh well, it’s fixed now :p

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So just a note to expect a little bit of downtime from the site but don’t worry I’ll be back

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So why not drop a comment on this post telling me a bit about yourself, your sites & how you make money

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There’s a number of quick ways you can increase the relevancy of your ads:

Section Targeting: Google allows you to suggest certain parts of your blog that you’d like to emphasise or ignore when the Adsense bots come to check it out. There are a few tags you can implement to do this:

If you want to emphasise a certain part of text use:

If you want to tell Adsense to ignore a certain part of the blog use:

So for example in my wordpress template I use the first set of html tags in my single.php. I place the first one just before the title of the post & the last one after the post is finished. This helps to target the ads to the post rather than the rest of the blog.

URL: Adsense relies very heavily on your actual URL to determine the ads. So for example, notice how the url to this post mentions adsense in it? That’ll help me target ads for that specific term.

i.e. http://www.earnersblog.com/adsense-ebooks/

This would target the page to adsense ebooks.

Some people think that the page title also comes into play slightly too, however I’ve found that the two above techniques play most heavily on the type of ads displayed.

Related Resources:

• Join Adsense
• Adsense Registration

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First of all, forget all those Get Rich Quick books. We do not claim to make you instantly rich overnight; but what we will succeed in helping you achieve the knowledge that you need to Earn Money Online.

We will explore various avenues, recommend the products to utilise, the resources to read. Don’t expect us to recommend resources in order to make a quick buck; we plan to show you which resources are money making scams & how to avoid such schemes.

Lets face it, making money from home is certainly something that everyone aspires to. It enables you to spend more time with the family, manage your OWN time & give the flexibility you need to enjoy life (see our working from home tips).

However I cannot stress enough that it takes patience & time to reach that level. You will be putting in a lot of hours probably working less than the minimum wage, but when you reach your goals; it’s worth it. When you surpass your goals, it’s a bonus.

So I welcome you to come on this journey with me, get ready to work from home & earn money. I do hope that you learn not only what I have learnt, but also learn with me.

Don’t forget to grab the money making feed below so you can stay updated!

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