Las Vegas, Affiliate Summit West 2010

Filed under: Other — rasim

As I wrote before, this would be my first time going to Vegas. I am leaving early, actually in about 24 hours and will arrive on Thursday, January 14 early in the morning and will be staying in new planet hollywood westgate towers. I hope that I get my tickets to ASW and give myself enough days to explore the city and win/lose some money. :)

As it gets closer to the event, I start seeing more and more parties by affiliates and networks. All of them are RSVP, you can see most of them in Nickycakes ASW party list here. You may also register for Meetup202 here, which is probably going to be fun and full of affiliate marketers as well. I am still thinking which ones to pick and can’t tell for sure if I am going to attend any of them.

Anyway, in case you are getting to Vegas earlier and feel like gambling a bit or just meet and have a drink, contact me using this form or just post a comment with your name and phone number (I am not going to post it). :)

Well, I hope it is going to be a lot of fun, as for now, I still got a bag to pack and get my cameras ready.

Focus on work, stop wasting time

Filed under: Other — rasim

One of the biggest challenges of working from home is time management. Even since I left my job, my schedule got all screwed up. Even though I stay more at the computer, I actually work less. There are too many distractions and removing them should be the primary goal.

My #1 source of wasted time was checking my stats. I was checking my adsense, azoogle, cj, adwords, yahoo marketing, etc. accounts A LOT. :( After a while I just had them opened in a separate browser window and F5 every half an hour. That is a big time waste and don’t do it unless you are trying to optimize your campaign by studying conversion for a particular time of the day. :) Now I just check my stats at 12:00-12:10am every day, spend 10 minutes studying and tracking the conversions and done.

My #2 distractions were instant messengers. I generally use skype, icq, msn and aim. Sometime I would start a conversation with a client/friend/relative and talk most of the day. Not anymore… brb, away and offline statuses are there for me now, adding another hour or so of work time every day.

Email was #3 in my list. Now I try to check it only twice a day, which is more than enough – the first thing in a morning and the last thing before I go to bed. This saves me a lot of time as well.

#4 on my list is web – youtube, blogs, digg, etc… I am still trying to do something about it. :) I try to check those while I have lunch, but still get carried away sometimes… Not to mention that I just don’t feel too motivated on certain days and start checking these again… and again… :( Still a big time waste for me, but I am hoping to limit myself to 30 minutes a day while having my lunch.

#5 source is the general environment. Even though I have a separate office, I find it harder to focus since it is still at home. I can just get up and go grab some snacks or turn on the TV for the news on the background. All of these are the distractions.

#6 is my phone. Usually people don’t call during a day time, but when they are off work, I am still working. Putting my phone in silent mode helps.

These are the main reasons, however, a lot of time I just don’t have enough motivation. I still try to work, but I am not as productive. Usually after forcing myself to work and after a couple of hours I get into code/design/whatever and forget that I was not motivated. The day ends up being productive, unless something from the list above gets on the way. :) For instance, if I get myself focusing on work and an im window pops up, I end up chatting for a few minutes… Then it takes another hour to get back and remember where I was in code and get myself motivated again. buagh… that’s when I get frustrated and can’t get anything done. This is why I usually can’t be reached in any way any time I am working now. Hopefully I can get back to being super productive like I was before by eliminating these distractions.

Focus on one thing at a time. A lot of times I can’t get crap done (or at least it seems that everything stands still) because I try to focus on too many things at once. I code project on one screen, do some research on the other, looking for something else on my laptop, etc. Now I just focus on one thing at a time. Usually after checking my email in the morning, I set a goal of what I intend to get done by the end of the day. This helps to keep the frustration down since I don’t overload myself and motivation up since I know exactly what I need to get done. If I finish early, I just take my time doing something else and end up being super productive.

Working at home is not easy. Set your goals, eliminate the distractions that stand on the way and get motivated. Doesn’t sound complicated, but I couldn’t get anything done by the end of the day without it. :(

Affiliate summit west 2010, I hope to be there

Filed under: Other — rasim

I have never been to Vegas before and affiliate summit was a good reason to go this year. After heavy celebration of Christmas and New Year I decided to book the trip today. I actually just got myself 7 days of stay since I never been to Vegas, leaving a few extra days to explore the city. I admit, I have a small gambling problem… I hope I left myself enough time to check out the city, all the greatest casinos and a few shows.

