Affiliate101.com » Tool/Service

Keyword Research

dennis — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 22:14:20 +0000

It doesn’t matter if you are building a new website, or creating a PPC Campaign, you will need to do some keyword research. I suggest you do some brainstorming first. Think about all the different things that someone could search for that could possibly lead them to you and your website. For example, if you are selling an e-book about affiliate marketing on the internet, you may come up with a few different types of keywords to look for. Here are a few examples (ranked in order of probable conversion rate).Affiliate Marketing E-Book – obviously

Affiliate marketing - may not looking for an e-book, but could be persuaded

Internet marketing – someone that knows about internet marketing, but may not understand how affiliates work.

Work from home – Affiliate marketers can work from home, so this applies to them.

There are tons of others, but for the sake of time, I’m cutting it there.

There are a number of tools available to help you with your keyword research. Some are free, but some are paid.

Paid Services (some have free trials)

Free Tools

SEO Book – Go to the tools link

This is not a complete list. I will add others as time goes on.

Website Development Environment

dennis — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:41:28 +0000

If you are planning to pay someone to build your sites for you, there is no need to read any further, though I would still recommend you learn the basics, so you can keep other honest. By that I mean, if you go to a mechanic, and you need a new air filter, they may say that’ll cost you $300. If you don’t know the basics of your car, you may have to pay that. Same applies to website development. A developer may say something cost $10,000, but if you know it’s a simple change, you can take your business elsewhere. This is very important unless you really have someone you trust.

I am going to post details about the environment that I recommend. I have used some others, but ended up with this because it’s ~~AWESOME~~ FREE. Actually, it may not be the best, but this is definitely not an example of you get what you pay for.

PHP/MySQL/Apache
This has become the standard for many websites these days. It’s all free and there are so many developers, and code sample out there, that it’s very easy to get started. For this, I recommend the following installation. It includes the Apache Server, MySQL Database, and PHPMyAdmin all bundled up in a nice package, and in a way that’s easy to manage and upgrade. This is for PCs. There is something for the Mac called MAMP that is very similar:

EasyPHP – Windows

MAMP – Mac

Code/HTML Editor
As for Editors, you can use an Open Source environment called Eclipse. There are a bunch of different ones out there, but this is pretty good (and FREE).

Eclipse - Mac/PC (make sure you get the PHP Environment)

Database Management
If you are going to be doing alot of work with MySQL, you will need a way to manage tables, and data. EasyPHP installs PHPMyAdmin, which you can do everything you would likely need to, but if you want to do alot more, and with an easier interface, you’ll need to spend some money (not much though).

Navicat – Mac/PC

Source Control – Advanced
If you are going to be developing as part of a team, you will likely want some sort of Source Control. We use Subversion (SVN).

Subversion Source Control – Mac/PC (if you get to this point, let me know, there are alot of things you need to do it right).

Google Website Optimizer for Landing Pages

dennis — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 12:20:47 +0000

I sat in on a Webinar about the Google Website Optimizer and here are some thoughts and notes.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t like many of the pages on my website. I just don’t. Many of the designs are 3 years old, may have some misspellings, and are basically done by someone with little design experience. The problem is that the pages work. Some of the best websites in my industry look like they were done in the mid 90s. But they work, and maybe they work better than some of those shiny new sites that are built with lots of venture capital. Anyhow, there have always been ways to make changes, and determine if it worked or not, but it’s never been this easy.

Enter Google Website Optimizer. You can track many different version of your pages, and really take any of the guessing out of interpreting the results. This is a free product from Google, the only requirement is that you have a Google AdWords account. Just because you need an AdWords account doesn’t mean that you need to do it on a page that you are sending AdWords traffic to. That opens this up for any of your sites out there. Did I mention this was FREE.

Features:

A/B Testing – 2 completely different versions of a page

Multivariate Testing – For every section of a page changed, it makes a unique combination. So if you change a header, a graphic, and a description, there will be 9 difference versions of that page tested with results.

Followup Testing – Once you’ve gone with the best based on the results above, are they still working?

Testing Possibilities:

- Info rich or short and sweet
- Left or right layout
- Product facts or aspirations
- Lead or sales focus
- Reinforce site security or privacy
- Highlight a free service

In doing your tests, they recommend that you have about 100 conversions (click, email, sale, lead, etc) per version you want to test. So if you are only getting about 200 conversions in a 2 week period, you should only test 2 pages. This isn’t a rule, but I guess it makes a difference for how solid your results will be.