Epicenter Network Blog

Tomorrow marks the official start of December and for many, the countdown to Christmas. This is a time when children start watching their behavior and begin making Christmas gift requests for Santa.

If you were lucky as a child, you may have believed in Santa up into the ages of 10 or 11. However, if you were like me and had older siblings, your Christmas wonder was probably shot down by the age of four or five. Either way, every kid is a believer at some point and should experience the joy of getting a letter from Santa.

Parents then have the option to forge a letter themself or make it more legit by ordering it online and having it post-marked from Santa at the North Pole. You can help make it easier on parents by including Epicenter’s newest Your Santa Letter offers into your holiday marketing campaigns.

Both Your Santa Letter offers are available now on the Epicenter network, along with some additional holiday themed offers and creatives.

One of the best ways to keep an edge in affiliat marketing is to keep up-to-date with technology, trends and search engine updates. So on that note, here are the most recent updates at Google (minor changes, but still important to take note of):

AdWords API
New version is now available featuring asynchronous calls, keywords and placement ideas and location extensions previews. Upcoming features will include ReportService, AccountService and the ability to pre-check for errors.

Custom Search
This is now available on smartphones and higher-end mobile devices. Your mobile custom pages can be hosted by Google or you can host them on your mobile site.

Google Search Appliance
Added new Self-Learning Scorer that analyzes employee clicks and behavior to automatically improve its built-in relevance tool.

Google Reader
Just added an Explore section and Personalized ranking. The Explore section will organize new content based on popular and recommended sources. The personalized ranking uses a sort option called “magic” to organize items in your feed based on your personal usage and overall activity.

Google Friend Connect
Now you can strengthen your blog’s community with the Google Friend Connect Wordpress pulgin.

In search marketing, getting your message saturated into the market is the best way to gain control and ensure that as many people as possible are viewing your page or product. This gives you more creditability and increases the likeliness that the user will click on your link.

When a user enters a search query, Google will present them with 10 organic and about 11 paid listings, presenting you – the marketer – with about 22 chances to win them over. The goal is to gain as many of those spots as possible and to achieve a stronger presence for your targeted keywords than your competitor.

There are many ways to go about saturating your message and becoming successful with organic and paid search takes time and a lot of testing. Here are a few ways to gain more control of the search market through “free” and paid techniques.

If you are striving to dominate in a competitive market organically, you’ve got to get creative and use your competitors to your advantage. Start by running a query on the keyword or phrase you want to rank for and see who your competitors are and what they are doing. Then brainstorm ideas that can make you stand apart from them and offer a more specific, targeted solution. You can then incorporate your messaging into your page titles and meta descriptions and write them like ad copy.

Gaining saturation in a competitive marketing through paid search is not an easy task and will require a lot of time, money and monitoring. To get the most out of paying for top listings, you may want to consider day-parting, placement testing, geo-targeting and determining your most lucrative timeframes.

When working in a less competitive market, using long tail phrases for organic results saturation may help you jump up the page quicker. Focus on getting more than one page within your domain to rank for a query. This way, Google will combine your listings and you can move up a spot or two on your results pages. For example, if you were displayed at spot 4 and 6 before, Google would combine your listings and move you to spots 4 and 5.

For paid search saturation, gain rank through buying directory listings and paying for sponsored ads to be placed on competitors sites. You may also consider building multiple web sites and buying PPC ads for these sites for the same keywords and phrases. The only downside to this strategy is that it can be expensive and you need to make sure that you aren’t bidding against yourself. Additionally, this may grab you a large share of the market, but also gives your competitors a chance to drive up the bids on your long tail phrases.

Overall, the best way to gain saturation of the market is to stay one step ahead of your competitors. Keep an eye on what they are doing and strategies they are using and then try to optimize on them.

Using ppc marketing is the best way to reach a targeted audience and drive more potential buyers to your sales page. If you are using Google AdWords to manage your campaigns, one of your biggest focuses should be on relevancy and creating the most targeted ads possible.

Here are 5 tips to help you succeed in AdWords and create the most relevant ads for the search engine and your customers.

#1 – Don’t group all keywords into one campaign and one ad group. Instead, split up your campaigns according to base keywords and split up your ad groups to have variations on your base keyword. The more your separate and micro-organize, the easier you can view the performance of different terms and help you to create more targeted, specific ads.

#2 – Make your ads as targeted as possible. Not only does this make your ad more relevant to a search term, but it also makes it more relevant to the user and will encourage more people to click on your ad.

