Affiliate BizDev | Finch Sells

Google Panda About To Eat SEO Professionals?

Jun 26 2011

Google has rolled out Panda update 2.2, and webmasters around the world are staring in awe as their sites dance around the rankings like uncontrollable drunks. The sense of confusion is growing, and incredibly mixed results are being reported.

I’ve had affiliates telling me their sites have surged to the top of Google for ultra competitive terms. Others seem to be drowning their sorrows at the prospect of a long-term stay in the dreaded Sandbox.

It’s rare that I post about SEO. There are two reasons for this:

SEO requires more management than my paid traffic campaigns (which earn a lot more money)
I believe SEO to be rapidly heading towards extinction.

For those who, like me, rarely stick their heads out of the rabbit hole to see what’s new with the world of SEO, let’s take a look at the disputed intentions of the Panda update.

Google wants to reward websites that offer engaging content and a rewarding user experience.
Google wants to punish websites that scrape content and leverage thousands of weak backlinks.
Google wants to place the responsibility in the user’s hands to determine whether a website deserves to rank well.

Google has always publicly encouraged engaging content, but the algorithm has struggled to match the stated objectives. Panda seems to be changing the game, or at the very least, taking a sincere hack at it.

Naturally this is going to rip a new one for many affiliates, especially those who use SEO as their primary means of driving traffic.

SEOMoz has an excellent article explaining the likely repercussions of Panda. The overwhelming message is that SEO…isn’t really SEO anymore. The easiest way to game the system is to actually play along with the system.

If ranking well becomes a question of designing engaging websites where the user is left with a positive feeling, a sense that he hasn’t been shafted by Johnny Rogue Affiliate on a commission crusade, then surely the SEO professionals of the future will be forced to prioritise their work around the shit that truly matters – satisfaction in the eye of the end user, rather than an algorithm and it’s thousand loopholes.

I have long seen SEO as an inefficient middleman between excellent content and the interested readers who would want to find it. My own sites have generally responded well to the Panda updates, which is encouraging given that I spend about 2.4% of my working day giving a damn about SEO.

If the most important factors for high rankings finally shift towards user-engagement measurements, then isn’t it time SEOs changed their job titles? Wouldn’t it be ironic if after optimising for local SEO terms, they had to rebuild from scratch as UEOs? I can see a growing demand for User Engagement Optimisers…get the domains ordered, guys!

Likewise, if Google wants to reward brand-driven websites where little thought is given to keyword phrase density and second tier backlinks, then I’d happily invite the Panda in to my home for tea and biscuits. Fuck it, I’d even scrub up nice for the occasion.

I am as clueless on the next move as everybody else, but I would guess that Google will be using engagement metrics such as bounce rate, time on site, return visits and a whole host of social sharing monitors to weigh up relevance. It wouldn’t surprise me in the future if Google took one look at your Analytics, smelt the bullshit, and didn’t even bother to count the backlinks.

Ultimately, nobody can say for sure what the true scale of the Panda changes are. It’s too early to measure the ranking fluctuations with any conviction. But what matters is the intention. Google is clearly taking a stand against the webmasters who blast thousands of blog comments and 500 word articles in their attempt to fake relevance.

It would be very rich of an anti-SEO blogger such as myself to hand out SEO advice to those who have based their professional careers around the craft, but I’m going to do it anyway.

DIVERSIFY YOUR BUSINESS!

Assume that Google had a blackout and no longer existed, how would you get customers to your site? If the answer is “By shifting my focus towards Bing and Yahoo”, you’re doing it wrong!

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The Worst Converting Campaign Of All Time

Jun 12 2011

Did you know that it takes a mighty 12.5 million spam emails just to sell $100 of viagra?

This number was enough to send the cogs of my brain in to a wheelspin. The sheer inefficiency of it all is difficult to comprehend. Admittedly, the majority of viagra emails are handled by botnets that take much of the human labour out of the equation. But this is still a ridiculously inefficient line of business.

To put those numbers in perspective, on any given day, an American viagra pill slinger is more likely to die in a car crash than he is to convert with a single viagra spam email.

As affiliates, we bitch and moan about being scrubbed. But I don’t even want to contemplate how agrieved the poor bastard who just saw his 1/4000000 conversion rate fall to 1/8000000 must feel.

The numbers make you wonder how spamming in the name of viagra pills can ever be worth the effort. These emails show no sign of relenting anytime soon, proving that some businesses are still finding ways to profit from them. And as long as they do, I will still be ignoring hilariously titled emails such as “Make her orga$m by Inflate your pecker”

There can’t be too many products that rival viagra in the inefficiency stakes, but this also shows just how meaningless a conversion rate truly is. If a company can stay afloat with such shocking figures, maybe it’s time to spare a second thought for all those traffic sources you dismissed as junk in the past?

Many affiliates spend 100% of their time searching for the best quality traffic, when other much ridiculed traffic sources are actually effective in their own relative terms. I’m not saying you should dust down the botnets and load up your “erection” madlibs, but clearly a business doesn’t have to enjoy the best – or even respectable – conversion rates to succeed.

The best converting campaigns aren’t necessarily the best investments for your business, and are certainly by no means a guarantee of a healthy bottom line.

