First of all: Google loves Wordpress blogs. No secret at all. Period. Thats why I don’t understand why so many guys just delete their Wordpress footprint. Are you really affraid that 1 out of 1000 paid users will click on that link? Just make it target=”_blank”. Be a proud Wordpress webmaster and pay less for clicks.

Second: Comments! Many AM’s are just faking comments and turn the comment function off after posting some fake comments. Well, that’s generally ok, because you should of course fake some comments in the beginning.
But after that… just let your visitors do the rest. Also keep in mind to keep your comments clean and moderated so you can delete comments that are not that nice as you’d like them to be. This has many benefits. Customers will trust you more and Google gets feed with free content -> higher QS and conversions.

It’s that easy. Now give me some feedburner love!

I spoke to Myspace Germany’s Head of Direct Sales at the Somesso Conference in Zurich about this issue. According to him, MySpace was not launching the self-serve platform globally like Facebook did. Snap. And according to him, it was only launching in March for us German-speaking peeps.

But with the help of some IRC folks (you know who you are) I was able to get my ads set up. Here’s how I did it (You will need at least a virtual private server to make this possible).

• Step 1: Get yourself an english version of Firefox
  MySpace outputs their site according to the language of your browser. If you have a German browser, for example, you won’t get those crucial Javascript files from their server that you badly need to get their advertising tool working.
  So make sure to get yourself a second (ENGLISH) install of Firefox. Just use a different installation directory, don’t overwrite your original Firefox, duh.
• Step 2: Proxy!
  So, you need to make MySpace believe that you’re in an English speaking country. You will need an open proxy that is working or at least a virtual private server to make this work.

  If you already have a proxy all set up skip this step and, enable it in your Firefox Browser: “Preferences” -> “Advanced”.

  If you have a server ready and are able to access it through ssh, open Putty (or your resp. Terminal for you maxxorz and linuxxorz) with following parameters: putty.exe -D 8080 user@123.234.232.232 . Don’t forget to change the parameters to match your login, duh. After you’re logged in with Putty, point your Firefox Proxy Socks 5 Settings to Localhost and Port 8080.

• Step 3: Signing up, set up your first campaign
  Well, no brainer.
• Step 4: US-Credit card
  Some people told me that you’d need an American Credit card for this to work. I got it working with my Swiss card. If they don’t accept your card, consider using a Virtual Credit Card (Paypal for example). And if you don’t have one, just try your own credit card. It may work

After your signup process is through, just confirm your mail Address. After this, all you need to manage your MySpace ads is your already installed English Firefox Browser.

Now, lets see if you guys can manage to do this. It may be a long journey but it’s worth it! Leave your result in the comments

1. Exercise. Just keep practicing your favorite sport or go to a regular work out at the local gym. Don’t get yourself too exhausted though. Trust me. When nothing’s doing well and you just lost a couple thousand, go out and run for a while. 15 minutes of running and breaking another route record will do wonders for your state of mind.

2. Hang out with friends. Well, thats an obvious one. If you’re losing friends because of AM, think about it. If it’s your fault and not because they’re getting envyous, try to fix it. Because real friends are worth gold and will eventually stand by your side when you’re spending more than bringing in.

3. Parties. Let’s admit it: Affiliate Marketing not yet controller by a 50yr old crowd. Until then, party on! Some of you guys have me added on social media portals and probably know how I like to have a blast and just party with my friends. You should do that too. It gets you motivated and I bet it feels better for you to restart work after spending one day in your bed trying to get off that hangover (remember, you can still party without alcohol ). Also note that with partying, I’m not reffering to clubbing alone. A trip to the pub can do wonders as well.

4. Girlfriend. The human kind is by evolution not meant to be a monogamous creation. But if you chose to do so, just don’t dump her because you need more time to work. The time you’ll spend with her will free your mind and fill your pockets afterwards. But player: Stay off WAG’s.

5. Your Family. This is probably the most important part for me. Even though I probably didn’t end up as what they once thought would be the best for me, they still love me. And they are proud of what I’m achieving and have achieved. Even more important: They were still proud of me when I wasn’t scoring goals every single game and banking in. These are the kind of people you want to have around when not everything is working out well. Stick to them, no matter what. And give them a taste of the wealth you’ve achieved through the whole game.

6. Don’t talk to anyone When you’re in the game, some people will notice it. Will it just be from people thinking that you know your shit from comments or forum posts or just because some Affiliate Managers can’t shut their mouth at conferences. Then noobs will contact you and will try to squeeze every little bit of information out of you. Lately that has been happening to me. I was ok with noobs contacting me a few months ago. But now, c’mon… get your shit together and stop trying to immitate people! I know this may not be quite fair but the amount of information I’m open to share is in this blog and not to be found somewhere else. If people that inquire you are old friends that have helped you out before, that’s a different thing.