#3 – Incorporate your keyword into your ad. This plays into tip #2 and helps get Google’s attention and the user’s attention. When you include a specific keyword in your ad and that keyword matches the search term of the user, it appears bolded on the search results page. You can see this if you type in “shoes” or “backpacks” into Google.

#4 – Create multiple ads and run tests. Create three or four good ads for each ad group and let them rotate through. Keep an eye on the stats for each one and you will probably start to notice that one or more of them will outshine the rest. This will help you to further optimize your ads and make them even more targeted.

#5 – Keep up with Google. It seems like Google is always evolving, adding new features, changing up algorithms or creating new policies. Use this to your advantage by staying up-to-date on their newest tools and announcements and periodically check out their Help Center and Learning Center.

We are pleased to announce that this year’s Affiliate Summit Las Vegas trip for two is going to Aaron Rosenthal. Aaron has won a two night trip for two which includes airfare, hotel and tickets to a Vegas show of his choice. Congrats, Aaron!

Thanks to everyone that stopped by our booth and be sure to stay tuned for our next big giveaway announcement!

If you’d like to learn more about Epicenter or sign up to receive our newsletter, click here to send us an email and we’ll get you started.

More than two billion people are roaming the internet at any given time. They are on social networking sites, checking email, searching the web for some kind of answer or solution, etc. And even though they haven’t all logged on to shop, they can all be considered potential customers.

When it comes to attracting someone’s attention online there are many options – banners, emails, text ads, paid search, pop-ups and so on. However, without proper placement and utilization, your efforts can be fruitless; just as placing a banner for baby food coupons on a car parts website isn’t going to make you rich.

A good place to start is by finding out where people are going online. Compete.com is a good resource for locating top visited sites and you can also search for traffic by industry and behavioral trends. This is good if you are focusing on a particular niche and want to get a feel for the competition and your users’ online trends. Similar resources include Quantcast and Alexa.

Next, check out the current online trends. You can check out what people are searching for by using Google Trends, Yahoo! Buzz, Bing’s xRank or trendy!bing. Another good place to check out trends is on Twitter where you can view the top trends of the minute, day or week.

Blogs are another good indicator of what people are interested in. Check out the blogosphere for a particular niche you are interested in and see what people are talking about. Try using Technorati.com or Google Blog Search.

Once you find where people are going online and what they are interested in, you can start incorporating new ideas or offers into your marketing campaigns. This kind of search also helps with locating a new niche or expanding upon and updating your current projects.

Selecting a good domain name for your website or online business is an important part of building up your brand and improving your online presence, along with improving your online ranking. Owning your own domain name adds credibility to your site and adds mobility so that you can take your name with you if you transfer Web hosts.

So when it comes time to create a domain name, here are some tips to keep in mind:

• The shorter, the better
Short and sweet is definitely the way to go. If your domain name is too long, it will be harder for people to remember and therefore harder for them to recommend to others.

• Always try to get the .com version
This will help you improve your odds of being found organically online. If a user types “shoes” into a search engine, they will typically locate the .com versions before moving on to the .net, .org, etc. extensions.

• Think of odd, one-word domain names
Think Yahoo, Google, Wikipedia, Bing or eBay. These sites have seemingly strange domain names but they are easy to remember but they are short and stand out from the norm. Try Wordoid.com for ideas.

• Incorporate the keyword(s) you are trying to rank for
Make a list of all the keywords you are trying to rank for, then separate them into primary and secondary lists. Next, try various combinations of these keywords and see what you can come up with.

• To hyphenate, or not to hyphenate
There is some debate as to whether hyphenating a domain name is a good idea or not. This domain is hyphenated, so I guess I think it is ok at times. Some people use them when the unhyphenated domain name is already taken or to break up a string of keywords.

• Protect your name by registering multiple extensions
If you really like a selected domain name and plan on building out your site and pushing your brand, it may be a good idea to buy all the extensions of your domain name. This deters people from copying your name.

Over the last month or so I have suffered pretty bad writer’s block. I’ll sit down with my topic and draw a complete blank.

This isn’t good when it comes to blogging, as inconsistent posting usually results in less visitors and a lower page ranking. It’s also bad for business if you are an article marketer and can lower your overall quality of writing.

So how do you overcome this obstacle of brain freeze as an article marketer or blogger? Here are a few tricks to help you overcome writer’s block and be more productive.

