Darrell Freeman’s Internet Marketing Blog

Not been blogging for a while mainly due to spending most of October on holiday (Kenya/Thailand) and spending November catching up with the backlog of work.  Just a quick post, as the freelance graphic designer I used for projects has now decided to go back into full time work and part of his contract is that he can’t do any freelance work.

Anyway I’m on the lookout for a good freelance graphic designer.  Main requirements is that they have experience of producing PSD visuals of a web site (normally homepage and internal) from a design brief.  Also usual little jobs (e.g. business cards etc….).  The jobs are infrequent but I would like to have someone lined when and if the jobs come up.  I normally pay a set fee per job, paid by Paypal upon successful completion of the project.  The graphic designer doesn’t need any coding experience.  Recommendations welcome - just leave details in the comment.

If interested just leave a comment with a link to your site or protfolio……

Blog post on a Friday night! Just about to go down the local for a few scoops but quickly wanted to let you know about a new (I think its new) cross browser tool called Adobe Browser  Lab that I have just come across.

When I get a new site designed I need to know that it will look good in all commonly used browsers (IE 6, 7, 8, Firefox, Chrome and Safari).  In the past I have used the Multi IE’s but it doesn’t work on Vista and also used Browser Shots a few a times - but nowadays have to wait nearly 30 mins on Browser Shots so no good really.  There are quite a few paid services (e.g. £20 a month) but as I don’t need the service too often I’d rather not pay.

I’m really impressed with the new tool, however it doesn’t have IE 8 which is a dissapointment.  Anyway as a FREE tool it is pretty cool.  Have a play around with it and see what you think.

Been hearing a lot lately about keyword domains and micro sites.  Hopefully sum up what they are, advantages and disadvantages of keyword domains and micro sites.

What are keyword domains & micro sites?  Examples?

Basically you buy a product related domain and then develop a micro sites (few pages) around the product and with some simple on-page SEO they will rank quite well in Google.  For example, Ipod Nano 16GB is a good example.  Good domain name and a great micro site.  The person who owns that site probably took a few days to build it, hardly any maintenance and gives them a decent monthly income.

I developed one recently, the Quinny Buzz site took me about a day to develop and so far as got me a few commissions.  In a few months I’ll report back on the progress and see if it was worth it.

What are the advantages of keyword domains & micro sites?

There are a few clear advantages:

• Domains are generally available.
• Quick SEO rankings in Google.
• Quick to build the site.
• High conversion rate (specific product terms usually convert better than generics)

Any disadvantages?

There are once again a few disadvantages to consider:

• Low search volume.
• You may rank page 1 in Google, but the ‘gold’ is in the top 3.
• Manufacturers may sometimes get pissed off with your brand domains.
• Unique text needed for all sites which for some people can take a while to produce.
• Losing true sales to voucher code affiliates (happens on normal affiliate sites though).

Top tips for micro sites?

• Make sure the on-page SEO is spot on before launching (e.g. title tags, meta description, keyword research, unique text, keywords in the text etc…)
• If you have a price comparison on the product, be selective about merchants you use.  Consider conversion rates, affiliate payouts (e.g. Click and reserve with Argos pays out just 25p, so I would never include them).
• Get a few backlinks to the site.

Let me know of any more tips and tricks for keyword domains and micro sites.  Are they working well for you or waste of time? Leave a comment and let us know!

Recently whilst building a new affiliate site I’ve been using a few tools to make life that bit easier and quicker on the design and programming side.  It always good finding easier and quicker ways to do things.  In the online world you are inundated with offers to use new tools (SEO, PPC, CMS etc….) and if you decided to trial them all, your bank account would soon be empty.

Anyway I recently decided to do a bit of a review site and really didn’t want to get a custom design from a graphic designer due to time therefore decided to go for a Wordpress theme.  After looking through the free themes I couldn’t find one that I liked enough and eventually went to Brian Gardner’s Studiopress and choose the excellent Lifestyle theme.  There are also loads of tutorials to totally customise the theme and a very active forum.  The themes are just $59.95 and after a Google search I picked up a discount code of 25% (PERF25) which made the theme just $44.97 (about £28 - Bargain!).  The theme was easy to set up widgets on the homepage and the one or two design issues I encountered have been cleaered up very quickly on the forum.  Considering using the corporate theme now for a few non blog sites.  Great stuff!

