Watch this video to get an idea

The whole point is to AUTOMATE, AUTOMATE, AUTOMATE all those crappy stats-downloading, checking, excel-sheet-writing, tedious browsing thru different reporting interfaces from PPC engines and affiliate networks to finally answer that ONE SIMPLE QUESTION:

AM I MAKING ANY MONEY ??

Are my campaigns profitable?
Which keywords and offers perform best?
Which campaigns should be cloned to other PPC networks?
and: which campaigns should I stop ASAP?

It all boils down to a quick, painless calculation of your profits,
and unless you have a great Affiliate Marketing Dashboard built yourself,
you need a tool like StatsJunky
(or continue to fly blind)

StatsJunky is priced as low as $39 so with this closed-loop tool they are close to the pricing of a simple stats-checking tool like StatsRemote.

I would suggest to checkout StatsJunky TODAY – since they have a lower pricing til end of May.

What the common forward link tool does

The common forward links tool finds those super authorities that a bunch of other authorities or important sites link to.
And you then just go out and get links from those!

This means if you have a set of valued authority sites (e.g. the top 20 marketing blogs) you just ask the tool where these sites link out to in common and try to get on the linked-to sites… thereby having all the inbound trust from the initially entered authority sites.

How the common forward link tool works

1. Enter a list of authority sites that you have researchede well, and already believe are authorities in your niche, i.e. the top 20 SEO blogs
2. Tool looks at all the forward (outgoing) links those sites link to and finds common patterns
3. Tool lists the commonly linked to urls and domains (along with JUICE, Age, Inbound links, Cache date and other important metrics)
4. You go out and try to get links from these super-authorities that are linked from what you considered an authoritive site already…

So by using this tool to extract the sites linked FROM all those sites you entered we find a common pattern of sites aka super-authorities that are important to ALL the sites you entered. And obviously Google & co will love the inbound links you get from these super-authorities,but you need some upfront reserch to find the input list.

Nice that after having the idea in October 2006, we finally got to implement this using MSN’s linkfromdomain command

This is another twist to finding common backlinks of your competitors and trying to get on those, but I like it so much better, because it actually makes your competitors link to you – indirectly.

MSN’s linkfromdomain

Almost two years ago MSN introduced their “linkfromdomain” operator and I came up with three great uses for the linkfromdomain command

Today, after reading Gab’s post on Cheaply retargeting I realized that what he was doing was looking for common forward links (i.e. links out of a set of authority sites) and try to buy ads on those sites. Which in effect are authority sites in that niche to improve your brand visibility.

Well, apply this to good ole link building and you come back to the “common forward links” tool that I mentioned 2 years ago.

What do you think about this approach to get on super-authorities?

this tool is not (yet) public

But with enough people interested (i.e. links, comments) I might let the one or the other guy allow to test it for his own stuff if I get to hear a great reason to do so

PS: You can even even enter all YOUR competitors (hint hint) and make them indirectly link to you !

Let me know your thoughts!

Well – thin affiliates sites – (as Matt Cutts calles them), driven from a database that was replicated 1000s of times over the whole web were killed years ago by Google’s duplicate content filter – back in 2005 or so. The idea of DataFeedR is bascially the same – import a generally available database into your wordpress, and manage it from there… but…

DataFeed Sites a’la 2008

The improved concept of filling up Google’s index with product descriptions and images from big vendors here is the augmentation with content written by yourself, your writer or maybe your users (i.e. blog comments). Of course the fine line between success and failure here is HOW you do that job… imported the datafeed and leaving it as is would probably be just a waste of money…

DataFeed Pre Processing

But at least you get Stefan to sort our and clean up the merchant’s datafeed mess for you and provide you a quality download. And judging from the quality of his content packages those feeds must be killer quality.

And on the other hand, assuming that you have some funky programmer’s inhouse, you could still builld your own converter tools for feeding into this plugin and then use it “only” as a data management tool and forget about Stefan’s feed processing service at DataFeedR.

Merchant’s supported so far

Stefan made some quick screenshots of merchants supported currently here and here and here

DataFeedR’s price

But what you get for this is a rock-solid data feed management solution with attached data pre-processing services I’ve yet to find. And it supports Wordpress 2.2-2.3 AS WELL AS the new 2.5.x

Other features

• Support Forum – the young forum is there – it’s up to Stefan and his team how he lives up to our expectations

• Update only parts of products – obviously you need to rewrite and optimize the product descriptions, so when you update your product list, the following values are updated with new product information: Affiliate Link (URL to the network), Price, Image URL, Thumbnail URL - This means that when you have changed product descriptions and product names these changes will NOT be overwritten by uploading a new datafeed version. But you can customize that behavious as explained in the forum

• Embed products within your blog posts – you can add multiple products to your WordPress Posts or Pages – check this out

I’ll keep you posted about DataFeedR and comparable products (which all seem to suck compared to DataFeedR) and my experiences with them. Some impressive features that are announced to be here soon are

Meanwhile you can go check it out yourself

Since I’ve been doing quite a bit NON-seo areas like domaining and PPC arbitrage recently, I spent an hour today to research on some more or less obscure solutions to perform click tracking measure keyword conversions. Some of that does have to do with PPC arbitrage, so there’s quite some money to loose or win.

