www.affiliateconfession.com

There used to be a day when I received lots of traffic from Technorati, but that’s nearly a year in the past. When I kept up with my American Idol News blog, there would be some months it would receive around 3,000 visitors and some single days it would get more than 500 visitors from Technorati alone.

I haven’t seen anything but a trickle of traffic from Technorati or much benefit from tagging my posts with Affiliate Confession at all, even though I have an authority of 139, 17 fans and a rank of 44,842. In fact, what completely puzzles me is that Technorati won’t even index my tags with all that authority and being that this blog is almost 4 months old. It could have something to do with the age of Affiliate Confession, but I’m not sure about that. If anyone has any insight, please leave a comment.

If I post at the above mentioned Idol blog, the Technorati tags still get indexed almost immediately or within a few minutes. I no longer keep up with the AI blog because it took too much time and wasn’t producing any revenue to speak of. However, it did produce quite a good flow of traffic from Technorati. The secret was to blog about something on the Technorati top 10 tags list, when it used to be right on the front page, and when American Idol got around to the top 12 usually one or more of the Idols were on the Technorati top tag list. I would write a post and get 100 to 300 visitors from Technorati within 30 minutes of publishing it. (I’ve hardly watched the show at all this year)

The big mystery is that the American Idol blog has almost no authority, no fans and a horrible rank, yet the posts with tags get indexed in minutes. If you compare the American Idol blog at Technorati with Affiliate Confession, it make no sense whatsoever. Affiliate Confession should be getting tons of traffic from Technorati, but it gets less than 5 visitors a day. What does Technorati want before they start indexing tags from a blog? Did they change their rules when I wasn’t looking? If Affiliate Confession doesn’t have enough authority to get tags indexed at Technorati what blog does?

All this brings me back to the original question, is Technorati broken or just lame?

Alan

I’m beginning to have my doubts about the value of Entrecard. In trying to use up the 8,000 credits I accumulated for the massive advertising experiment, I’ve already spent around 10 hours checking out worthy blogs to advertise on and that’s only going to keep ads running for Affiliate Confession through March 4th. Plain and simple, that’s way too much time to spend for so little advertising. I could spend about $500 and 2 hours of my time and have advertising set up for at the very least, 1 month, but possibly much more.

It has been rather difficult to actually spend the 8,000 credits as I still have more than 800 left in my account. Even with dropping my quality standards, it has still been vary hard to find blogs worthy of advertising on. I come across several that are ridiculously overpriced. Many blogs cost over 400 credits to advertise with and have less than 10 Google backlinks and less than 100 links listed in Yahoo. That’s just insane and something has to be done about this kind of disparity if Entrecard is going to enjoy long term success.

As of yesterday I had a total of 92 ads approved, 27 running and around 40 more waiting to be approved, but again, that’s only going to keep ads running for 9 more days. In the last 3 days since my advertising has started to kick in Affiliate Confession has averaged around 100 advertising clicks per day. Usually internet traffic slows down on the weekends so that is encouraging, but a better test will be this coming week when I’ll be averaging more than 10 ads per day showing (even more when pending advertising is approved) and more people will be online.

For the last 800 credits or so I will be trying a different strategy to maximize the exposure of this blog. Being that it’s hard to find a lot of quality blogs to advertise on and because it’s even harder to advertise on blogs that I know will bring a return because of their popularity outside of Entrecard, I’ll be simplifying things a bit. There are hundreds of blogs that cost 2 to 15 credits to advertise on and I will specifically be targeting these opportunities as long as the blog looks nice and has their Entrecard widget displayed. The reason I’m taking this strategy is because even if I get only 1, or even 0, clicks from each of these sources at least the blog owner will see my 125 x 125 ad for a full day and I believe I will get more overall exposure through the blogosphere than spending 400 to 500 credits to advertise on a blog and get 10 or 15 clicks or even less.

Occasionally I’ve received a large number of clicks from a specific blog, but they are so few and far between, and hard to get a spot with them again without logging into Entrecard every hour, it’s not worth monitoring them constantly for an open spot. I’ve also seen a few blogs produce a large number of clicks to Affiliate Confession according to Entrecard stats, but then have Google Analytics show only half the number of visitors Entrecard reported.

It’s not looking too good for Entrecard thus far in my book. I’ve kind of switched my opinion on the whole system mainly due to the amount of time it takes to work it effectively. Yes, I’ve received some traffic and have had some exposure for this blog, but I can’t afford to work this system 10 hours a week. I’m still optimistic this week will produce good results so I haven’t written Entrecard off completely.

Whatever the result, I certainly won’t be spending another week tweaking any advertising system for 10 hours.

Alan

Build A Niche Store (BANS) users received a very exciting email yesterday letting them know that version 3 of the eBay affiliate niche store builder is getting the final tweaks and will be released on March 3rd. This new version promises to be a very significant upgrade to an already robust script for use with the eBay affiliate program.

I’ve been reporting on the progress of the latest BANS update for about a month now and have been telling everyone that the upgrade is just one more week away. Well, it is official from the horse’s mouth, as of this coming Monday the release of version 3.0 is just one more week away. This latest email included a link to a pdf file that outlines all the major upgrade features of this new version, complete with numerous screenshots of the new admin panel and interface.

The pdf outlines in much more detail than any emails or updates up to this point all of the new features including:

BANS Goes Global- All previous versions of BANS have only included 4 or less countries eBay has a presence in. The new version adds 8 more including Austria, Belgium, France, India, Italy, Netherlands, Singapore and Spain to the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Australia.

BANS Goes Local- New geotargeting features of BANS now allows you to target local customers anywhere. Sell eBay featured golf clubs to someone in Florida or to golf enthusiasts around the Masters Tournament in Augusta Georgia. This also opens up local advertising opportunities for BANS store builders.

