I am working on a new affiliate project. Besides earning money, my goal for this new project is to get a better understating about two issues:

1. Google quality score: What are the parameters that make the different?
2. Google “Average Search Volume”: Is there a correlation between this value and the actual traffic volume?

I will try to answer these questions and hopefully I will have some good stuff to report at.
I will keep you posted about this project output since in any case it will save you time an effort to check those things by yourselves.

For this project, I am going to launch a new website. I plan its structure to reveal some of the questions that I marked to myself regarding the above issues.

In the last days I spent some of the time doing some keyword research for this project. In the next post I am going to show you something very interesting about my finding. I have decided to dedicate for it a separate post because it’s worth it

In the last few days I’ve been doing some research about the landing page quality score.

It’s all started when I’ve tried to set a PPC campaign to one of my websites. It’s an old website with lots of backlinks. This website ranking is very high for some competitive keywords. I am getting a lot of traffic from the three major search engines. 90% of the traffic is directly to the homepage. For some of the keywords you will find this website as number one on the first page and for some wider expressions you will still find it on the first page but in positions 2-5.

I’ve tried to put an ad on those keywords and on some of it variations. After I upload the campaign most of the keyword went from active to inactive. I’ve good a very low quality score – poor. Due to that the minimum bid was set to $1. It’s a very high bid for this website niche.

I found out that the landing page quality score that I know from the SEO world is different from what you will find with AdWords. Looks like that with organic results Google try to deliver the most relevant content based web page. With AdWords Google try to expose the user to the best relevant product or service for a given keywords. From Google AdWords guidelines you can get the hunch that their assumption is that who ever use PPC do it in order to make money and not to deliver information.

I did not find any solid proof for this theory. However, from putting together all the pieces of information that I found in the last days, I can almost say for sure that this theory is probably true or at least close to be true.

On of the things that I found is an article that was written by Dave Davis: How To Master the Google Landing Page Quality Score
Although this articles was written almost ten months ago it has some very good example on how two landing pages on the same website, using the same template, got different quality score. The first one got “poor” quality score while the second landing page got “great “quality score.
Take a look at the HTML code of both of the landing pages. You will notice the differences.

So, what next?
My goal is very simple. I will try to draw the guideline on how to get a “great” quality score. To do so, I’ve decided to develop a new website that for each of its sections I will try to get a “Great” quality score for different keyword group.
I will work according to the theory above. I will purchase a new domain so any historical data will not interfere with my experiment results. I will report to you my outcome.

I would like to apologies in advance that I will not reveal the website URL. Mainly because I am going to use it for an affiliate program that I’ve been thinking for a long time to promote. Secondly, I am sure that Larry and Sergey are reading my blog so let’s not give them extra information than they already have

Smarty Link Exchange system is still under developments.
Although most for the system is ready we still have some open issues that we need to close.
Unfortunately few weeks ago my partner on this project decided to drop. He got tired from the start-up way of life and moved to a bigger company. This is the main reason that things are going slow now, but we are very close to the end.
Allow me to wish him a big success although I am sure he is going to be sorry for not sticking with this project

Stay tuned…

Almost two weeks ago I signed up to the AffiliateClassroom trial. I wrote about it in a previous post named AffiliateClassroom. For only $1 you get access to all the program resources.

At the bottom line I did not continue with the monthly subscription. You might find it suite for your needs. I did not find a good reason to pay the monthly fee. In this post I will describe in details what I found with AffiliateClassroom.

As I mentioned earlier, AffiliateClassroom offers a great collection of information in several formats: audio files, PDF files and some online documentation on site. You can download all this information to your computer. It will take you couple of minutes but it worth the effort. Once you downloaded the files you can read the information on your own time without the need to log in to the AffiliateClassroom website.
Some of the files are old but yet you will find most of the information relevant.

AffiliateClassroom offer a directory with affiliate programs that should be profitable. Per affiliate program you will find some useful tips on how to promote the affiliate program. It’s a good practice to read others marketing point of view. I learned some aspects that I did not think about till I read those tips. However, the directory contains some old affiliate programs that no longer exist or contain some broken links. To me it looks like the directory was not update for a long time.

AffiliateClassroom offer you a tracking system for your affiliate programs. The idea behind this system is to escorts your steps on by one. If you are not organized with your actions this will help you to get organized. More than that, it based on AffiliateClassroom recommendation on how to succeed with affiliate marketing.

Why I did not continue with AffiliateClassroom monthly subscription? Unless I missed something, I don’t see any justifications to pay the monthly fee just to have access to the affiliate program progress tracking system. It’s the only feature that I found that you have access to only by paying the monthly fee. The rest can be downloaded to your computer using the 14 trial.

If you have $1 and you would like to get some useful affiliate documentations try AffiliateClassroom. If you need incentive on a daily basis AffiliateClassroom tracking system can do the trick for you.

When you are setting your PPC campaign you have the option to use several matching type: broad, exact and phrase.
If you are using Google Analytics to track your campaigns conversion rate you will notice that in Google Analytics report you see only the phrase that you set within the PPC campaign. You don’t see the actual phrase that the user used before he clicked on your ad.

Knowing the user exact phrase can be very vital for your PPC campaign success. It will give you the ability to eliminate the phrases that do not convert. Alternatively it is a practical way (although can be expensive) to discover the keywords that visitors are using while searching the web, segmented by geographical region etc. Using this value information you can refine your PPC ads and their landing page. Doing so will improve your landing page quality score which will lead to reduce in the bid amount.

For example: Suppose we would like to sell tennis racquet. We can bid on the keyword “tennis racquet” and to choose broad as the matching type. Using Google Analytics will we get the number of click per “tennis racquet” even if the user typed a wider expression like “Federer tennis racquet” or “Free tennis racquet”. If we set up a Goal, then the conversion rate report will include the phrase that we set and not what the user typed. Google Analytics take the phrase from the PPC campaign settings and not from the actual search.

I found a very nice JavaScript that overcome this problem. It’s a simple JavaScript, yet very elegant, developed by Michael Harrison. With only few simple steps you can get within Google Analytics reports the exact phrase that the user typed before they clicked on your PPC ad. You need to download the script into your server and modify the Google Analytics code very slightly. The scripts store the information in the “User Defined Value” field. You will see this option under the segments combo box. Using the script will reveal the desire report once your will choose the “User Defined Value” as the segment option.

Great solution for a crucial PPC issue