Another tool that is new (kinda) to the affiliate marketing space in the UK is Easy Content Units.  Now I can put products on my sites in super quick time with products from a variety of merchants and networks.  I’ve only just started to use this tool, but the units were very quick to setup in the admin area of Easy Content Units and then it produces some javascript code which you just paste into your webpage (easy!).  To add/delete products just use the simple interface in Easy Content Units, you don’t need to change the code on the page.  I’m currently using the free version (80/20 revenue split) and see how it goes.  If it goes well I’ll upgrade to the paid version (£20 a month, no revenue split).  Give it a play today, it is so simple to use.

So you have Studiopress to create a site and ECU to populate with products.  Need some content and can’t be bothered yourself?  Try Content Now (I’ve not used them yet so can’t comment on the quality).  Now if Tracking 202 would add some UK networks you could have affiliate sites up and running with minimal fuss and best of all, minimal work!

I was asked for advice by somebody the other day, who was going for their first SEO job interview and it got me thinking about my previous experience of SEO job interviews. I’ll try and sum up my experiences of SEO interviews and hopefully provide some handy links to possible questions.

In my experiences of SEO interviews if your going for a starter role I would be surprised if you got asked anything more technical than 301 redirects, on-page factors and some basic link building questions.  Going into the mid level roles you may have to give examples of link building in a competitive market place that actually had a positive effect on the rankings and show good social skills (particularly if applying to an agency role).

I would also stick my neck out and say that somebody who is committed to learning SEO could be in a starter role within 3 months of starting to learn SEO and a lot of places would take you on anyway if you knew the basics and sounded keen to learn more.

The common questions that regularly come up do revolve around how you keep up to date in the industry (e.g. read SEOmoz, SEObook, various forums etc…), past work on different websites and a few technical questions along the lines of ‘What is a 301 redirect and give me an example where you would use it’?  I’ve always found the interviews to be pretty chilled out affairs and sometimes there may not even be an SEO person interviewing you.  It is not unknown in some companies to get interviewed by the head developer who wouldn’t know a title tag from a robots.txt file.

Below are a few links to different sites with some example questions.  I would advise if your attending an SEO interview (depending on the level) make sure you know the answers, have a good range of examples of past SEO work completed and be able to talk about the industry indepth at ease.  Last thing is that if you do know basic on-page optimisation you will probably be ahead of 75% of other applicants straight away - unless this has changed in the last few months since I was interviewing for an SEO.

Some of these below are quite extensive, remember for starter SEO roles, your interview will only be around 45 minutes so after the usual introductions you may only be asked a few questions.

http://www.themadhat.com/search-marketing/seo-job-interview-questions/

http://www.allthingssem.com/seo-interview-questions/

http://www.justmeandmy.com/80-seo-job-interview-questions

Today I needed to buy a train ticket for next week so I went to the Trainline website and after picking the correct route, finding suitable times and fares I was ready to checkout.  I was at the last screen and got presented with the following screen:

You see the problem, I can either pick up the train tickets from the nearest station or pay for next day delivery (£7.50).  Ok, my journey starts from Capenhurst which is 1/2 mile from my house but nearest train station I can pick up the tickets is Chester, which is 16 miles roundtrip - not really suitable.  Also I’m not in a rush for my tickets (as I’m travelling next week) so therefore don’t require next day delivery at £7.50 (over 50% the costs of my actual train tickets).  So where is the 1st class post option for a £1??

Done a bit of digging around QJump is exactly the same.  Also Trainline charge a booking fee and credit card fees as well so they always make a few quid on every booking.  If like me you want 1st class post (free!) for your tickets, no credit card fees and no booking fee then use the service by First Great Western, they also don’t select travel insurance for you by default.

The marketing/usability guys at Trainline need shooting, for people in the same situation as me the cart abandonment will be really high and as they have deleted the option to have your tickets sent by 1st class post I can see their conversion on a big downturn - good work guys!