   /edit: I just saw an interesting page regarding this issue over at jon’s blog.

This is it. Anything else? Feel free to share!

But what I’m missing out and noticing most as an advertiser is the way that most networks just forget about the biggest joker they’ve got in their hands: It’s their userdata.

Facebook and MySpace already seem to understand what value you can provide to advertisers by letting them target by hobbies, likes, school, gender and their age.

ecadamy was represented by their CEO Thomas Power (great name btw). He told the audience that ecadamy just monetizes themselves by paid subscriptions and some „google ads, banners ads“… Damn, if you guys have enough techies and geeks in your garage to build up an own social network, what the hell is holding you guys back? Why dn’t you guys just come up with an own advertising portal instead of giving a big piece of the pie to google.

Just my thoughts. But I do actually believe that you need to rank in cash. Otherwise you’ll just disappear in a few years. I’m not saying ecadamy is doing it wrong, damn, they aren’t. Just saying they could earn more on advertising if they’d offer an own solution.

It’s not about the ticket’s price (which is still pretty low btw). It’s more about my school’s schedual (final stuff already going on) and my dad’s 50th birthday that I don’t want to miss at all. Well, gotta party with dad on his 50th, can’t let that pass by!

Sorry to all friends and affiliate managers that wanted to meet up in NY. Hopefully we can meet up in Vegas, San Francisco or wherever the next conference is held. Let’s hope I’m 21 by then or else I won’t be around as well by then. I don’t want to miss out all those affiliate network gigs just because of a dumb number.

Somesso
I’m still joining in tomorrow at the Somesso in Zurich. Its a social media related conference with speakers from companies like IBM and MySpace. Hopefully I get also some time to ask the MySpace representant aka. Joss Hertle why they won’t let me advertise on their own platform just because I’m in Europe. If you’re there, gimme a @tweet or just contact me.

In Switzerland most newspapers are struggling to keep alive. Most of them just slept out in the last 10 years and do not provide valuble online content for their tech-savy userbase. They just left a golden cow pass by and are trying to get back in the game now by launching portals that provide triplicated content.

Lets take Joe the Plumber (McCain seems to have a crush on him btw) as an example. By the way: I think it’s pretty stupid how the US presidential election works. Europeans just want to get over it and hopefully end up with Barack as president.

Whatever, back to topic: Joe’s been working at this local plumber company for years. Now he wants to buyout his employing company since the actual owner is retiring and he’s feeling good about doing his own thing.

Now lets pretend Joe has already bought the company and is now running it. He probably will lay off some workers that he does not consider crucial for the company. Nothing special, nothing fancy. Everyone’s laying off workforce these days.

I’d expect that the marketing budget is probably also getting some sort of cut even though this is the last thing you should do when in a crisis. Instead of cutting the budget off, he could just take the oldschool advertising budget made by his old boss and spend a bunch of the cash on a decent site about his business that actually acquires some clients, replacing that old frontpage-fabricated website by the nephew of his old boss. But that’s not everything.

I’m not saying he should just spend his whole marketing budget advertising on adwords for the keyword „plumber“. Nope, I’m saying he should just take the money that was meant to be spent on local newspaper ads and spend it at some local (maybe the local newspaper) online portal. Also, try to not forget those sweet long-tail keywords on Goog, Yhoo and MSN.

Why? Simply because it’s trackable. You can see if the money you spent on the keyword „plumber Boston“ is bringing in more money than the keyword „pipe’s broken, need plumber in Boston“. It’s as simple as that. You don’t have to guess or ask your customer which damn magazine or newspaper advertising dollar brought you that new customer, you can just track it. Cookies do all this for you and they do it sooo much better and faster. Also: When you advertise on search engines, you are advertising to people that are actually looking for or interested in the thing you’re selling or offering.

For most Small-Sized businesses, the only thing you can use Offline-advertising for is branding. But thats a whole different area, I’m not honestly aware of - yet. Correct me if I’m wrong in the comments.

Just my thoughts on this stuff. I’ve been seeing lots of offline advertising for Small- and Mid-Sized companies and I keep thinking about what they were thinking when they bought that ad space. PS: Gary Vaynerchuk already did a pretty interesting Video about his thoughts on this, and I’m all in with his thoughts.

I know I keep praying Gary’s video, but he’s just so right about this. What’s your guess?

Image: Flickr

What makes European Affiliate Networks less attractive to Search Engine Marketers than US-Networks?

