I just posted a great page on Google's Supplimental Index with an explaination of what it is and how to avoid it. And if you can't avoid it, then how to get out of it.
To get access to the page, you need to be a member of my Private Posts group.
By beoming a member of my Private Posts group, you gain access to my hardcore SEOknowledge and Affiliate Marketingtips.
To Get Tips on SEO, Design and Affiliate Marketing … Subscribe Now!
It's the big yellow box to the right above my Affiliate Blogger image.
Want to be an affiliate for eBay? I did, and when I went to find out how to hook-up it was not easy to find the right information. So, I thought I would help make this process a whole lot easier for other affiliates.
First you will need to sign-up at Commission Junction as an affiliate for eBay.
The RSS Feed Generator is an easy way for affiliates to generate RSS feeds that include trackable links to items. The RSS Feed Generator has been embedded into eBay Advanced Search and allows affiliates to create feeds that meet predefined search criteria.
You can generate feeds in three simple steps:
- Go to the Advanced Search page.
- Enter the search criteria that you want the RSS feeds to satisfy
- Enter your affiliate tracking information at the bottom of the page and click Submit.
The Search results page includes an RSS feed. The item links in the RSS feed includes your affiliate tracking information.
Now, click on Create RSS Feeds to get started on creating eBay feeds for your website or blog. I use Magpie RSS reader code to read in my rss feeds.
I also came across a nice post by SuperAff.com called The Poor Man's eBay RSS to WordPress Hack that offers you some other options. So, here's what SuperAff had to say….
Here’s an eBay workaround I’ve found that helps make affiliate life a little easier:
Install and activate the firstRSS WordPress Plugin. This will allow you to display RSS feeds within your WordPress posts.
Tip #1: Open the firstRSS.php file and change the cache_time to something like 30 minutes so that your eBay listings will always be fresh. Also change the items_limit to a reasonable amount–eBay’s lowest search results option is 25. I don’t know about you, but a blog post with 25 auction items displayed isn’t all that appealing.
Tip #2: You can choose to display both pictures & auction titles/information or just the auction titles.
eBay RSS Feed Generator: Generate the rss feed for the items you want to display within your WordPress posts.
Tip: Because the feed isn’t going to refresh every second, set the listings to end in more than 1 hour (found in eBay’s advanced search area) so your visitors will always view live auctions from your blog.
When you’re wanting to display auction results within a post, simply insert [rsspara:URL] or [rsslist:URL] within your blog post where you want the ebay auction results to display. Replace the URL with the ebay rss feed url. To display all the auction info, use rsspara, rsslist displays the titles only.
Benefits: Highly targeted ebay items are displayed within your blog posts since you can get very specific with your search terms. This method also keeps your juicy data private since you’re not using a third party feed display setup.
Drawback: It takes time to go to eBay, make your search & create your rss feed. Not much time, but it still has a lot of room for more automation.
Solution: I created my own WordPress Quicktag for eBay RSS results (read here how to do that). Now all I have to do is click my eBay quicktag when writing a blog post and simply edit the search phrase to what I want.
If you’d like to grab my copy of the quicktag hack, here’s the file: eBay Quicktag. Just save it as quicktags.js and upload to wp-includes/js folder.
Important: Make sure to change the afcj=12345 to your Commission Junction affiliate PID to afcj=yournumber.
The eBay quicktag displays in front of the “more” quicktag. You can move that wherever you want.
When writing a post, simply click the eBay quicktag to insert the rss ebay code. Change “insert+keywords+here” to whatever auction search results you want displayed (remember to use + between each word).
Customization Tip: You can create a special div to wrap around the rss code. For example: Have an ad box that aligns to the right of the page within the post that just lists the auction headings. Have the background a different shade than the rest of the blog post. The sky’s the limit . Simply include the
in the quicktag info so that it’s automatically included and add the div to your CSS file.
I just received an email that made me laugh out loud … and I had to share. Everyone needs a good belly laugh once in a while. Here's the email with a few private informational parts removed:
This email is to notify you that you have made a sale.
You have earned $0.01 in commission for this sale, which was placed by (I removed the name here).
This will be added to your total commissions for this month.
To verify your stats online please visit ….
Please note that this sale and commission is based on the approval of the order and receipt of funds. If the order cannot be confirmed, or funds are not received, your commission account will be updated accordingly.
If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us.
