A few weeks ago, I had a chance to talk about the issue of cookie stuffing and dos and don’ts of it on Aff ABC. I did mention that I found cookie stuffing to be OK if you had a site dedicated to a product and you were putting cookies for that product only visitors’ computers. That’s what I would call gray hat affiliate marketing at best. If you are taking time to create a site dedicated to product ‘X”, and you are sending PPC and SEO traffic to the site, it would be unfair to not get commission due to the merchant’s incompetence in tracking your orders. Not a lot of my former colleagues approve of this, but If I were an affiliate manager, I would have no problem with that.

What I had an issue with was mass cookie stuffing, in which affiliates stuff the visitor’s computers with all kinds of cookies for products that they are not even promoting. Now that is wrong, and it is illegal. But the new practice seems to be creating a thin page with nothing of value on it, and then using PPC services such as Adwords to drive traffic to it only to put cookie on the visitors’ computers. I believe this approach is even worst than the one I discussed on Aff ABC. At the end of the day, not only you are putting unauthorized cookies on people’s PCs, you are also intentionally driving them to that page with no goal of promoting the product – just to make quick cash. Now that’s like pushing people into a bank and then rubbing them.

Cookie stuffing is a practice that should be acceptable under the circumstances that I mentioned above. The goal in that scenario is not to make more money but to get credit for all the hard work that you put in as an affiliate. However, if you are using cookie stuffing to just make a quick buck and have no plan on actually promoting products, then you should be banned, and in most cases you will. But a lot of Black Hats don’t care about that, now do they?

I had been thinking about buying a subscription to SpyFu a month ago. After all, that’s the one tool that gurus seem to agree is a potent competitive intelligence weapon (for those of you not familiar with SpyFu, this is an online tool that allows you to find out what the hottest keywords are, what your competitors are advertising on, and who is spending more in your industry). Most of the data is available for free, but the videos available on the site are more than enough to tempt anyone to try the tool. But the tool has enough merits to justify paying twice the price they are charging for right now.

I have been involved in the financial industry for years now, and you have more affiliates in this market than you have people in my state. Not only that, the costs of pay per click marketing in this market are going through the roof. I have been bidding a branded term (I have permission to do it from the advertiser) and am still paying $8 a click! That’s insane. Even if your merchant is paying you $150 per sale, you are still going to have to deliver a sale with 17 clicks to break even. Now that wouldn’t be an issue in the credit card industry as you can get 1-3% conversion rate without too much trouble, but when you are talking about the mortgage niche, then it’s tougher to get people approved and get the credit.

A month ago, I finally decided to jump in and see what all the fuss was about with SpyFu. Here is what you can get from SpyFu for free:

• Top 100 SEM Spenders
• Keywords with Highest Cost Per Click
• Keywords with Most Clicks per Day
• SEO Top 100
• Keywords with Highest Cost Per Day
• Top 100 Ad Buyers
• Biggest Changes in CPC
• Largest Budget Changes
• Largest Search Engine Shift
• Largest Cost/Day Changes
• Largest Clicks/Day Changes

So the good thing is that you can taste the information that you do get with SpyFu. But if you want the most up to date data with SpyFu and would like to extract every keyword under the sun that your competitors are using, then a subscription to SpyFu is a must.

What I like about SpyFu so far are the two items that I have in bold in the above list. By figuring out the keywords that are getting the highest CPCs, you can create Adsense campaigns to make quick cash with content heavy Adsense sites. And what about the all powerful clicks per day information! People think Google trends is hot. But don’t ever go blind into a market without doing proper keyword research and that’s exactly what this report show you. The latest information about the popularity of core keywords for your campaigns.

There is so much good stuff to talk about when it comes to SpyFu, but I strongly suggest that you watch the videos and find that out for yourself. And don’t forget to check SpyFu U.K if you are running campaigns for that area. Watch this space for more information on SpyFu.

I don’t know about you but I am in love with the StumbleUpon advertising platform. It’s not that complicated, and you basically don’t have many options, but boy it can deliver cheap traffic to a website. StumbleUpon currently charges 5 cents a visit (not a click), and that is a decent price for getting traffic to a new site. The system does not have complicated budget options and the minimum cut off for traffic is 100 visits. 