It was tough to make a decision and chose the right hotel since I have never been there. I read through many posts, including Shoemoney’s 2008 post about staying in Stratosphere, and looked through a TON of reviews of all the hotels. Stratosphere was almost free, but looks like it is at the very end of the strip, so I started to look somewhere in the middle. After hours of research I finally settled with the new Planet Hollywood Towers right in the middle of the strip. I hope I made a right choice. The hotel just had a grand opening, so they try to sell out the rooms with a decent discount through some of the sites.

I believe I may have a pass to the event, but not 100% sure if I do… It’s kind of hard to foresee how things will go and if I will actually get it, but I hope I do since affiliate summit west 2010 is officially sold out. :( Just hope I can get inside, listen to some of the sessions, meet people, take pictures and just see how it is.

Either way, I hope that Vegas is going to be a blast! “To the night we’ll never forget” (c) Hangover, or something like that… a week in my case actually. :)

Going to Vegas was actually one of my big dreams since I came to US in 2000. Another dream was to make it to affiliate summit. I guess 2010 already brings something I can scratch off the list of things I want to do and I just hope that I can scratch off more than one thing with this trip.

Bing is sneaky too

Filed under: SEO & SEM — rasim


In the last post I wrote how google advertises on bing by bidding on the cheap keywords. Today I noticed that bing advertises on google too and according to a few older posts that I found, bing has been doing it for a while.

As you can see in the example image above, bing comes up as #1 result when searching for “search engine” on google. I checked the same keywords on bing and google doesn’t come up in the search results. Pretty interesting, seems that bing actually chooses highly targeted keywords that are not really cheap. I assume that being #1 in the search result for “search engine” costs couple bucks per click. It seems that the two competing companies chose different advertising methods to advertise on each other. I wonder if there is a way to measure the results and actually see who is getting a better deal. It is interesting to see if one google user who clicks on highly targeted ad is worth more to bing than forty bing users (assumptions) who click on less/non targeted ads to google? I would think that google got a better deal here, what about you? My assumptions are based on my cpc campaigns and I tend to like 0.05 cent keywords more than $1-$5 ones, I usually get better ROI this way.

Another interesting observation is that bing comes up as #3 result in organic search, as you can see on the same image above. While it is not #1, it probably still gets a quite few new users to bing. I also think that google has some explanations for this, #1 altavista is the oldest, #2 dogpile is older then bing too, etc… However, when searching for “search engine” on bing, google is not even on page 1. It is in position #14 on page 2 for me here. Hmm… That is odd. While bing may have it’s own algorithms that are somewhat confidential, it makes me wonder how searchenginehistory.com for instance comes before google? Obviously pagerank doesn’t have value here as google is 10 and this site is 5. Backlinks are not the main factor here either, google has waaaay more backlinks. Is it domain age? Doesn’t seem so… It shows 2005 for searchenginehistory and 1998 for google here. Traffic rank/bookmarks/sitemap stats are significantly better for google too. While bing is pretty new, it makes sense to see if there is some bigger factor here. To me it looks like google beats searchenginehistory in every way except that it doesn’t have “searchengine” in the url or the title. There is also no content (it must be the king, right?). Does bing pay that much attention to these?

Anyway, its time to make some sort of conclusion on how we can relate this info to our interest. :)

First, watch the competition and get as much details as possible. When I was writing previous post, I didn’t know that bing is using google for advertisement as well. I thought google was the only smart one. :) While I had some interesting observations, I did not have enough facts.
Second, always go into the details, think why things are the way they are when it doesn’t make sense. As a result of this observation I learned that domain name, content and title have more effect on the position in bing than I thought it had. I will probably do additional research on the subject and see if I can rank higher in bing for some sites. :-P
Third, when you look at the competitor, think that a competitor may be looking back at you. If you have a valuable service, be protective, be smart, be sneaky… As long as it’s all legal… :)

At last, you probably have some interesting assumptions as well. Please post your comments, let us know your opinion on the subject.

