Well, yesterday was the last day of Affiliate Summit East and man it was a great time. I'll post more details about my time at ASE in another post though... This post is about the Jon Fisher Competition.

For anyone who doesn't know, basically, I was trying to get my website Jonathan Volk to rank in google for the term Jon Fisher. Jon Fisher of AoJon.com (and the owner of Wickedfire.com) was trying to rank as high as possible for the term Jon Volk.

I saw Jon the first day of ASE in the night and when I had checked the rankings we were both at position 5. When I first saw Jon, I said, It's a tie!!!

After that we decided to extend the deadline to Monday morning.

Monday morning I didn't see Jon but Tuesday morning right before I was about to leave we caught up and checked the results right there on my iPhone.

In the few days time we had to finish optimizing, Jon had moved up 1 position to be in position 4. I was thinking, "Crap...!!!" Hahahaha.

Next we checked my google results and BOOM. I had moved up 1 position too!!! Another tie!

So all in all, we tied and we'll both be giving each other the links.

And that ends a fun google bomb competition.

More details to come about Affiliate Summit (with photos). Feel free to subscribe to my posts to get updates.

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Many people don't know that you can generate keywords in many ways for your pay per click affiliate campaigns.

In fact, there are a ton of ways that you can find huge keyword lists but not all are effective or worth it. So I will be going over a list of the commonly accepted ways to get large keyword lists, why you need large keyword lists, and where to go.

First, the way MOST people generate their keywords (80%+ I'd estimate) is via the normal google and yahoo tools. You create a campaign and boom a keyword generator pops up for you to use. Easy and works well, best of all free.

The way that most people don't know about is generating keywords via other tools and programs. Some of these tools are free, some cost, some suck, some are amazing. I have tested pretty much every program on the market today.

First, the bad keyword generating tools. Stay away from these:

• Keyword Elite. - Like sorting through 50,000 keywords to find a few good keywords? Not me. No thanks.
• Keyword Companion. - Expensive tool that is similar to keyword elite but sorts through keywords a bit easier. Overall, TERRIBLE customer support (I had to spam the owners blog to get a response to my support ticket, no joke.)

Now, the following tools are ones I have used and found to be great and actually useful.

• My personal favorite: Wordze. This is the tool I like the best for generating larger keyword lists. You can read my Wordze Review. here.
• WordTracker. This program is one of the top in the industry and the best part... a full 7 day free trial. No reason why you shouldn't try it.
• PPC Coach. While reviewing the PPC Coach program, I noticed a reallllllllly amazing keyword tool. I actually utilized the tool multiple times already and well, I'm not really going to get into the tool because it's a secret I don't really like to share. It's worth the $50 bucks just for that tool and you'll notice in the comments of the PPC Coach review that people seem to find it worth it too.

Why do you need large keyword lists?

In search engines, the more areas of coverage you have, the more traffic you get. Plain and simple.

Many times in google, you can just use a broad keyword such as "credit cards" and it will cover all the credit cards keywords. Here is the problem: With broad match like that, you're going to get a percent of untargeted traffic unless you're using a large negative keyword list.

What do you do? Use these generators and use exact and phrase. Then you know exactly what you're getting as far as traffic goes.

Test broad search at a latter time.

With yahoo search marketing, I find the more keywords the better as long as you group your keywords well.

So now you know how to get good quality keywords and where to put them and how to implement them.

EDIT: Wordtracker link was broken. It's now fixed.

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I read a lot. Every day, I read tons and tons of web related material. One of the sites I frequent is Retireat21.com.

When reading some of the older interviews, I came across one which is probably my favorite out of them all (except mine of course hahaha jk). This interview is with Sean Belnick, the owner of Bizchair.com.

When reading through the interview, you'll see that Bizchair expects to bring in close to $50 million in sales this year. WOW. That's intense.

Just to break that down into a figure, that's a little under $137,000 per day in sales. Impressive for sure. So in order to get there, I need to multiply my earnings by roughly 30 times. Hahahaha.

Who would have thought that you could bring in $50 million dollars selling office chairs? Not me. I never thought that would be possible.

So I say all of this because there are potential markets in a lot of areas. We may not realize at times the enormity of the internet. When we find ways to garner some of that traffic, the options are truly limitless.

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Not too many people know about my beginnings as an affiliate marketer.

I, like many, had innumerable questions about being a successful affiliate. And to be honest, I wasn't able to find all my answers right away. There was however a couple who I looked up to who gave me many of the tools I needed to get going in the right direction.

Today, I want to talk about one of my mentors. His name is Derek and he run's a blog over at ClickConsultants.com.

Derek is a super affiliate (through azoogleads, neverblueads, incentaclick, and more) who certainly knows his stuff. He's had the opportunity to work with some other top affiliates such as Paul from UberAffiliate.com and more!

All that to say, his blog is one jam packed with very helpful affiliate information... and you know what? You can never know too much about affiliate marketing and/or internet marketing.

I have been following his blog and a couple of highlight posts you might want to check out are:

• Direct linking vs Landing pages...
• Easy PPC Tips Part 1. Part 2. And Part 3.
• Increase ROI with Day Parting.

Etc, etc, etc. The list really goes on and on.

Anyways, all of that is basically to say: Check out his blog. It's worth your time.

Besides the blog, Derek also runs a paid private forum which can really help starting affiliates get their feet on the ground, so be sure to check that out as well.