Stop writing
This seems like an odd solution, but sometimes taking a walk or doing something unrelated is a great way to refocus yourself. Writers block is usually from over thinking and over complicating something and in turn psyching yourself out.

Read something
The best way to get into writing mode can be through reading. It’s a good habit to start out your day by reading blogs or articles related to your niche or posts on your favorite blogs. If you haven’t already bookmarked it, add affbuzz.com to your list of sites to visit, as it consolidates all the major affiliate blogs.

Write whatever comes to mind
Don’t worry about what you write; just write whatever comes to mind. Don’t use the backspace button, just let it all out. You don’t have to use anything that you write, it just helps you get warmed up.

Give yourself a timeline
I am a procrastinator. I work much better when I wait until the last minute to do something. This probably isn’t the best strategy, but it works for you, then it’s worth giving yourself a deadline on writing projects.

Write when you are tired
When you are tired you are less concerned with perfection and your mind is more at ease. Your writing will be more natural, but will probably also have some typing and spelling errors, so it’s important to edit it the next day or after a nap before you post it.

Clean your workspace
Clutter can equal distractions, so clean up your workspace. Set your messaging accounts to “away” and close any additional windows on your screen.

Trash the idea
If you already have a topic selected and just can’t get yourself to write anything, it may be because you just don’t care about it. If you aren’t interested in what you are working on, it will show in your writing and other people won’t be interested either. Instead, write about topics that appeal to you and you’ll get more value out of your writing.

The overall purpose of optimizing your website is to get your pages to rank higher in the major search engines. Creating a site that is search engine friendly usually involves targeting keywords and phrases, placing html links to pages within your site, using targeted meta tags, updating content and providing smooth site navigation.

Moving beyond technical optimization, visually optimizing your website is just as important and in the end can make a huge impact on the overall success or failure of your site.

A good place to start visual optimization is with a style sheet. Stick to one and it will help you clean up your code and remove any font tags. This will help avoid any problems with spiders and won’t make your targeted keywords stand out in your coding, just visually.

The next place to look is your homepage. A good rule of thumb is to keep important information above the fold and that the eye moves from left to right on a page. You typically don’t want to place an image smack-dab in the center and remember to leave a good proportion of whitespace to promote readability. A good tool to use when optimizing your homepage is Feng-GUI.com. This tool highlights how people view your website and which areas get the most attention.

Another thing to consider is your site’s navigation and how easy it is for a user and a spider to locate information and move between pages. You can improve navigation by including text links along the bottom of your pages to supplement a drop-down list, as a spider can’t read JavaScript. Along the lines of navigation, also be sure to include a site map so it is easier to index.

In general, here are a few things to keep in mind when designing your website:

• The eye is attracted to color blocks
• Whitespace on a page promotes readability
• The eye is attracted to human faces
• Balance and contrast are important and help guide your visitor to certain areas of a page
• Always choose simplicity over complexity
• Use complimentary colors – typically across from each other on the color wheel

Oh Twitter – the love it or hate it micro-blogging site that has taken the world by storm. Not originally designed to incorporate advertising, it was merely for the exchange of ideas and 140-character messages. However, as most things go, as the popularity of the site grew, so did the advertising opportunities.

So should you jump on board?

This depends on who you ask. According to a recent poll, 45% of advertisers reported that Twitter was still in its infancy and they expect for its use to grow exponentially over the next few years. Others say that it is simply a hot trend and like all fads, its popularity will soon die off.

With that being said, Twitter still attracts over 14 million visitors and is expected to reach over 18 million within the next year. So if you are interested in broadening your advertising portfolio, here are a few ways to utilize Twitter.

AdCause
“Saving the world…one tweet at a time”. AdCause allows for you to buy and sell ads on Twitter and provides you with the option to sign up as an advertiser or publisher. Advertisers simply buy ad space, select their target audience and then let AdCause serve the ad.

TweetROI
Similar to PPC, TweetROI creates a biddable marketplace among Twitter users where the advertiser has control over their tweets. For marketers, you provide the suggested tweet text and a link and designate your campaign settings. Then, twitter users take you up on your offer and tweet about it in their own words.

Featured Users
This Twitter application ad network helps you get more Twitter followers and further promote and brand your product. It works by purchasing impressions to have your profile displayed in the Featured Users network. The more impressions you buy, the more your profile is displayed.

Keep in mind that these methods of advertising are all fairly new, so payments are limited and you shouldn’t expect to strike it rich. Advertising on Twitter can be a bit of a crap-shoot, but may pay off as their advertising solutions become more sophisticated.