Epicenter Network Blog

Microsoft’s newest search engine, Bing will go live June 3rd. They are calling it a “decision engine” and claim that it provides more intelligent search tools to simply tasks and help people make more informed decisions. Developers wanted Bing to focus on enabling people to actually use the information they find, rather than just providing them with search results.

Bing is starting out by focusing on four main verticals:

     • Making a purchase decision
     • Planning a trip
     • Finding a local business
     • Researching a health condition

Microsoft says that Bing will replace their Live Search’s core search with advancements such as query intent recognition, entity extraction and expansion and document summarization technology. Virtual Earth will be rebranded as Bing Maps for Enterprise and the cashback program will be renamed Bing cashback.

So what does this really mean when it comes to search? Possibly an increase in impressions. The project was given a bigger marketing budget than Xbox, so many predict it will start off with a bang. Many feel that conversion rates and ROI are almost always better on Microsoft compared to other engines, so the new advances in Bing could make your stats even better.

If you want to find out more before it launches, go to DiscoverBing.com.

So do I think I will start “binging-it” more than googling-it? Hard to say. I can say that it will be hard to compete and overcome such a giant in search.

There is no set formula or algorithm that guarantees you success in affiliate marketing. What works wonders for one person may sink your budget and produce no conversions. Just because one offer is working well for one affiliate, doesn’t necessarily mean it will work well for all affiliates.

Your success in affiliate marketing can depend on how you drive traffic, the size of your marketing budget, the time you put in, your experience and some creativity and maybe even luck. However, there are some basic guidelines you can follow to help set you on the path toward profits and achieving success in affiliate marketing.

Here are five of them.

1. Differentiate the Offer
Always remember you are not the only one running an offer – there are tons of other affiliates in your network and other networks trying to capitalize on the same thing. The trick is to promote your offer in a way that gives it a unique angle.

       • Speak from experience       
       • Share success stories
       • Compare it to other products

2. Find your niche, but don’t get trapped there
If you have an awesome site on riding lawnmowers with tons of visitors, don’t advertise for the Strap Perfect or a wrinkle cream – your audience doesn’t care. Find a network that has offers that cater to your niche. At the same time, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. There might be another niche out there that you are even better at and it’s always a good idea to diversify your offerings.

3. Build a good relationship with your affiliate manager
Your affiliate manager can play an important role in your success. Making them your bff isn’t necessary, but being chummy will help you stay on top of new offers, get better payouts and help you save money if a campaign needs to be paused due to bad leads, etc.

4. Deep Link
Deep link and improve your conversions. Don’t ever make your customer search for information or for the order form – take them to it directly.

5. Think of affiliate marketing as a business
To keep a business successful you need to take care of your customers, follow some kind of business plan, build partnerships and work on budgeting and accounting. Work with your mailing list; treat your subscribers like actual people and make it personable. Also remember that time is money, so if something isn’t producing results, switch it up.

Whenever I need to do some research, find an image or perform any kind of web browsing, Google is my search engine of choice. I’ve gotten pretty good at finding what I need and modifying search terms to produce more exact results. This is probably why Google captures over 60% of U.S. online searches.

However, it’s important to remember that Google is not the only search engine out there. You also have the other two big players – Yahoo! and MSN – and a handful of up-and-comers looking to offer their own unique approaches to online search engines.

Here are a few to check out.

• Kosmix
This engine is in the “beta-ish” stage and incorporates more real-time search results. Information is sorted by source – ie. If it came from Twitter, Hulu, YouTube, blogs or government – and has about 12 different search categories, or featured searches.

• Twine
This is more of a community search engine where you create an account and receive tailored search results. You customize your interest feeds and are provided with results based on your Web use.

• Searchme
Call themselves the first multimedia search engine. It’s interface is similar to that of iTunes and allows for easier sorting and shuffling through videos, images and music.

• Hakia
Hakia’s search results come from sites that are recommended by librarians – which I guess would make this helpful for school reports. There is a link on the homepage that says “Compare to Google” where you are given the Hakia challenge and you get to see side-by-side search results for the two search engines.

• Wolfram Alpha
This is a computational knowledge engine, so it’s more of a calculator than a search. Even if an answer to your question doesn’t exist online, Alpha will use algorithms to gather data and produce the answer for you.

• Cuil
This start-up has already deemed themselves as the world’s biggest search engine – stating they search three times more pages than Google and 10 times more than Microsoft.

• Scoopler
This is another real-time search engine. It takes updates and feeds from a variety of social networks – like Twitter and FriendFeed – and sorts through them to display results.

