Through the Brick Wall

So this is my second week trying to work this full time. It didn’t really worked as I hoped it since there were still distractions (minor) and sometimes it still struck me that I’ve done my daily task and there is still so much time. I try to work it out and fill it with productive activities instead of just fidgeting to fill out time.

My first project was altering my traffic source to PPC. This didn’t really work well though. My first attempt was several months ago when I tried to use Mark’s method (review page and targeting “product review” keyword”. I received warning from G because it violate their “Bridge page” policy. Your page will be marked as “bridge page” if only exist to drove traffic to other website (which pretty much the core of affiliate marketing). They said my page doesn’t offer value to the user and give example of a page comparing products, which – in their opinion – is giving value to the user.

So I tried to follow their advices. I made a huge comparison table and compare 10+ products head to head, then try to drove PPC traffic to that page. Again, G said the landing page violate their ToS. Didn’t bother to look for which ToS this time since they suspend my AdWords account permanently.

This is their email

Dear AdWords Advertiser,

It has come to our attention that your Google AdWords account does not comply with our Terms of Service and Advertising Policies.  As a result, your account and any related accounts have been suspended, and your ads will no longer run on Google.  Please be aware that you are prohibited from possessing or creating any other AdWords accounts, both now and in the future

In other words, if I want to try PPC again, I’ll have to use different name and different credit card. Nice. I think it’ll be hard for an affiliate marketer to advertise in AdWords anymore as long as the “bridge page” policy still exists.

Before I had my AdWords account banned, I also tried to look for PPC training for affiliate (since most PPC training is aimed toward business/product owner). PPC classroom is still ongoing and won’t open until God-know-when, so I opt in for PPC Coach despite the reviews on WarriorForum.

Consider this as my review for PPC Coach. First, the opening videos were quite outdated, it dated back in 2009 and he promoted his own affiliate network (a CPA based network which NO LONGER EXIST). Still, he didn’t bother to update the video and still use that network as an example.

He didn’t promote ClickBank. Instead, he suggest to be a member of a handful of CPA based networks which have quite complicated sign-up procedure. I finally got in at Ads4Dough. The affiliate manager interviewed me and approve my account. Quite an affiliate manager I would say, since he need 2 days to answer each of my question and he answer with another question. Great.

The training videos are all dated back in 2009 when G didn’t hate affiliate so much and you still could direct-linking and get away with it. The method (which he called ‘hot topic’ method) was quite shocking. You simply pick your niche based on news site, then post something, put an ad in it, and hoping your PPC traffic will click on that ad.

The example went like this:
1. He chose wrestling niche
2. Find a news about Hulk Hogan
3. Copy and paste the news with added opening and closing 2 sentences paragraph (how much quality score could you get with that method now?)
4. Put a banner that promote credit card or something like that
5. Bid on “hulk hogan” (no one bid on that keyword at that time which is a sign that it is not a profitable keyword).

That’s it. We’re expected to keep update the site and bid new keyword and put new ad for every post created. I was like “wow!”. Everyday I got hundreds of free traffic to my page, coming from a specific keyword with product promoted matched to that keyword and still the conversion is really low. What’ll happen if I send paid traffic there?

He still has some other methods and I’m still considering whether to keep learning or not (since the service is expensive at $50/month) when my AdWords account got banned. Well, that’s the signal for me to get out.

So now I still stuck with SEO as my traffic generation method. Currently I’m trying to build a new site and promote physical product instead. Hopefully this one’ll work .

Here’s September Earning:

This month’s payment is huge enough that I start thinking of doing something drastic, but some particular circumstances prevent me from doing it right away.

The cleansing post panda

The “cleansing” seemed to work good. I deleted or altered a lot of pages containing duplicate contents and one of my site regain its ranks. Going to do this with 2 more sites, but have issues with some of my contractors. Hopefully, I could get it done this month.

Seventh Site

My last site is doing super poorly; it got several visitors already, but the average time they stayed on page is about 15 seconds or so. I think I missed the point in this niche and didn’t give them what they want. My only solution is searching for a provider that truly understand the market and I think I have found him (judging from 2 articles he made), but it still have to be tested and I really have no time to spare for that.

So that’s that, site #7 pending while I’m trying to revive site #5 and #6. I might work on site #4 in the future, but already gave up on site #3. Weight-loss niche is just too much for me. I get about 700 visitors/month but nobody has bought anything for the last several months. Heck, my neglected first site is doing even better!

A thought on conversion

Anyway, I no longer believe more visitors=more sales. More and more proofs have been presented before me to believe it’s just a myth:
- My own experience: my 4th site got 3k visitors in a month and make ONE lousy sales.
- My best performed site currently only have around 1k visitors/month
- Clayton’s site experiment: 9k visitors with $300 in sales. I believe he got better conversion rate in other sites.
- Justin’s site (affiliatefreedom.net). Last update (May) he said he make 1k/day. That’s 30k visitors per month and he got around $200/week.

“Understanding the market” seemed more and more crucial. Before, I was to busy generating traffic that doesn’t realize this. It’s not like I’m a traffic-expert now, but at the very least I try to pick suitable writer for specific niche and make an attempt to understand the market better. The 7th site is just a series of research-keywords-and-throw-them-to-contractor. She wrote as she wished and I thought that’s good enough. Well, I was wrong.

Future plan

Affiliate marketing is good and lots of people gain much from it, but now I think it’ll be even harder for us. I mean, giving “good recommendation” doesn’t seem that nice once the person find out that you get money from product he bought based on your recommendation. It’s not pure help, it’s help with string-attached, thus it become less credible and questionable. This is also why a lot of people in IM world give recommendation with *this is not affiliate link* attached. They want you to know they got nothing from it, thus the recommendation could be trusted.

