Online Marketing Experiment

Failure is never easy to deal with it and to be honest I experience it every day with various tasks that I implement. It’s never easy and I am really not sure if it ever will be.

With that said, sometimes you just have to pick yourself up and get back on the horse, even laugh at yourself a little. So we found a UB40 song that had the perfect lyrics for our “Google Quality Score” which we were laughing about when we got hit.

They rate their quality score between one and ten. Saw UB40 live not too long ago, good show.

Best Wishes
Paul

Here is an interview with Alex Goad which may give you some insight into the latest “Google slap” which hit the web on Wednesday the 21st.

Initially I thought that just fake blogs, review sites and thin affiliate sites were getting slapped.

As more information comes to light it seems even well constructed sites and blogs with valuable content are being hit and to be honest that is what happened to us with the Golf Blog.

We were using a traffic lab redirect link which pushed the click through to our testing lab before re-directing to an affiliate offer.

Even though we had it re-direct at the first level we still got slapped.

The common variable tends to be a naked affiliate link that kicks in the slap but again as always there are other complexities involved which of course makes it more challenging to reverse engineer.

Again there are other factors relative to your market.

You can check out the Alex Goad Interview here

It’s Official. I can confirm that Google has landed another slap and affiliates are going to be caught in the cross hairs.

Here is what it seems they are doing.

They are currently cutting out all fake blogs and fake review sites.

Why, well all relates back to Google’s business model and that is “search”, delivering relevant results to those using their search engine.

Google’s goal is to provide valuable content to their searchers and good content relates to providing value.

If your site does not add value, there is a good chance that you will find it difficult if not impossible to promote your site using Google’s natural search and paid search platform.

There are work arounds - such as cloaking your affiliate links, however keep in mind that at the end of the day if you do not provide value you will constantly be looking over your shoulder.

I will go into more detail on this on the next post.

We just recently ran into a problem when we began split testing landing pages using Adwords as part of our PPC testing.

Our landing page quality score started to drop to a score of “1”. As it happened we thought there was an issue with our landing page and the way we were split testing.

In addition we were using an I-frame on one of the pages and thought this was the issue since it incorporates hidden content.

Google does not like hidden content on a page.

As a result we started testing landing pages with no I-frame and no A/B split mechanism.

I even ran ads directly into the blog. The result was the same, the quality score dropped.

What it seems the problem was, (as we isolated variables) was affiliate links on the page which we were not cloaking.

Then yesterday I got an e-mail from Perry Marshall suggesting that Google was slapping landing pages with affiliate links.

Especially review style pages.

Is there a work around, yes there is. One is to build a list using an optin form with lots of good content on the page as opposed to linking out to an affiliate offer.

Create a thank you page with Google java script to see which keywords are converting and use those keywords on different PPC platforms such as Yahoo and MSN.

These keywords you can use for direct sales.

The fact is building a list is a good idea anyway because you build a customer base as opposed to trying to sell your visitors on the first visit.

I will keep you posted as we learn more.

Best Wishes
Paul

May is over. It is time to start evaluating my actions, and make decisions for the month of June

We have achieved our primary goal, which was to measure interest. We’ve jumped from over a million in the Alexa rankings, to just over 500,000. Now to be honest with you that really means nothing to me.

What’s more important to me, was to find out, using articles, what level of interest there was in the golf niche

To put it simply I wanted to measure traffic. Here’s the thing, without traffic you have nothing. You need traffic to test, and you need enough traffic in order to test properly.

We needed to know first if it would be possible to get traffic in this competitive niche without loosing our ass and if so how much?

Example, if you only get 100 visitors a week it will take you a considerable amount if time to test or just as importantly make a sale.

What I needed to find out was the following, would the articles I wrote get a lot of page views? Is the market I am going into too small? This we needed to find out before we preceded to invest more time & resources into this project.

The fact is we’ve proven that there is enough traffic and there is enough interest and now we face the uphill battle of conversion.

In actual fact we sent out some really crappy videos, we were not looking for perfection, in actual fact I learned to quickly get over perfection.

The goal instead was to take action, because by those very actions we could measure response. More importantly we could look at the subject matter of those videos and determine where to put more effort in - or just as importantly where not to put as much effort in.

Just like the articles we wanted to see how many views the videos would get and which ones would get the most? Which topics were of interest to the audience?

Once we found a winning video, as in how many people viewed it, we could then up the production quality to improve the traffic generating objective of that video. In addition we could now also start testing the message.

Because we have a testing engine in place that will track what a visitor does when they land on our web pages, we can move to ramping up traffic and looking for tell tale patterns relative to what is on those pages.

Now that we can get traffic we are in the driver seat, its time to pump it up and get as mush data as we possibly can so we can figure out what’s not working……. and what is, as quickly as possible.

Then when we have enough data, start sharing it with those of you on the list.

This month we will start split testing landing pages.

Last month we did 98 articles, we did some social book marking, we did videos, forum marketing, we got listed on directories, we did a Press Release and made posts on other blogs.

We have sold some product and we’re very happy about that, but the truth is, the return on investment at this moment is quite honestly terrible.

But just like any venture, we got the hard part out of the way, and that is actually taking action.

Going out there when you know that you’re writing skills aren’t very good, when you know that the video quality is poor, the production weak, it can be tough… however you don’t have to let that stop you, instead you just go out and do it, you take the hard knocks, you take the criticisms.

In addition you deal with the doubts that you have, you deal with the fear that creeps into your mind every day wondering if you’re doing the right thing?

That’s probably the hardest part of any journey, the part where you have to get of your rear end and face the music.

But one thing I’ve learned in life, which relates back to the test blog… and why it took me so long to let it out there, is this.

You will never get it perfect and if you fail to take action you will never get it right.

In actual fact perfection in my humble judgment is a “myth” and it is the very myth that prevents the masses from getting anything done, which relates back to the fear of failure.

In actual fact that is why so many fail to test their efforts because testing in effect exposes failure and in my next post I am going to go a little deep on this topic.

Kinda funny but I may go off the deep end, but don’t worry I will swim back. Now again you have to let loose, you have to run with it and put your heart out there.

See you on the next one, by the way we will be providing test results real soon to those of you patiently waiting.

Best Wishes
Paul