Instead of keeping the list of products found in secret I thought I’ll just list what I came across today, including my thoughts of Pros/Cons

Google Analytics
well obviously this is the most popular package supports tracking your conversions, but I haven’t yet found out yet

• how to track the conversion of a “click” on an Adsense/YPN or otherwise PPC style ad unit (which IS the conversion when arbitraging)
• how to import keyword traffic data from other sources than GAW, i.e. YSM to track … and you WANT to see that!

Xtreme Conversions

Xtreme Conversions is a clickbank product I found today, haven’t used it yet and promises to track your conversions by keyword level. As usual the sales page is full of mumbo jumbo “you’ll get rich stuff” and makes this offer look a bit fishy at least, especially since I haven’t found any specific feature list on the page.

Their claim “The Entire Conversion Tracking Process Is Automated!” sounds to good to be true but I doubt it highly so. They say that “Xtreme Conversions will work with ClickBank and CJ and any other merchant that allows you to put tracking code in the affiliate URL.” so the steps that will be required at least will be:

• uploading your keywords to THE tool
• generating a destination url list with keyword ids
• uploading the keywords with keyword id tracking codes (manually to GAW since I don’t expect them to have an API access)

any other solution wouldn’t work at all.

It seems they require some PHP include on the top of each page to track keywords, and their sales page talks about tracking ClickBank only. Now well, that’s not very tempting.

But since they offer Clickbank-style refunds for 56 days this will be a sure signup so I can update you on that later. And I returned “Affiliate Elite”: to Brad Callen after 1,5 months because I couldn’t find any good way to use it (due to the lack of server power in HIS new backend mainly)

Affiliate Radar

This is one of the most comprehensive campaign tracking tools and I’ve used it for some months back since last summer to run a campaign in the dating market. As it seems I’ve already been buying into one of the better tools with that back then already, and the monthly charge of $97 speaks for that (as opposed to single payments with software tools)

Looking at the process diagram they we have above (from Affiliate Radar) you will see that it’s pretty well integrated – as long as you are fine with importing and exporting of data to/from Google,Yahoo,MSN … and the affiliate networks. This can become quite a tedious job and I found quite a few data conversion problems in the process which urged me to fix these CSV files in the text editor to make it run…

Summed up this means that you’ll never ever be “up-to-date” with your tracking but have a tedious “batch-style job” to do … at best on a daily basis… but at least AR offers “some kind of” support for 100+ affiliate networks reports, which doesn’t seem to be the case with Xtreme Conversions (I wonder if I want to spend any minute on that one still)

SeoSemTools

This clickbank product titled Pay-Per-Click (ppc) Search Engine Keyword Tracking Software promises keyword level conversion tracking, but I highly doubt this can be any good. Just take a look at their sales page. While it’s fine that they don’t try to run me thru a multi-foot-long sales page with sublimal psycho-tricks I hate that they don’t even show a feature and requirements list – and that for a recurring service to charge you $47 on a monthly daily basis.

No idea on those, but given that they offer CB refund style I might try that as well

KeywordXray

KeywordXray is another tracking tool, this time by the Rich Jerk and a freaking nice designed web site. It’s a hosted service, and again this means relying on somebody else to a) keep your campaigns and sites confidential b) providing the server power you reqire.

This tool is a $47/month service for the lowest volume and I guess this would require a longer trial as I haven’t found detailled specifications or even screenshots of their application. Any NO, def. NO, I don’t think that fricking sales videos with talkative ladies can make up for a detailled product specification. (damn, why does the whole web think professionals love to watch videos when they can get the required info by skimming some detail feature lists?)

Summary

I still haven’t found what I’m looking for, am still not where I’d need to be to not feel like a donkey doing monkey work and still losing money…

Even AR which had quite a bit of good understanding what is needed finally frustrated me with the inflexibility to sync campaign with GAW and especially to weed out non-performers or make structural changes (YEAH – you’d actually had to resetup everything within a new adgroup structure if you wanted to do that …)

What could you recommend?

What it does offer:

• permutations of keywords (like all 50k+ cities) thru your keywords, ads and landingpages
• generation of proper ad groups (Google Adwords only allows 2000 lines per group, so if you are bidding broad,exact,phrase that means no more than 666 REAL keywords)
• a datafeed script that allows you to populate your landing pages with product info from merchants (good if you are to promote video recorders or other retail productc)

Thereby a close to perfect match between

Keyword >>> Ad Text >>> Landing Page

which in turn means a good CTR (click thru rate) to your ads and (jopefully) a better QS (quality score) on Google Adwords (GAW).