AC Support
Affiliate Classroom
For the record, my affiliate links to AC are more about helping other marketers. So, no I wasn't planning on getting rich off this. The funds earned will go to supporting my work on the Affiliate Guild, where I'm tying to help newbie affiliates get going in this business. But still … this is pretty funny!
You can now target your PayPerPost (PPP) campaigns based on Google PR, Alexa score and topic and domain.
It's getting a lot of thumbs up from the advertisers. Honestly, I like it, but not sure if they will be able to pull it off or not. I recently ran an ad with PayPerPost where I was very detailed about what I wanted, but still a very easy post to make for the publishers. I guess because I was so specific I didn't get even one taker.
I chalked it up being a little more focused on who I wanted posts from. Like I wouldn't accept any MySpace and I wanted PR3 or higher. I asked for the bloggers to some how be related to the niche I was campaigning for. So basically, I'd already narrowed myself … and for that, I got zip.
My guess is that the publishers will need to get educated and come around to what the advertisers want if they want to get paid for posting. Otherwise, it's best to just enjoy your blog and forget the PPP aspect. PayPerPost's move towards segmentation is a clue that the blog advertising market is heading in a new direction.
Affiliate Blogger posts and articles are all over the Internet as resources and helpful tips for the success of other affiliates, but this blog … my Affiliate Blogger blog … is my home-base where I bring all those tools and tips together in one place.
I also have the Affiliate Guild, where I offer a ton of educational materials for new affiliates and tools to make the process easier. A lot of those tools are totally free, as are most of the affiliate classrooms and materials.
My personal goal is to help others get started in Affiliate Marketing, and not have to learn the hard way like I did.
Things are much easier these days, and then again with all the changes in technologies happening so freaking fast … maybe in some ways it's harder. That's why I take the time to create thoughtful posts as the Affiliate Blogger … to try and help you stay up with the trends of Internet Marketing.
One of the biggest trends is the movement towards more use of video, and especially interactive video. I've found an awesome tool for you and gotten a great reduction in the pricing to offer as well. It's not free, but it's close to it.
The tool is called Screen Show Pro and it's an inexpensive screen capture tool similar to Camista. Only difference is that Camista will cost you $299 and Screen Show Pro will cost you $29 … this is a keeper!
I'm using Screen Show Pro to build my interactive videos for my various Internet businesses. I'm liking it a lot!
After I made my videos, I joined the new interactive video community sitecalled FreeIQ. It's free to join and gives both a venue to distribute your videos, as well as your products, services and affiliate links.
FreeIQ is full of helpful and informative educational materials and products … many of which are for free.
Visit my FreeIQ website … http://freeiq.com/bobbiegrennier to learn more about all of this because the Internet is quickly moving towards a video rich world and you need to be a part of it to be successful.
No longer is content king. Now it's all about entertainment and video education.
MyBlogLog ranks amongst the best in social networking sites, helping to increase your traffic and your social circle.
They provide a dynamic interface that helps their members to build professional and personal relationships.
You can get to know members who visit your profile page and website/blogs.
MyBlogLog offers widgets for your website/blog that shows their visitors to your site.
How MyBlogLog help its members:
● Helps your blog presence irrespective of posts.
● Better personal relationship with your readers and to the authors of your favorite blogs.
● It's a nice SEO tool as well.
● Encourages participation in blogs, and encourages new visitors.
● If people find your blog interesting, they join your community.
I really appreciate the MyBlogLog visitors to my blog!
Joining solid affiliate programs is a good start. But the affiliate program is usually only going to give you banner ads and text ads … most don't provide the content part.
Here's my advice, do a search on "free rewrite articles." Pick an article repository, go there, search on your keywords … not sure what they are for you, but an example would be "music" … be as specific in the keywords as you can. Music might be too general.
Grab yourself some articles. You must publish articles with the author's signature at the bottom. Give credit for the content where credit is due.
Now, keep yourself out of trouble with Google. You have to write some content too. You need to have about 20-40% of the content on the page be unique. On every page!
So, if I were you I'd write a few paragraphs about the article's topic, maybe getting a little focused on the keywords you're going for on that page. Definately use your keywords as the anchor text for the affiliate program's links.
Meaning, if you're talking about electric guitars on a page and have an article on electric guitars, then in the part you write, link the words "electric guitars" to the affiliate program's link to their electric guitars. See?
You can't touch the content of the author's article. It's a matter of honor on that reguard. It's your way of valuing that author giving you free content.
Basically, you're writing an intro to the article and you need to make a clear distinction between what you're writing and what the other guy wrote. This should resolve your content issues for now.
