(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.

This morning I was chatting with Kirt Christensen on Skype and we both had our video cameras going.

Here’s a shot of what my video camera shows:

My wife needed to take a shower so she gave me our 10 month old to hold while she showered.

She knew I was working so she showered quickly and then came back quickly to take the baby away from me. So quickly in fact that she didn’t bother to put on any clothes.

What she didn’t know was that the flattening technology (read: my webcam) was running and Kirt was on the other end of it.

Beware of flattening technology, it might catch you unaware sometime too.

I love you Kim!

In the book he lists 10 “flatteners” that have caused globalization over the past 10-15 years. They include web browsers (anyone can view content), work flow software (managing processes), uploading (people sharing info online), oursourcing, offshoring (moving your plant overseas), informing (search engines), and other things.

One of the things that wasn’t listed (because it wasn’t nearly as big in 2005 as it is now) is the ease of putting video online.

I’m not talking about youtube or google video (which are obviously huge marketplaces). I’m talking about the ability to communicate via video and how easy it is getting and how it’s making globalization easier.

For example, as many of my readers know I have quite a few people who work for me full time in the Philippines. One of the big reasons I have been so successful with it is because of the ability to record a video of a process I do online using screen capture software like Camtasia Studio. I’m busy. If I had to type out processes I use to give instructions to people overseas, I simply wouldn’t do it and employees wouldn’t have my processes. Work wouldn’t get done.

Because of video, I can easily record my process and upload it and they have immediate instructions, in my voice, personalized to them and their situation.

For the past year or so I’ve been using Jing to create videos. The reason I use it instead of camtasia is because it makes it even easier to create and upload a video, reducing the overhead time of creating a video to virtually zero.

The ability to give instructions so quickly and easily makes it that much easier to move anything and everything overseas.

The flattening experience I had yesterday was when I got a Jing video from a customer of mine where she detailed feedback about using our website (how we could make it better, problems she’s having). She took a jing video of her using our site and detailed the problems she sees and why they’re problems. Feedback doesn’t get any more clear than that.

The flattening happens because now it’s super easy for me to forward that feedback onto my developers and have them make the changes, and nothing gets lost in the translation.

Feedback directly from the mouth and screen of a user going straight onto the screen of a developer overseas.

As more and more people realize the power and ease of creating videos and putting them online, the knowledge worker here in the U.S. had better become more knowledgeable or they’ll be replaced by people overseas (which obviously is already happening).

For those of you with jobs working for a company, if you’ve read the 4-hour work week, my guess is you can see how to use this to help outsource yourself!

When you and a few co-workers pitch in together to hire someone overseas, and you create videos to have them do your work for you, so you can go play golf, and you do it without your boss knowing, let me know. I love this stuff.

3 weeks ago I set up a campaign promoting a page on my blog in Adwords.

When I wrote the ad it got flagged for a trademark violation (which is super common in Adwords) so I “requested an exception”.

The next day my account didn’t have any impressions in it.

I contacted google to see what was wrong with my account.

6 days later I heard back from them saying that my account was suspended.

Here’s the email I got back:

Hello John,

Thank you for your patience. I’ve consulted your account with our
specialist team and it has come to our attention that your Google AdWords
account does not comply with our terms of service and advertising
policies. You have repeatedly submitted ads that violated our copyright
policies in a related account. As a result, your account has been
suspended and your ads will no longer run on Google.

As noted in our Terms and Conditions, Google reserves the right to
terminate advertisements for any reason. To view our Terms and Conditions,
please visit https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder.

We appreciate your cooperation.

Sincerely,

Michael C.
The Google AdWords Team

Needless to say I was shocked.

At first I thought this must be a temporary suspension, I hadn’t done anything wrong. I mean…I hadn’t done anything to hurt Google. I hadn’t done anything that I knew of that violated any of their rules. I used their own process to “request” an exception. I didn’t demand anything. I didn’t do anything malicious. My account was in good standing.

In my mind, this must just be temporary…after all, I had been spending over $20,000/month on Adwords (which, obviously isn’t a lot of money to Google, but 2 days prior I had gotten an email saying “since you’re one of our top advertisers, we’re now offering you phone support.”).

I was wrong.

I contacted them through both live chat and phone (Google phone number: 1-866-2google) and was assured that the suspension wasn’t temporary and wasn’t an accident. It was permanent.

I was also told that the “specialist” team had made the decision and they assured me there was nothing they could do about it, and that there was nobody else I could talk to.

