I’ve been watching CJXBeta for months since it was rolled out to selected Beta testers, and it seems like, like everything else we do, it will help you make more money if have good traffic already and you have something relevant to offer your visitors.

Here’s what CJ says it does:

CJXbeta will rotate ads through your site based not only on context, but also based on performance. First it analyzes the content on your site, then the engine will select the most appropriate ads from the available ad inventory. In addition, the engine looks at performance and will place high performing ads over ads that have fallen short. It is important to know that you will not need to be joined to the advertiser programs of CJX advertisers in order to earn commissions. Each advertiser has loaded a separate campaign into CJX that can be either CPC or CPA.

WOW…did you notice this? you will not need to be joined to the advertiser programs of CJX advertisers in order to earn commissions.

It’s really easy to get in on the Beta testing too. Just log into your CJ account and click the tab that says CJXBeta. I applied and I’ll let you know what happens.

Grab one folks. Test it out. See if it helps you make more money. And let us all know in this space.

Mark also has interesting guests that come and offer webinars. I got an email recently about a webinar they were offering, and it sounded like they used me as the model:

Our group of presenters is lead by Dr. Veit U.B. Schenk, who has a PhD in medical imaging and a background in brain research. For the last 14 years, he has worked as a coach and he has helped countless people gain deep insights into the REAL reasons why they’re struggling so they can turn around their lives easily and effortlessly.

Hmmmm….where do I sign?

In this short, to-the-point but full of actionable gems presentation, you’ll discover:

My partner is always telling me that I save things until the last minute. That I don’t work efficiently. Blah Blah Blah (love ya babe!). So I remembered this email the other day and thought it sounded really good.

I was having trouble concentrating that day but I decided that I was indeed going to go for it. I would get a lot out of it and I would blog about it here.

It took me a long time to dig up the email in the mess I have of a filing system but I got it and I was excited and ready to go.

The webinar was last week.

Sigh.

The FTC is cracking down on websites that falsely promise guaranteed jobs and opportunities to “be your own boss” to consumers who are struggling with unemployment and diminished incomes as a consequence of the economic downturn.

Wow…they’re not screwing around..This is serious alphabet soup here. This is the DOJ, the FTC, the USPS and various and sundry Attorneys General. Of course what struck me right away is all of these politicians accusing OTHER PEOPLE of empty promises.

Seriously folks, use your heads. Don’t spend you hard earned money on something that sounds too good to be true. Here’s a secret I use when I’m trying to figure out if something is legit or not. Take the product you’re questioning and google it along with the word SUCKS and/or SCAM. So in other words, if you’re looking up United Widgets, Google United Widgets Sucks or United Widget Scam. This way you will get any complaints about that company or that product to rise to the top of the Google results.

Yowza….we’re talking about a ton of money here. At the top of the list of this enforcement action seems to be a company called Ivy Capital, which allegedly bilked people out of $40 million.

telemarketers asked consumers how much credit they had on their credit cards and then talked them into using a substantial portion of their available credit to purchase a business coaching program. But the promised products and services were worthless, the complaint alleged. Ivy Capital’s “expert” coaches lacked the promised knowledge and experience, its website-building software programs did not work properly, and the lawyers and accountants the defendants said would provide assistance were nonexistent. Consumers paid up to $20,000 for a business coaching program and related products and services but got very little in return.

Wow…this is bad news. $20,000 for coaching? They should be ashamed of themselves. Let’s see… I put in Ivy Capital Sucks and Ivy Capital Scam and got pages and pages of complaints. So it does work.

And remember…most companies will happily provide you with samples of their products and actual testimonials of real people. Read them. Always go with your gut. I’ve walked away from multi-million dollar deals and royally pissed off my partners because my gut was telling me something wasn’t right. Listen to that.

You can always drop me an email. I can help too.

Look…business is rough. You have to work hard. Money doesn’t drop from the sky. You work hard for your money…don’t blow it on this crap.

