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.

More: continued here

Download audio file (geekcast16.mp3)

Lisa Picarille was unable to make it on this week, so without the voice of reason, we ended up with a NSFW-cast with the chatter of Todd Crawford, Sam Harrelson, Scott Jangro, Jim Kukral, and myself.

We tackled lots of topics, including the Affiliate Summit Awards sans Wayne Porter, disappointment in the Web2.0Expo, and whether conferences should share video and audio of sessions.

There was a guessing game about Todd Crawfordâ??s next gig, as well as a trip down memory lane for the one (merchant) that got away from Todd in the old CJ days.

The super nerds got into role playing games for a while (as if the gaming world doesn’t begin and end with Madden) with talk of Grand Theft Auto IV and Star Wars on the Wii.

There was a conspiracy theory about Jim unleashing Twitter bots on us all, and Todd introduced the gang to TellMe.com.

We journey into a weird place for a while in a segment where only adults and emancipated minors should listen, but then recover for discussions on Disqus, Evernote, and PBwiki.

Subscribe to the RSS of the entire GeekCast.fm network, or add us on iTunes.

Listen to the show at http://geekcast.fm/archives/sweet-16/.

Episode 16 lasts over 80 minutes.

More: continued here
Powered by SmartRSS

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.

More: continued here

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.

More: continued here

 

    Listen Now Mark Eibner and Broker IPTV on Real Estate Radio USA. 

 

Mark Eibner, BrokerIPTV And Real Estate Radio USA Interview about video and blogs and IPTV channels

Barry1: Hello everybody and welcome back to Real Estate Radio USA. Thanks for joining us on this Tuesday edition of the program. You are on with the B&B crew. Now, joining us on the program is a gentleman. We have been looking at this website for quite some time. It is brokeriptv.com. It is run by a gentleman, Mark Eibner, and he joins us on the program. Mark, how are you doing sir?

Mark Eibner: I am doing fine Barry. How are you? It is Mark Eibner… that is the way [Misc. Voice]…

Barry1: That’s Eibner, i-bin-ner.

Mark Eibner: My whole life, I have had to struggle with that.

Barry1: Well, I apologize for that. But I tell you what, that does not do when you [inaudible] you guys are doing a heck of a job on this website. I mean incredible content you guys got up there.

Mark Eibner: Well, I think today most of video, most of blogs really is about content and I think it is about video content that is a step above the user generated that has been put on a lot of real estate sites out there.

Barry1: Yeah. Well, I have been studying one of the things. My big question I am going to start off with this, okay? Who came up with the tag-line brokeriptv.com - "real estate information and news from down our street and up yours"?

Mark Eibner: Oh, that was the making of myself and my partner Dirk Freeman. Steeleboy Productions.

Barry1: I will tell you what. Since I first heard it, I have never been able to forget it, so it works.

Mark Eibner: Well, thank you.

Barry1: Well, tell us a little bit about the BrokerIPTV business model and what you guys are trying to accomplish out there?

Mark Eibner: Well, really BrokerIPTV is… it is like a white paper to prove to people that I think are just a little bit behind the curve on what the importance of not only video, but blogging is to the future of the real estate business and to the future of, I am going to say, large and small scale business. BrokerIPTV is just our way to get into large brokerages, large producers, key people, and do the right interviews, blog the interviews up of the video, push the video out to all the top social networks, index the video itself and re-purpose it, on a different whole group of blog and video aggregaters, improved to one person or a group of people that one single blog done appropriately with video can end up you surfing sites that have been out there, static websites, that have been out there for years. I mean if you look at some of the things we have done, we have moved people singular names and singular companies to the front page of search and that… and they are sites and people that have been there like I said one, two, three, four, five years.

Barry1: I love that. It is all about content, right? What do they say about sites like that, content is king.

Mark Eibner: Correct.

Barry1: Well, IPTV, you talk a lot about IPTV channels. What channels are in the works?

Mark Eibner: Well, we just got approved our first real estate channel for a major brokerage firm. It is a company out of Colorado, Metro Brokers. Actually, we have the domain up now with some dummy information on it, some prototype information, but www.metrobrokerstv.com is our first commercial contract. We are working with two national lenders right now on a similar product. We are also working with a marketing company for a restaurant and catering channel.

Barry1: Wow. You guys are not just doing this for real estate. You are doing it for any business that wants to achieve a really great web presence?