Apparently Google has some magical “specialist” team that doesn’t have to answer to customers, and acts as an excuse for the people who do answer to customers so they can just say “I’m sorry, I know this must be frustrating, but I can assure you there’s nothing anyone can do. The specialist team made this decision and their decisions are final….no, there’s no way you can speak to them….no, there’s no way you can contact them or make any explanations to them….no, there’s no way to appeal their decision, their decisions are final.”

So then of course I started flipping out. This is how I make a living, and I was just told that because I made a simple, honest mistake, I’m not allowed to ever show any ads on google again ever for any reason…forever…permanently.

A simple mistake for which I received no warning, and there is no way to appeal the process.

Murderers don’t get that kind of treatment.

Rapists don’t get treated like that.

(yes, yes, I understand that google is a business and they can do anything they want…blah, blah, blah. Whatever happened to “Don’t be evil”? I’ll tell you, It went out the door on August 19, 2004 just like wall street said it would.)

So, I started trying to contact someone. Surely there must be a way to contact the specialist team and explain to them that this was an honest mistake.

I wrote a very nice email explaining my situation and sent it to a few email addresses inside google that I thought might get some attention (one of them, btw, is matt@google.com. You might want to try it too…although it didn’t get me anywhere).

The email I got back was:

Hello John,

Thank you for your email. I understand your concern regarding the
suspension of your account. However, as mentioned in our previous email,
your Google AdWords account has been suspended due to multiple Copyright
disapprovals. We are unable to revoke your account suspension, and we will
not accept advertisements from you in the future.

Please note that our support team is unable to help you with this issue,
and we ask that you do not contact them about this matter. If you need
more information about our content policy guidelines, please visit
https://adwords.google.com/select/contentpolicy.html.
…
…
standard google email garbage
…
…
We look forward to providing you with the most effective advertising
available.

Sincerely,

Saman
The Google AdWords Team

I thought the “look forward to providing” part was funny.

I then tried to contact 2 different people inside of google directly through linkedin, both of whom declined the invitation to be introduced (not surprised).

At this point, I’ve given up on trying to get my account re-instated. They don’t care that I’m a human who made a mistake. They’re not going to repeal their decision (how could they possibly have been wrong in the first place…right?)

I don’t have an adwords account now. It has been a good 3 weeks of becoming more intimately accustomed to the way yahoo and msn do their ppc. They’ve made a LOT of improvements.

In the end, this will probably end up being a blessing to me. It’s an excuse to start everything from the beginning. New business. New address. New name. New credit card. New websites. New computer. New IP address.

Again, I’m writing this as a warning!. Please don’t rely solely on Google for your online advertising (fortunately I hadn’t…and I had other streams of income). If you do, you might make a mistake someday and find that you’ve been slammed to the floor and kicked while you are down, like I was.

Please feel free to blog about this and spread the word. More people need to know that they’re not allowed to “request an exception”.

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:

Yet…the whole point of these things is that we’re going to put off doing them until the new year comes.

And, since you don’t start something on a Tuesday, this year we’re going to put off starting our new habits until Monday, January 7.

So, a month ago, you decided to procrastinate losing weight because there was something special about January 1 (well, now January 7 because that’s a monday).

And 2 weeks ago you decided that January 1 was a magical day when you would work on making money outside of your current job, or you would be more patient with your kids, or you would be a better person.

January 1 doesn’t have any magic. That’s why new years resolutions almost always fail.

Procrastination is bad. And generally that’s what a resolution is. It’s something we’ve procrastinated, and something we knew we were going to procrastinate until the new year.

What happens if you need to lose weight in July? You’re going to get fatter until January 1? That really stinks.

I don’t do new years resolutions because when I realize I need to change something in my life, I make a big effort to change it today.

If I need to lose weight (which has happened a few times), I stop drinking chocolate shakes at 9:30 at night today. If I need to stop spending so much time on email, I close my email browser today.

Of course, I always write these things down in my todo list and email them to myself.

Make your new years resolution for 2008 to not need to have any 2009 new years resolutions. Resolve to change your life “today”, every day this year. You’ll have a much more productive year if you do.

I was totally blown away.

It wasn’t that it was totally new information. It was how they had put together a bunch of different concepts and used them in such a way that it took advantage of all the things we know about blogging and cut out all of the un-useful things about blogging…when it comes to selling products.

They took a blog and turned it into an exceptionally effective ecommerce site. Then they repeated it.

I get asked all the time “how can I easily build a website about X”.

My response: WORDPRESS!