There are a bunch of other companies mentioned in the article. You should take a look at the article. And WOW…look at the FTC. VERY Internet savvy. Music and everything. Here’s a video on Operation Empty Promises:

As Bruce Springsteen once said, I went out for a ride and I never went back.

Way back when in 2006 Darren Rouse was getting famous with his Problogger Blog, and I made a splash when I bought this domain AffiliateBlog for $2500, enough to make a splash and get on a list. Imagine that.

My intention was to blog about Internet Marketing and affiliate programs and all kinds of related stuff have fun doing it.

Unfortunately a good friend of mine, Sara Whalen, died of cancer that year, leaving her life’s work, Pets Alive Animal Sanctuary, in a shambles. I had to make a choice, and I chose Pets Alive. Together with my partner and good friend Kerry Clair we built Pets Alive back up and four years later I am back here and Kerry is still going strong at Pets Alive as things continue to get better and better. More than 4000 animals are still alive because of our efforts and the efforts of the dedicated staff and volunteers, and it was quite a ride.

I kept my hand in Internet Marketing and SEO. Not as much as I’d like to, but I set up some test domains and methodologies that are still working today. I turned to my test sites when the Google Panda update was announced, and I have a lot of interesting stuff to tell you about that and other things.

I look forward to working with all of you again and hope you tell your friends I”m back.

I have some great ideas as well. I see Darren wants you to pay $5.95 a month to hear what he has to say. Good for him. I won’t ever charge for my stuff. I have an idea for a premium service that includes a weekly analysis of all the major affiliate networks with their top performing programs. I’ll be rolling that out as soon as I get around to rewriting the spider I wrote back in 2006.

I just did a little digging and apparently Darren has between 45,000 and 48,000 subscribers each month to his community. That’s $3 million a year. I am speechless. God Bless him. Wow. And then he wrote a book too.

Wow…but I still have 70 subscribers to my feed. 70. Thanks. Bet you’ve been wondering why I’m not there anymore. You probably were just too lazy to delete me. Well now it’s gonna pay off for you. Email me and I’ll give you some free phone time just for hanging in there.

I’m looking forward to writing again and working with everyone. I think I can offer a unique perspective and we can have a lot of fun together. So sign up for the email digest because I have some great stuff coming down the pike and I’d like to share it with you.

It’s great to be back!

In case you haven’t heard, Google is going to offer a Pay-Per-Click video ad product. They’re going to run it through AdSense and we can’t opt out — we’re going to get video ads whether we like them or not.

I think video ads are a dumb idea. Mook-Jon thinks they’re only going to annoy people, like the banner ads that make noise. I think he’s right.

In fact, I agree completely with Michael Arrington at TechCrunch. Here’s what he says:

1. Google’s not putting these ads on its own sites. As Michael says, Google needs to eat its own dogfood. If we have to, they have to.

2. You can’t tie a video click to something else that measures ROI. I think this is very significant. Clicking on a video won’t take you to another web site where you can take some sort of action that can be measured. It’s just video.

3. Normal TV ads are plentiful and cheap. Why make an ad for Google when you can advertise on your local (or national) TV system for $25? Michael cites Spotrunner, a company that produces and distributes TV commercials for small business, and there are tons more of them out there.

4. People don’t want to click on video ads. The great pieces of video are usually spread virally and don’t need Google or anyone else to get them trafficed.

5. It’s a lot harder and more expensive to produce a video ad, and Michael thinks this will result in fewer advertisers producing vide ads. Again, I think he’s right.

6. There’s going to be a low PPC and low clickthrough. Video ads are a pain to make, and there’s going to be a low clickthrough rate, which means we’ll make less money on the ads.

Michael thinks that video ads will end up on the Google ashheap like click-to-call and their print experiment.

The least they can do is let us opt out like they did.

The report is split up into Budget Strategies, Bidding Strategies, Keyword Strategies and Ad Copy Strategies. I’m going to go over a few below.

In Budgeting Strategies Joe covers Day Parting, where you might want to change bid strategies throughout the day and possibly turn off bids at different times of the day, and Day Excluding, where you may want to turn off your campaign during certain days or even seasons.

