Using Google, Yahoo, and MSN to effective drive targeted search traffic to your site is a must. How well it “works” depends on the metrics you need to hit through these campaigns. Some companies are OK with breaking even or even losing money on their PPC spends, due to the fact that there could be ancillary benefits to increasing your traffic (i.e. Long-term value, repeat visitors, etc.). PPC is a great way to gauge the actually conversion rate of your website versus the competition. In the PPC environment, the consumer is given choice, so it’s imperative to “convert” this traffic into acquisitions. And if you can’t convert them get them to leave their contact info with you via newsletter signups and exit pops. PPC can really grow over time, and should be a constant focus of improving the depth and effectiveness of the ads and keywords you are using. Targeting landing page content to the actual search phrase is a great way to improve conversion rates. Test and retesting ads and landing pages to increase conversion rates should be a constant focus of your company. You website is NEVER done being improved. It’s always a work in progress tha should be a constant focus of your company.

So many people and companies under-estimate affiliate marketing and how powerful it is. They seem to know it’s a necessary form of driving traffic but don’t have a clear grasp on how to grow a productive affiliate program or what the potential really is. Very few people actually know how to really grow a hugely productive affiliate program, so there is a lot of mystique to the industry. That’s why outsourced affiliate management companies have evolved…to fill this need in the online marketplace. The one problem is very few of them actually know how to recruit affiliates and management them properly to turn the greatest percentage possible into producers. A lot of it boils down to proactive and effective management from the stand-point of enabling your affiliates to produce sales with tools and ideas. Assuming that your affiliates know what they are doing is a problem, you should be contact them and acertaining their level of online marketing experience. Once you know their level of ability you can work with them on whatever level they are on currently to attain a higher level of affiliate production and traffic driving. Most affiliate managers don’t know much about HTML, PHP, SEO, content management or keyword research. It takes more than just an energetic marketing grad to take you affiliate program to another level. You have to have serious knowledge of html, seo, ppc and other acronymns that will allow you to impart practical knowledge to your affiliate base. Tagible tools and tips that can be put into play and show results are what’s going to grow your affiliate program to reach it’s potential. Also, being a super nice and friendly affiliate manager that is always there to help and seriously wants to get to know each affiliate personally is part of the key. Of course, I recommend hiring an experienced outsourced affiliate program mangement company like Experience Advertising to acheive this for your company. You should have a strong desire to be in the affiliate space before working with us. Affiliate marketing is a long-term strategy with short-term gains. So starting down the right path from the get go is crucial. Let us know if we can help you attain your affiliate marketing goals. Contact Experience Advertising today for a free consultation.

He is my attempt to strategically get ranked in the search engines for a term like seocontest2008 which is fairly easy now but in a few days wont be! If you are looking for an seo contest than this is the seocontest for you for 2008. What could be more ideal then a friendly competition for rankings for a new search term. This is a really great idea and I hope to win the new seocontest2008 and take home the prise money. Go out and register for the 2008 seo contest and start attempting to break into the rankings for seocontest2008.

UK Webmaster World SEO Contest

Hey everyone just wanted to let you know that our new site CJAffiliate.com has launched and will start being built out this weekend!

Everyone knows that it’s good to have a lot of websites linking to your website on a one-way basis. The search engines generally tend to view these links as a favorable vote that your website is worthy of linking to. The general consensus is that you want related sites linking to your site, but this isn’t always mandatory. Good quality sites that have good rankings in Google and a good amount of their own inbound links are the types of sites you ideally want linking to you. Another very important factor is the actual words in the hyperlink, ie the “anchor text.” The anchor text gives the search engines an idea of the topic of your site. It is generally desirable to have various popular keywords that pertain to your site in your anchor text, but the majority of your links shoulds refer to the most popular topic of your site. For example, if you site is an online shopping mall, you want the sites linking to you to use “Online Shopping” as their anchor text the majority of the time. Of course you don’t always have control of what anchor text a site is using to link to yours. That’s not an issue at all, but expected but the search engines.

There are a couple of really easy ways to get relavant inbound links to your site for free. You can submit your site to online directories. This is a manual process but worth the effort. Make sure each title and description of your site is differently worded on each directory. There are literally thousands of online directories you can submit to. Go to Google and type in “Health Directory” or whatever your site is about to find directories to submit to. Another killer way the get free inbound links is to join online forums, ie message boards, related to your site topic. When you join forums, you are able to put your site’s URL in your profile. You can also setup a hyperlink in your Signature. This means that everytime you post on the forum you get a free link from your signature. This is a trmendously good strategy for acquiring related inbound links. These are but a few tips on gaining inbound links to your site. Now go out and start posting on forums! Make sure you are making valuable contributions to the forum or you may get banned.

Experience Advertising has signed ECNResearch.com to handle all of their affiliate marketing activities. This includes managing and recruiting to build their affiliate program. ECNResearch is one of top online survey companies and has been one of the largest for several years. Experience Advertising will also provide creative services as well as partnership recruiting for ECN. We are very please to welcome ECNResearch into the Experience Advertising family of clients! If you would like to form a partnership with ECN Research, please contact: evan@experienceadvertising.com.

My favorite netowrking site, LinkedIn, could be the gobbled up by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. This would be a great acquisition in my opinion due to the fact that LinkedIn is the best social network for business users out there. I have always loved this site, I have over 1000 connections and 60+ recommendations. Referring people to my LinkedIn profile add quite a bit of credibility to company, so let see if it happens…

There are many great affiliate programs to choose from. Most affiliates are members of several hundred affiliate programs at once. Via Commission Junction or Linkshare, affiliate can join a multitude of affiliate programs at once and then choose the ones they want to promote. Its hard to narrow it down to a few affiliate programs, there many excellent programs out there to choose from. Some of the best performing affiliate programs are in the industries of home improvement, health insurance, ebay items, online dating, surveys, loans and mortages, and many others. If you would like to join good affiliate programs sign up for the merchants listed on this website or ask me for recommendations.

Good SEO is not hard to attain…here are a few principles to follow to make sure your site is properly optimized for the search engines. I only concern myself with Google, Yahoo, and MSN, as this is where the bulk of the search traffic is coming from. Make sure to have good unique meta-tags on every page of your site. This is the Title Tag, Keyword Tag, and Description Tag of the HTML that makes up your site. If you site is in PHP or ASP using include files, you can have your site coded to display the article title in those meta fields. You also have the ability to bypass the header include and manually insert meta-tags in any particular page of your site. You should strive to add as much unique content to your site as possible and do so on a daily basis. Using a content management system (CMS) is vital to making daily content publishing a reality for your site. Google especially loves to see fresh new articles and posts about related topics going up frequently. The more frequently you publish, the more frequently the spiders will comeback to grab new content for their database. Republishing articles from other sources is OK but it shouldn’t be the bulk of the content being pushed live. Make sure to make a sitemap or using a linking structure so all your pages can be found by the robots and spiders. That’s it for now!