Handsome Logic

The legendary forum and SEO-friendly directory list v7n.com was posted for sale on SitePoint today. The owner is asking $500k and says that last year’s average monthly revenue was around $40k.

Bidding starts at $400k, and there are no bids yet. I would imagine a BIN offer within a day or two though. Here’s a link to the auction:

http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/auction/20949 

As reported yesterday on Sahar Sarid’s blog, Yahoo will no longer allow parking companies using Yahoo Search Marketing for advertising to accept anything but direct navigation traffic.

According to Parked.com and Yahoo:

All other types of traffic including bought traffic, traffic driven by PPC campaigns, traffic directed from hyperlinks are not permitted.

The parking arbitrage strategy is to set up a parking page targeting a high-CPC keyword and then send traffic to it using advertisements on low-cost networks. The Yahoo advertiser whose ads appeared on the parking page end up paying Yahoo prices for 7Search (or worse) traffic. Yahoo will allow you to block some of these domains, but you have to find them in your logs first. This, of course, is only possible once you’ve already been billed by Yahoo for this traffic.

This is great news for those of us who have been forced to accept non-converting traffic from Yahoo because of their “Domain Match” program. It won’t put an end to parking arbitrage, but it will shake out some of the low-hanging fruit.

Here’s the full Parked.com TOS 

This is the second installment of Why Most Affiliate Marketing Arbitrage Newbies Fail. The idea behind this series it to identify common reasons why most new PPC Affiliate Marketers have limited (or no) success. If you haven’t read Part 1, check it out.

Selecting an offer

Lots of PPC Affiliate Marketing newbies get their network membership approved and immediately sort the list of campaigns by highest CPA. Those who joined with the intention of pushing a specific offer or niche are probably heading right for the ringtones section.

I’m as guilty as any. When I started in AM, I was promoting ringtones, even though I’ve never downloaded a ringtone in my life. The market was saturated then and it’s over-saturated now. Is there still money to be made? Of course!

But wouldn’t I have been better off to choose a niche I actually knew something about? Maybe a niche where Shoemoney hadn’t already broadcast to the world how much money he made in it?

I tried investing in the stock market for a while and lost money because I knew nothing about stocks. It occurred to me to take some online courses, read some books, and try again. Instead, I chose to focus my efforts (and my money) on things that I already knew enough about to make money with them. Why pay to learn more if you’re not already capitalizing on what you know?

Some of the best money I’ve made in affiliate marketing has come from offers with absolutely meager payouts. But because I saw the angle or was able to catch the offer before everyone else on the network beat it to death, I was able to drive enough volume of quality traffic to it to turn a nice profit.

Examine the niche before you examine the payout. Colon cleansing may not be the most attractive niche in the world. But if you give people the option of buying the product online instead of having to stand at the supermarket checkout counter surrounded by other shoppers and a snickering 17 year old store clerk… cha-ching!

Listening to Gurus

First a disclaimer: There are some affiliate bloggers out there who are genuinely selfless with what they give to the newbie affiliate marketer and the community as a whole. There is good information to be gathered on the blogs of so-called “super affiliates”. However, there comes a time where you have to close your feed reader and learn for yourself.

Affiliate bloggers did not make their money by creating competition for themselves. Certain bloggers, who I won’t mention by name, will pitch crap offers to you that they would never run themselves. Why? Because if you sign up through their referral link, they get a commission of your revenues whether you profit or not.

The next time some super affiliate tells you to punt a mesothelioma affiliate offer, reevaluate your RSS subscriptions.

These are the same people telling you to do direct-to-merchant PPC. Let me clear the air on this one…

Direct-to-merchant PPC with an CPA network using a jumplink is a risky, short-term strategy. You killing your AdWords account quality, having your campaigns deactivated, or losing your account altogether holds absolutely no consequence for the person whose referral link you signed up through. It also doesn’t matter to them that, in most cases, the advertiser can simply check their referral reports to see all the keywords you’re bidding on and what sites you’re sending traffic from.

Think about it…

Can we agree that most affiliate marketing newbies fail and/or quit? Ok.

My belief is that most fail or quit because they don’t know how to do it properly. I think that’s a safe assumption.

So what makes more sense from the standpoint of an affiliate blogger?

1.) Reveal current strategies you yourself are using and create huge amounts of competition for yourselves for a lousy 2% commission on what the new affiliate you refer earn.

2.) Churn and burn the newbies. Get them signed up, take a percentage of what they generate, and wait for them to drop of the game. Free money, minimal threat to your business.

Relying on Affiliate Managers

You are alone. Just like with your Google or Yahoo account reps, the biggest fish get the best managers.

Unless you have already made a name for yourself in affiliate marketing or have a history of superb performance with another network, you’re not going to be assigned to the top affiliate manager in the company right off the bat.