In our current economic state, the trend for many laid off employees is to ride out the recession in the classroom. Enrollment for online courses is higher than ever, as people head back to school for a bachelor’s degree or to continue their education with a master’s degree or specialized certification.

This is a great trend for online colleges and even better for online marketers. As more people get laid off, they are probably spending more time online looking for jobs, updating their Facebook profiles way too frequently, or looking for a good deal on online classes.

At Excelsior College, for example, online enrollment is up 30% from last year. Other schools, like the UC Berkeley Extension, have since spikes in enrollment for their certificate programs, as more and more people are looking to update their skills in order to stay ahead of the competition.

Take advantage of this trend of eager virtual learners through compelling testimonials, interactive online college lead gen sites and motivational content – “Never let a down economy squash your dreams”.

Epicenter has well over a dozen offers generated toward getting people back to school and have been seeing really good conversion rates. Interested in any of these offers? Leave a comment or leave me a message here.

Also, following this trend of online learners is also the work-at-home-online-mom/dad trend. Lots of our biz-opp offers have been doing really well, as they provide people with the materials to make money online from the comfort of home.

There have been a lot of bloggers jumping on the “fatblogging” bandwagon lately, and I’ve got to say that it is becoming pretty hard to resist the urge to join.

However, being a girl and all, I’m not too interested in posting my weight online. I’d rather approach the whole thing in terms of toning rather than weight loss and improving my overall nutrition. This issue has been discussed between the ladies here in the Epicenter office, and here is the plan we have come up with.

First things first, we are going to clean up our eating habits. For me, this will entail consuming less adult beverages and going cold turkey on pop. I will also cut down on my carb intake, which is in still in marathon training mode and that ended last week.

Next, we are attending a spinning class every Tuesday and Thursday at lunch. For the remaining week days, we will switch it up on the treadmill, elliptical and bike and add in some weight lifting.

The goal is to be toned up in time for our Epicenter retreat in July and for Affiliate Summit in August.

Listing your web site or blog on online directories is an easy way to build traffic and page ranking, provide great links and even help with saturation. While some directories charge a listing fee, the majority of them are free and only take a few minutes to complete a submission.

Here is my list of the top 10 directories to get listed on.

1. Yahoo
This is one of best-known directories out there and will cost you $299 to get started and an additional $299 every year to stay listed. Pricey, yes, but you will get some good back links and their directory listings tend to get displayed in search results.

2. Squidoo.com
I like this site because it is really good for search engine results saturation. You can publish a “lens” and share your brand, product or company with others for free. Click here for a good explanation of its benefits and functionality.

3. DMOZ.org
This one has been around for a while and is held in high esteem with Google and other major search engines. Getting listed here is free but approval is pretty difficult and takes a long time, if it happens at all.

4. BOTW.org
Best of the Web has been around since 1994 and costs $10/month for the local listing and $99/year to be in the main listing. I’ve heard that their listing pages usually have a page rank of four.

5. MerchantCircle.com
You can get listed on this one for free and they tend to rank near the top on most related search queries.

6. JoeAnt.com
This site has themed categories and is very picky about who they let list for free. If you don’t want to wait around, just spend $40 for an expedited review.

7. Clickey.com
Super simple site that offers free listing.

8. YellowPages.com
YellowPages is another well-known directory and offers free listing. This is good primarily for companies that are looking to target a local crowd, but will also generate some nice results saturation otherwise.

9. Best of the Web Blogs
As the name suggestions, this is for blog listing – and it’s free. They are picky about who they accept, but getting listed here will really help bring in some additional traffic.

10. Affbuzz
Gotta give a shout out to Affbuzz, where this blog is currently listed. Most blogs on there are from affiliates or CPA/ad networks.

Starting June 4th Google plans to open up trademarked keywords to AdWords advertisers. This is going to make for some heated battles in the search engine results pages over company names, branded products and services.

Google released a list of 200 countries that are allowed to purchase rival trademarks as keywords to trigger display ads. Check out the complete list here.

However, this is new is not entirely new. Google has allowed for bidding on trademarked keywords in the past, but would slap you on the hand if they received any complaints. The difference now is that trademarked companies’ complaints won’t be accepted. You also still can’t use a competitor’s trademark in your ad.

For affiliate marketers, this opens up the potential for more money. However, there are still many advertisers that enforce their own rules for keyword restrictions, and those will still have to be followed.