It hardly matters if you convert at 10% or 1% on an affiliate offer, only that you understand the mechanics of the equation better than your competition. You could be the best sales writer in the world but if you have no understanding of the arbitrage attached to your work, you can never be a successful affiliate marketer.

Our job is primarily to solve mathematical equations while occasionally stroking our own feathers by pretending to give a shit about actual marketing practices (when the tried and tested maths no longer work).

This is why so many affiliates end up in the legal gutter.

Trivial matters such as FTC guidelines are happily tossed to the wayside in an aggressive pursuit of numbers that work in our favour. The viagra spammer is simply an example of pushing the envelope too far. We can laugh at the poor conversion rates, but high traffic at a tiny cost is just another way of playing arbitrage. No better, no worse.

You don’t see too many affiliate blogs bragging “How I Made X/Day With This ABYSMALLY Converting Trick!“, but maybe that’s because most of us are guilty of over-simplifying the maths. There’s no pride in having the best conversion rate if some other sucker is doing thousands more in profit and posting EPCs that crash the system with too many zeros.

The numbers game can be played in many ways. That’s worth remembering if your marketing career has slowed to a halt at the prospect of monetizing $1 clicks on Facebook.

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Why “Easy, Profitable And Sustainable” Will Never Exist

Jun 07 2011

The Affiliate Marketing business thrives around the belief that three qualities – easy, profitable and sustainable – are just waiting to be uncovered. Look at the average bizopp sales letter and you’ll see it summed up in a nutshell.

“How I Earn $6904/Week On My Laptop With One Simple Secret Trick!”

Such a title ticks the three boxes that matter most to a sucker on the verge of quitting his day job to chase said dream.

Is it easy? Have you not seen how well I mine on Runescape? All Internet be easy to me.
Is it profitable? $6904/week…fuck, tell the kids we’re moving to Hawaii.
Is it sustainable? The guy’s Clickbank stats just keep rising. This time next year, we’ll be trillionaires Rodders!

Sarcasm may be dripping off this page, but make no mistake, this is the naive attitude that drives many an ebook launch.

In my opinion, only two of those qualities can ever exist in tandem. You can have an affiliate campaign that is easy and sustainable, but it won’t be very profitable. Or you can be driving huge profits for the long-term future, but it won’t be particularly easy.

Then you have the most dangerous combination in our industry.

Easy and profitable…but absolutely not sustainable.

This could be applied to a Plentyoffish campaign that peaks and perishes in the space of a weekend, but there’s nothing spectacularly dangerous about that. More importantly, it could be applied to a number of darker marketing practices that many of us are now familiar with.

The fake blog is a great example of easy and profitable, because it pinpoints the reason why sustainability can never follow.

Our challenge, as affiliates, is to come up with new and inventive ways to reach the skeptic mind. The flog was mighty successful in blurring the lines between advertising and believable testimonial. Many would argue, myself included, that it was far too successful. If an advertising practice becomes so commonplace that any half arsed marketer can spin a profit from it, you can be sure that it won’t be long until that practice becomes the most detested in the industry.

Did anybody expect such a profitable marketing trap to stay viable after affiliate marketers rushed to abandon conventional landing pages in favour of it? Every legitimate business with a weight loss product to sell was going to react unfavourably to a bunch of cowboy affiliates stealing their market share. That’s your first problem. The second problem is the customer.

When one customer feels ripped off, not many people are going to pay attention. When thousands of customers feel ripped off, reputations start to suffer. In the space of a few months, the snowball effect of broken trust amplified by relentless affiliate campaigns had driven a successful marketing ploy to the precipice where it had to fail.

The flog itself, controversial as it was, needn’t have crashed and burned as emphatically as it did. The marketing logic behind it was sound but ultimately too easy to execute, and too open to abuse from the affiliates who based their businesses around it.

Zero barrier to entry + very easy + very profitable = definitely NOT sustainable. Anybody with a grasp of basic economics should be able to work that much out.

I’m not trying to provide an obituary of the flog here, but rather a simple explanation of why “get rich quick” tactics will never be sustainable. They may exist, but they typically involve the bending of rules in such a way that the associated risk is never going to lead to the stress-free life in a hammock that you were promised in the stock photos.

If an easy moneymaking ploy becomes too profitable, it will draw attention from a) The customers and b) The competition. At this point, the ethics of the ploy will be called in to question. This is where they normally disintegrate. But even if your ethics are sound, the competition will soon catch on and copy. With increased competition comes less profitability – or simply a much tougher time making money.

Easy, profitable and sustainable affiliate marketing campaigns are never going to be published in an ebook or handed to strangers who haven’t busted their balls in pursuit of the same knowledge. It would be foolish to believe they even exist.

So you have to ask yourself: “What am I going to focus my business on?”

Easy and sustainable… without the lucrative rewards of more ambitious projects?
Sustainable and profitable… with a receding hairline from the stress of finding the magic formula?
Easy and profitable… and I’ll worry about the future when my luck runs out.

It’s pretty obvious which category most affiliates fall in to. But is that through choice or a complete disregard to the sustainability of the marketing they practice? Who knows, who cares.

For the rest of us, the challenge isn’t simply to be profitable. But to be so profitable that we can afford Wayne Rooney’s hair surgeon after finding that magic formula.

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