Your AM works on commission. This commission is a percentage of your revenues, not your profits. Now, it’s in your AM’s best interest to help you make a profit so you don’t up and leave the network — but they get paid either way.

The top affiliates are not sharing their secrets with their Affiliate Managers, because they don’t want those managers sharing the secrets with their other affiliates. More money for their other affiliates equals more commissions for the AM equals more competition for the original affiliate.

The Affiliate Managers who do know some “secrets” are also not sharing them with other Affiliate Managers in the network. If they have a top affiliate who is totally cleaning up on a certain offer, they’re not going to tell every new employee to get in on that offer. That would create competition for their affiliate, thus threatening their commission.

I had a few other points to cover but don’t want to overload one post, so perhaps there will be a Part 3.

Barry over at Search Engine Land outlined how every Tom, Dick and Jane can get themselves a free, non-nofollow link on Wired.com’s “How To” Wiki. The wikis (howto.wired.com) are powered by Socialtext/TiddlyWiki, and the articles are, in fact, indexed by Google.

However, the first substantial block of non-code text in the source of every Wired.com wiki page is… code. This makes for some rather unfortunate descriptions in the SERPs:

That’s the description for, from what I saw, every wiki page on the site. Certain other pages that involve parameters (such as index.cgi?action=search) don’t display code for their description, but don’t display anything useful either.

The code that’s being displayed as a description is part of a textarea tag for a form object. The problem, of course, is that while this code displays properly on the wiki for visitors, the search engines read it as-is.

<textarea id=“st-tags-tagtemplate” class=“st-jst-template”>{for t in tags}
&lt;li class=&quot;st-tags-tagline st-page-box-listing-entry&quot;&gt;
&lt;span class=&quot;${t.level}&quot;&gt;
&lt;a href=&quot;?action=category_display;category=${t.name|uri_escape};tag=/${t.name|uri_escape}&quot;
class=&quot;st-tags-tagline-link&quot;&gt;${t.name}&lt;/a&gt;
&lt;/span&gt;
{if Socialtext.perms.edit}
&lt;span class=&quot;st-tags-tagdelete&quot;&gt;
&lt;a href=&quot;#&quot; onclick=&quot;Tags.deleteTag(’${t.name|escapespecial|quoter}’); return false&quot;
title=&quot;Remove ${t.name|h|quoter} tag from page&quot; class=&quot;st-tags-tagdelete&quot;&gt;[x]&lt;/a&gt;
&lt;span&gt;&lt;/&gt;
{/if}
&lt;/li&gt;
{/for}
</textarea>

Surprised this got past the CondeNet team who runs Wired.com, they’re a good bunch.  Some of the only pages whose descriptions haven’t been totally tossed by the above block of code are the Socialtext instructional pages, release notes and documentation online, which were left online in their original form for the site’s “Help” section.

Remember kids, audit your CMS! I wonder how many of Conde Nast’s other sites are using this CMS…

Just read this on WickedFire:

On January 7, 2008, AzoogleAds confirmed that it has reduced its workforce, thereby streamlining its operations and enabling continued operations at maximum efficiency.

It is part of a strategic initiative to properly size the organization to 1) ensure its continued impressive income growth trend over the last 7 years and 2) to properly allocate and prioritize resources that are internally-focused and outsourced. The workforce reductions were mainly done in the Toronto office, and the company still maintains a strong presence there.

AzoogleAds continues to take pride in retaining some of the best and brightest talent, who support the company’s leadership position in the online marketing industry. External partnerships, business development, publisher relations, and ongoing business conducted with all other 3rd parties are unaffected.

AzoogleAds continues to be headquartered in New York City, with offices in San Francisco in addition to Toronto.

I’ve had several affiliate managers in my time as an Azoogle affiliate. Sometimes it seems that every time I log into my account I have a new one. To be fair, I don’t do much with Azoogle anymore, but I can’t help but wonder if this has anything to do with the Florida Attorney General fining them $1 Million. (Update: As per Azoogle, that’s not a fine. No, that’s an $1M Assurance of Voluntary Compliance. I’m in the wrong line of work.)

Upon execution of this AVC by Respondent, Respondent shall make a contribution to the OAG of $1,000,000.00 (one million dollars) payable to the Department of Legal Affairs’ Revolving Trust Fund to cover attorneys’ fees and costs associated with the matters resolved herein and to assist with the costs of future investigation and enforcement efforts related to the third-party wireless content industry.

Update: Mike Sprouse, Azoogle’s CMO contacted me to let me know these firings are in no way related to the $1M settlement with the Florida Attorney General. Draw your own conclusions, but since he took the time to contact me I’m happy to include his comment.