One thing that I’ve learned is that it takes just as much research and time to promote a product with $7 commission as it does to promote a product with a $100 commission. Of course, I learned it the hard way.
Back in April, I bought Niche Marketing On Crack, and I thought it was a pretty well laid out plan and got to work right away. However, instead of doing proper research (that I knew how to do and had done for so many other products), I went into Commission Junction and picked one of the newest programs added - Bob Greene’s Best Life Diet membership.
Bad Move 1: People might disagree with me but at least on sites like ShareASale and CJ, I would NOT recommend people to join brand new affiliate programs. A lot of these companies are just testing the waters. However, because Bob Greene was a big name and backed by Oprah I thought I was relatively safe and didn’t think about the ‘new’ factor too much. It was also paying $18 commission per sale after the 10-day free trial.
Bad Move 2: The competition was just horrific. On top of that, “Best” is a stop word, which means that it’s too common of a word and some search engines don’t ‘record’ it in order to speed up searches. Do not just pick affiliate programs on a whim - just do the research.
I did actually go on to make a couple sales from the site so I know the NMOC formula works. I also got a few additions to my autoresponder. It’ s just it was a horrible thing to begin with. I thought of it like my guinea pig site and spent some time doing different things with it. Looking back, I think I spent way too much time on it.
Anyway, one day I’m looking at my Analytics account and see that the site has gotten a decent amount of traffic and I see people clicked thru to the affiliate link, but for some reason I am not seeing any clicks on CJ. I went to my site and clicked thru to the link to test it.
Turns out they close the affiliate program WITHOUT notifying any of the affiliates! How unprofessional! I was pretty depressed since I had spent quite some time on developing the site. A couple weeks later I saw that this particular program was being managed by another company who were managing other diet memberships. But now they were only paying $12. I went ahead and changed the links because some $ is better than no $.
Recently while just tracking my sales, I went and saw that they had now changed the payout to $7 - once again without any notification, but at least the links were still active. Anyway, this whole thing left such a bad taste in my mouth. You’d think that such a big name program would at least have the decency to notify their affiliates when closing the program.
Anyway lessons learned:
When blogging, you need to notify the search engines that you’ve updated your blog, and here comes the value of the ping list. This list allows you to notify the engines themselves rather than wait for them to come along to your site. Since most of my websites are now wordpress based, pinging comes extremely handy.
I originally got my ping list from Brandon’s SEO blog at SEOFeed.com, but since then have looked at additional resources, and added some of my own to the mix. Here is my current ping list:
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc/
http://coreblog.org/ping
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blogbot.dk/io/xml-rpc.php
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://mod-pubsub.org/knapps/blogchatt
http://ping.amagle.com
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogoole.com/ping
http://www.blogoon.net/ping
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogroots.com/tbpopuli.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/knapps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
I have been thinking about buying the pricey SEO Elite for some time now since I had read only positive reviews. Just recently got around to doing my own research, and found some useful free alternatives mentioned on seobook.com:
BacklinkWatch is a web-based tool that shows the page rank and anchor text of inbound links for free.
This is another web-based tool that compares your site’s link profile with the sites that rank in the top 10.
Tattler and Backlink Analyzer are both downloadable tools that provide backlink information for free. This is primarily the reason I was interested in SEO Elite, and since all of the tools mentioned above are free, I think I’ll try them out first.
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