Like any system, there are major glitches in the Stumbleupon service. For instance, often your funds do show up correctly in the system. The approval process is long and rejection notes are often as vague as they come. But I can’t tell you how frustrating it is not being able to convert this traffic to sales. StumbleUpon is great for getting a lot of people to your site and just have them look around but don’t expert a decent conversion rate with these guys. I have gotten as low 0.1% conversion rate with StumbleUpon which is dismal. The traffic is cheap, and you can actually make money with it, but I recommend StumbleUpon for cool or heavy content sites and not for sites that only focus on sales. There are few strategies that help you increase your conversion rate on SU (I will talk about them in future posts), but don’t go around building your PPC business around SU alone.

One of the most underrated advertising services that often goes under the radar is ClickRiver. So what is Click River? It’s your key to the kingdom that is called Amazon. Amazon is one of the most visited sites on the Internet. A large number of people visit Amazon on an everyday basis with their credit cards handy and ready to buy, so you do have a whole lot of people that are in the shopping and buying mode. If you have used Amazon in the past couple of years, you have probably seen listings that are similar to the following:

The good thing about Clickriver is that you can choose to pay by category. Whether you have a service on stocks or just a programming product that you want to sell, you can list it on Amazon using the ClickRiver service.  Here are the main categories that you can use for your ads:

• Automotive Services
• Home Services
• Leisure Industry
• Education
• Personal Finance
• Health & fitness services
• Technology Education

There are many subcategories to choose from, but best of all, you can use Amazon’s geo-targeting to show your ads only in local areas! Now that is very powerful. Clickriver is very similar to the advertising system offered by Stumbleupon. It is a very basic system that does it’s job brilliantly. I personally have found that ClickRiver traffic is more qualified and converts better than Stumbleupon. A lot of people feel that the traffic from ClickRiver should convert as well as Google Adwords to be a viable option, but the traffic is cheaper, and if you have hit the ceiling with Adwords, can help you acquire more customers.

Should you use ClickRiver? It really depends on your business. A lot of people don’t even bother with Clickriver, but you’d be surprised how well it works in some verticals.

I have been searching a product that provides a blueprint for a quick start on pay per click marketing. Most products that you find on the Internet pretty much repeat the same old stuff that you can get from books. Having success in pay per click marketing is more than just paying Google and showing your ads at position number one. It’s all about having a system that you can use time and time again to make online profits. Here is why I am very impressed with the new version of Adwords Profits:

• Products: Choosing the right market and products to promote is often very important when it comes to affiliate marketing. But even if you are not an affiliate, it is essential to have the right mindset to promote any product. Let’s say you are working for a pharmeceutical company. Knowing what makes people click is essentially a big part of the whole game and an area that a lot of marketers struggle with. Any product that discusses the mentality that is needed to succeed in pay per click marketing has my vote.
• Ads: so you have a product. You know Google Adwords inside and out. What good is it if you can’t write ads that make people want to click and buy from you? That’s what writing effective ads is all about. Not many people know how to do it though.
• Landing Page: let’s say you get people to come and click on your ads. You even get your Adwords clicks to as low as 5 cents per click. If your landing page is awful, you are not going to make it. Landing page optimization and the Taguchi method are essential for any marketer. Not a lot of folks talk about how you can do this (I got to give props to Tim Ash and his book “landing page optimization.” His book was truly a breath of fresh air).
• Google System: Adwords has become a highly strategic game these days with all the changes that Google is making to quality score. One thing is constant and that is the quality score of your landing page. But how can you improve your quality score and survive the wave of Google slaps is what makes Adwords Profits 2.0 special.
• Product Creation: one thing that many affiliates don’t understand is the less work you put upfront, the less potential you have to make money. Take a look at anyone who has made it, and you will see that they have their own products. To be honest, I still don’t have my own product yet, but I am working on it diligently. When you think about creating a new product, there are a lot of uncertainties and risks. I wish I had a blueprint that I could use to create a product. But you can certainly have it in Adwords Profits 2.0.

Now Adwords Profits is not a cheap product but it’s not that much more expensive than some of other books that are out there. What I like about it though is that it’s practical. You can see things done and implement them right away. So in that sense, it’s well worth the price. But don’t take my word for it. Check out the author’s page. for more information.

