Online Marketing Experiment

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

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

So today I started out with my marketing tasks as usual beginning with the Roadmap. I will do this throughout the month of May and provide exact test results as they come in to those of you on the list. I started my day for this project at 9:20am and spent about 6 hours total.

What I did was as follows.

1/ Created content in the form of two articles.
2/ Created two blog posts and submitted to high PR Blogs with my desired keywords.
3/ Made a comment on a blog on a different topic with my desired keyword.
4/ Edited 35 articles which were written for me and prepared them for submission.
5/ Added budget funding for articles
6/ Submitted 3 articles to Ezine articles awaiting approval.
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As mentioned on the last post I am going to go through how to get more mileage out of your content.

The goal is maximize your efforts. In this case what I do is create a video from the article I write. I do this by creating a slide show outlining the key benefits mentioned in the article.

You can also add images and so on. You can also create an image gallery to further illustrate your point. The objective is to the syndicate that video out to various video directories so as to get more exposure from your efforts. You also get get more links back to your site from the same content.

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The first goal as always for me when setting out to market a site is content creation. This I break down into a number of levels.

Level one, blog posting, posting to my own site, then creating other blog posts and syndicate them out to other blogs linking back to the site with my desired keyword.

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