This week I was very busy with the Affilicon conference. The first Affilicon happed only 6 month ago, while close to 700 people took part of it. This Affilicon we had close to 1500 people including lots of guest from oversees.

With the presence of variety of affiliate networks like ClickBank, Azoogle, MediaTrust, Advaliant and more, along with great speaker like Dush Ramachandran, VP of Sales & Business Development, Clickbank, Dr. Harlan Kilstein, Internet Marketer, the Affilicon can definitely be marked as one of the great affiliate event of this year.

For me this kind of conferences are more for networking. Most of the time you will find me out of the sessions halls, expect from some exception shows where there is a benefit to both the newbie and the veteran.

A BIG “thank you” to Itay Paz, the man behind this event.  It’s amazing what a single man (with the great support of his wife) can come up with. And it’s not ends there because the Affilicon is now on the roads. The next event will be in Stockholm, Sweden, October 14-15, 2009. More information about it you can find at the Affilicon website: http://www.affilicon.com

During the next week I will probably write more, and in detail, about some the sessions that I attended. One of them was the great show of Dr. Harlan Kilstein. If you don’t know who is Dr. Harlan Kilstein, just Google after his name. It will motivate you to check my next post with some great stuff from his sessions.

The Affilicon was closed at a private dinner party in a nice restaurant in Tel-Aviv. It was a great evening with a great group of people.

Now I have few months to relax from this crazy week.
For me the next affiliate event is the Affiliate Summit East in NY. If you have planes to attend there don’t hesitate to drop by and say hello.

There is a simple way, yet creative, to increase your PPC campaign ROI.
Since I was talking about it a lot this week, I thought to bring it up also on my blog.

For almost any successful niche you will find more than one product. There are some niches that you can find more than 50 different offers. Each has its own landing page and many others characteristics that differentiate the offer from his competitors. As a result we experience different CR (conversion rate).

You probably heard it so many times; Do a spilt test. Checks which offer convert the best.  Its true and you are advised to do so, but this post is not about a split test.

I assume that you already found the best offer that convert best for your traffic. Intentionally I use the term “Convert best for your traffic” and not “Convert best” because you will find that what works for others might not works for you as vice versa.

But is it the best that you can get for your traffic. It is NOT !

Let’s get straight to the bottom line. Most of the affiliate marketers forget that in a place they offer a product they can offer another one. By doing so, theoretically you double your campaign ROI. Because it sounds so simple affiliate marketers tend to drop this approach. After all the common spirit in the making money online community is that it has to be complex.

I do not support that myth. Making money online can be a simple task. The only thing you need to do is to use your mind, to be creative, to do a good research on how to use this sale technique effectively.

Let me give you 2 samples that you will find on the internet. The first one is very common although I don’t use it due to morality issue (Google don’t like it as well). The second one you will hardly find on the web but those who do so earn more money with less competitors, and most important they make money while giving a true added value to the buyer.

Case #1
There are many skin care products offers on the market. Their CPA is between $30 to $40. Lots of affiliate marketers are promoting them and therefore their bids rapidly increasing. Almost a year ago a gifted affiliate marketer (no names of course) started a campaign where he claims that he found the right way to use these products: it’s all about the combination of the two different products. This campaign was designed as a blog with touching personal (fake) evidence. This campaign was a success and you can tell that only by the numbers of affiliate marketers who copied it to their benefit. It was just a matter of time until Google stepped in and gave a “SLAP” to those who did so.

Case #2
What if I tell you to promote an online fax service? How many do you think will jump on that offer? I bet almost none. The most common excuse will be that it’s barely $10 commission with low margin.  What if I told you to promote a DIY (Do It Yourself) office desk?
The story is simple. There is a guy (no names again) who developed a “Start your own Home office” website where he give practical advice on how you can start your own home office. The idea is to help people to get things done without getting into huge expenses.  His average CPA is around $80! His ROI is more than 300%.
He will probably not get copied, mainly because most affiliate marketers are too lazy to do the kind of work he did.

