John Jonas Blog

Here’s a podcast of this blog post
Or you can listen to it here:

(The audio is different than what I wrote below)

If you’re using Google Adwords, you’ve probably already seen or heard about the change that’s coming on April 1, 2008:

Important Change to URL Policy Enforcement Starting in April, display URLs for new ads will be required to match their destination / landing page URLs, without exception. Please adjust your URLs accordingly when creating new ads.

I’ve had a few people ask me about how to deal with this so here are a few thoughts:

1. For People Doing Direct Linking
I have 3 solutions for how to deal with this for people who are direct linking to affiliate programs.
First, get better at adwords than your competitors and out rank them. By out rank them, I mean write a better ad that gets a better CTR and hence a higher ranking ad in google’s results. If you do this, you can use the merchants display url with your affiliate link and your ad will be shown above all other affiliates.

If the merchant is advertising for themselves on your keyword…I don’t really have a solution for you. Very often if you outrank the merchant they’ll get really mad at you for being better than they are at selling their product and they’ll kick you out of their affiliate program.

However, if you’re just competing with other affiliates, writing a better ad will usually do the trick to get your ad shown.

One thing you need to realize in this is that while google doesn’t dislike affiliate marketing, it doesn’t help their core business. Affiliates usually fill an inefficiency in a marketplace. Google doesn’t like inefficiencies and if they can take care of them without having an affiliate in the mix, they’ll be more than happy to do so.

As a direct linking affiliate, you’re fighting an uphill battle. Not that it can’t be fought, but over the years google has shown a consistent pattern of making it more and more difficult to do direct linking as an affiliate.

Knowing this, you can either make the choice to continue doing it, fighting the uphill battle, or you can chose to evolve and do something that google isn’t fighting against.

At this point, it’s like the days when adsense died. Google had made it clear that they didn’t like sites that were made for adsense (MFA sites). At one point they made a change where it became very difficult to continue with the page generator/adsense business model. Smart people changed their model. Others continued doing it because it was the easiest path, and today they’re really struggling (at least…I don’t know anyone who is still succeeding with that model. If you do, I want to know them).

Second, set up your own domain. You have a few options in doing this. You can set up a simple iframe landing page where your domain just has a page with an iframe on it. The src= part of the iframe is your affiliate link. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t know how google is going to deal with it with their new rules. But, doing this, you can have your display URL be the same as the actual page where the person ends up (because they’re on your website).

Another option for your own landing page is to try and add value to the transaction you’re trying to create. As an affiliate, you’re trying to get person A (buyer) to buy product B. If all you’re doing is providing a link to product B, you’re not adding very much value to that transaction.

However, if you can give person A a reason to buy product B (You give this reason on your website), now you’re adding value to the transaction and now you’re starting to build a business for yourself.

In doing this, you leave the realm of people google is fighting against and join the side of people google likes…information providers.

Google knows that the first reason someone goes online is to find information. It’s always super simple to find someone who will sell you something, google knows that. They also know that it’s much more difficult to find someone who will give you good information without selling you something (or even someone who will give you good information before selling you something).

They also know that the first 2 steps in the buying process (browers and then shoppers) are looking for information. If you can be a voice that someone trusts in those first 2 steps, they’re very likely to trust you when they’re ready to whip out their credit card.

So how do you give a person a reason to buy?
Here are a few ideas:

• Write reviews that tell the person which product is the best
• Solve a problem the person has and give them the solution if they buy through your affiliate link
• Give them a free something (report, mp3, video…) that partly solves their problem, and then tell them to buy product B to completely solve their problem
• Write about your personal experience with product B and how it solved your problem and how it will solve their problem too

There are a ton of ways to add value to the transaction. I think most affiliates who are doing direct linking would be surprised to see their conversion rates go up after creating a good landing page.

Third, try cloaking.
You can set up a landing page that just has content on it that’s related to your keywords so that google will give you a high quality score, and then cloak that page (either by a redirect or a straight cloak…there’s software that will do this for you) to go to your affiliate link. This will allow you to pass that visitor on to the final landing page (not your own url) but will have google think that the person actually is landing on your url (so your destination URL is your domain, and google thinks the person is going to end up on your domain (so they’re ok with it for their new rules), but the person actually ends up on the final landing page through your affiliate url).

Just be warned. This can be tricky, it is considered black hat, Google doesn’t like it, and it can get you in trouble.

Lots of people do it.

That’s all I’m going to say about it.

