Keeping your blog active without blogging

Eh? A blog is that, a blog. Somewhere you log your thoughts, opinions, share tips and more. How can you keep it active without actually blogging? More importantly, why would you? When your blog gets popular enough to get recurring users (I’m starting to get some!) then people will visit your page every few days and see if it’s changed. If it has then great, new content to read an absorb, if not then your page is as stale as the last time they refreshed it.

People forget there are lots of services you can use to make your blog ‘move’. In my blog I have a twitter account embedded on the right and below that I have my flickr stream, both of which get updated quite often. That’s just two services, you can embed facebook apps, poll’s, news from elsewhere – anything. By tweeting a few times a day and adding new photo’s to my flickr, it makes my blog look a little less static – also even subtle things like rotating your ads more can help the user think that your page is dynamic and always up to date

Check Out My New Toy! =D

W00H! I’m going to NYC in a few weeks on a family trip for my dad’s 50th. I’ve always wanted to try and take some really nice shots in a city like New York but my old Canon Powershot isn’t really up to it, so I’ve got a new toy as a very early birthday present! Introducing the Sony D-SLR A-200!

Me there with the signature “first in-the-mirror shot” =] I love it, had it a few hours and took almost 2 hours learning how to set exposure and aperture properly etc, it’s a great piece of kit!

My Own Forum

For those of you clever people who are signed up to PPC Coach, just a little heads up to let you know in the main forums, I have my own little forum now called Programming which I moderate If you need any help at all, from me or the huge PCC Coach community then leave a post in that forum

My First Guest Post!

Yay! I’ve never guest posted on another persons blog, let’s face it I’ve not been blogging that long! But recently I was talking with a friend of mine, Jonathan Volk, about the best ways to increase blog traffic and various SEO techniques. Eventually Jonathan asked if I’d like to guest post on his blog, this guys an affiliate marketing genius so I couldn’t exactly post marketing tips as they’re his strength, instead I posted using my strengths with a more technical post on SEO tips and tricks using htaccess =]

Jonathan’s blog is a great source of information and is always a good read, I strongly suggest you check it out – and of course don’t forget to check out my guest post!

You’re Only as Good as Your Tracking!

In my first few campaigns I simply skipped using tracking systems, not really seeing the point. I created a few mini-sites and some adwords ads, I got my clicks, I got a few conversions and all was good. The time came to scale, I increased my daily budget and increased my bids on keywords with high click-through-rates (CTR) and I quite hastily saw my conversions fall.

The problem was that I was bidding on generic keywords that users who clicked on weren’t really interested in my offer, a non-converting user. Without tracking, I was unable to see which keywords were generating me leads and which were just sending me the wrong type of user. Thus tracking was invented.

Now I’ve tried a fair share of trackers, from PPC Coach‘s tool, to Tracking 202 but I found them all to be a little overwhelming for a newbie. Let’s face it, no one RTFM (reads the fucking manual). I want to use the software and fields to be labelled clearly enough for me to guess my way through it, a values, b values and z values meant nothing to me.

After some learning, I’ve gotten used to tracking but still think most systems have room for improvement, roll on PPC Trackr!. Just another tracker I found? No. PPC Trackr is a project I’ve been working on a week or so now, it’s far from finished but I’ve figured rather than have a development blog for it, I’m going to post updates and such here. For now I’m not releasing any information but keep checking back for updates =]

To be successful; track, track and track some more!

What is Lead Scrubbing?

Well the blog is off to a slow start, but the numbers are slowly increasing and I’m getting a few emails and comments, one question that I got twice however from fellow startup affiliate marketers was “What is (lead) scrubbing?”.

Aside from a major setback and a huge pain in the ass, scrubbing is the unholy practice that some evil networks and advertisers partake in which involves essentially ‘shortchanging’ you. Let’s say you’re sending 100 unique users a day to an offer and 50% of those users become leads. At say $1 a lead you’ve just earned $50. Awesome.

The problem, however, is that if you continuously send a fairly large amount of users to an offer and they convert, some advertisers or networks will ‘scrub’ some of your leads off and report that you got less conversion than you actually did. Some advertisers will report that certain leads were declined when in fact they were actually kept. The main reason for this is advertisers will say that the payout is $1 when actually they scrub 25% of leads, meaning your real payout would be about $0.75.

If you’re promoting a campaign for 4-5 days with a conversion rate of say 60% that suddenly drops to 30% it’s time to be a bit weary about why, it could be because of the latest news (Acai Berry makes you fatter?) or maybe you’re just the victim of lead scrubbing

Have you been the victim of scrubbing?