I did post on SEO ABC about the immediate Edge about a week ago. The immediate edge is an advanced marketing program that Ed Dale and Dan Raine have put up to help affiliate marketers stay in top of their markets. One powerful aspect of this program is the advanced facebook marketing course that covers the mentality and theory behind making a successful Facebook ad campaign. The program is currently going for only $1 for 14 days, and I personally think that is plenty of time for one to finish the Facebook marketing course. I obviously had a chance to take a peak at a lot of videos and content that is available on the immediate edge, but 14 days was simply not enough time to make a real dent in there. But depending on how fast you can read, you maybe able to do some damage there. Here is the immediate edge $1 trial offer.

If you have worked with Google Adwords for quite sometime, you are probably familiar with the concept of day-parting. The Day-Parting feature allows you to choose when you want to run your campaign and at what time. I used to run a tech deal website, and the market is quite competitive. Now my rivals would kill each other for a piece of the pie until 7 PM EST. But after doing research, I realized that a lot of these guys don’t set aside proper budget to cover much after that time. The result was that I was on the first page by paying only $0.50 a click for highly competitive terms.

Now this technique works in some markets and doesn’t work in others. A lot of big companies have so much money to throw around that they are covered for 24/7. But in smaller markets and more niche ones, a lot of these guys don’t know what Day-Parting is, which means you can take advantage of it to promote your site heavily on certain times or days. First you need to go to your campaign setting and turn on ad scheduling. Once you do that, you can choose the times and days that you want your campaign to show or not to show:

When you combine this technique with geo-targeting and embedded matching, you get the ultimate ninja PPC formula. I will go over the other techniques later in the future, but these are the techniques that a lot of people don’t even know about (surprisingly), so you should definitely use them to your advantage. Stay tuned!

Google has announced that they will be updating their quality score in the upcoming days for the Adwords service. Google’s quality score is their crown jewel, and now they are improving it to make provide more relevant results to search. So what does it mean for you as an advertiser?

• Uncertainty: The new Quality Score will be calculated at the time of query which means your quality score can go up and down at different times during the day. But what is certain is that landing page quality has become just a bit more important as its score is calculated less frequently.
• Inactive Keywords: Google used to make keywords that were found irrelevant to your site inactive unless you paid a large amount of money per click. Google has announced that they will activate those keywords and show them if there is a relevant search out there.
• Bye Bye Minimum Bids: not really, but Google will now show what it takes to show on the first page. First page bid estimates are really what matter to most marketers, so this is an interesting move by Google. You are going to probably pay more in competitive markets to end up on the first page, but at the same time, you don’t have to use the First page bid estimates as your minimum. You can bid below it and still be shown on the subsequent pages.

The effects will be known soon, and I am sure there will be a lot of complaints by affiliates and PPC marketers. But that’s usually given. Check inside Adwords for more details.

Now I get this question a lot. If you have read any books about pay per click marketing, you have probably heard the saying that you shouldn’t graduate to Yahoo! and MSN Adcenter until you have pretty much mastered Google Adwords. The truth is, a lot of concepts that you learn by using Google Adwords can be applied to Yahoo! and MSN. But at the same time, you won’t waste your money away as Google usually has the best traffic. But a lot of people start with all three at the same time, and that is understandable as well. Now here is the thing. What should you do if you have exhausted all the options with the three services above?

If you are a one man business, then you probably have enough to worry about with the top three PPC services. But most big companies are not satisifed with the amount of traffic they can get from these three, so they look at other services such as ASK, Miva, ClickRiver, and even Stumbleupon. I personally have had so much success with Stumbleupon, but Stumbleupon is not really for everyone. In fact, they won’t even approve your site if you don’t meet their content criteria.

But of all the other 3rd party PPC services that I have tried, Miva seems to have the most reliable traffic. Now you can’t expect to get Google type results from Miva, but you don’t waste your money with Miva either. Best of all, these guys are very responsive to questions, which helps a lot.

SES Chicago, Dec. 8-12 is going to be upon us real soon. In fact, I just got an email from SES guys that has the schedule and everything you need to figure out if you need to go. I personally don’t miss SES events at New York, but I have been to Chicago a couple of times (I don’t like flying much).  The focus of this event is on Semantic search, mobile search, and shopping search. Check out the stacked SES schedule to get a feel why you should go for this. It’s not a cheap conference, but a must attend for all internet marketing professionals. Not only you learn Advanced Keyword Strategies, they have sessions on bid management tools as well. If you want to go, you may want to reserve your tickets soon. These things sell out so fast!