Ok every week or two I log into Google Adwords and download a search query report - normally do this to find new negative keywords and find new keywords for new ads and landing pages.

Whilst looking through a report for the last month I noticed that a match type which appears is ‘Broad (session-Based)’.  Maybe I haven’t been paying attention but I’ve only just noticed this.  Anyway it is quite alarming to find that the search phrases users are using for ‘Broad (session based)’ are nothing to do with the keywords I am targeting.  Whereas nearly all the search phrases for ‘Broad’ match are relevant they are not relevant for ‘Broad (session based)’.

A solution would be for Adwords to give advertisers the option to disable ‘Broad (session-based)’ however to do this I would need to disable ‘Broad’ match type and I do not want to do this.  The problem with ‘Broad (session-based)’ is that it shows adverts from a users previous search, for example if I type ‘holidays’ into Google and my next search is for ‘car rentals’ there is a good chance that due to ‘Broad (session based)’ match type a few ads for the 1st search term (holidays) will still appear in the results for the 2nd search term.

It is a good idea in theory from Google as many users may enter a generic phrase to start with (e.g. tv) before drilling down into more detail so the 2nd phrase maybe ‘lcd tv’ and then maybe a model number ‘32lg2000′ as the user moves along the buying cycle - but Google needs to recognise when search phrases are related and when they are not.  Then they can effectively implement ‘Broad (session-based)’ match type.

In the algo for organic results, LSI (Latent semantic indexing) is where Google recognises keywords which are related (e.g. Google knows that both keywords ‘mobile phone’ and ‘nokia’ are be related) and a strict version of this needs to be implemented into the algo for Adwords to stop ads appearing for totally unrelated search terms on ‘Broad (session-based) match types.

A solution for me is to maybe stop ‘broad match’ and go back and see what search phrases generate ‘broad’ match ads and start to move these into ‘phrase’ and ‘exact’ match.  Here is some info nearer the bottom of this article from Google on Broad (session-based).

Ok I’ve applied for a programme, the merchant or their agency who deal with Aff marketing for them as had a look at my profile in AWIN and rejected me.  No complaints as the primary site url listed in ‘Account details’ in the Awin interface has nothing to do with the programme I was applying for.  But why do Awin just allow you to enter 1 url, obviously they know many affiliates have various sites in different niches therefore you should be able to enter as many urls as possible.

So first suggestion is that Awin changes the ‘promotional tab’ in ‘Account Detail’ to allow affiliates to enter more than 1 site.

Secondly when you have been rejected by a merchant why isn’t there a way to ‘appeal’ in the interface, could send the merchant a simple explanation of why I am applying for their programme and also the url I am using to promote the site.  These changes are quite simple and would benefit the affiliate, the merchant and also the network.

I only login to Webgains every few months.  Don’t promote any of their merchants anymore (actively) so don’t expect any commissions.  Today I seen this on my Webgains dashbaord.  Ha ha I need 1p to get my next payment from Webgains.  Wish Argos and their crap reserve and buy (a.k.a scamming affiliates) 25p offer was on Webgains rather than CJ.

What a pain in the arse.  Firstly you have to download your Google Adwords campaign, I did it via the Adwords Interface.  Then I tried to upload it to Yahoo’s ‘Convert Third Party Campaigns’ and it didn’t upload properly.

After a bit of messing around I found it was because of the negative keywords so I deleted them and uploaded it again and it converted the file and I then had to download the converted file save it and upload it again for the import.  However when I tried to upload the converted file it had errors!!  How can a file Yahoo converts have errors??  Finally after a lot of tweaking got rid of the errors and finally uploaded the campaign.

I don’t understand why Yahoo and MSN don’t have a simple 1 step upload feature which will take an upload of your Adwords campaign and convert it with one click of the mouse.  It seems one of the most obvious features to make sure is 100% correct and is easy peasy for the customer otherwise they won’t bother and just stick with the king that is Google.  Rant  over - Yahoo’s customer service is much better than Google’s - they answer the phone!