Beginners might want to take a look at Bidding Strategies, where Joe puts into words the typical strategies people use intuitively, including Maximum Cost-Per-Click (self-explanatory), and Bid to ROI, where bids can automatically be adjusted based on pre-defined performance metrics. I liked Maximize Clicks for the Given Spend – If the daily budget is stable and being reached every day, a very quick optimization technique would be to lower the max click rates to find the sweet spot where the daily budget is just met each day. This optimization drives more clicks at a
lower rate. Sounds good.

Joe also covers other strategies for keywords and ad copy. The report is worth a read, though it may result in a sales call from morevisibility.com.

Here’s the table:

Our old friend Structured Settlement Alliance is at the top spot. Here’s their number one banner with just over $4.00 in EPC:

I would imagine you need a certain type of site to have this banner pay off, but why not give it a shot anyway?

I also find it interesting that there are five loan offers in our top 10 considering that the loan rush is supposedly over (this according to the Federal Reserve). A newcomer to the list is Merrick Mattress, makers of the Angel memory foam bed. Interestingly enough they show a 7 day True EPC of $2.88, and all of the individual creatives that I saw show N/A as the 7 day EPC. Wierd.

If I had to pick the best pulling ad it would probably be Structured Settlement Alliance or Get Smart, but it’s difficult to tell this time around and the EPCs seem low to me.

On the whole, the average EPC across all of the categories is .21, which is definitely lower than I’m used to seeing. The gap between average Pay-Per-Lead and Pay-Per-Sale has also widened considerably, with PPS at .23 and PPL at .46, double for Lead over Sale. Take PPL over PPS in a heartbeat.

The top category in EPC is Investment with $1.02 EPC, followed by Loans at .74 and Financial Services at .72.

Kevin believes that over time, paid search results should and would become more relevant than organic results for search queries that have commercial intent or relate to researching a purchase.

He also believes that PPC ads should have more relevance to the search results than organic results, because Search Engine spammers don’t care how relevant they are as long as they get clicks, while PPC buyers pay for every click so they have to be as precise as they can be.

According to Kevin, here are the elements that will float your ad to the top of the PPC results:

• Copy highly relevant to the search query.
• Highly relevant landing pages (the engines now look for this).
• A recognizable brand or a domain name that’s highly descriptive and reassures the searcher that clicking on the ad isn’t a mistake.
• The ability to fulfill searchers’ needs (there would be no reason to bid aggressively on a keyword if you were unable to fulfill a searcher’s need and a competitor also bidding could fulfill that need better than you).
• An efficient company infrastructure that doesn’t put them at a significant disadvantage with regard to gross margin and customer retention.
• A strong company with the financial resources to be a going concern.

With improved relevance comes improved conversion and improved position (or the same position for less money).

Here are some tactics that should be revisited regularly by search engine marketers who strive to improve both relevance and efficiency:

• Moderate your use of broad match listings. Lazy search marketers overuse broad match and neglect to break down their listings into more specific phrase and exact matches.
• Review ad creative to make sure it has “scent,” meaning the searcher sees keywords and concepts that are a strong fit with her search query. Using the keyword in the ad is part of that process.
• Tune landing page selection based on the exact or phrase searches that were entered. This means testing more specific landing pages than a typical category page.
• Use negative match on any broad or phrase match listings. When you use broad match as a net to capture long tail searches that were difficult to predict or didn’t have sufficient volume, think about which negative match keywords would prevent a non-relevant result from occurring.
• Use log files or campaign management software to determine which new keyword phrases or exact matches in a PPC campaign can be built out of existing listings (both paid and organic).

PPC is critical to the success of any campaign and any site.

So the headline on Jimmy Daniels’ Revenews post is this: Gates says we will crush Google.

The first thing that comes to mind when I read this is Steve Ballmer’s now-famous tantrum that is outlined in the Luchovsky court affadavit and referenced on one of my first Affiliate Blog posts. Here’s what Ballmer said:

At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office. Mr. Ballmer then said: “Fucking [Google CEO] Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I’m going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to fucking kill Google.” ….