• They don’t have affiliate managers for each and every affiliate.
  Either you have to be already pushing hard through that affiliate network to get anyone from them on the phone or AIM. There is no person you can directly reffer to when you want some new shiny offers that are doing well. Also you’re screwed if the advertiser’s site is down or their tracking sucks since you will need to mail the account rep for the offer you’re having trouble with. That is, if she/he decides to answer your mail after like 1-2 weeks.

  In comparison: If I’m having any problem on an US offer, I just call up my affiliate manager. No matter how much money I’m making on that network, he’ll/she’ll look it up.

• Payterms
  If you’re doing more than 500$ a day, you can pretty much score weekly payments without big issues on any major affiliate network (if you haven’t been the biggest douche to your affiliate manager, they’ll give you bi-weeklies on even less revenue). In Europe, thats almost impossible. I honestly don’t even know how much you need to rank monthly or daily to get on bi-weeklies.
• Offers
  There are a lot lead-based offers in Europe, but most advertisers here want to play safe and actually will only pay a few euros for a lead. If you’re lucky, they’ll get you a few % on the final sale. This can be a good or bad thing, depending heavily on what you’re promoting.
• Lead confirmation
  In any US Affiliate Network I’ve been in, sales and leads are instantly accepted. In Europe though, the advertiser has to accept them first. Depending on the advertiser’s lazyness, this may take weeks. Or months, if you’re on certain networks.
  Think about it: You spend a few grand on adwords, being all happy about how much ROI you’re getting on that offer and in the and the advertiser just declines every lead. Why? You’ve broken some branding rules.

Only a few thoughts on how affiliate networks like Zanox and Affili.net are being ignorant. If I’d have the time

But hey, I found an even better one!

There’s this group which is called “IF 10 MILLION JOIN MARC ZOMBERG WILL BRING BACK THE OLD FACEBOOK!”

Well, dear Jakob… the dude which allegedly revolutionized social networking isn’t named ZOMBERG, his name is Zuckerberg!

It’s funny how Facebook is restricting Ads the way they are doing. And on the other side even allowing guys to found huge groups with no sense at all (and wrong names). But I guess thats the way how Web 2.0 works.

BTW:
How about Dr. Zoidberg? That’d be nice, I always liked his Futurama role and he would fit the usual Web 2.0 CEO type. Young, dynamic, incompetent and always partying like a rockstar. Please, rename the group, Jakob.

Google is going to remove their minimum bids and instead implementing the “first page bid” which will inform you about the amount of money you need to bid to get your ppc ad listed on the first page of results.

Google’s not giving up the Quality Score though. They’re just redefining it. Instead of having it calculated from time to time on your campaign, the Quality Score will be determined on each search query. Let’s pray for some burning Google’s datacenters.

It seems that Google is overthrowing everything and I predict that they’ll end up with more money than you. Until now you had to pay a specific amount of money to get listed, now you will know how much you have to spend to get listed on the first page.

I don’t know how this will turn out for us affiliates. I guess it sucks for people with generally great QS since affiliates gaming Google with coupons and bad QS will now get their ads listed no matter what. They’ll just have to pay like 12$ per click.

Whatever. This change isn’t going live in the next days. First Google will do a test run with selected publishers. Are you among them?

I mean, this is a no-brainer. While at MySpace your target crowd is between 12 and 20 years olds internet noobs with too much time on their hands, Facebooks target audience is much more technical-savy and older. Therefore, they may have more money in their pockets but will need much more conviction to click on your ad and then pick out their credit card.

Now this Valleywag article is stating that Tim Kendall, Facebook’s director of monetization, thinks they could make more money by bringing back a more sophisticated version of the so hated Beacon. Obviously Facebook needs more squeeze out more money if it wants to get profitable and satisfy analyst expectations. You can expect Kendall to be under some pressure at this moment.

Example: You buy a ticket to a concert. After that, all your friends will be notified of your purchase if you want to.

The goal is to achieve a better viral distribution of the product or event. They are planning in rolling out the new Beacon in about 6 or 12 months. I’m not expecting them to name it “Beacon” again, just too much negative media buzz on that name already. I always thought it was only a matter of time before they start again with this Beacon stuff. The main difference now is that marketers will have to pay facebook to get named and the user itself will have to opt-in to get that message displayed on his news feed.

I guess if they turn this into an opt-in feature, lets just hope that users are also going to be rewarded for sales that will be reffered by their Beacon message incentivizing them to promote the product or event.

Facebook has a great batch of data for each user in its datacenter. That data is worth pure gold to Facebook and marketers, but if Facebook decides to keep their ad guidelines the way they are now I see people giving up on submitting 50 ads a day and getting 1 of them approved which will perform like sh**.