The thing that really hit me hard was that you can (and very often should) use wordpress to build almost any type of site you want (ecommerce, single sales page, information, cms, affiliate site, review site, squeeze page). It’s all set up for you and with the info they give in this course you know exactly how to configure it for best results…for selling!

There’s such a huge difference between being able to sell things online, and being “cool” or “read” or “just in it for fun” or “I just do it for networking”. This is where a lot of people I know get caught going in the wrong direction with their blogs. They want to make money from it, but they’re treating it like a social event. They don’t ever get into what actually makes people buy things online.

It’s also where I see marketers go wrong in how they’re trying to integrate web 2.0 into their plans. They go about spamming instead of just using the tools given them to their advantage where it will stick around for the long term. Using wordpress in conjunction with the system BTS outlines integrates the best of both worlds (the blog/web 2.0 world and the internet marketing world).

So, after I listened to the course I immediately went out and started a blog based on the principles they talk about.

Then, over the next month or so, I really, really ramped it up (this is why I call it “Blogging To Sell On Steroids”).

I took all the marketing tactics I could remember and wrote them down in an organized todo list. Then I went and started asking other people who I know knew a lot of stuff, about marketing tactics they use, and I added their lists to my list.

What I came up with in the end were 13 todo lists that start before the beginning of the BTS course and take you way past the end of the BTS course, on the path of setting up a super successful blog that actually sells stuff and makes you money.

I call the system:

Blogging To Sell On Steroids

and you can get my todo lists for yourself by following that link.

I’m giving the system away for free (Keith let me give away their course…Thanks Keith!)

It’s not for everyone. It’s just for people looking to make money online who already have some knowledge about blogs and marketing.

[tags]blogging to sell, wordpress, blog, marketing[/tags]

Since then, tracks was built and released as an open source system built solely around GTD, and a few other systems have come out that make implementing the Getting Things Done philosophy online really simple.

I’m writing this in hopes that it will

1. make it easier for people to figure out how to implement the GTD philosophy online
2. influence developers of online GTD implementations to make their systems more robust.

Right now there isn’t a perfect system. A few come close, and I think will be right there really soon.

So, here are a few things to consider:

1. GTD is an entire philosophy. The correct implementation is going to be different for everyone. I can’t tell you which will be best for you, I can only tell you what’s best for me (…I guess then, it MUST also be best for you ) and what features you might/should want and why.
2. Because GTD is a philosophy, any system you use should be large. Not large as in bloated, but it should be able to do all things you do now, or might want to do in the future. It’s very common for people to want to implement something like this and when they’re starting they just want the basics, and they can’t see a time when they would want more. Trust me, if you really get into implementing GTD, you’ll want more.
   So, by a large system, I mean an full personal information management system online. I want to be able to manage more than tasks and calendar, I want to be able to manage ideas, goals, affirmations, notes, websites, plans, projects, …
   Backpack it does a good job of letting you create notes, todo’s and pages, but the todo’s aren’t organized correctly for GTD. What I really like about backpackit that other softwares are missing is the ability to create pages of content and notes that are just stand alone notes, not a todo with a note attached to it. You can easily keep your online reference material inside backpackit and keep it organized. With other systems I’ve used you have to fudge the system to do this.
   Being able to keep all your online reference material in a system like this would be a big deal (being able to keep stuff like websites you use infrequently, logins and passwords, windows OS tips and tricks you might read about, anything you might put on a post-it note that can get thrown away).

   If you don’t want this stuff now, you will at some point (unless you already have a good system for this).

3. It should work with all technology, even if it’s not technology you use right now. If you really get into using your online GTD system, you will want to always make sure you can get stuff out of your head and written down no matter where you are. If you don’t send text messages now, you will some day, to write down ideas you have as you’re driving. The ability to send these to your todo list is a big deal.

   It’s also a big deal that the system you use have the ability to contextualize these as you send them.

   As far as I know, all of tracks, vitalist, toodledo, and backpackit allow you to email todo’s/notes to your todo lists. Tracks is the only one I know of that will allow you to contextualize the todo’s as you send them.

   For me this is a big deal because I send between 2-20 todo’s to myself every day via email. If I send 15 notes, or goals, or affirmations, and they all show up in my “inbox”, I’m not very happy that I now have to go and re-categorize them. This is the reason I’m sticking with Tracks for right now. Vitalist and Toodledo look like they’re more full featured than tracks, but they’re lacking key features that make the system really, really usable.