It's a lot of work, but that's how it's done. Dig in!
Currently, I don't offer any one-on-one tutoring at Affiliate Guild … yet! If you guys think that's something I should do sooner rather than later, then let me know. I would have to charge a fee, but I also could keep it reasonable. Affiliate Guild has a complete school already in place, so it's not that hard to do.
You might have read my posts about the Affiliate Marketers Bootcamp. Taking this course is really helping me to be more aware of what the newer affiliate's needs are. It's all information I already know, but it's always good to hear it again. I'll be blogging and posting about things I think could benefit others. Maybe some of that will help you as well?!
I get a lot of emails from all sorts of Marketers. I don't post that much about those emails because, well frankly most of them are just spammy crap.
Once in a blue moon I'll get one that's really got some merit to it, and then I'll share it with you.
Your readership is valuable to me. I value your attention to the posts I blog about, and it's that attention that's given rise to the post I'm doing today.
There's a lot of discussion that we're heading into a new age of Online Marketing, pushing Permission-based Marketing to its limits.
A fairly well known marketer named Rich Schefren has released a new report called Attention Age Doctrine. This report outline's his predicitions for the near future of Online Marketing.
Like you, I said to myself … Oh great, another get rich quick scheme being hatched. I don't know about you, but I'm so sick of those tired old pitches full of hype and BS.
I decided to sign-up for Rich's free report and see what he had to say. I was expecting the same old song and dance, but that's not what I got. I was plesantly surprised.
Oh sure, there's a bit of that hype and zeal that marketers use, but there's also some meat to this dish … and it's worth the read. Very much worth the read.
If you look at Rich's list of clients, it's a "who's who" list of the top online marketers. Rich has been around awhile and has spawned some of the most widely used marketing strategies online to date.
Many of these online marketers are still doing business using traditional techniques, but they are listening to Rich's counsel and I can see how many of them are heading in this new direction that Rich's report outlines.
For the last month Rich has been writing his new Advisory report. It's called The Attention Age Doctrine.
The Attention Age Doctrine talks about the new environment of the Internet and where the Market is heading. I think he's dead-on in his analysis.
SimpleTuition Debuts Affiliate Program For Organizations Looking To Share Student Loan Comparison Research
Tuesday November 14, 10:27 am ET
Innovative Referral Program Allows Donations to Educational Charitable Organizations
BOSTON, Nov. 14 /PRNewswire/ — SimpleTuition, Inc. (http://www.simpletuition.com), a company dedicated to helping students and parents make sense of education financing choices, today announced the launch of its new Affiliate Partner Program. Available today at http://www.simpletuition.com/friend, the program is open to high school guidance officers, personal financial planners and advisors, as well as professional and student organizations and others that wish to offer objective third-party student loan comparison and research.
As a SimpleTuition Affiliate Partner, organizations that refer parents and students to the SimpleTuition web site for advice will earn a reward for each new visitor that uses the SimpleTuition solution to compare student loans and then clicks through to a lender's loan application site. For non-profit partners and public schools, SimpleTuition is planning to offer the option of donating the referral reward to an educational charity, thereby avoiding any conflicts of interest. A first for referral programs, SimpleTuition is working with leading educational charities, who all share a common vision of helping students and their families attend college, to make this a reality.
"Every year hundreds of thousands of students and parents receive advice and conflicting recommendations from friends, family, co-workers and other advisors about how to best research and manage student loan finances," said Kevin Walker, co-founder and CEO of SimpleTuition. "Since launching SimpleTuition, numerous parents have been telling us how desperate they are for a resource that offers a clear and easy way to understand their student loan options. When they hear of SimpleTuition, they want to tell all their friends. With that in mind, we created the partner program."
According to the recent College Board report, caps for federal student loans are not keeping up with inflation, yet tuition costs keep rising, up 35% from five years ago. With the cost of college at an all-time high — projected to reach $220 billion this year, $86 billion of which will be financed by students or their parents — families nationwide now require multiple loans each year to pay for college. Many are desperate for a clear, concise and easy-to-use resource to help find the best student loan options.