I know some of us doing honest business and recommend only proven and thoroughly-researched product, but most aren’t. And every development by major authorities seemed aimed to crush those scammers (and grind us with them).
- The new policy to write that you get something in return if the visitor buy a product promoted
- Google cash: banned
- You can’t use review page as landing page in AdWords anymore; they called it bridge page (a page with sole reason to drive traffic to other site). I tried this and they threaten to close my AdWords account.
- Every Google update seemed devised to counter SEO method a lot of affiliate marketers are depend on. They don’t put too much weight in meta keywords anymore, they kick content-farm site and thus lower the effectiveness of blog network, they hit article directories PR, etc
- Web 2.0 owner also hate affiliates, you can see from their new policies, especially in HubPages and Squidoo.

All SEO method, regardless white, gray, or black are aimed to “trick” Google algorithm by giving data that doesn’t represent actual public opinion. For every new trick in SEO, Google will release updates to counter it. We live from Google while fighting it at the same time.

Thus:
- Depending on SEO is short-sighted. It’s a constant battle; it’s like walking over a layer of thin ice and you don’t know when it’ll break with you on it.  With so much change over the course of 1-2 years, how would you sustain a business for 10-20 years? You need to be able to access your target market without depending on Google.

James Pruitt has said this thousands of times and I know he’s right, but I just don’t know other method and social-media marketing is just too overwhelming for me.

- People despise you for recommending digital product and found out that you got something in return of their purchase. They feel deceived. I’ve seen a guy promoting a CB product on forum; the reply is “hey look guys! Viral marketing!”

On the other hand, people are OK with buying from e-commerce site with those large “BUY” and “Checkout” buttons. Perhaps being blatantly trying to sell something means you don’t have any hidden agenda?

I’m not really sure yet, but perhaps having your own product or selling physical goods are better business model in the future. You can utilize PPC, banner ads, press release, facebook fan page without having people or the authority suspect you of solely trying to send traffic and get commissions.

Just a thought.

So here we are at the end of August. Here’s August earning:

Following the drop of visitors on all my sites after the Panda update, the CB sales suffered heavy blow. Well, can’t expect much from 20 visitors/day anyway. I’ve been firing a barrage of articles to articles directories for the past 2 months in vain and that has forced me to change strategies. Apparently, I simply cannot “force” Google to get back my site ranking no matter how many backlinks I created.

I did some search on the Panda updates and here’s what comes out of sites that received heavy blows (taken from quicksprouts):

• A high percent of duplicate content. This might apply to a page, a site or both. If it’s a site measure then that might contribute to each page’s evaluation.
• A low amount of original content on a page or site.
• A high percent or number of pages with a low amount of original content.
• A high amount of inappropriate adverts (pages don’t match the search query), especially high on the page.
• Page content and page title tag not matching the search queries a page does well for.

Well, all my sites DO have large percent of duplicate content since I spin all of them and submit them to various directories and article distribution service for backlink. Here’s his suggestion to fix this:

• Share only high value, unique content – even if the Panda updates aren’t yet sophisticated enough to fight scraping sites still dominating the SERPs, rest assured that that’s the direction Google is heading. In the long run, providing people with good, original content is the best way to survive.
• Improve page load times – Google has made several announcements related to page load times, so it’s clearly something that’s on their radar now and will be in the future. To improve your page load times, restructure bloated code, compress or resize image files and take advantage of caching plugins if you are running your site on a content management system.
• Build brand awareness with social networking – because links from social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are now being taken into account as a ranking factor, it’s a good idea to increase your presence on these sites. Use them to reach out and connect with your visitors naturally, instead of trying to game the system by spamming links or buying friends.
• Avoid over-optimization – when it comes to ranking well in a post-Panda world, natural is the name of the game. If you have pages on your site that are so tightly targeted to a particular keyword phrase that they’re nearly impossible to read, rewrite them. Or, if you’ve coded every meta and headline tag with your target keyword, consider replacing some of them with terms that create a better experience for your users.
• Share expert content – remember, Google is looking to reward expert sites, and one thing that these authority pages routinely do is to link out to other great content that they feel will benefit their users. When you are writing your new, unique content, start linking out to at least 1 to 2 high quality sites in each article.

So, here’s my plan to get the site back:

1. I still targeting the same keyword, but I’ll replace most of the article in my site with new unique content. I won’t spin this and I won’t place it in anywhere else. Actually, this is part of Adam Short’s “21 Days Article Marketing” strategy and I’ve been know it for quite a while, but back then I thought it’ll be a waste to just use an article once, so I spin it anyway.

2. I tried to improve my site’s load time.
- Install W3 Total Cache plugin; this has made my site crashed and took all day to fix it.
- Install WP Super Cache plugin; don’t feel the effect yet.
- Lowering the image quality of my header, thus decreasing its size. I’m thinking of doing the same with the banners, but don’t have time for that yet.
- Uninstall unused plugin such as akismet.

3. I discard AMR from my backlinking strategy. I used it for month and it doesn’t seem to do anything at all aside from wasting my time and make my anti-malware software screaming “accessing potentially dangerous site” over and over again. From time to time, I also checking the backlinks at Yahoo site explorer; they don’t seem to be indexed anyway.

4. I stop submitting article and try to convert existed articles into different format (such as PDF, MP3, or video) to be submitted to various directories. I get my writer busy creating unique content for my site instead.

Hopefully this will give some boosts to the visitors post Panda update.