4. The reason I’m writing this is because Vitalist and Toodledo have some features that Tracks doesn’t have that I want and think would be helpful in keeping me organized. They both have the ability to sort your todo’s, and to prioritize them (or star them…like in gmail). Tracks doesn’t have this. They both have import functions too, which is really nice because I’m free to switch between the two. Tracks doesn’t have this.
5. It’s important that the system you use is fast and easy to add tasks to. If it doesn’t use AJAX (where the page does stuff without having to reload the whole page) don’t even bother. It’s also important that the system has a way to get your tasks/lists out of the system, and in front of you on a regular basis.
6. Free. Free-ness is important. Sure, I’ll pay for things, I don’t mind that. But when I have to pay $10/month just to get the minimal amount of use out of something, it bugs me and I’m really hesitant to make a long term commitment (toodledo). For $10/month you can get a really, really good hosting account online. This is the reason google is sooo successful. They provide the best apps online, and they provide them for free. People click their ads.

My point with this was to explore some of the options that are available with online GTD systems right now. The big 3 that I see are tracks.tra.in, Vitalist, and Toodledo. All 3 of them are really close to doing everything I’ve said, but none is quite there. As you make a decision for which one to use (if you’re not using the GTD philosophy somewhere, you’re missing out on a lot of time and money and brainpower for yourself) look at what you currently want for features, and then look at these 3 softwares and their potential for future use.

[tags]GTD, Getting Things Done, GTD online[/tags]

After reading David Allens “Getting Things Done” and having his system change my life I have stumbled upon/created a system for personal productivity that uses technology to make me more productive.

If you’re not paying the $20/month to be able to do email from your smartphone, I think you’re wasting the biggest productivity tool you have. I’ve always said that outside of being a phone, most pda/smartphones are just toys. They look cool and sound great, but in the end, they’re just eye candy. Toys to play games with in your down time and keep people’s contacts in.

Here’s my podcast of How To Turn Your Smartphone Into A Million Dollar Tool instead of just having a phone and a toy.

Or you can play it here:

The website I use and talk about in the audio is http://tracks.tra.in.
I also use Google calendar.

Here is the php script I use to email myself the todo’s.

Here’s a video of instructions:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=816501744180957431

[tags]gtd, getting things done, gtd online, blackberry, smartphone[/tags]

But, there are a lot of things that don’t require a full time person. They require someone else to do it for you every once in a while. Here’s how I outsource some of these things:

Graphics: I get graphics done a few different ways. One, I have a designer who does contract work. He’s reasonably priced (most designers aren’t) and is pretty good. I don’t mention who he is because then he’ll get too busy to work for me anymore.

Recently I’ve also been using the “Contests” feature at sitepoint.com. There you can let other people compete for your work where you say I’m willing to pay $XXX for “Such and Such” to be done and then you get a bunch (or a few) people doing different designs for you and you get to pick the best one. Similar to the logo concept developed at logoworks, but here 1) you get to name your own price, 2) you get as many people as you want submitting designs, and 3) you can have any sort of graphics done.

Basically, you can have multiple people compete for your job ahead of time without having to pay anything up front. If you’re not happy with any of them, you don’t pay anything. If you like multiple ones, select more than one as the winner.

Simple, effective, outsourced.

Copywriting: I hate writing copy. I hate everything about it. Sales copy is worse because it matters. If I have to write sales copy for a business, that business stops and doesn’t get done. So, I always find someone else to do the copywriting. I’ve used quite a few different services, none of which I’m happy with, so I’m going to tell you what they are and then ask for your feedback.

I’ve done copywriting projects on elance. The problem with this is that you never know how good of copy you’re going to get. If it’s sales copy, you might get something good, you might get pure garbage. You can read someone’s feedback, but it doesn’t always mean it’s going to work out.

I’ve used Copywriting Club once before. It sounds like a great solution to this problem, but the one time I used it, I bought the silver package, then was told that I was getting “platinum” level copy because one of the owners wrote it for me, and then I sent over 1000 clicks to the sales page and it never converted a single time. This was in a market I had researched and tested and the copy totally sucked. I should probably test it again, but the one time I used it I wasn’t very happy.

I’ve used a few individual contractor copywriters also. The problem with this is it’s expensive. You can pay $45,000 for a single sales page. Yes, you’re likely to make that back, but that’s a lot of money for sales copy. There are quite a few people out there who will do this for between $4000 and $10,000. Ask around to people you know. You don’t necessarily need the best copywriter (depending on your business). If you can test and tweak and manipulate the copy then you can outsource it to “someone” and just get it done.

My brain is kind of fried right now so that’s all I can think of. As I come up with more things I outsource outside of full time employees I’ll post them. Feel free to comment with any suggestions.