This decision comes at an interesting time, as a prior court ruling in 2006 was overturned recently in the Rescuecom v. Google case. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals recently reversed the lower court ruling and said that recommending and “selling” a trademark to an advertiser to trigger a sponsored link could violate trademark law.

They went on to say that even product placements could be subject to trademark law if the trademark holder could prove that the consumers were confused.

Good luck proving that one.

I have been getting a lot of junk mail lately. This morning alone I had 35. I used to scan through them to double check that nothing legit got sent there by accident, but now I just hit the ‘delete all’ button without looking. Maybe I’m missing out on some good stuff, but chances are that it actually is spam and opening them would be a waste of time.

Emails that end up in spam or junk inboxes usually come from untrustworthy sources or have some kind of security related issue – giving them a very short life span. If you are an emailer, this is definitely not the longevity you are looking for.

So what gives an email a longer life span? Keeping it out of the spam folder is only the first step; you must also convince the user to 1) not delete the email 2) save the email for later or 3) open the email 4) click on your links and then 5) take action.

The majority of these steps have to do with creating excellent subject lines and also who and from where it is sent. This is how I would break down the different life spans of an email, from shortest to longest:

• When an email lands in my spam folder – deleted immediately.

• When an email lands in my inbox with an unfamiliar e-mail address as the sender’s name – Glance at the subject line – if it interests me I will save it for later, otherwise it is deleted.

• When an email lands in my inbox with an incomplete/unappealing subject line or if it doesn’t fully display – Delete.

• Newsletters – only open these when the subject line catches my attention. Also, open membership exclusives (mostly only from REI).

• If the email has a legit sender and subject line, but content sucks – delete after a second or two if I can’t find a good reason to click on the links.

• If the email has a legit sender and subject line, good content and easy to follow links – I will either click on the link or save it for later.

So besides making a good name for yourself, make sure to spend some time crafting your subject lines and doing some testing of what works best. Also make sure to categorize your lists and try to target groups individually. Double check your content and make sure that you are getting your point across in the least amount of words possible.

Call me strange, but I really like when people make “7 deadly sins” lists for things. Here is one I found on David Griner’s blog about the 7 deadly sins of social media.

1. Lust
Avoid becoming a stage-5 clinger. Show your customers/followers some love, but don’t overdo it.

2. Gluttony
Take it slowly. Bite off too much at once, and you will choke. It isn’t always necessary to have a profile on every networking site out there.

3. Greed
You can’t build a friendship when all you are doing is pitching sales. First build the trust, then talk business.

4. Sloth
Relationships take work and online profiles need to be updated regularly. If you aren’t out there shaking hands and keeping up with people, they will forget about you.

5. Wrath
Just because someone deserves to be told-off, doesn’t mean that you should do it. Sometimes no response is the best response.

6. Envy
You can’t be great at everything and you may not be the most followers, link backs or comments. Don’t give up; just keep true to yourself and what you have to offer.

7. Pride
No one likes a cocky hot shot. Stay humble and modest and make yourself more approachable. Listen more than you talk and treat everyone the same.

Achieving success online comes from hard work and patience and through building and maintaining positive relationships. This isn’t much different than relationships in the real world – except for the fact that monogamy in the online sector is highly discouraged.

Initially, you must put yourself out on the market to attract online users with your shared interest, and then once you get them, you’ve got to keep them interested. The work doesn’t stop after the chase; it actually is just the beginning. This is where link love comes into play.

The reciprocal sharing of links is vital for all online relationships, as it displays a level of commitment, value and trust in each other’s content. This sharing of links builds somewhat of a neighborhood and creates an expanded web of knowledge within your content area.

However, just like in the real world, rejection can occur. How do you avoid linking to someone who doesn’t link back? Or if they do link back, how can you be sure that you have found lasting link love?

First, always keep in mind that you must give before you can receive. Besides just linking to your own content, start to branch out and link to external content. This will start to build your web of links and other users will start to notice you, check out what you have to offer, and may link back to your site.

Once these links are made, you must continue placing time and effort into maintaining the relationship and keeping things fresh. You can’t just call occasionally – some wining and dining must be involved. Comment on their newest blog post, keep up with their articles and give credit where credit is deserved.

But link love isn’t all about free love – remember to set your standards. If the content doesn’t match your style or doesn’t reflect the message you are trying to portray, don’t link to them. Your only standards in dating shouldn’t be that the person has a pulse, so you shouldn’t link to another site just because they are in your content niche.

And lastly, be sure to play the field. Don’t limit yourself to exclusively linking to one site. Spread the link love to lots of different sites and improve your traffic and visibility.