SpeedPPC also allows tracking on the keyword/ad/landing page level…

What it also promised is to lifts conversion rates by dynamically changing the landing pages based on the original search keywords used. That means injecting the keywords into the landing page – which isn’t new or hard to do at all. but still.

For roughly $ 500 this tool is not cheap.

For $ 500 you can buy nice things, but keeping in mind that this is a one-time investment (compared to subscription based tools) this new SpeedPPC could offer a nice all-in-one-solution for stomping out full “long tail campaigns” and this would be perfect for things like bidding on “lawyer in city” …

I read, that SpeedPPC has a promotion for $497, which implies that they want to raise the price, so maybe today is a good day to buy that tool… give it a shot!

Update Feb’08 : I came across Efficient PPC today and it looks like it offers the same functionality minus datafeed integration as Speed PPC

why no YSM? because you need a gold account for importing files, that means you have to spend 500+$/mo

Me too – because I have to thank Google for giving me – and my clients a new competitive advantage.

Why do I thank Google for removing interesting signals?

Well, until last week every wannabeo-seo and his mother could see (in the SERPs, see grandfathered sample below)
if a page had a problem with ranking…

There have been huge posts by Jim , Halfdeck and Halfdeck again and a lot more on what/why/where supplementals are. Even I posted about Supplemental Hell and one PayPerPost link buying penalty bringing pages into the to supplemental index.

Today however…

People need to put more effort into detecting if a page has problem due to being in the supplemental index.
That means a certain (large) amount of SEOs just won’t be able to do this in their everyday job.

Halfdeck has his own Supplemenal Detector which is a fancy JAVA application that is in fact a “pagerank emulator” – and all pages below a certain threshold are marked as supplemental. I encourage you to download this data scraper, and I’m sure it works nicely – but haven’t tried it.

After playing with Halfdeck’s Pagerank emulator I must say that it’s a great way to simulate how the “link juice” flows thru your site and where you are actually wasting precious link juice (i.e. on useless stats pages). Halfdeck even implemented a “backlink emulator” where you can judge on the effects of an additional PRx link to any page you like… pretty cool tool – it just lacks TBPR live queries, but I hope he can add that in the next version.

But, in fact I never cared much about the TOTAL number of supplementals, but always if a single page is in supplemental. Why that?

Well, I guess Link Ninja Master Jim Boykin knows why – it’s because you don’t want to get links on pages in the supplemental index because they won’t get crawled as often.

Jim’s recent explanation on finding if a page is in supplemental pretty well details how to detect if a page is “healthy” at all – i.e. ranks for obscure terms.

If a page does not even rank for an obscure terms on it, you don’t need a link there.

So you ask again, why is this cool for your business?

Because the way to check if a page is worthy to spend time to get a link on it has just become a bit harder. You will need more work, time, effort, unless you automate it. Just as we do here.

And this is the perfect situation to use an “internal tool” (as many SEOs have) as a competitie advantage to get more and better links in a shorter time… heck – some link builders might spend another couple clicks on each page to find out if it qualifies for hunting for link.

We Don’t

In fact we already see the “Supplemental Index” on top of our brower toolbar bar when we visit a page.
In fact we already see the “Supplemental Index” label as it used to be printed for ALL google users in the past, nicely embedded in the SERPs.

And in fact Google has bought itself now 10-20 more Google queries per SERP page my Link Arbeiter team screens when looking for links – plus we are inflating the pageloads of all those sites we screen by one…

Do you think that hurts Google? Nah – enough resources.
Do you think it hurts me? Nah – just got a bunch more proxy IPs to make up for the bigger Google scraping load.

Do you think it will hurt the SEO scene building links? Well …

I would assume a huge bunch of people won’t even notice a difference – after all even SEOmoz de-classified 70% of SEO companies for not knowing the SEO basic

Furthermore a couple of smaller equipped companies will struggle as they will need to do more a lot more work (as per Jim’s description) to get the same results…. and I mean – A LOT MORE.

Now this moves the benefits to larger scale companies (as Google is) that DO have an intact SEO infrastructure for their daily SEO work.

But the small scale link builders will first have to build that infrastructure, browser plugins and knowledge to make visible what Google has just taken from the public.

Thanks Google !

Yes, I’m talking about SEO4FF - the cool plugin made by Aaron Wall/SEOBOOK which I higly respect…

but it just lacks some flaws which I already found sucky last year, and Jim told me he also had to limit it’s usage in his link ninja teams

Why? Well – SEO4FF just doesn’t scale. It’s made for one-stop shops, but doesnt help you when working in link builder teams

The main problems are