Session Description: This session is a quick moving brain dump of how to use the most advanced powerful tools to help you with SEO. Expect to learn how you can walk out and use several SEO tools to grow revenues today.  The speaker was:

• Wil Reynolds, Associate, SEER Interactive (Twitter @wilreynolds)

I’d never previously had the chance to hear Wil speak, despite meeting him a few times.  It always seemed poorly matched up against other sessions that were more relevant to me as an affiliate manager.  This time I made sure to make it to Wil’s session, and I was NOT disappointed.  He’s an SEO genius and did, in fact, give us tools that I used TODAY!

Bullet Point Review!

• Tool: Google Insights
• Tool: Microsoft Advertising Intelligence (Formerly MSN adCenter Add-in for Excel)
• Watch your bounce rates, because even if keywords rank this is a problem.
• Always check Google Trends for the keywords.
• Evaluate bounce rates daily for each keywords (this catches problems quickly)
  • SEER did this for a client and caught a page 1 ranked keyword with a bounce rate sometimes as high as 80%)
  • Home page was ranked for the product search instead of a product page.
• Ranking is a big distraction.
• If you are analyzing search engine performance by where you rank you would never have caught the issue – analyze SEO by more than just rankings.
• Tool: Microsoft adCenter Labs Audience Intelligence – remember to search for singular keywords and plurals.
• Affiliates need to know research vs. commercial queries to help convert traffic.
• Marketers need to know what kind of message to put in front of people when searching.
• Plural tends to convert much better, but is not a hard & fast rule.
• Know the flaws before you use any tool so you know how far to trust the data.
• Yahoo Keyword Suggest is better than Google’s because it’s a general phrase match and not a character match.
• A 40 to 60 ratio isn’t enough to suggest a strong patter – go for closer to 30 to 70.
• Look for the queries highly skewed to one side or the other (commercial v. noncommercial) & look for high degrees of confidence from the engines.
• Test against your own data set on keywords that are currently ranking well before using the tool so you knoe how far to trust the data.
• You have to look at things through a marketing lens and not just take the word of the tool’s data.
• Affiliates need to take advantage of hot keywords because they can move much faster than larger corporations.
• Major competitive advantage: big companies move slow.  Their inability to act for mid/long tail/hot keywords = opportunities for you.
• Don’t look back too far because trends rapidly change.  Look at more current data sets, around 30 days old at most.
• Check out the Rising Searches area towards the bottom in Google Insights to see what trends are on the rise.
• Don’t go back more than a year data-wise, unless you’re looking for seasonal trends.
• How is a product getting hot?  How do you rank for it?
  • Try moving it up one level in the hierarchy of the site – possibly link from homepage in a hot product section.
• Top 200 products no more than 2 clicks from home page.
• Suits = slow = opportunity for you
• Google’s algorithm seems to be favoring large brands more and more; you’ve got to find ways to compete.  Lots of ideas at blogstorm.co.uk
• Link building is about exposure to stimuli.
• You can’t have all the ideas – you need a Spark.  Put yourself in a position to have great ideas.
  • Install Greasemonkey script in Firefox.
  • Install Twitter Search Results on Google for Greasemonkey
  • It’s about being exposed to things that will trigger your brain to a link building opportunity.
• Tool: Google Trends Hot Trends
• Paid Tool: SEOmoz Labs – has a graphical representation of links.
• Put plug-ins and stuff at the bottom of the HTML code in case they hang up loading so they don’t stop everything else from loading.
• Wikipedia links help.
• Paid Tool: Hub Finder from SEO Book
• Tool: SeoQuake
• Seed Keywords allows you to find scenarios if you’re having an interal battle over which keywords would work best.
• Google Universal Search’s thumbnail pictures will definitely start to influence clicks in search.

Questions were really peppered in throughout the presentation, and Wil didn’t get to all his slides but promised they’d be made available and any links would be shared through Twitter if asked.  It was a terrific session and I learned a ton that I’m ready to go back and start using now! For your benefit, here’s the presentation:

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As the first course of the conference yesterday, I’m sure there was a lot of pressure for this hour and fifteen minutes to really set the tone for the three days of Commission Junction University.  Titled “Affiliate Marketing 101: Back to the Basics”, I attended hoping to maybe pick up some things I didn’t actually know considering I taught a lot of the basics to myself a couple years back.  The speaker was:

• Jeremy Palmer, President, QuitYourDayJob.com

I converse with & follow him on twitter and I’ve heard great things about his last projects The Black Ink Projects and Black Ink 2, although haven’t had a chance to check it out myself.  I won’t know until Thursday if this session really did set the appropriate tone for the conference or not, but it was definitely worth my attendance!

