Archive for the ‘Affiliates’ Category

Google AdManager Beta Launch

Author: Michael

13 Mar

If you haven’t heard already – Google has quietly launched an invite-only Beta for their AdManager product.

This is incredibly exciting news. Everyone currently using other Ad management suites, including OpenX, will find themselves migrating to Google AdManager as soon as possible. I really support Open Source and have had great experiences using PHPads (OpenX), but when the Google Goliath makes a move like this… there really isn’t any way for other solutions to survive. This is an E.L.E. for those developments.

Check out the FAQ and Features list to find out more on how Google hosting, analytics and the other benefits of using Google AdManager is going to directly effect our online businesses.

And, before you do anything else today, GO SIGN UP FOR THE BETA AND TRY TO GET AN INVITE! (if you didn’t receive a private invite already).

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Filed under: Affiliates, Net Marketing

Update to Credit is Important

Author: Michael

20 Dec

First off, a quick update!

Many of you are finally receiving e-mail responses to messages you may have sent to me from up to a month ago — I took a couple month-long retreats and had some incredible experiences, which I will post about in the near future.

I appreciate everyone’s patience and understanding my time constraints. I enjoy and appreciate receiving e-mail, but I am not about to start taking up huge chunks of my time responding to messages.

I’m going to return to making more frequent posts soon, as I have some great information to pass on to site readers and all of you RSS subscribers!

To get back into the swing of things, I wanted begin by giving a longer response to a comment left by Scott in regards to Credit Card balance:

18% seems pretty arbitrary. Where did you get that figure? I’ve seen 50% and 75% and 90% discussed as key cutoff points on FatWallet Finance but haven’t heard anything about 18%. - Scott

The 18% figure was given to me by an Executive over at Wells Fargo Financial. A fantastic company, one of the largest banking institutions in the States, and I highly recommend you find a nearby branch or business center of their banking arm and work out getting yourself a personal business banker to assist you with all aspects of your endeavors.

Some further details from her indicate that this seemingly arbitrary number is derived from analysis of how the credit bureaus’ algorithms define what is to be considered “good or bad,” which is then used to determine an overall score when combined with all the other factors of credit (i.e. existence of any derogatory elements, such as being late on payments, etc.) The 18% number, arbitary or not, is what WFF credit consultants use when doing seminars or information briefings for mortgage brokers to assist them in taking their clients’ scores to the next level. Therefore, if a mortgage brokerage was on top of their game, they would be advising their clients to aim for this number as well.

Wells Fargo also wants consumers to know about their new program, announced on Dec. 5, called Steps To Success^SM, the mortgage industry’s first comprehensive program aimed at helping Nonprime customers take a proactive approach to their credit and get on the right path towards their financial goals.

True financial education is something all of our schools are lacking; managing credit and debt is what young adults and even children (at some level) need to receive now more than ever. Let’s hope the readily available information on the Internet will give future generations an easy way to gain access to understanding of this important aspect of our lives!

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Filed under: Affiliates, Finance

Effortless Web Traffic Increases

Author: Michael

17 Sep

I’m back from a week-long excursion and happy to say I am feeling just great!

It definitely wasn’t a vacation, as “a vacation is what you take when you can no longer take what you’ve been taking” (Earl Wilson quote) — and I enjoy every minute of what I do on a daily basis. I’ll get into the habit of letting you know when I am planning on not posting for more than a few days at a time.

So, how about a few tips on increasing your sites’ web traffic with little or no effort? Let’s dive in.

We’ll have to break things up into two types of basic sites — business/sales sites and more personal/blog style sites. (Both types may serve as a “muse,” depending on monetization and other factors.)

First off, increasing traffic to your more traditional “business” income sites (cart-based, services, affiliate sites), without just increasing your spending on Google AdWords, can be accomplished by just making subtle and even simple changes to your content and layout.

Content: Increase the relevancy of your content — create more in-depth explanations by linking to FAQ’s and provide your customers with access to more information (yes, even to other sites that you do not own) to give them the feeling of confidence in your position as an authority site for your specific product/service. Even in the beginning of this very article, I provided a direct link to Wikipedia.com — if someone might want to find out more about professional baseball player Earl Wilson (who said that great quote). Just that action may result in more traffic down the line, because even though a reader may forget Earl’s name or the exact quote, there is a very good chance they will remember reading the quote here at HHWW and return to the site to find that specific link leading back to Wikipedia.

Layout: Always re-visit your sites to ensure that the layout is readable, easy to navigate and just has an overall user-friendliness. Would you return to a site that annoyed you everytime you wanted to browse? I can think of a few sites that have an annoying layout or difficult navigation.

I’ll give you a great example. Sometimes I like to visit StumbleUpon.com and check out a few videos. Seems simple enough. After going to the site and clicking Videos, you are presented with several thumbnail-size video links and not a Stumble button. That means you have to click one first, just to get started. This not only annoys me, but I have actually met two web-savvy people who actually kept looking on that page for a Stumble button for a couple minutes.

Once you’ve actually loaded the video interface, try clicking on the StumbleUpon logo in the top left corner to return to the site’s main page — no dice. It doesn’t link. Sure, you can use the back button, but that is something that should be ingrained into every web designer’s subconscious — logo/name links back to homepage (almost like a reset button for the user). In fact, there are almost no navigation options — aside from Sign Out & Learn More. Visitors remember even the slightest difficulty in navigation or awkward layout and will respond by not returning to the site as often.

Secondly, for your personal/blog style sites, you should definitely consider the above two items along with the following:

Consistency: Keep your topics consistent. (Or at least organized into well-defined categories). Write new posts on a consistent basis, and if possible, try to write a minimum of one post per day to build traffic faster. You’ll get more traffic over time, free, from organic searches on Google and other engines as your overall content expands by subject and depth.

Social Linking: You will automatically build traffic as more sites point to your site as an authority on a specific subject or if you are writing great content. There are, however, other ways to build up the number of sites/links pointing to your blog.

I mentioned one such service above: StumbleUpon. You should check it out and utilize it right away. Many sites are getting the majority of their traffic just from being Stumbled Upon.

Another, newer service, started by John Reese (super successful Internet marketer) over at Income.com, has been released as BlogRush and it is already taking the blog world by storm. It was released for public use a few days ago, and as of now, all the features seem to be working great — including the Dashboard stats (which didn’t quite function at launch!).

BlogRush is set up to allow each user to earn “syndication credits” based on how many folks are looking at other posts that are listed on their blog (you can see a working example of BlogRush here on HHWW, on the right sidebar). It has the potential to build traffic exponentially over a short period of time, and best of all, its free.

And, even newer (just announced today at the Techcrunch40 Conference), is an upcoming service from Adbrite (the company started by Phillip of F’d Company fame) named Spottt. Make sure you go sign up now to qualify for the upcoming Beta program while you can.

That’s it for now. I’ll be making a post about SEOmoz’s contest results and my thoughts on landing pages, soon.

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Filed under: Affiliates, Net Marketing, Web Design