2. For people using adwords for testing
Brian Todd wrote a good piece on how to split test url’s using Adwords even with google’s new rules.

Read it.

3. Go use Yahoo/MSN
Obviously this isn’t a way to deal with Google’s new rules, but I think that most affiliate just blatantly ignore Yahoo/MSN ppc.

Mistake.

While there isn’t as much traffic from either of those as there is from google, and both of their systems are more difficult to use, I consistently find that the traffic I get converts better. Less money spent + more conversions = higher ROI (Yes, I understand that it doesn’t always mean higher profits).

Conclusion
As far as I can tell, what they’ve said is that this will effect “NEW” ads that are created after April 1. It shouldn’t (not yet) affect things you’ve done in the past. But, if google is moving this direction, you better believe that at some point they’ll make this rule retroactive.

This is a good point for affiliate marketers using adwords to make a decision about what they’re going to do in the future with their businesses. As far as I’m concerned, I think it’s time to evolve.

Let me know your thoughts.

Over the last couple years keyword research has become difficult as the quality of tools have degraded. Overture’s keyword research tool became totally unreliable about 18 months ago. Wordtracker just doesn’t have the data to provide accurate results. Sometimes in fact, wordtracker’s data comes from such a small data set that it doesn’t provide any data for keywords that get large search volumes.

So, I’ve come up with new ways of doing keyword research.

One way I do it is with KeywordTopia. I built it so that I could get results from all the places that would give keyword results.

Another way I do it is with the free google keyword tool, in conjunction with google trends.

Here’s a video about how I do keyword research across multiple niches:

Yesterday Chris Knudsen and I went out to lunch. He said he had finished reading the 4 Hour Workweek on a plane a few days before and he kept thinking “This is John Jonas” as he read it.

Last night I finished reading it.

A few thoughts.

1. The stuff he says in the book is possible for anyone.
2. It’s not as easy as he makes it sound (what ever is?).
3. Making a lot of money, and then taking “mini-retirements” is VERY possible.

Read pages 166-176 where Tim gives a system for testing a product before putting up money to have it manufactured.

Basically it involves

1. Find a market
2. Find a need/product in that market
3. Put up a short sales page online
4. Put up an order page after the sales page where someone thinks they’re going to buy (but don’t collect their credit card info)
5. Advertise on Google Adwords
6. Track sales

Most people get stuck on

1. Find a product
2. Put up a sales page

Here’s how to solve them:

1. In an area you know something about (golf, scrapbooking, construction, health, diet, souping up cars, paper, …), pick a product you know people want/need. IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT IT IS. Just pick something. Once you’ve done it and failed once, finding another product and succeeding the second time is much easier.
2. Write a headline, 2 sub-headlines, and about 500 words of sales copy. Then hire someone on elance.com to put it on a website for you (it’l cost you between $100-$500).

Simple.

So why am I writing this “review”? Because Tim put onto paper a bunch of ideas/thoughts I’ve had over the past years/months. Because I’m planning my first extended trip overseas right now (because of the book). Because it’s something you should read.

Because tons of people are reading this book right now but after they’re done with it, nothing changes. They just go back to their J-O-B and talk about how it would be cool if they could actually do what Tim talks about.

You Can!

PS. Please don’t come to me asking me to help you sell your idea unless:

[tags]4 hour workweek, 4 hour work week, four hour workweek, four hour work week, timothy ferris[/tags]

Earlier today I did a review of revenge of the mini-net, the ebook.

I didn’t actually review it, I summarized it and added a bunch of my own advice and experience into the summary.

Within minutes of sending it out I got this email back from someone whos email signature includes

SEO Specialist, [Company Name]

John, this is the best SEO information I have read all year!!!

This is also some of the best info you have ever given to me personally!

This is the reason I do the internet marketing reviews.

I like getting the feedback from people and I especially like helping people out.

If you’re involved in SEO or in running your own business IMO (in this case is not an HO because it’s my own writing), this is worth reading.

Whoever you were who sent me the email (you know who you are), You’re welcome.

Note: I don’t claim to be the best SEO around. I’m not. So all you SEO experts can now feel free to call me an idiot after reading what I said about creating mini-nets.

[tags]revenge of the mini-net, review revenge of the mini-net, seo, seo review[/tags]

Right now there are a whole bunch of people trying to create the next big adsense. People see the value in contextual advertising, and programs are popping up all over the place.

I think most of them are missing the boat, and are setting themselves up for failure. Most of them get trendy, people realize they don’t work very well, and stop using them within a few months.

