Darrell Freeman’s Internet Marketing Blog

Most mornings I go through all the posts on my Google Reader. Most of the blogs I subscribe to are a mix of SEO, PPC and aff marketing.  Anyway now and again I come across a blog post which I find useful and in the future will no doubt want to refer back to and just find it easier to do so on my own blog.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/working-with-navigation-in-seo?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+seomoz+(SEOmoz+Daily+Blog)

Thought this was quite a good video by Chris. Shows how cheap rural Thailand really is and sees a great place to chill out and get some work done. For under £50 a month aswell.

http://www.myeggnoodles.com/apartment-in-mukdahan.html

Seems nowadays everyone has a Mac instead of a PC. Are there any graphic designers in the UK who still use a PC over a Mac (by choice!)? Obviously, there must be some attractions of a Mac over a PC and I’m eager to investigate.

Been thinking for a while of switching from a PC to a MAC but as I spend a lot of time online this has to be a transition without the usual hassle and steep learning curve.  I visited the Apple store in Liverpool One at the weekend and have to say I was impressed with the quick demo I was given on the MacBook.

I’m now planning on attending one of the free workshops they offer which is for begineers switching from the PC to the Mac.  I’ll see how the workshop goes and maybe think about attending a few more before I decide to take the plunge and spending the best part of £1k on a new Mac.

An e-commerce site I have been working on is big mens clothing shop, Big Dude Clothing and slowly been building momentum and collecting opt in email addresses ready for when the time is right to try email marketing.  We added the Checkout Newsletter extension to the store and now collecting email addresses at the checkout. Since we added the extension, 100% of the users who have ordered have also signed up for the newsletter.

Decided that the time was right to dip our toes into email marketing, after a few Google searches we landed on Mail Chimp (aff link - I’m I bothered? No - because I would be writingt this post anyway even if no aff link available) and after seeing they offer a free account for upto 500 subscribers and many other features we signed up for the free account.  We had all our email addresses (little over 100 subs) in the Magento CMS and by using a Magento-Mail Chimp Extension we easily imported all our email addresses from Magento to Mail Chimp - not only this, but it keeps the Magento list synced with MailChimp in the future (love automation!).

To get started and send our first newsletter we choose one of the e-commerce templates and followed the wizard in Mail Chimp, which was very simple to do and within 15 minutes we had sent out our first email newsletter, not only that but just now we have had our first sale from an email newsletter.:)

If Carlsberg made email marketing systems….

I first went to A4U whilst SEO Manager at Prodo in late 2008. Good conference with plenty of quality sessions, good networking and a good vibe. Learnt loads of good stuff and really opened my eyes that working full time in affiliate marketing would be sweet.  6 months later I went to A4U in Amsterdam - not as good as London - too many of the same sessions as A4U London, however was worth it for just going to Amsterdam! Great City!

I missed A4U London 2009 as I was on holiday in Kenya and just looking at the details for A4U Munich now.  With the cost of €395 a ticket, over £150 for flights, £175 for a decent hotel and spends of around £200 I reckon I’ll get more benefit out of not shelling out the near £1,000 and also missing a few days of work.

However looking at the agenda, noticed a session by the guys at The Conversion Experts and thinking the cost maybe worth it for just that session.

Google Adwords is amazing! Not only does it drive relevant traffic to websites but without doubt Google Adwords is the best keyword tool there is. If you have your keywords on broad - then you can do a search query report and find all the keywords that users used to find your site. This is miles better than Wordtracker or any other tools out there! Obviously the only limitation is the initial keywords you have for your Adwords campaign.  Not only can get the search query show the keywords users are using to find your site but Adwords can also show the highest converting keywords aswell.

The content network also provides a great opportunity for SEO’s. The placement report can show the websites where your ad has been on.  These are websites that Google deems are closely related to your ad and therefore these websites are perfect for link building. Google Content Network can find you hundreds of relevant websites to approach for a backlink.

Finally got around to producing some business cards and flyers for big mens clothing shop Big Dude Clothing.  I think the design for both are wicked and got them printed from Scuba Printing.  They fit well and tie in nicely with the look and feel of the website.  Only problem is I should have gave 10% off to returning customers and not the tight 5%.  Oh well, next time I’ll sort that out!

Affiliate Marketing is great, the money and lifestyle of those working full time in Affiliate Marketing can be amazing (not mine though)!  However as with any job there are those things that I hate:

1. Voucher Code sites.  I would love to know how much my sites have lost out to voucher code sites as the user is on the checkout on the site and they open a new tab and go and get (or ty and get) a voucher code which overirdes my cookie.  My hard work lost at the last moment.  Obviously I could open a voucher code site but the market is quite saturated and also with new guidelines coming out all the time on voucher code websites, it seems a huge amount of work to get it working properly!
2. When merchants redesign their websites and do not tell the affiliates or give them enough notice. This usually leads to the structure of the urls changing and therefore the affiliate website is left directing the traffic to 404 pages, great!
3. Other affiliates in the same market ripping off your site.  I’ve even had other affiliates use my own banners on their own websites.   A few emails threatening legal action eventually sorted but how cheeky is that!
4. Merchants having poor checkout processes or poor lead generation pages.  On some offers I know I could generate a substantial amount of business but the problem is the merchant’s site or pages would have a very poor conversion rate due to design issues (e.g. generally asking the customer for too much info), so it is a no go.
5. Affiliate Network Interfaces - Lets be honest, most of the interfaces of the affiliate networks are confusing and are not easy to navigate around and find the info you want. I would say Webgains have the best interface out of the networks.

It is definitely time I updated my blog, considering it is now over 2 months since I last updated.  The only major event during that time was a holiday over New Year to Boston and New York.  Above are some snaps taken from the holiday and put together in a collage using the software at Shape Collage (nope, it is not an affiliate link).  Check it out, free trial edition and the interface is really easy to use, super quick at importing images and edit the overall image as you like (how close photos are, background image, shape of image, size, density of photos and loads more).

Adwords recently improved some of their reporting (few months ago).  For example the Search Query report now shows actual keywords (big help!) rather than ‘1 other unique’ or something like that.  Anyway, I would really love to get hold of the keywords which trigger an impression of my ad! Why?

Few reasons, firstly I could find more negative keywords, this would mean finding possible negative keywords before they click on my ad and cost me.  Therefore showing me keywords which produce impressions would lower my cost.

Secondly, with more negative keywords I could reduce my impressions which in turn would increase my CTR (click through rate) and therefore increase my quality score possibly leading to increased ad position at the same cost.

Finally, it would allow me to possibly better targeted ads, which in turn increases my click through rate and quality score.

I can see why Google do not provide this information as some campaigns will produce thousands of impressions per day.  However there would be benefits to Google aswell, such as helping advertisers to delete non relevant ads and produce better targeted ads and therefore more sponsored CTR equals more money for Google.