Bullet Point Review!

• Choose Your Niche
  • The niche you choose should be your passion – it’s the easiest foundation to build upon.
  • Know a lot about your niche to be successful.
• Develop a Business Plan
  • Put together a SWOT analysis for you AND your closest competitors – their weaknesses can be your opportunities.
  • Just make it a simple spreadsheet.
  • Have a unique selling proposition.  It’s not enough to just copy someone else, you have to see what they’re doing and how you can do it better.
  • Learn about the customer persona.
  • Inventory your own skills objectively – what can you do yourself and what would you be best served by outsourcing?
• Write Value Added Content
  • Start writing content before you design your site.
  • Content is the key to the site.
  • Have 10-15 pages of content before you launch to improve Quality Score.
• Design Your Site
  • You must have professional tools to create a professional site.
  • Be objective about your experience and consider outsourcing.
  • TOOL: 99Designs for design contests – you only pay for the winner, and you pay much less.
• Develop Your Site
  • Outsourcing programming can be done on Elance or oDesk quite effectively.
  • Be sure to write extremely detailed specifications on what you want the site to do and how it should be done when using outsourced talent.
  • With these services you can escrow your payment so that no money is released until certain milestones are done – and done to your satisfaction.
• Test the Waters with PPC
  • Google hates “rich pages” (also referred to as “thin landing pages”) where the only intent is a conversion.
  • Google recently updated their algorithms and human QC when assigning Quality Scores, so be sure to read up.
  • Essentially Google wants you to develop your own content: they want independent reviews, content not found directly on the merchant’s website, and the comparison of several merchants.
  • Many affiliates have had good success with video reviews because they resonate more with consumers.
  • Remember that Google isn’t the only game in town – test on Yahoo & MSN to discover what works in terms of keywords and ad copy.
• Test & Optimize
  • Look at conversions using keywords.
  • TOOLS: Tracking 202 (free), Prosper 202 (free), Optimize My Site (paid), Google Website Optimizer (free).
  • Pay equal attention to conversion rate and click through rate.
  • Don’t use vague or hype laden copy – it won’t convert well.
  • Split test your landing pages.
• Build a Sustainable Business.
  • Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
  • You want to thrive without Google just in case.
  • Facebook Ads are growing with better ROI.
  • Remember the viral marketing element (what can you do that people will pass on?)
  • You want to be who people will think of when they think of your niche.
  • Create a brand for yourself.
• Random Tips
  • Some books to check out: Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin & Malcolm Gladwell and The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, & David Weinberger.
  • When doing product comparisons, try throwing in a weaker competitor to enhance the value of the better products.
  • DO NOT use the standard Wordpress template when adding a blog to your site – make sure it looks like the rest of your site.
  • Comparison pages only need to be very simple tables.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• Mobile has great opportunities for merchants and advertisers, but it’s hard for affiliates.  People are not (yet) likely to use mobile devices to make purchases.
• Outsourcing content?  Elance is ok but Jeremy expressed some displeasure with what he’s got from that site.  An audience member suggested PR Newswire and searching for keywords to find experts.
  • My own suggestion is to try going to LinkedIn & looking for experts to approach for writing.
• Go where the good designers and writers hang out to find them – when you go to freelancing sites you’re getting the people who might be hard up for work and not that great of results.
• In regards to CJ, pay a lot of attention to the Network Earnings bar.
• Once your site’s Quality Score tanks, you’re done.  You have to start over with a new site because there’s no way to get that back.

Jeremy did an excellent job mixing up the experience level of the information he put forth, knowing instinctively that most people attending wouldn’t quite be at the 101 education level in regards to affiliate marketing.

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Pay Per Click (PPC):

• A program where an affiliate receives a commission for each click they refer to a merchant’s website.  PPC offers some of the lowest commissions and high conversion ratio since visitors need to only click on a link to earn the affiliate a commission.

The most common search engine utilizing PPC is Google AdWords, however some PPC affiliates are also fond of Yahoo and MSN due to the lack of saturation of the market there.  The downside is that not as many consumers are using Yahoo or MSN to search than Google.  Some of the most successful super affiliates are PPC affiliates.

PPC is the core of search engine marketing (SEM).

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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine

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