BANS For eBay Sellers- This is a very cool feature I didn’t even know about until this pdf was released. Not only is BANS great for eBay affiliates, it’s a fantastic tool for eBay Sellers as well. If you sell a lot of items on eBay or have an eBay store, you can set up your own web site outside of eBay and increase the exposure of your auctions, plus earn affiliate commissions on your own merchandise. eBay has allowed sellers to earn affiliate commissions on their auctions for about 7 or 8 months now. 

BANS Becomes Even More Search Engine Friendly- This is the most significant feature in my estimation because BANS will now allow you to automagically generate a Google Sitemap, cloak all your affiliate links (links will look like they go to your site, not eBay), generate meta tags site wide and for any individual page and will also allow you to place content both above and below your auction listings.

Other features include the option to have different advertising on every page of your site by overriding the global advertising options, the ability to edit different templates without publishing them, the ability to turn on and off individual store pages of your site and much, much more.

Now that I’ve teased you a little with all the new features of Build A Niche Store, why don’t you download the pdf here and check them out for yourself.

Next week I’m going to get the ball rolling on one of my new BANS stores by buying the domain name and doing the preliminary set up just to see if I can get the site indexed in the 7 days before the release of version 3. If you already have version 2 of BANS, updating to version 3 promises to be a simple process and should take only minutes.

Get more info on Build A Niche Store.

Alan

Well, thank you very much Microsoft, that AdCenter affiliate deal didn’t last very long, did it? I signed up for the relatively new Microsoft Affiliate Program and was accepted into the program on December 21st and as of February 29th the AdCenter portion of their program will be closing as per an email from Melissa Witt.

The only reason I signed up in the first place was to promote AdCenter since it paid a nice $35 per confirmed sign-up and then that amount was raised to $100 if the new member spent $50 in free clicks in a 90 day period. The other two offers through Microsoft pay a whopping $1 for the Windows Live Toolbar (who wants another toolbar?) and 50 cents for Windows Live OneCare download (I don’t even know what that is). No one is going to make a living or put their kid through college off of those.

If you don’t mind me saying Microsoft, that’s pretty rotten. Thanks for dangling the carrot. This was an affiliate deal that was pretty easy to make money at because they were offering a nice incentive for new sign-ups and a nice pay out for affiliates. It was a great win, win situation for both sides of the customer / affiliate relationship, but apparently it wasn’t for Microsoft. Right after I signed up to be an affiliate, I proceeded to earn $210 in January and just became aware of the $100 bounty for affiliates. Thanks, an email update would have been nice.

It’s a weird thing for Microsoft to do this on such a short notice. Why would they pull the plug on this and give their affiliates, who have been acquiring new customers for them, a 9 day notice? Why pull the plug in the first place? Why not just scale back the payout from $100 to $35 or $25? Bizarre to say the least. Does Microsoft really want to tick off the blogosphere? That doesn’t seem to smart to me.

At the end of Melissa Witt’s email she states, “Thank you for your participation in the Microsoft Affiliate Network. Please let us know if you have any questions.”

Since we already know her name, I just have 2 questions for Melissa: What is your quest and what is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow, European and African?

Alan

I’ve seen the “dot com” domain name question many times, but it’s still one that confuses people and I finally came to a black and white decision on exactly what kind of domain names to buy, and what to stay away from, a couple of years ago. Terri from By America For America again posted this great question a few days ago and it always begs for an explanation.

My rule for domain names is pretty simple, unless you have an organization, never, ever buy anything other than a .com name and unless your company name has a dash in it, never, ever buy a domain name with a dash in it. Of course you might want a .mobi name for your mobile phone web site or a country suffix if it is required.

Dot com names have been the most popular domains on the internet since day one. It’s what we all matured on the net with and when you know the name of a company, but don’t know their url, the first thing you’re going to search on is some form of their company name followed by a, you guessed it, dot com. Unless you are trying to be real cute with your domain and come up with something very brandable or memorable like WhatDoYouThinkOf.us, there isn’t any reason for a business to buy anything other than a .com name.

Why no dashes? I learned this the hard way when I bought www.i-work-at-home-based-business-opportunity.com. Stupid, just plain stupid. I was a noobie affiliate marketer and though I would be smart in trying to stuff as many keywords into my domain name as possible and make it easy to read. There are all those keywords, work at home, home base business, business opportunity. What was I thinking? It’s six dashes too many.

That domain has never done well except at the very beginning when I was getting around 200 people a day. After about six months Google and MSN deindexed it and even though I’ve tweaked that monster for 3 or so years and it is now indexed by Big G, I only get about 60 visitors a day (MSN still won’t index a single page of that site). I have read that having too many dashes in your domain devalues it in the eyes of the search engines. But the truth is, no one really knows.

However, there is a much better reason not to put dashes in your domain name. Let’s take a look at a situation where I’m trying to tell someone that long domain name over the phone:

Client - What’s your url?
Me - It’s uh, double-u, double-u, double-u dot i dash work dash at dash home dash based dash business dash opportunity dot com.
Client - What, could you repeat that a little slower?
Me - double-u, double-u, double-u dot… i… dash… work… dash… at… dash… home… dash… based… dash… business… dash… opportunity… dot com.
Client - You work at where?

Get the picture?

You don’t want to get yourself into a situation where you have to spend more than 5 seconds telling someone your domain name. Unless you find a name that is very catchy and brandable I try to find a keyword that fits well with my concept for the site and make the name as short as possible. If you have to explain your domain name to someone, it loses it’s appeal and it more than likely won’t be remembered. Quick at easy is the rule.

Alan