Why don’t they work very well? Because the businesses use a horizontal market model. They try to be google and be everything for everyone. They try to be able to serve relevant ads to any page, and it doesn’t work because they don’t have the ad inventory that people want, like google has.

This is why Yahoo hasn’t done very well yet, but will do well in the future. They have a gigantic base of advertisers, and that base will grow to the fringes as they improve their version of adwords. They already have a huge traffic base so it’s worth it for advertisers to come and advertise with them.

Others don’t have this luxury, they don’t have the huge traffic base, so they don’t draw nearly the number of advertisers.

So what’s the next big trend in contextual advertising?

Vertical markets.

Being the best source for traffic in a specific industry. If you can be the best source for traffic, you can get lots of targeted advertisers, not lots of random advertisers.

NextInsure.com is the best example I’ve seen of this. They only do insurance and mortgages. They have advertisers bid per click what they’re going to pay, and then they go out and get their ads on high quality publisher sites. If you’re an advertiser in the insurance industry, and you’re doing a PPC campaign and nextinsure isn’t part of that ppc campaign, you’re missing the boat.

I think this is the way most contextual advertising is going to go over the coming years. Imagine a technology targeted ad network that was only targeting technology stuff. The payouts on these networks are higher. Don’t you think sites like devshed.com or expertsexchange.com would love to have a technology targeted service that pays much better than adsense or kanoodle?

Or how about the work from home verticle market. Imagine how much wahm.com could make if they didn’t have to serve crappy adsense on their site, and they could be part of an ad network that was specifically and only targeted at work from home advertisers.

Vertical market advertising provides higher payouts to publishers, and better traffic for advertisers because you can control the distribution of the ads. You can make sure the ads are only on high quality sites. It means less click fraud, less spam, less advertising money wasted.

Vertical market contextual advertising is a win-win for everyone involved.

In the past 2 weeks I’ve had 3 different friends call me to ask me what I though of 12dailypro.com.

After all three told me they were making lots of money with it, I decided I had better look into it to at least warn them if they’re in danger of losing the money they’ve put into it.

Basically the site promises you a 44% return on your money (up to $6,000 invested) in 18 days. Obviously this is crazy money.

So my question was how are they financing this? How do they pay you $8600 when 18 days earlier you put in $6,000 (because all three of my friends have had this happen to them)?

I thought maybe they had some well thought up advertising scheme where people pay $0.01 per page view on their website or something like that. They thought it was like a pyramid scheme. I didn’t see how it could have been a pyramid scheme with so many people making money from it but alas…the answer comes in their FAQ:

:: How can you afford to pay at this high rate?
In order to insure the long term success and sustainability of 12daily Pro, your upgrade earnings are financed not only on incoming member fees, but also with multiple income streams including advertising, and off-site investments. In addition, the fact that we only payout to upgraded members allows us grow our reserve fund at an exponentially faster rate than other programs.

Your earnings are financed on incoming member fees!

So what happens to your earnings when there aren’t incoming members?

So yeah, basically the surfing is a way of turning an illegal pyramid scheme into a legal “venture”.

If you’re involved I’m not telling you to get out, especially if you’re making money.

But, I am warning you. This will end at some point.

Obviously contextual advertising is where the good advertising revenues are going to be over the next few months/years. Adsense has taken the internet by storm because the model is so efficient for everyone involved.

However, the monopoly that google has on it is beginning to be a problem now (as evidenced by my previous posts about it) and I’d like to see some competition. Sure, Yahoo has their publisher thingy, but it stinks right now.

Other PPC contextual advertising programs are coming out and are turning out to be reasonably profitable like chitika and kontera, but they’re just not as effective as adsense.

So, for you budding entrepreneurs out there, how about this for a business model:

I’d like to see a contextual advertising service that will place affiliate links on my pages. Basically the service would go out and join thousands of affiliate programs and get a huge inventory of ads in their system. They would then do the exact same thing that adsense does with serving those ads onto my pages: Figure out what the page is about and put ads on the site (using javascript).

When someone comes to my site and clicks on an ad and buys on the following page, the service would get paid and then would pass on 60-90% of the money to me, keeping 10-40% of the money for providing the service.

You could aggregate affiliate programs together from all the major affiliate service providers (CJ, ClickBank, LinkShare, …) and provide them to publishers in a nice little package.

Someone’s going to do this soon. Clicksor is already doing something very similar. Hopefully they’ll get bigger soon. For my sake!