Mark Eibner: You bet.

Barry1: Okay.

Mark Eibner: To me this is the marketing channel of the future right here.

Barry1: Absolutely. Now, I noted… of course we have been in real estate a while just like you have. I know you are a real estate broker, as you own real estate company, you have your own title company, you have your own data systems company, you are a really busy guy. I applaud you for that. Talk about an entrepreneur, but one of the things I wanted to ask you is I see real estate agents producing videos all the time. Who does your production first of all and how do you set your guys apart? I mean it is so slick, it is so professional, and it is so well done. How do you achieve that quality?

Mark Eibner: Well, I think I have got a 30 year industry veteran unfortunate enough to be partnered with, Dirk Freeman out of Steeleboy Productions. They are based in Denver, Colorado. Dirk has been in the TV and radio industry. Dirk’s Steeleboy, it is his old radio nickname and they have a production house. We have all the equipment, all the cameras… I mean everything that most real estate companies, most real estate brokers… even though I know people who claim they can go out and buy an HD camera  for 800 bucks and they could use a Adobe Photo-shop and that is why I always ask people, "Are you in the real estate business to [Inaudible], produce video or are you in the real estate business to sell real estate?"

Barry1: Exactly.

Mark Eibner: Better make your choice. I mean if anybody out there wants to be in a production business, we will hire you.

Barry1: Right.

Mark Eibner: If you want to sell real estate, I recommend that you… you are going to have to cut some of your revenue out and introduce into your revenue model. You don’t have to raise or find other revenue pieces. You just have to replace the… I am going to say ineffective old world marketing techniques that real estate companies and small businesses are using with the new video model.

Barry1: Right, okay.

Mark Eibner: I think our standards… Dirk’s, if you look at his production, his standards, I mean he is just top of the line. He does a number of infomercials, that is where he makes a lot of his money, is in infomercials actually world wide.

Barry1: Good money in that.

Mark Eibner: Yep.

Barry1: Well, now everybody and I know you guys are big proponent at that. We have talked about blogging and blogs all the time on the show, big proponents of that and you guys are into and of course BrokerIPTV. Explain to us a little bit about the vlog (video blog).

Mark Eibner: Well, what we are doing right now with any piece of video that we produce is we actually get a transcoded and put into textural form, so we can actually blog that up, back-link it, keyword it, give it all the relevancy that we need for… it is just like we are not posting up just raw video and hoping the world is going to find it. The whole idea behind the vlog is using the "Semantic" parts of the web, using textural pieces of the web, married up with the video piece to give the relevancy that Goggle is really looking for out there.

Barry1: All right Mark, I am going to slow you down there buddy. You threw me for a loop. So, I know our real estate professional listeners out there just got lost too. Explain a little bit about what you said and try to keep dumb it down for guys like me.

Mark Eibner: Like the Semantic web?

Barry1: Yeah.

Mark Eibner: Well, really the Semantic web is… everyone is talking about Web 2.0 and things of that nature. The Semantic web is really Web 3.0 that is effectively where the entire web is going right now. People don’t realize this. A lot of folks… they always ask like, "Well, how is somebody going to get to my blog" or "Why are they are going to go to my blog?" In fact a friend of mine, a really good friend of mine, sent me an article today stating that only 2.5% of the consumer market utilizes blogs for their consumer shopping needs and things of that nature and my response back to him is whether someone is using your site or not is irrelevant. What is relevant in the world today is when someone goes to that little box, the doorway to the Internet called Google or Yahoo and types in phonetically linked together letters in a proper fashion, spell a word or phrase you, had better show up on the front page.

Barry1: Absolutely, absolutely.

Mark Eibner: End of the story, over, that is it, that is the web. The Semantic web - word phrase is the web, that is the web and it doesn’t really matter what your site is anymore, what matters is the consumers brain goes to search, they type in letters or phrases in a box, and you had better somehow show up and somehow to show up today is blogging and more importantly is video within your blog.

Barry1: So, your are SEO and you are enhancing the video itself?

Mark Eibner: Correct. We take all of our video pieces even if we have to make sure our talent, our interview talent, are using the right words in the interview and making sure that our… like when you are talking to me right now that we are actually repeating the right words, so, then when this gets trans coded and blogged up, we can create some back links and keep trace of relevancy for Google to actually index our interview and then we also take those same words. We actually push our video out, part of our process is… we push the video and the keywords out to at this particular point five different aggregating sites, blog sites, and about 14 different social media/video sites. So our blog is re-aggregated on social networks out there. Everything from like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Revver, StupidVideos… I mean you name it, we post it out there.