Memo to Steve – you can get decaf at Starbuck’s too.

There’s been a lot of speculation about how Microsoft is going to kill Google. Here’s the answer:

Bill Gates announced Wednesday that they will crush Google, much like they did Netscape, by integrating their competing components, in this case search, into their operating system. With this integration, they will be able to ease user overload, as users will be able to search intranets, the internet, their pc’s, the network and more from a common user interface, Windows.

This is what I said a few weeks ago in my post Clash of the Titans.

Here is more of what Gates said:

He said they were “digging the ditch” with the next version of Windows, Vista, and that software will no longer just run inside a company, but can run outside of the company and you can connect to it with software as a service, or SaaS.

I certainly never thought I would hear Microsoft touting the Internet as the operating system. Dig a little deeper and you’ll see that while it sounds like that’s what Bill is saying, he’s not.

Microsoft’s SaaS model relies on Windows as the operating system. So no matter how much Microsoft’s vision for the future takes search (or anything else) off the desktop and on to the network, MS Windows is always in the background like some bloated Vishnu-like figure, pushing buttons with its many arms.

Google, on the other hand, relies on components written in OS independent languages like Java, which abstract away the operating system and make it largely irrelevant.

Who is going to win? I’d put my money on Microsoft in the long run. There’s more to come, though.

His article starts with a reference to Jeff Molander’s ThoughtShapers blog where Jeff cites data that shows the big retailers are spending less on affiliate marketing and directing the money toward search engine marketing.

This is what I would call disintermediation, or basically squeezing out the affiliates by going after customers directly via search engine marketing. Jeff puts it this way:

Retailers are pro-actively shrinking their affiliate marketing programs while concurrently ratcheting up search marketing spending.

As always, I apply my smell test rule to that statement. It seems intuitively possible, right? But the statements have apparently elicited some seriously negative comments toward Jeff Molander. So along comes one of the best internet researchers around, Anne Holland of MarketingSherpa, and here’s what she says:

”… folks that were super, super heavy search marketers… tended to be spending a lot less on affiliate marketing. In fact, they were spending about half what the average marketer was spending on affiliate marketing.

So it seemed like if you ratcheted up your search marketing it sort meant you were taking away affiliate marketing from the affiliates. You were in a way taking it in-house. So that has real implications for the future of affiliate marketing.”

That’s a serious statement. Stefan Tornquist of MarketingSherpa adds more:

That retail marketers, especially while the model of a few years a go might have been to use their affiliates essentially as an outsourced search provider because so many affiliates are quite advanced in using search marketing so retailers were willing to allow them to use trademarked and branded terms.

And really with the incredible growth in search and so much research coming out on the efficacy. I think a lot of marketers saw those sales as really being redundant.

What does this all mean?

Well, for large, multi-channel retailers (Wal*Mart, Sears, etc), affiliates are becoming less important. So what.

Wayne Porter:

However, smaller or mid-sized businesses, or businesses in a highly specialized niche or businesses with a new concept or service can certainly benefit from affiliate programs. I speak from experience here. Also businesses who sell commodity items like inkjets where there is no true “market leader” or powerful brand equity benefit as well.

There are some ideas in there for those of you looking for niches. Commodity items, or businesses with a new concept or service over the Wal*Marts of the world. Sounds like Capitalism to me.

Wayne also brings up the same thing that went through my mind as I was reading that Wal*Mart thinks they can do it without us. When I’m looking for a product, I never go right to Wal*Mart or Sears or anyone else — I go to a comparison shopping engine like shopping.com and see who has the best price. Most of you probably do as well.

Wayne thinks we search marketers created that behavior. That statement also seems intuitively correct.

Does it seem like the big guys are trying to squeeze us out so they can do their own search marketing and customer acquisition? The evidence is there. Do I think this effects the future of affiliate programs in general? Maybe — but we will always be able to do it better than the behemoths, so I’m not all that worried about it.

It’s interesting to think about, though.