It’s up to you do decide whether you like to take your online marketing business to its next level or keep copy what others are doing. It could be the difference for making 100K a year or 1M a year.

For years affiliate marketers and website owners have to follow some restricted rules in order to avoid what so called duplicated content.

Duplicate content is a term that refers to a situation where the same webpage content can be found in several places over the net. Search engines like Google developed algorithms in their efforts to handle this situation.

It all started when people realized the power of search engines organic traffic as a way to generate money. They started to spam the network with content in order to get as many indexed paged. It is much easier to duplicate content with minor changes rather to generate unique valuable content. So not only that the search engines results become less relevant but they also had to deal with a huge amount of pages to process.

When Google first came out with the duplicated content algorithm there were some legit websites that suffer from it. In one night they lose major part of their organic traffic.
Websites owners had to adapt to the new situation while taking into consideration some serious restriction in terms of the user experience.  Take for example a typical e-commerce website. This kind of websites usually contains thousands of products. Usually within the product page you will find only few sentences about the product and lots of other content that can easily be found on the other products pages. Is this is a case of a duplicated content?

The personalization approach that PPC marketers are using were always relying on minor changes in the landing page. Search engines will consider it as a duplicate content while there is no doubt that this approach increase sales.

Its endless struggle while website owners want to make more money from their website while search engines don’t like when someone is trying to trick their search results pages.

As of few months ago there is a legit solution that supposes to help both the search engines and the website owners. Live search has partner with Google and Yahoo to support a new tag that will help websites to tell search engine about the situation (Partnering to help solve duplicate content issues)

The following is an example on how you can use the new tag:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://mysite.com”/>

The use of it is very simple. Suppose you have a set if pages that looks like

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://mysite.com/product.php?pid=6538″/>
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://mysite.com/product.php?pid=4564″/>
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://mysite.com/product.php?pid=3345″/>

Now you can tell the search engine that those pages are based on a different page:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://mysite.com/product.php?pid=6538″/>

Please note that for now Live Search will not consider this tag as a command but as a hint. This is mainly to allow a period of time that they can test its implementation and to avoid any abuse of it.

As part of their ongoing improvements, ClickBank came out with a new look to their website. The traditional blue/gray color scheme has been replaced with a red/brown.
There is nothing new within the interface but there are some talked that ClickBank is going to upgrade their interface within the next few months.

In addition ClickBank now offer a new tool called HopLink Shield.
HopLink Shield is a free tool that encrypts the affiliate and vendor nicknames in HopLinks.
Now your affiliate link can look like this: http://2de14oqj69s7oq8dml2ppljxff.hop.clickbank.net hiding both your affiliate link and the vendor nickname.

This can be very helpful to those who can’t cloak their affiliate link due to a technical problem with their hosting server or are to lazy to do so

Few weeks ago I signed up with Azoogle IPhone application beta testers program. They named it iMobilePublisher.
In one word – WOW !

In my opinion its one of the applications that you should install on your IPhone, especially if you are an Azoogle affiliates. If you are not (yet) Azoogle affiliate, their iMobilePublisher is a good reason to start working with them.

Azoogle, for those of you who are not familiar with, is one of the largest CPA network if not the biggest one.

I’ve included some screenshots of the iMobilePublisher application as it can be seen on my IPhone.

The iMobilePublisher has a pretty simple interface. At the opening you get to see a brief summary of your leads/sales. You have the option to navigate through your account and to check how your campaigns are performing. You also have the option to check your payments reports.

It’s a great way to track your account when you don’t have access to a computer.

Currently the iMobilePublisher is in its beta stage.
I understood that Azoogle plan to officially launch the iMobilePublisher at the Affiliate Summit West 2009 in Vegas. As last year, Azoogle is a Platinum Sponsor of Affiliate Summit West 2009.
Although the iMobilePublisher is in its beta stage, I didn’t find significant bugs. Beside few times that the top menu did not show up expectably, the iMobilePublisher application works fast and smooth. To be honest, I like Azoogle iMobilePublisher IPhone application much more than I like their website interface