Barry1: So, you are just all… you want to be in as many places as you can be?

Mark Eibner: Absolutely.

Barry1: Okay. Well, now I am a real estate agent and I want to…I have got a blog, but I want to supercharge it with you guys. What is my process, what do I do, do I have to be become a host, do I have to do interview, how do I do that?

Mark Eibner: Well, some of the sites… we have got another product line we are selling called Zealot Universe in which we sell blogs through Zealot Universe and we have got a couple of different structures that real estate brokers or real estate companies can get involved in. I think mostly what we are doing is selling the blog platform off. Let’s just say you are a one person broker wanting to produce a video based blog. We will provide the players and the production for what we consider let’s just say the top 10 or 20 pieces of video you want in your website and then in turn, we will get that produced, we will get that up there, we get it thrown out there, and then we actually teach our people what equipment to buy and how to actually shoot their video. In a lot of cases, we are actually going to them. We will process it and edit the video back in our shop and hand it back to them, because a lot of people don’t realize, well, shooting video is one thing. Trying to edit it and trans-code it and put it up on the Internet that is where once again are you in the business of selling real estate or are you in TV-media production.

Barry1: Exactly.

Mark Eibner: It is a big, big back end to that.

Barry1: Yeah, because I mean… I know the production is a whole lot of work. Is that going to cost me more time or when I could be out there selling real estate would be the question?

Mark Eibner: Well, I don’t think so. I think as in any blog, you have to figure out what your prime essence, your prime role in life is going to be and that is what your blog has to be about. Right? You have to get down to local, you have to decide who you are really going to serve. Once you figure that out, you start targeting your blog to that niche. There are some key professional pieces of video that can be produced in our standards for your site and I think with some of the equipment that is available out there, you can certainly shoot your own interviews, you can certainly do restaurant [phonetic] reviews, you can certainly interview principals at schools, all those things that… here is my big thing on blogging and video where I have always contended that the transparency of blogs and video, okay, will cut the wheat from the chaff. Period. I mean end of story. In the old days, people used to send out mailers, say how great they are, they have been in the business X amount of years, I got a little dog with me, here is me in my Mercedes. Okay now, in the new world, here is what people do. You tell them all this stuff. They right your name down or they see your name on a sign.  They go home, they pull up Yahoo or AOL or they pull up Google and they type your name in. If you don’t show up, at least I going to claim within three years if you are not thirty pages deep, thirty pages deep with content, video, and articulate articles on the area, the only thing you are an expert in is hot air.

Barry1: Or not understanding your market anymore…

Mark Eibner: Exactly. It is too easy. The iPhone opened the world up. Anybody that realizes what the iPhone, the iPhone is an oracle in your hand. I could go there right now, pull up what is the Real Estate…

Barry1: Radio USA.

Mark Eibner:  Radio USA and I can find up… find out as much information about you guys in my phone on my hand in my car or wherever I am at. I don’t even need an internet connection [inaudible] in your house.

Barry1: More like…

Mark Eibner: You can do it anywhere.

Barry1: I have talked to the other Barry about that at length. I am prognosticating that we are eventually going to see day where you send a virtual home tour or a video about a house to someone instead of doing a showing. When do you foresee something like that? Do you even think that that is going to happen?

Mark Eibner: Interesting. I think in some regards that is… it is already happening a little bit right now.

Barry1: Right.

Mark Eibner: I think what we have to look at is a lot of the players out there, the trans-coders and the other end of the players like the iPhone users or Safari Browser although there are some restrictions on what they are allowing the Adobe Flash to play. I think within the next, I don’t know, I would say less than a year here, if you look at some of the contracts… remember to be on like AT&T or Sprint or Verizon… to actually be an authorized pusher of information per se, video tours and things of that nature, you actually have to do deals with those network providers. Like right now our players will not play unless you have the upgrade version of Flash, which you can put on a pocket PC. You can watch BrokerIPTV on a pocket PC, but you cannot watch it on an iPhone, because we don’t have… because the iPhone only lets you have certain what release of Adobe Flash, but I think as soon as that happens, I think there will be a myriad of things. Number one, you will just be in front of houses getting tours sent to you. It is that easy.

