One way to make sure your disclosures are all in order is by using services such as CMP.ly. These services are designed specifically for anyone who is promoting and reviewing products online and want to have a way to differentiate between their relationships on their various landing pages. Sometimes you are promoting a product because you are an affiliate. Other times, you are getting freebies and other incentives to promote a product. Whatever the case, you are going to need to have proper disclosure lines on your website.

Many marketers have now realized the risk of not having proper disclosure statements on their landing pages. The same concept applies to testimonials as well. If you are putting anything on your landing pages that can’t be proved or is not entirely accurate, you better disclose the facts on your page. As far as affiliate products are concerned, you can always rely on CMP.ly disclosure statements to help you along the way.

Disclosing your relationships and facts on your landing pages may not increase your conversions, but it is what’s required of marketers by the FTC at this point. You certainly don’t want to leave yourself open to warnings and potential penalties for not staying compliant.

Online marketers today need to be more well-rounded than ever before. It’s not enough to be just good at one thing anymore. If you happen to be interested in expanding your horizon and mastering the art of search advertising from ground up, here are 3 books you should read to get you started:

Ultimate Guide to Google Ad Words: I don’t like giving people more credit than they are do, but you have to tip your hats to Perry Marshall. He comes up with some of the best training material we have seen on a consistent basis. His Adwords books are classics and keep getting better. If you want to learn Google Adwords once and for all, you should get this book.

Web Analytics 2.0: if you are not a data cruncher, you better start getting into the game. No matter how talented a marketer you are, there are things you can’t figure out without using your Analytics software to its fullest. Web Analytics 2.0 shows you how you can go about optimizing your campaigns and turning your data to actionable information.

The Online Marketing Inside Out: not an online advertising per se, but it is a must read for those who have not tried channels such as social media to bring down their CPA. It does cover ways you can go about advertising and promoting your business online, but it goes beyond that and covers search engines, e-mail marketing, and beyond.

There you have it. 3 books that any marketer should read to hone his/her skills and learn new things to apply to his/her busines.s

Let’s say you want to pick up an e-book reader and start your search on Google instead of Amazon or B&N. What would you do if you saw the following ads?

Essentially, some of these apps are promising you a lot off on Kindle. Some are comparing a device that is not available for sale with Kindle. Let’s not forget that Kindle and iPad are trademarked terms. And let’s not forget about Amazon Associates Program’s policy either. Use of:

any trademark of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates, or any variation or misspelling of any trademark of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates, in any domain name — for example, a domain name such as “amazon.mydomain.com”, “amaozn.com”, “amazonauctions.net”, “facebook.com/amazondealsgroup,” “endlessboots.com,” “endless.mydomain.com”, “endlss.com,” “kindlemagazines.mydomain.info,” or “kindlewirelessreader.co.uk” would be unsuitable

I am not suggesting that you shouldn’t be aggressive with your Adwords campaign. But this is pretty far pushing it too far. At the end of the day, you could get banned by Amazon and your ads could be removed by Google. Many of those who engage in such activities actually expect that to happen. Their business is short-term, and they don’t plan on making long-term money this way. But this strategy is risky, and your competitors will most likely report you sooner rather than later. If you make a lot of money from Adwords or Amazon, you want to stay as far away from these practices as possible. The consequences could be very harsh.

Unfortunately, many marketers assume that Google Adwords Keyword Tool is the be all end all of all keyword tools. Have you ever wondered why people pay for premium keyword tools when they can just use Google Adwords Keyword Tool? There is a reason for that. The tool does provide you with some decent information, but it doesn’t give you a complete list. I have also found the stats from WordTracker or Keyword Discovery to be more useful that numbers and stats provided by Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Premium keyword tools may cost you some decent amount of money, but when used in conjunction with Google’s tools, they can help you create a better, more comprehensive keyword list.

Keyword Discovery: one of the most powerful keyword tools on the market. While many prefer using Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery has its own advantages. It comes with a variety of features to help you slice and dice your keyword lists.

WordTracker: has been around for years. It’s used by many SEO and advertising professionals. If you are into digging and digging more, WordTracker is a reliable too to consider.

Wordze: has improved a lot in the past few months. For a long time, Wordze wasn’t considered as a true contender to WordTracker and Keyword Discovery. But now it is one of the best keyword tools on the market. Comes with a ton of features and can help you build great lists fast.

What’s your favorite keyword tool for online advertising?

Think about it. Let’s say you have acquired a sponsored link on a top blog or website. You don’t want to just look at the number of people who have come to your website. You also want to know the referring URL for those links and maybe the number of impressions it has gotten as well. Besides, you want to make sure you can break-down your data all the way back to each individual link.

If you happen to run your landing pages on Wordpress, you can always use tracking plugins such as Redirection to gain all kinds of insight to who has visited your links and from where. You can also use services such as bit.ly to track your link, their progress on social media sites such as Twitter, and much more .

At the end of the day, whether you are an affiliate marketer or own a business online, you want to make sure you have all the data you need to analyze your campaign performances and make decisions accordingly. The last thing you want to do is leave things to chance.

Web Analytics is one of the most underrated aspects of making money online. Without it, you are essentially operating blind, and that is not the way to run a business. Before throwing money at your problems with your online business, you want to make sure you have all the data you need to figure out ways to improve your business’ online performance. That is precisely the reason the below 4 analytics books are must read:

Web Analytics 2.0: one of the most exciting web analytics books in years. It shows you how to conduct advanced analysis on the data you get from your analytics software. Best of all, it teaches you how to develop actionable strategy from that data.

