A Right Riveting Read #4

Fourth in my series of riveting reads is perhaps on face value a little off-topic for affiliate and search marketers. For several months I’ve been an email subscriber to the newsletter of innocent drinks and if I wasn’t so technically challenged I’d presumably be able to subscribe to their blog feed in google reader (ah, done it, add this http://innocentdrinks.typepad.com/innocent_drinks/index.rdf – there’s hope for me yet!)

innocent drinks practice very well what I was discussing only yesterday about customer newsletters. Each and every week I receive my email that is

• brief (so I’m inclined to read it)
• funny (or quirky perhaps)
• relevant to their product
• informative – they tell readers about new their new smoothie products
• brand enhancing

They even send out little presents for a lucky few. Before Christmas I received a little box of mistletoe from them. Okay, so it’s not like a tenner from Aunty Ethel that you never see but it keeps me aware of innocent and they tied it in with a send us your kissing photos that were published on flickr. A kind of online + offline linkbait thing.

Why I like them is because I believe they demonstrate an engaging way of building and maintaining brand awareness and loyalty. A good example for bloggers and search marketers.

Now, I’ll be even more impressed if they comment upon this post.

Keeping Up-To-Date With Your Merchants

A lot of affiliates rely on the affiliate networks to keep them up-to-date on the latest news from the merchants that they promote. Some merchants are pro-active too, emailing you with new product info and the like. But what are your merchants saying to their customer base and are you hearing the same message?

Well, here’s a simple tip that you might want to adopt…

Wherever possible I subscribe to my merchants email list/newsletter or whatever they call it. That way I get to hear what my potential customers are hearing. From personal experience I know it’s certainly worth doing – I’ve heard about new product releases ages before I hear anything via the affiliate route.

You might even consider signing up to competing affiliate sites newsletters too. A number of the affiliate shopping portals run them and if you subscribe you get to hear about what your competitors are up to.

Affiliate Marketing

An Update on boo.com

I mentioned the return of boo last month. Well things appear to be happening over at boo…..

There’s a new title of “say what you like, love what you find” and some snazzy flash type graphics with a slider to play with – just visit and you’ll see what I mean!

What do you think the title suggests? Some sort of social media site with product reviews or such like?? boo was a fashion site, is it going down that road again or will it try something different this time around?

How intriguing!

I’ll keep you posted.

More On Adwords Quality Score

Having been on holiday (and come back with a decent head cold!) it seems that my suspicions about the tweaks to the adwords quality score were right as google report.

Now that the dust has settled it would appear that I still have some work to do on some of my landing pages. Early indications suggest that brand new landing pages can immediately score as “Great” as I’ve achieved this on some new stuff I’ve been working on.

I’m paying a bit more on some of my bids but (so far) nothing to lose any sleep over.

Adwords Quality Score: Dare I Look?

The adwords quality score is now live in my account which makes for interesting reading!

First thing to note is that the quality score column is not displayed by default and as I haven’t seen an account wide default setting (do tell if there is one) I’m having to customise columns in each campaign which is a little cumbersome.

Anyway, it looks like I’ve got a couple of tweaks to do on some landing pages as I’ve got a few “OK” scores and some “Poor” scores too. There are a few surprises. Some pages that I’ve thought were fine aren’t (bugger!) and some that I kind of thought needed some work are in fact “OK” (though not “Great”). A 7 week old personal blog with no relevant backlinks is achieving a handful of “Great” scores for a particular set of related (affiliate linked) phrases whereas a specific niche site that’s 4 years old doesn’t appear to be quite hitting the mark.

Of course, one thing you can now do is to compare the quality score of one landing page to another. So you can find out if the merchants landing page scores better, same or worse than a landing page that you’ve produced yourself. Of course you could do the same with a competing landing page and see how you compare to that too.

It’s early days and more research is required but my first thoughts are that the quality score will make you work on your landing pages in an attempt up the quality score and presumably lower your bids. That’s no bad thing – but you do have to trust that Google is offering a genuinely level playing field here.

It’ll be interesting to read other PPC’ers thoughts.

[edit] Well it’s a couple of hours later and I’m wondering if there are a couple of teething issues with the quality score. For instance, an existing ad for a single exact match keyword is rated as “Poor” with a minimum bid of 20p. As a test I create a new ad group for the same landing page + keyword and currently the quality score is “Great” with a minimum bid of 2p. So something isn’t quite right there.

Search Marketing Adwords

MyBlogLog Getting Sexy With It?

Has mybloglog changed recently to accommodate sites of a .. erm … specialist nature?

I just added a personal blog of mine (nothing salacious, honest!) and noticed that you can now (at time of writing) specify if your site is p*rn or not. But then at the bottom of the page there’s a “report adult content” link. Isn’t that a contradiction? Do mybloglog members who frequent such sites really want to see their photo in an adult blogs recent visitors hall of fame?

Or has it always been like this and I just didn’t notice?

MyBlogLog Social Networking

Google CPG* Blog

*Consumer Packaged Goods

A few posts ago I mentioned that in google reader it’s possible to subscribe to all the google blogs in one go. Because I do this, I’ve now come across an interesting (to me anyway) new google blog – the google cpg blog. Here’s their first post detailing what it’s all about. A blog to keep an eye on perhaps – the latest post about Valentines Day has some interesting consumer stats.

They also refer to trendwatching – something that I’ve been reading too for the last couple of months.

One thing to note Google CPG blog team (if you’re reading this!): you seem to have an issue with the blog archive. The posts archive drop-down is empty and it’s not possible to visit posts earlier than 19-Dec-06 unless you use reader.

Will Removing Crappy Links Help Me?

I’m working on a long overdue revamp for one of my sites – actually, I’ve been working on this revamp for absolutely ages but I keep allowing myself to be sidetracked onto other stuff. The site is about four years old and it includes a couple of links pages. Bog-standard (on-topic) reciprocal links pages that I’d built in the hope of improving my search rankings in Google and the rest. I suspect it never did make a blind bit of difference really! Well it might have helped page rank I suppose.

I’ve just spent an hour following these links. All of the sites still exist so I’m not linking to non-existent pages. A couple seem to be now offering cheap hosting deals or that highly relevant mix of mortgages and ringtone downloads. Most have either deleted their reciprocal link back to be me or buried their links/resources page where it’ll never be found anyway. Some sites that I recall having page ranks of 5 or 6 are now zero. So, with the exception of one or two, I’ve removed all these crappy outbound links from my site and I’ll wait and see if it has any positive impact. I can’t see it being detrimental at all anyways.

Search Marketing Reciprocal Linking

Blogger Backups

The always informative, thorough and sometimes techie googlesystem blog has a useful post telling you how to back up you (new) blogger blog. A top tip.

Backups ….now I vaguely remember those.

blogger backups

A Right Riveting Read #3

My third post in my new series of A Right Riveting Read. Read #1 and #2 if you haven’ t already.

Anyone who has an interest in SEO (search engine optimisation) will have probably heard of SEOmoz. Rand Fishkin and his team have built strong brand awareness and have a reputation for being a very open company. There is stacks of useful information within the site, though I suspect that some of the (perhaps new) really good research may now only be available to premium members and paid-for downloads.

I haven’t paid for a membership myself – yet!

Here is their popular blog. I notice that when you comment upon posts, other contributors can give your comment a thumbs up/down. Each thumbs up earns you a MOZpoint. Accrue enough of these points for freebies. As you can see, I’m already racking them up! And that’s not my DOB.

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