Aug 28
Over the past few days I purchased a couple of Adwords courses. I havent quite finished going through all of them but I just thought I’d share my findings. If you’ve signed up to Adwords specific mailing lists then you would have received promotional emails promoting Commission Blueprint. I received about 4 emails from different people promoting it and I’m a big fan of videos so I checked out the video link. I was kinda drawn into it and was curious about what it could offer so I signed up. It was a one off $77 cost.
The course basically consists of a pdf manual, landing page templates and 14 or so videos. I’ve bought my fair share of Adwords courses over the past 2 years and am aware of the quality of a lot of them. Some very good…most just rehashed basic material. I’m not going to provide links as I wanted my review of these courses to be as unbiased as possible. Courses are not cheap and especially to us Malaysians so I wanted to provide you with a list of courses that were really worth the money.\ Read the rest of this entry »
Aug 20
We’ve all heard about Google’s duplicate content penalty but how does this affect PPC affiliate marketers?
I bought an adwords course and the expert on the call talked about a little about this so am just going to share what I learnt. Don’t want to get into trouble with the owner of the course so am not going to disclose it here..anyway here’s what I learnt from the course.
‘If you have multiple landing pages with only slight differences between them then just select one as your control page and insert a no crawl code into the rest of the similar landing pages so they don’t get crawled by the Google bot’
I haven’t done this yet but in my experience (can’t say for sure but…) most of my landing pages were hit either because the design was similar to another advertiser or it focused primarily on making a sale. Anyway most of my landing pages are unique and use PHP code to dynamically insert the new keyword into the landing page instead of creating 100s of landing page. Its easier maintenance with PHP. This way when I need to make a change to a link or image etc I just need to change one page instead of all of em….
Aug 20
I’ve just gone through some of the comments and since I haven’t been updating my blog some of the comments are from way back. Sorry about that. I’ve just been so busy 
Instead of answering each of them separately…since some of the questions are fairly similar I’ll try and answer them here. If you have anymore questions just send me more comments and I’ll reply accordingly. Now that I have improved on my time management I’ll have more time to work on my blog. Here goes…
1) Do I direct linking to the merchant or use landing pages?
I tend to use landing pages a lot more. There was a time when I was doing really well with direct linking but the problem is Google’s one URL policy. A new advertiser came along and bid through the roof. My ad was then shoved off in favour of the better performing ad. An alternative is to cloak your URL using an iframe but its against Google’s policy and after reading in forums about the masses who’ve been banned or suspended from Adwords I just don’t want to take the chance.
2) How do I get content for my landing pages?
I hire a ghost writer to write a whole bunch of articles related to the niche I’m promoting. These are mostly short 500 word articles.
3) How many pages of content do I have on my landing pages?
It varies from 5-20 pages and they consists of Privacy Policy, Contact Us and some related articles.
4) How to contact me personally?
I’ll put a contact me form ony my blog so you can email me directly.
5) Hows my Adsense project doing?
Well…I’ve found that traffic to my blog seems to be directly related to updating of content. I haven’t updated my Adsense site in awhile and my traffic has dropped to about 300 uniques a day from 1000. I’ve noticed before that when I update the content, the traffic seems to increased probably due to the increase in rankings of my site on search engines. I haven’t quite monitored it (and i know i should) but am pretty much focused on my CPA offers instead. My Adsense earnings are now about $0.4 a day.
Aug 18
Hello all and in case you were wondering…no I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth. Yes its been a long while since I last updated my blog and with good reason. Yup you guessed it alright. Google’s been keeping me busy. I can’t recall exactly when the avalanche of Google slaps started but I believe it was in March and I’ve constantly been hit every other month since then. I’ve been busy rebuilding landing pages and trying to find exactly out what Google wants.
Google is basically a huge black hole. You kinda know what makes them happy when it comes to affiliate advertisers (emphasis on ‘kinda’) but you never know exactly what. I’ve build content sites around my landing pages with unique content and yet boom…I’m hit with $10 bids. The only thing I can think of is that I haven’t really been constantly adding new unique content to these sites. I was always too busy looking into new niches that I never quite focused on that.
There came a point where I decided to leave Google and just focus on the other search engines. I tried to build up campaigns on Yahoo but I just couldn’t get the same amount of traffic as I had from Google. So I finally decided to stick by Google and take the bull by its horns. I have built some new landing pages and am gonna update them on a weekly basis. Let’s see how they hold up this time.
I’ve also been focusing a lot on CPA offers. They convert at a much higher rate and also I get to test out a market pretty quickly. Unlike other campaigns I don’t have to wait till 200-300 clicks before I determine that the niche is not working. Any keyword that doesn’t convert in 20 clicks is basically outta there. For the rest of the year my plan is to focus on improving my existing Clickbank campaigns and expanding into more CPA offers. Will keep ya posted…..
Mar 19
Phew - I’ve been busy busy busy! The dreaded Google slap is back - and did a lot of damage indeed. 3 of my campaigns were hit BIG time with $10 bids. Those domains are now useless despite the fact that all my landing pages were mini sites on their own. Oh well - I guess they just weren’t good enough. Am not completed back on track yet but am getting there. In fact I’ve learnt quite a few valuable lessons from this. Will get to that shortly. In the meantime this is what I did to get my campaigns back up and running (mind you - its easy to just transfer over your content from your slapped domain to a new one and get Great QS for awhile - problem is you haven’t addressed the reason you got slapped in the first place). I’ve attempted to slap proof my campaigns and heres what I did :-
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