Google advertises on Bing

Filed under: SEO & SEM — rasim

I performed a few bing searches for a few cheap keywords today and found a pretty interesting ad. I have a search screen above and in case you want to see the ad text, here it is:

What was interesting to me is that the keywords for this ad were cheap – I assume around .05 since google was not even in the first position for the term. The page actually went to google’s site (http://www.google.com/services/hp/#utm_source=en-ha-na-us-hge-google&utm_medium=ha&utm_campaign=en) with a button to make google a home page. If I were to assume that their conversion rate is under 10%, which is the average on my campaigns, it means that they get a visitor for over $0.50, which is probably worth every penny. Here are a few reasons behind my assumptions:

1) People who click on the ad actually click on sponsored listings. $.05 will pay off the first time user would click on the ad on google since it is the lowest bid on adwords for search network. A converting user may be clicking on sponsored ads throughout the rest of his/her life. :)

2) People who use bing convert better since they are usually less computer savvy and many don’t pay attention to the difference between sponsored and regular links.

3) Seems that bing is gaining some market share, would google be able to slow down the growth with $.05 bid for lower end keywords? Google has a lot of adwords data and it doesn’t take them much to figure out high volume lower paying keywords.

However, there are a few things that I find odd:

1) Google is all for “Positive user experience”, no unrelated landing pages, right? Well, what is this page then – http://www.google.com/services/hp/#utm_source=en-ha-na-us-hge-google&utm_medium=ha&utm_campaign=en? One button? On “Create avatar” keyword? I find it interesting when a company does the same thing it tries to fight, kind of doesn’t make sense to me. I know Microsoft adCenter has some sort of “quality score” system as well. I find no solution to “create avatar” on this landing page. How did google manage to get unrelated traffic to low quality one page site?

2) Google assumes that the user who clicked on the ad did not find what he was looking for on bing and therefore may want to check out google for results. Having some knowledge in affiliate marketing, their landing page seems awful to me. Nothing to compare the results, nothing to say why I should make google my home page, nothing to convince me to switch.

Oh well, it’s google. They can do whatever they want I guess. I can just take it as a lesson. The lesson #1 here is – study your competition, pay close attention to what you can do to decrease competitor’s market share and gain yours! A lot of time I notice that the competition is running adsense. I then can use adwords to run my ads on their sites. I can make unique landing pages to take over customers from 0ther companies, write unique ad text for each of the sources that I find. It is possible to make a bank this way and seems that google just illustrated this perfectly.

As for lesson #2 - work on gaining authority! Then you can do what you feel like doing, even if it contadicts your own policy. :)

Pay attention to the events

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing — rasim

christmasmasMost of the affiliate marketers pay a lot of attention to different events. They know what offers go on Christmas wish list and love to make these people happy by providing a great looking landing page for them. For example, here is a good list of affiliate products with a schedule that shows which ones convert throughout the whole year.

So, what’s an event exactly? I look at it as something that triggers a big chunk of the target audience to do things differently than they normally do. For example, today is the last day of school for most of the kids and students in US. They have no homework, just sit and stare at their myspace/facebook profile all day waiting for your ad to appear. This is a good time to get more traffic and conversions. Just make sure to target the right crowd. It is also almost Christmas, a lot of people do late shopping, some don’t even think about it yet and need to get reminded by your ad.  Your ad probably needs to  show how fast one day shipping is on your cheap overstock products.

Some events are more niche, like March 8 – woman’s day, that gets celebrated by all Russian women while others are more broad, like the global depression that changes the buying habits. Some event are repetitive, such as cold winters where people are more likely to buy a snow blower rather than a bicycle , while others happen once in a lifetime. As I mentioned before, most affiliate marketers pay attention to most of these events. You can still gain some advantage by finding different products and targeting smaller events that everybody else misses or just jump on a big boat with everybody else.

The morale: Pay attention to the events. They have a direct influence on your traffic and conversions.

Blog traffic

Filed under: General Web — rasim

blogtrafficIf you are like me and just starting to blog, one of the easiest way to get traffic is to be active on other blogs that you read. Post comments and provide feedback. All these time my number 1 source was google, but as you can see, it moved from #1 to #7 this morning. It will probably change by the end of the day but blog traffic is still a big part of my visitors. Surprisingly enough, one of my comments got some attention on ppc.bz yesterday, which resulted in a third of all my traffic this morning. I may have received the unexpected response to that comment, but none the less, who cares when it’s my first month blogging. :)

The morale of the the story: Be active on the blogs you read.

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