Barry1: Exactly, okay.

Mark Eibner: I mean you see a house in a static old world magazine. I mean you will see people using old world and new world technology together. You will be able to pull that tour down, you try to buy a house, you will be able to just pull that tour up or have it sent to you, be attached in a link and boom, you are watching the inside of the house.

Barry1: That is the kind of cool stuff that I believe real estate agents or the real estate profession is sorely lacking in that kind of vision about what can be done to enhance the industry and I think you guys are really, really out in front of it.

Mark Eibner: Well, thank you.

Barry2: Mark, it is the other Barry. I have got a question for you. I am looking at your website. I am clicking on a couple of videos. Barry wants to meet a couple of chicks on the [inaudible]

Barry1: Oh, yeah.

Mark Eibner: We can hook you up.

Barry1: We are going to talk, my friend. I am in Colorado soon.

Barry2: I am noticing that a button like you would see normally on a YouTube video where you can embed a video in a page, your videos don’t have them. Is that proprietary [inaudible] you are not doing that…

Mark Eibner: They do have it. If you actually go to the individual blog post, you will see that there is in the individuals, what we call the Single Player. In the Single Player, where the video is embedded on a separate post, you will see that we have small bar, toolbar, across the bottom where you can embed, mail a link or email to a friend.

Barry2: So, it is not on the front page. It is on the inside?

Mark Eibner: Correct. It is actually posted where we take that piece of video and put it in a blog with the transcoded textural words.

Barry2: Okay. I am looking at it. Okay. I got it. I am on it right now. The second question I have since I am the nosy one and always want to look at business, looking at the business model here, I am looking what you are doing… how do you make money on this? What is your revenue source for BrokerIPTV in terms of looking at it from a outside perspective?

Mark Eibner: Well, BrokerIPTV right now, we have just got our ad engine software re-initiated. We kind of did a remodel with the blog and one of the things that was lagging a little bit behind was our ad engine and that will be up. We will have this small banner advertising that will be included in the BrokerIPTV model. Really, BrokerIPTV, like I said, it is kind of like a white paper. So, as long as it is just paying for itself, our goal is to actually sell IPTV portals like we sold a portal to Metro Brokers, Metro Brokers TV. So, if you can imagine any type of business model out there having their own blog based video portal, that is really our business model is to go out create numerous, not just real estate, but small business, large business, video based blog portals.

Barry2: Okay, I got you.

Barry1: So, I mean that kind of stuff has really taken off right now. I mean I have never seen a company, I mean you are the first company I have seen that actually will put everything together for you. I know a gentleman who does wine this way, who has a video blog for wine that is very, very successful and you are right, people for the most part use their computer for everything. They like to interact, they like to sit and watch. Not a lot of people like to read and that is why I always thought blogging at the very beginning was going to be really slow to take off, but you add the video with it, I mean it just adds a complete another dimension. Until we talked to you, I didn’t even know you could SEO a video.

Barry2: Well, yeah what we do with transcription.

Mark Eibner: Well, just so a lot people do not know this right now. I mean Google is already working on spiders in engines and software right now to index every piece of video that they claim or I don’t know what their category is going to be, what is important, not important, but see right now when I push a piece of video through a social network to be indexed by Google, they believe me on what I use for my keywords, my title, and my headers, right? They believe me. It may be a lie, right? I am just doing it to get positioning, correct? Well, leave it up to Google. What they are going to do is just start spidering every piece of video that is out there. They are going to transcode it with computers. They are going to take their own key relevancy out and they themselves will start indexing videos just the way they have textural static sites. That is the next realm. That is why I said the next realm is the Semantic web. Every word is related to every other word on the internet. Video has words. We just have to get them so that computers can see them.

Barry2: When you say transcode, do you mean a natural text transcription or is it some sort of back-end…?

Mark Eibner: Yes sir. Text transcription.

Barry2: Okay, I got you.

Mark Eibner: Yes, so they will match that up and see if it is the same as what I am saying it is and if it is not, they will penalize me. You [Inaudible] they will.

Barry2: Now once you sell, like for instance, say a call to franchise to metrobrokertv.com or any other real estate agency that wants to have that, it is up to them to go do their own production and put their content on, correct?

