News Flash from Dr. Glenn Livingston of Rocket Clicks:

I got word from several affiliate marketers that Google dropped the hammer today on affiliate review pages. Many pages went from quality scores of 10 -> 1 overnight. And these were NOT skinny sites, rather well build out, consistently updated blogs with good navigation above the fold, xml site maps, high click through, hyper-relevant keyword mapping, low bounce rates, long average time on page … everything else Google loves.

When we analyzed which pages survived, and we take it in combination with other information, it seems pretty clear they’ve added code which screens for affiliate links on the landing pages.

At the moment it seems cloaking and PHP redirects are untouched, … but I can’t imagine these are far behind. (I’m guessing they’re just avoiding this in order to decrease their server burden … takes some CPU cycles to visit every link on the page and evaluate for affiliate code)

I’d say it’s safe to conclude Google’s on the war path against affiliate review sites, and we should be advising clients towards a different business model… at minimum it seems necessary to avoid placing affiliate links on landing pages, but ideally, I think people need to move towards a deeper list building/relationship building strategy and/or a strong e-commerce model.

Time to stop “building on sand”.

Glenn

Many affiliates make their living creating product review sites.

Many product review sites are trash.

Many times the affiliates don’t even own the product and it’s a big pump and dump.

Savvy web surfers quickly recognize these sites and don’t trust their advice. Worse yet, it tarnishes the reputation of even a good product, because it’s cheesy and sleazy.

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This strategy is one we use in our “5-Day eBusiness Success Clinics” as we teach people how to build a fully functioning online business from scratch in five days or less.

Our students come into our clinics without even a product idea — and they leave five days later with a website that’s getting great traffic and already making sales in many cases.

And a key strategy that allows our students to set up their businesses so quickly is using Google AdWords to build a huge list of potential customers before the product is created.

Not only that… it’s a great way to confirm the success of your business idea before your website is even ready!

Here’s how you can implement this effective strategy yourself…

1. Create a keyword-targeted landing page

You’ve done your keyword research — using a great tool like Keyword Discovery or BeBiz of course — and you know people are searching for information related to your product idea.

… Now it’s time to put those keywords to the test!

How do you do this? You create a simple web page that addresses the need people are demonstrating when they perform searches on your top keywords — and promise them a solution to that need.

For example, let’s say one of your top keyword phrases is, “how to teach child to play guitar.”

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All the products that you want to sell online are ready. You have already signed up with the Google Adsense program or with other affiliate marketing programs or you have your own product that you created and you have already prepared the ad you want to post on your affiliate’s site. Your mind is now set to being the next most successful online entrepreneur.

But is there anything else that you might have forgotten to prepare? Maybe not, but how about your landing pages? Are they all set for your business? Landing pages are simply web pages where visitors are directed to whenever they click a result in a web search or whenever they click a web ad.

For affiliate marketing, landing pages would refer to the web page where you, as a merchant, would want your potential customer to be directed after clicking your ad on your affiliate’s website. Landing pages are, at most times, nothing really different from other web pages in a particular website, especially if the said website is an e-commerce site. Read the rest of this entry

Pay per click offers you the opportunity to put together different controls that you can test to see which ad you put together performs the best. Now this really doesn’t take all that much extra time, but it is surprising to me how few do it. When your working with pay-per click campaigns, this is an essential step to get the most out of your dollars spent. This is all about getting the clicks and converting those clicks, and since we as online marketers I working the numbers game don’t you think that it is worth the time?

Google Adwords is, in my eyes anyway, the most under utilized tool that you have available for getting instant traffic to your site and split testing your Ads and landing pages, only improves your income. Most of the changes you would make typically are subtle changes that make a big differences. Split testing is the key to winning the AdWords game. And the faster you can split test and learn and improve, the more likely you are to become the dominant player in your market. Read the rest of this entry