Currently, nearly twenty organizations have already joined the SimpleTuition Affiliate Program. Designed for all types of educational support organizations, partners can choose from three options:
Partners who want to be able to share student loan information can link directly to SimpleTuition
Affiliate partners who want to send SimpleTuition applicants (first-time visitors that open a student loan application with one of SimpleTuition's lending partners) receive a referral commission
Colleges, universities and other organizations can request a customized solution that integrates with their web site
The amount of information on student loans is overwhelming with many different types of loans from various lenders; each with different options, including fees, repayment plans, total loan amount, consolidation options, credit strength scores and FAFSA eligibility in some cases. SimpleTuition allows users to compare multiple financing options from a variety of lenders that can be sorted by monthly payment, total cost of the loan, number of payments, fees and APR. SimpleTuition is not a lender.
About SimpleTuition, Inc.
Founded in 2005, SimpleTuition is dedicated to helping students and parents make sense of education financing choices. Recently featured in FastCompany.com's top 12 innovative websites for Web 2.0, SimpleTuition is the only company to offer an independent and objective solution for researching and comparing parent, private, GradPLUS and federal loans. SimpleTuition is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts and is funded by Atlas Venture and IDG Ventures Boston. For more information visit http://www.SimpleTuition.com.
Affiliate Marketers Bootcamp is taught by James Martell, and let me say that it is a good class for the very new to Affiliate Marketing. If you don't know how to make web pages, if you don't know how to do web hosting, if you're not a good writer or good at making graphics … then, this is the class for you.
James shows his students how to do all of these things and how to find the people who do it, if you don't. He shows his students some tools that make it possible for a complete newbie to step into the publishing world on the Internet.
For me it was the distinction that James made clear, that he is teaching "publishing" and not "web design" that really drove home the difference between James and myself. James is a web publisher, who has learned some skills about web design through the years. I am a webmaster and a web publisher, so for me some of what James had to say would not equate to my world-view on Affiliate Marketing … but makes perfect sense in his world.
Affiliate Bootcamp had a heavy emphasis on Google ads with some affiliate programs tossed in. I had hoped there would have been more on the affiliate program side of things, but maybe that's left for an advanced class someday. Datafeeds were explained only in so much as to what one does on your website, not how to actually do it. I definitely see this as advanced information that would have been too much for this group of students.
One of the best things James did was to help these newbies understand how to make quality websites that would also convert fairly well. For most of those people, that information was worth the price of admission.
Although I was good in class and kept my mouth shut, I deeply disagreed with James on the topic of SEO. James teaches his students not to have anything to do with SEO, and that means that if they need a writer, they are to find someone who writes without SEO in mind. I don't think there are enough words for me to use to express how much I disagree with that, but considering that I was in a class with mostly newbies … I'll just express my difference of opinion on that one here.
James, if you read this … please chime in and explain why. If I understand your logic, it's basically that a well written article will do the trick without the SEO considerations; what to speak of a room filled with newbies that would only be confused by the whole SEO game.
James gave these newbies a lot of resources to go get tools and content, again that alone was worth the price of admission because he saved them years of finding out this stuff the hard way.
The classroom environment James uses is state-of-the-art and very user friendly. I do wish James had allowed us to chat more before and after classes. I also wish we could have sent each other private messages. He had all those features turned off. It could have been a great opportunity for networking of services and cross-links, but it didn't happen. Shame.
Did James reveal all his tricks? Did he reveal all the good stuff? No, I'm sure he didn't. The advanced Affiliate Marketing knowledge is still something that's yet to peek out from the safe hold. Not too many super affiliates are going to reveal how they do their thing.
James knows far more than what he shared, but his Affiliate Marketers Bootcamp is a solid series of classes for the base beginner. I will recommend it and I'm glad I went through it myself. It was a good review and good for me to see how green the new guys really are.
I enjoyed James Martell a lot. He's a down to earth family man with a dream, a goal and a purpose. He shares his knowledge in ways that allow you to have glimpses into his world. So, he's not afraid for you to get a sense of him. I found his teaching style to be caring and sincere. James is definately not afraid to give you his opinion on things. So, for the newbie students who seek his knowledge, James is a real find for them.
You know another thing I liked about James is that he doesn't spam my email box like some marketers do. His messages are clear and to-the-point. He only sends emails periodically when he has something new to share. I appreciate that a lot and so do most affiliates.
The level of student support I received was exceptional. As a student, me emails were answered in a very timely manner … for which I thank Arlene Martell, his wife. Students were guided every step of the journey through emails and timely autoresponders.
In closing, I'd like to thank the Martell's (and LinkConnector who sponsored me) for allowing me into the Affiliate Marketer's Bootcamp classes. It confirmed for me some of what I do as an affiliate, and I think I will walk away from the experience with some very nice friends and new-found business relationships. Now, let's look to the future!