Mark Eibner: No, we do all the production for them. Our contracts include your multipurpose community blog platform. They include multiple players, video hosting, the streaming, the delivery of the streaming. Up here on network, we also blog to a very strong national PR network. It is a software based PR network company that we are affiliated with and we also handle all the production. So, our contracts are basically 50% for the blog players streaming and hosting and 50% is done for what we consider 30 hours a month of production time. We just load in 30 total hours of production time in our contracts on each of our IPTV channels and then we sell out video per hour if they want more. So, somebody could certainly do 50, 60 or 100 hours of video a month and that hour means not finished video, but production, editing, filming, etcetera.

Barry2: So if I am going to do a conference in Fort   Lauderdale and I want it filmed, you send out, get out a crew force to film the whole thing and then put it on our website?

Mark Eibner: Correct. We have, absolutely. If you have… that is basically what Dirk does right now with infomercials is they are all produced and edited in Colorado and when people want something filmed specifically like they were just out at the EAS Arnold Classic in Ohio I believe; so, they flew out, did the video, brings it all back, it is all produced, and given back to EAS.

Barry2: All right. I want to do Fort Lauderdale and I want you to do my video production, what does it cost me for a Fort Lauderdale Brokers TV website?

Mark Eibner: Well, let’s just say if you are down and this is something you are going to do on a… this isn’t a one time thing, you are saying you want to run… this is a business portal for you down in Florida, right?

Barry2:  Right.

Mark Eibner: So, what we do is we have numerous contacts similar to other video production houses of shooters and talent that are available on the streets. So, we basically find one, two, three, how many local shooters we need as for as camera people and we decide if you are going to use talent or not. You have to have talent. May be your talent comes from inside your organization, but talent is usually your person that is conducting the interview or doing the interview or that talent person could be you too since it is your blog.

Barry2: I got you.

Mark Eibner: And basically you shoot… they shoot the video, you come up with what you want to produce as far as your pieces and we just FTP all that video back up to us in Denver. We cut it, we place it up on your blog, we edit it out, we blog it out, do everything we need from that standpoint. So, in a way, we are subcontracting the camera, the talent people, doing all the editing, all the PR, and all blog work is done back in Denver, which… it doesn’t really matter where you do that work.

Barry2: No, not at all. What kind of investment am I looking at?

Mark Eibner: Well, some of our big companies, let’s just say our… let’s just talk about our local producers that are… I am just going to call larger time producers… not… these are people that are doing a lot… I am going to say 30 to 100 deals a year… real producers in the business, having a platform that we are talking about for them using where we eventually teach them to do their own. These people are somewhere in the $2,000 a month range and in larger companies, you are talking about anywhere from $10,000 up to $20,000 figure a month.

Barry2: That includes the production.

Mark Eibner: Correct.

Barry2: Well, that is not bad at all.

Barry1: Not at all.

Mark Eibner: Well, it seems like 20 grand, 20 grand to, I think to Realogy,  they spend 20 grand on wine and beverages, right?

Barry1: Yeah, that is what they spend on their hotel rooms last when they threw a party.

Mark Eibner: Yeah. I mean it just seems like a lot of money, but you got to remember some of these companies spend, you know, I won’t even go into the numbers of what they spend on traditional terrestrial TV or what they are… I mean that is really what is going on right now. We are seeing this… we are not seeing any of the large real estate companies raise more fees through increasing splits or increasing desk fees. You just see them cutting out things like TV advertising and things of that nature and putting it into their web portals. That is all you are really seeing is just a morphing of the money they already have. So, we think it is… to me video is the most important corporate asset that any company can have. Let’s look at Metro Brokers as an example. So, they pay the PR firm, won’t even go into how much money. It is irrelevant, but let us just say it is six figures over X amount of years.  That is a big number, right? 

Barry2:  Right.

Mark Eibner: Now, one of those articles is, if you Google Metro Brokers on anything, you are not going to find any of the articles, they were never blogged, they were never indexed. All the TV interviews they ever did on Nine News or anywhere else will sit back in some production studio in a jeweled case. I mean so all that money was paid for what would we call two minutes of glory maybe.

Barry2: Right.

