www.affiliateconfession.com

In doing some research for another post I came across a huge resource for keyword terms for your Adwords and other PPC campaigns and for content pages. Believe it or not, it comes from Mahalo.com. It was bound to happen, I’ve finally found a use for Jason Calacanis’ search-engine-thingy-whatever-you-want-to-call-it.

It’s actually the category section of Mahalo and it is extremely useful. On this page you’ll find every category listed in Mahalo and then those categories go to their specific category page listing even more keywords linking to their individual page on Mahalo. It’s awesome because categories are listed in keyword fashion such as in the toys category. When you click over there you’ll get a list of all the most popular toy search terms for the last few years. And it gets even better because the words a listed in a way that you can just put your cursor over them and then click and scroll to copy whatever words you want in the list.

With Christmas coming up you could use the toys category to do keyword research for promotions for the buying frenzy during holiday time to figure out what parents will be spending their money on for kiddies. Want a list of popular toys that won toy of the year awards, go here.  Want to make a buck off of the Hannah-Montana-I-can’t-even-go-into-Wal-Mart-without-seeing-her-freekin-picture-EVERYWHERE insanity, checkout the Hannah Montana category.

Some categories are a bit sparse such as the vintage cars category (great for maybe doing ppc for vintage car parts) and other categories are overflowing with every keyword and subject you may have forgotten about such as the Xbox 360 games category. This one has thousands of keywords. I’m sure you could find something to do with all those words.

Some of the categories are listed in a way that you can just copy and paste your keywords into Adwords campaigns (I’d still divide them up into small adgroups by hand or with a keyword tool such as in PPC Coach) or you can just check them out to get some great ideas for further keyword research.

Check out the Mahalo category page and find a ton of great keywords to ramp up your ppc efforts.

I’m hoping Jason Calacanis can help me out here. Everyone knows that Jason loves to stir up trouble at Internet conferences and he recently caused quite a stir at Affiliate Summit West a couple months ago when he referred to Zac Johnson’s $300,000 check from Yahoo as pathetic.

Well Jason, here’s where you can help me out. I just received an extremely pathetic check of $1,309.21 from Google Adsense yesterday and I’m hoping you will embarrass me (and of course generate lots of publicity for me) at the next Internet related conference you attend by displaying the picture below of me holding that extremely pathetic check. What I’m trying to accomplish is rising from the ranks of extremely pathetic to just pathetic. I mean, if Zac can earn $300,000 in a month’s time from Yahoo Search Marketing and only be at the pathetic level, well, I’d darn sure like to be there.

Anyway Jason, here’s my pic and I’m hopin’ you think of me next time you speak somewhere. I need the publicity so I can afford to fix my teeth.

Thanks Jason. If you need one, I can send you a pic suitable for framing.

Valley Boy Jason Calacanis recently spoke at the Affiliate Summit conference and as his usual style, tossed grenades and threw in a few useful thoughts for good measure. He is a brilliant guy no doubt, but most of what Jason does is talk about himself or one of his projects. He’s such a great guy, he’s the only one who knows how to do it right, Mahalo is it, life revolves around Jason, he wants everyone on the net to play by his rules, blah, blah, blah. It’s time to grow up Jason and stop focusing on yourself.

Jason Calacanis did create the rather notable web venture WebLogs Inc that he later sold for $25 million and has played around at Netscape and Sequoia Capital and is currently working on the joke of a search engine known as Mahalo. However, Jason is probably best known for dropping bombs through irrational statements at web conferences that bait people into visiting his sites or wasting time writing about him such as I’m doing with this post. He is the ultimate self-indulgent Internet entrepreneur. In effect, you could say that Jason is the Great Master Baiter.

Mr Calacanis’ latest fire spitting rant at Affiliate Summit took issue with almost all of the affiliate marketing community and how we are pathetic for posting checks on our blogs. I’ve posted a couple of checks here at Affiliate Confession strictly to motivate other affiliates and Internet marketers, but they are minuscule compared to the $300,000 checks he really takes issue with. That’s right, Jason Calacanis thinks it’s pathetic, sad and embarrassing that people like Zac Johnson displays a month’s worth of earnings that total over $300K. Well Jason, I’m sure hundreds of thousands of people disagree with you and think you are the embarrassing one throwing out bait the way you do.

Mr Calacanis thinks affiliate marketers should stop spamming the search engines and instead build much more useful sites that are beneficial in the long term to a large amount of people. While I agree with him that there are way too many affiliates not adding any benefit to the net and just creating spam, he couldn’t be any more off base about affiliate marketing in general. Good affiliate sites provide information to the user, a traffic channel to the merchant and yes, an income for the affiliate. Affiliate sites work because people use search engines to look for specific items or information and don’t go directly to the merchant.

I use Google at least 20 times a day because I don’t know the source of the information or the product I’m looking for and sometimes I end up on a site that has an affiliate link on it. In all fairness I have checked out Mahalo about 2 times, but I will never go there again because it’s just another useless search tool I don’t have time for and the 2 times I’ve used it, it gave me irrelevant results for my “log cabins” query. I was looking for a cabin rental Jason, not Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I could find that at the library, but thanks for wasting my time. Sorry, I won’t be back in 2 years or so when some editor decides to add a relevant search result.

Mr Calacanis thinks that the only reason affiliate marketers do what they do, is to make money. Well yes Jason we are out here to make money, but so isn’t every person who goes to work at the factory or office every day. Many affiliate marketers such as myself have been able to take the step away from the office and now work at home. We still have to make money to pay the bills and eat.

Jason instead only thinks in the rarefied air of his elitist Silicon Valley mentality and assumes it is as easy to create sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Twitter (yea, there’s a useful site) as it is to start an affiliate project such as a BANS site. He suggests that it would be easy to add a couple more zeros to those $300,000 checks if we all just created more sites like Mahalo.

I’m not quite sure what would be easier; to create a multi-million dollar project on the net, or for Jason Calacanis to stop being such an attention whore?

Alan