Google Analytics: Google Analytics is being used by many bloggers and website owners these days. Even some of larger organizations rely on Google analytics to optimize their online campaigns. This book covers everything you need to know to get started with Google Analytics.

Complete Web Monitoring: web analytics, segmentation, conversions, and user interaction analysis are just some of the topics covered in this book. But it goes beyond that and shows you how to effectively monitor discussions and communities online.

Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics: goes beyond the basic and shows you how to dig deeper and get more out of Google Analytics. Whether it’s optimizing your ROI or your check out process, this book has you covered. The good news is the new edition is just around the corner.

What’s your favorite Google Analytics book?

One of the most popular ways to improve conversion rate on landing pages and web pages in general is by targeting your traffic based on the place from which they come to your website. Let’s say someone is searching for something on Google and just happens to land on one of your blog posts. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could reach out to them, give them an incentive to sign up for your newsletter, or share something exclusively with them?

There are obviously more ways to use this tactic to increase conversions. Many top affiliate marketers have struck deals with their affiliate programs to display a logo or brand on the top of the merchant’s landing page when people click on their landing pages. These marketers have spent time building a brand, and they want their visitors to go about completing landing page forms with more peace of mind. Implementation could always be an issue, but if you have a decent coder, it’s pretty easy to get it done with server-side scripting.

If you happen to be hoping to optimize your blog’s conversion rates, you can always rely on third party scripts to better target your visitors. WP Greet Box is one of those handy plugins that you can install on any Wordpress based landing page to target your visitors by their referring URL. You can easily customize the message and show your visitors some dynamic notes upon their visit.

This is not an approach that would increase your conversion rates every-time. But it’s certainly worth trying. It does work on some landing pages better than others. But you never know unless you test things out.

You may have heard about Google cracking down on advertisers who are not using their “real” URLs in their display URL. A few years ago, Google was a bit lenient when it came to dealing with people who were using redirects or other addresses in their display URL section. But that would open Google to a lot of liabilities, which is why Google is tightening the rules and adding new guidelines for advertisers.

When it comes to choosing a URL for your business or landing page, you want to make sure it’s something that is brandable, catchy, and short (with emphasis on short). A domain name that is too long and contains too many words is just tough to remember and hard to push through Google Adwords and other advertising websites. I have found that many marketers just get too greedy when it comes to choosing their domain name. They not only go for longer URLs (with keywords), they don’t even register their own domain. Running a business using blogspot is not too ideal these days.

There are tools that can help you find a good domain name and register it fast. Domainsbot and Domize are two domain name search services that let you mix and match your keywords with brandable terms to come up with URLs that can help your business grow instead of hindering it.

You can be the ultimate expert in landing page optimization and analytics. But if you don’t have a decent URL in hand, you are seriously hurting your business or campaigns. Don’t get me wrong. There are ways to get around whatever guideline Google has put forth. Google is notorious for keeping loopholes open one way or another. It’s also true that having the relevant keyword in your URL could help you with your 1st page bids. But don’t get too greedy. Length definitely does matter when it comes to URLs.

Here is what Google is asking its advertisers to do: display the full URL of your website if you are on a domain that hosts multiple websites. Here are a few nuggets from the announcement:

all ads leading to sites on hosted domains will need to have display URLs that accurately reflect their destinations….

Incorrect:

Destination URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com
Display URL: blogspot.com

Correct:

Destination URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com
Display URL: adwords.blogspot.com

Of course, Google is going to give you some hints with your disapproval note. So you are going to know exactly why your ads were denied, and how you can fix them. Unfortunately, unlike everything else that Google does, this policy could lead to more Google slaps and more disapproval headaches. Keep in mind that the 25,35,35,35 rule still applies. So if you have registered a long sub-domain on one of these hosted services, you want to make sure it stays below 35 characters.

A lot of marketers are not going to be happy with this change. I am sure there will be ways to get around this policy. At the same time, a lot of newbie marketers are going to get hit by this change. Transparency is everything these days, so if you have been hiding your display URL or been gaming the system, you’ll have to shift gears. While I hate new policies, this one seems to be a fair one.

Your take: what’s your thought on Adwords new URL policy?

As someone who has worked in the advertising space in the past, I can tell you that a lot of people are hurting by all the changes that Google has made to its Adwords program. We are not talking about the major changes. Everybody knows that your ad ranking depends on your CPC and your quality score. We also know that there are plenty of things that Google doesn’t tell you when it adjusts your quality score or slaps your campaigns altogether. But most often, people are blaming Google or keyword tools for things they are responsible for.

A lot of people believe Google Adwords is some magic service that will help drive traffic to your website and convert them at the same time. So they don’t pay enough attention to how they are putting their feet forward with their landing page. Getting slapped by Google can be an eye opener for a lot of folks. I have seen so many companies that have poor quality flash landing pages up and hope for some miracle. Some companies don’t even have a product yet, but they don’t even use their landing page to collect names or give people a way to find out more about their future products.

When you happen to put up a campaign on Adwords or any other service for that matter, you want to make sure you give your future visitors relevant information about your goods and services. And if you don’t have a product and are just using Adwords for branding or promotion of future products, you want to make sure your ad dollars don’t go to waste. Sure. You want to pay attention to the on-page factors on your pages as well. You want to have relevant keywords on your landing pages. You want to optimize the tagging of your images and add <h> and <b> tags when appropriate. But you don’t want to forget about what your page is supposed to accomplish.

Google Adwords is not a magic solution. It can’t get you traffic and convert it as well. So don’t put up a landing page without doing your research and paying attention to details. Can you easily tell what your page is expected to accomplish by just looking at it? That should be your starting point.