Most of the things I learned about starting a campaign were originated in that paid forum.

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I'm sure that everyone has seen a typical sales page on some site.

The truth is these sites do sell but this post is not about making a typical sales page (or your money back! hahaha). This post is about the most important factor on those sales pages that you can use on all your pages.

This single most important factor that every single sales page will have is a headline.

Surprisingly headlines are very important. They reaffirm to your visitor that they're going to get what they wanted when they clicked onto your page.

If your headline is not clear / visible or does not reaffirm the purpose of coming to your site, you need to change it.

When split testing your landing page, start with your headline on the landing page.

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The next part in the series of increasing landing page conversions is going to be on split testing.

What are the benefits of split testing?

• The first benefit of split testing is increase clicks to the offer landing page.
• The second benefit is increasing your quality score for Google and Yahoo
• The third benefit is increasing backend conversions on the landing page.

Really, the benefits of split testing your landing page is so large yet it's hilarious how many people do not test their pages.

First thing I do is I'll start out split testing multiple designs. In some niches, review type web pages work way better than a single offer. While in other arenas, a single offer can make your conversions jump way up.

This is something you need to test on your own to find out what works best for you.

After I find a general design that works for me, I like to split test my landing pages 1 item at a time. With this, I'll change 1 small thing and see which converts better. Then, after a statically significant number of clicks / views, I'll ditch the loser and keep the winner. Then I duplicate the winner but make 1 more small change. Simple, Right?

Doing these small tests can determine between a small profit margin and a large margin!

I hope that everyone is looking for the latter.

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Are you ready to hear one of the best tips for increasing your affiliate landing page conversions?

I've decided to write a short series on increasing landing page conversions.

Let's start! So how DO you increase landing page conversions?

Well it's quite simple actually. In order to know how to make conversions better, you need to understand the mind of your visitors.

This in years past was very difficult to track but thankfully there are a few good resources that will help you to essentially put on your visitors mind and see what they're thinking.

The first site is CrazyEgg.

What crazyegg does is allows you to see a heatmap of where your visitors are clicking.

Therefore the areas that are more heavily clicked are the areas you want to put your affiliate link. Simple right?

Areas that are less viewed you can fill with stuff that attempts to direct the attention to the links.

Another good example of how this can be used. On your typical ringtone landing page, you can use this to see what people click on most of your carriers page. Use this data to arrange your buttons in such a way that your most popular carrier is in the place that is clicked most often making it that much easier for your to convert that person.

Doing small changes like this take very little time and over the period of a month, you can be very, very far ahead of the competition.

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I had to post this because it's bugging me.

I've had a couple people comment (in reference to the original post) about how there is this great guide here or there about how to encrypt their keywords before sending them to the affiliate network SUB-ID.

Can I share a big huge secret with all of you?
Every guide I've seen doesn't do a bit of good at hiding your keywords.

Do you want to know why?

Think about how headers work in PHP and you'll realize that affiliate networks can still see your keywords used! Think about it for a second... Unless you add 1 vital step, your efforts are a waste.

This post isn't for most affiliates, just those encrypt their keywords and think they're safe.

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Please note that the below post is a very SIMPLIFIED version of how to track keyword level conversions.

GOOGLE Adwords Required Changes:
In your adwords ad URL destination you add to the end:

?OVKEY={Keyword}

Yahoo Search Marketing Changes:
In your Yahoo Search Marketing Administration Tab, you can turn "tracking URL's" on. That's all you need to do.

Step 2.
On your landing page at the VERY start of the file (About < html >) add the following:

< ? (remove the space between the < and the ?) $keyword=$_GET['OVKEY']; ?>

Step 3.
Now on your affiliate link add a sub id like so:
http://jumplink.com/jump.php?sub=< ?=$keyword;?> (Again remove the space between the < and the ?)

Obviously you replace the jumplink.com with the jumplink of your affiliate network.

Now you can see in the reports of your affiliate network which keyword converted for you.

The benefit of tracking keywords is you're able to find more profitable keywords and ditch the ones you're losing money on.

Just a word of caution. If you're running a campaign doing more than $100 bucks per day, I HIGHLY Recommend you work on some method of encryption for your keyword data.

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I've had more than a few people ask me questions that I've answered many times on this site so I decided to put together a small recap post for those who are just joining my RSS recently. I've have not yet joined, feel free to do so!

Favorite Affiliate Network:

• I think this post makes it clear...

PPC Coupons:

• Coupons (Adwords, Yahoo US, Yahoo UK, MSN)
• YSM UK Coupon (~$100 USD)

Landing Page Articles:

• Content Sites Vs. Landing Pages
• Affiliate Landing Pages
• GEO Target Your Landing Page For The Win!

Article Marketing

• The Secret to a Successful Article Marketing Campaign.
• When you know something is successful…

PPC Strategies:

• [I made a guest post on John Chow] - Evading the Google Adwords Slap - Guide to a Great Quality Score
• How to win with Yahoo Search Marketing.
• Update to: How to Win with Yahoo Search Marketing
• When to use Direct linking.

Affiliate Marketing (General):

• Affiliate Marketing On A Tight Budget
• Website / Niche Expansion (More $)

PPC Keyword Research:

• Wordze Review And Tips

That's it for now... I hope that gives you a good amount of reading to do!

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