Why doesn’t CJ offer something like this already? Who knows! Not all advertisers would have to participate in it, but why wouldn’t they all? They’re all doing PPC anyway. This would just be another way for them to get free advertising across tons of websites.

I’d be willing to help out with a business like this. I’m just not willing to deal with all the business details that go into it.

About 3 years ago I took an “Entrepreneurial Lecture Series” class at BYU. The class met once per week and had a different entrepreneurial speaker come each week and speak to us.

After 3 years I only remember a few of the speakers, and remember less of what they spoke about. However, there was one speaker I distinctly remember because he

1. Was a good speaker
2. Gave useful advice

I’ve never been able to remember who he was or exactly what his keys to success were, other than he said to get up early. Well, I just found my notebook from that semester and have been going through the notes I took from the speakers. Here are my notes from Jim Richie.

Jim Richie
Two formulas for success

1. J. Paul Getty
   1. Get Up Early - Successful people get up early in the morning. They work while others are sleeping.
   2. Work Hard
   3. Find Oil - Real Estate, banking, internet - Anything can be oil.
2. David B. Haight (his mission president, who gave this advice on his last day before going home)
   1. Get your education
   2. Make your mark - make a difference in the world
   3. Get prepared to be used / be of service

The more credibility you have, the more opportunity you’ll have. That’s why you get an education.

Putting all of those things together, Jim’s list was:

1. Get up early - 6:30 am at the latest
2. Work Hard
3. Get your education - Respect/trust is easier to gain if you have a degree
4. Find oil - Find something you can be the best at
5. Make your mark
6. Get prepared to be of service

The sixth one is the only one that matters. That’s why you do the previous five, so that you can serve others.
Make a lot of money and become financially independant so you can be of more service. You’re more useful to others if you don’t have to work.

I’ve had about enough of google adsense. They’ve been a monopoly for long enough and are really starting to treat people poorly.

Now, I know that it is still by far the absolute best contextual advertising program around. It has done wonders for the average joe being able to make money online. I mean, you can put up a page about anything and immediatly get very targeted ads on the page without having to do squat.

However, recently google has been taking too much advantage of the position they have.

Some examples:

Recently one of my adsense incomes was cut in half. Page impressions stayed the same, ctr stayed the same, content on the pages stayed the same, but income was cut in half. Google just lowered the payouts. I have numerous friends who have complained about the same things. Some of them were affected more than I was, like having income go from $1500/day to $300/day.

Yes, that’s still a lot of money ($300/day), but $1500/day is much better.

Another example is I’ve had multiple people from writingup.com complain about getting clicks and not getting paid for the clicks. I’ve seen it before where you get 1 or 2 clicks with no money, but TWENTY clicks! I had another person get a sequence of clicks like 6, 15, 7, 4 on subsequent days and not make any money!

I know these people weren’t clicking on the ads themselves (we talked about it), so why aren’t they getting paid for it.

I have a beta account for yahoo’s version of adsense and can tell you that it’s not a real competitor with adsense yet. They have the same ad formats yet their ctr’s are about half that of adsense ctr’s. Yahoo’s program isn’t even close to adsense yet. Hopefully it will get there at some point.

What I’d really like to see right now is microsoft come out with their own version of adsense. I believe they’ll do a better job than Yahoo has and they’ll do a really big push with it.

What happens then?

Google’s stock will go down because their earnings will go down because people will switch their adsense code for microsoft code. No matter how much people dislike microsoft and want to see google beat them, money is money. And if Microsoft is going to pay where google isn’t, so be it.

I’ll switch.

I’ve run the yahoo ads enough now to know that they’re not nearly as profitable as adsense ads, but I’d guess they’ll get there at some point.

I would also hope that at some point someone comes out with a system that’s open about payment instead of the complete closed box that google is. Google doesn’t tell anyone anything about what’s going on and it drives people nuts.

So how do you explain halving the income from about 10 different sites, that are totally unrelated to each other, all at once? Google doesn’t explain it, they don’t have to.

Hopefully some day they will.

Hopefully some day someone else will so I don’t have to deal with google anymore.

They’ve ticked me off enough times now (and yet I still continue to use them because of their monopoly)…Dang monopoly!

At least it was the best thing to ever happen to online publishers. Horray for dumb ol google.

If you haven’t heard yet about the geek dinner that’s happening in Utah County tomorrow night you should probably check it out.

Not only is Phil Windley speaking (he’s a great speaker), it’s going to be an awesome event to meet people.