Mark Eibner: Maybe a demo they do at sales, at some board meeting saying here is what we did this month, all of that stuff is out there gone. Cannot find it, cannot index it, irrelevant, means nothing and now if you look at taking the same amount of money, even more money, double it, double what you pay that PR firm. Every time you produce a video, every time you write a blog, it lives and gives you power forever on the Internet, forever. Every piece of video is there forever. It is selling 24/7. You are going to tell me that other brokers that are not interested in, let us say, moving from one company to … company X to company Z are going to go to company Z-TV and even find what the hell that is, what is company Z-TV, yeah.

Barry2: Exactly.

Mark Eibner: Yeah, I find it. Trust me if you have a who moved over, who is doing what, and some hot guy was at this shop or this hot gal was at this shop, now she is over at their company and they are doing an interview with her, why she came over, what are the benefits, you don’t think that is not going to have impact at 2 am on a broker at his house.

Barry2: Absolutely.  Absolutely. That is the way to do it and keep out there and have it work for you all the time. Mark, I want to thank you for joining us. We got to get a break and we got to move on. We got on another interview scheduled, but I want to thank you so much for joining us on the program and good luck with the endeavors. We definitely got to talk to you about some production that we have got coming up.

Mark Eibner: You bet. I thank you Barry, Barry.

Barry1: Mark I appreciate it. That is Mark. I want you everybody to go to brokeriptv.com and take a look at this stuff. I mean it is truly wave of the future type stuff for the real estate blogosphere. Barry, we got to take a quick break. We will come back with more Real Estate Radio USA, right after this.

More: continued here

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.

More: continued here
Powered by SmartRSS

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.

More: continued here

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.

More: continued here

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.

More: continued here

If you are a regular Affiliate Summit attendee and newsletter subscriber then you already know that Shawn Collins published all available Affiliate Summit video recordings from the past two years for free on the web. It is not necessary that you have been an attendee of the event in order to be able to access the content.

In order to be able to access the password protected area of the site with the videos, is it necessary that you request the username and password here. You will ask to subscribe to the affiliate summit email newsletter “Real Deal” in exchange for the access. That is not much to ask in return for over 70 videos, over 32 gigabyte, several dozens of presentation slides and more. You will not lose access to the content if you should decide to unsubscribe from the newsletter, but why should you?

Video recordings are available for the Affiliate Summit East 2006, West 2007, East 2007 and West 2008. Shawn also published in the past some videos for free and also transcripts, audio recordings and presentation slides via either the Affiliate Summit blog or his Affiliate Tip blog. He does not refer to all of that content from the new pages that contain the videos of the past four US shows. There is also no reference to any content from the Affiliate Summit 2007 UK show in London.

The old sites, such as affiliatesummit.com/audio.shtml and ase07.com now redirect to the new pages.

Here is a list of all the sessions from the four US shows with links to additional content that cannot be found (yet) at Shawn’s website, including content from AS London. Furthermore are there numerous other references to resources and content related to the Affiliate Summit conferences, including a brief outlook at the upcoming Affiliate Summit events and reasons for why you should attend one, if you have not already done so.

Affiliate Summit East 2006  
July 9-11, 2006 in Orlando, FL  - Agenda

Audio recordings, transcripts and presentations are not available at the AS site, but I found links to content on other sites, such as the Affiliate Summit Blog.

• Session 1a: Introduction to Affiliate Marketing for Merchants
• Session 1b: Introduction to Affiliate Marketing for Affiliates
• Session 1c: The Value of Pay Per Click Affiliates
• Session 2a: Building a Multi-Brand Niche Affiliate Program
• Session 2b: SUPER Affiliate Strategies for Sustainable Businesses
• Session 2c: eBay Web Services for Affiliates
• Session 3a: Benefits and Liabilities of Coupon Affiliates - blog post - transcript (PDF) - video (Google)
• Session 3b: How to Minimize Leakage/Maximize Commissions
• Session 3c: Loyalty Affiliates: Loyal Allies or Evildoers? - blog post - transcript (PDF) - presentation (PPT) - video (Google) - mp4
• Session 4a: Benchmarking
• Session 4b: Blogging Best Practices: Maximizing Your Success - blog post - video (Google)
• Session 4c: Affiliate Marketing Legal Issues - blog post - transcript (PDF)
• Session 5a: Co-Opetition, Comparison Sites and Conversion: Lessons Learned From The Adult Online Playbook - blog post - transcript (PDF) - presentation (PPT) - video (Google) - mp4
• Session 5b: Straight Talk on Search Engine Optimization -