Epicenter Network Blog

Epicenter announced yesterday the addition of display advertising to the DM2 platform. This new feature is free to all users and expands the possibilities for domain owners and site publishers to increase their potential site revenue.

As I’ve blogged about before, DM2 requires no software purchases, offers over 250 design templates and domain customization with unlimited pages, content and a sitemap. It also offers free hosting and now integrates display advertising for affiliate marketing and online advertising.

The best part about this new integration is the revenue sharing arrangement. Site owners are paid for their ad impressions, regardless of whether the visitor clicks on the ad or not.

Essentially, we want DM2 to be the best Web building destination for people looking to make money online.

For more information, check out the official press release here or here.

Want to build your own site and start making money? Sign up here.

The success of any marketing campaign is greatly influenced by the quality of traffic to your web site or affiliate offer. In search marketing, the goal is to drive highly targeted traffic through keywords that you will receive the highest return on investment from. However, you need to focus on more than just keywords to optimize your campaigns.

Here are 5 tips for improving your AdWords campaigns.

1. Gather as many low-cost, highly targeted keywords and keyword phrases as you can. Research and testing can help you avoid overly saturated markets and tapping into your organic searches can provide you with new keyword phrase ideas. Check out these tools for more help:

Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions tool
Misspelled Keywords
7Search.com’s Keyword Suggestion Tool
WordTracker (you can use the trial version for free).

2. Create many different versions of headlines and adcopy and do some split-testing. When you start writing these it’s a good idea to check out your competition and see what they have done. Who is showing up at the top of search results and how are they phrasing their ads? Make sure that you are using the best words possible and use catchy headlines to grab the user’s attention.

3. Become familiar with how AdWords works. This gets back to the basics. When you know how something works – in this case how AdWords ranks ads – you can work with the system and create your campaigns with the ranking system in mind. Examples of this include using the keyword matching or phrase matching options.

4. Control and monitor who is seeing your ads and when they see them. This is especially important if you are running on a tight budget. Analyzing your data and visitor trends is important and can save you a lot of money.

5. Monitor your campaigns and keep looking for ways to improve them. The market is always changing and the online consumer is fickle. Don’t let your ads run past their prime – modify them as time goes on to get more bang for your buck.

Last year, New York passed a law that would collect tax from online shoppers, in an attempt to “level the playing field” between online retailers and mortar retailers. This year, South Carolina wants to do the same thing.

David Hoyle, NC Senator, says it’s not fair that online merchants avoid a sales tax when mortar and investment companies with a “physical presence” must pay them. He says enforcing a tax on online merchants will help the state break out of their budget crisis.

Is this really the best solution? This tax will only produce a short term gain, as it will most likely be offset by the loss of business and revenue from affiliate marketers.

Amazon has already announced that they will sever their ties with all North Carolina affiliates once the law is passed. So what happens when all these affiliates are dropped? That is a big loss on income tax.

What can you do as an affiliate? Don’t sit back and take it.

Struggling to get your website looking professional? A good looking, properly functioning website plays a vital role in your success as an online marketer, but often the task of building a website can be pretty intimidating, especially without a background in web design.

Don’t let this be a roadblock. There are lots of free resources online, one of the best being DM2.

DM2 is a free online tool that helps you build professional looking websites and provides free hosting. The best part is that you don’t need a background in web design to produce a good looking site and after you publish it, you don’t have to worry about hosting.

Apart from design templates and hosting, DM2 also offer integrated advertising where all you have to do is drag and drop ads without any coding. You will also have access to listing services to help get your site noticed and start driving traffic.

Another cool feature this tool provides is the ability to easily add new content and media to your site and experiment with new templates without having to rebuild your entire site. This is helpful since adding fresh content is vital to creating and maintaining a successful site.

DM2 is a good go-to tool for building out offer landing pages and microsites for ppc campaigns; it pretty much takes care of all the work for you.

You can learn more about DM2 here, see sample sites or schedule a free demo.

I have to admit, like many others I was a total skeptic of Twitter when it first came out. After visiting the site and reading what it was all about, I was still confused and therefore decided that it was dumb.

Fast forward to today and I not only have an account, but it is among the first sites I visit each morning and where I now make daily updates. So why they change of heart? Here are a few reasons why having a Twitter account can help you professionally and a few tips for starters.

Twitter essentially is a micro-blogging forum that allows for users to post short, 140-character blurbs on what they doing, reading, working on, etc. You have the ability to design your own background, upload a photo, provide a brief bio and place a link to your site. You won’t have “friends”, you will have “Followers” and your updates are called “Tweets”.

Some people use Twitter to provide the world with an updated status of what they eat, when they nap, who they are mad at or how great they are. I don’t follow these people. The ones that I do follow update their status with useful information, blog updates and online marketing related content.

So why do I find Twitter useful? There are several reasons. The first is that it is a great way to connect with people in your industry and share ideas, resources and contacts. Twitter has helped improve my networking and stay in touch with people that I don’t see on a regular basis, or ever for that matter.

The second reason is that it is an easy way to stay up-to-date with online trends. It also has a search feature, so it can double as a live search engine.

Lastly, Twitter is helpful with branding, SEO and site traffic. My profile has a link to this blog and I get a large majority of my visits here from Twitter. You can use it to grow traffic to your site and get your name known. For SEO purposes, you can focus on certain keywords and build links.

So if you think this could help you, you can sign up here. If not, at least now you know what it is.

Also, if you already have an account, be sure to follow Epicenter: @EpiKim, @EpiMonica, @EpiGarrett

After all the delays and pushed back cancelation dates, today marks the last day of analog television.

What does this mean to me? Nothing, really. I only own one really ghetto t.v. with basic cable and a cable box. So since I can still watch Man vs. Wild with no problems, I haven’t paid much attention to this. I did wonder, however, why we were making the switch.

Here is the explanation in a nutshell, minus other federal and economic reasons that I didn’t want to get into.

Apparently, current television broadcast signals travel through the electromagnetic spectrum along with AM and FM radio, shortwave radio and radar. They take up a large chunk of this spectrum and by switching them to digital, they will take up 25% less space. The digital code is also more concise, has the ability to be high-definition and can have surround-sound encoded into it.

The new space created by the switch from analog to digital were returned to the federal government and auctioned off to new providers and services. They made over $19 billion.

Now I have learned something and maybe you have as well.

In the search world, this has companies running more digital tv ads and more people searching for “digital tv” related keywords. Google Trends shows that searches for the digital transition are 10% of this morning’s top searches. If you have a way to capitalize on this trend, you should probably take advantage of it now.

Are you new to search marketing or looking for some funding to improve your skills? If you said yes, then you should consider applying for the SEM Scholarship from Marketing Pilgrim.

Here is a brief description of the scholarship contest:

We want to help find the brightest minds in search and social media, so each year, we ask you to submit your very best “how to” article on the topic of SEO, PPC, or social media. Over a 4 week period we tally the traffic count and send the top 5 most visited entries to our panel of expert judges. They pick their favorite, and the winner helps themselves to a prize package worth over $10,000!

If you win the contest, not only are you given $10,000 but you also receive a prize package full of SEM and SEO event passes, memberships and subscriptions. A few of these include a premium membership to SEOmoz.org, a subscription to SoloSEO.com and passes to SMX East and Pubcon.

Want to enter? The deadline is June 22nd at 6pm Eastern time. Click here for full entry details.

Here in Seattle it feels like summer has finally started. Today temperatures are supposed to get into the mid-80s and it has been sunny for the last two weeks. (Hopefully it won’t start raining by the time I post this.)

So because I have deemed today the official start of summer, it’s time to start marketing with summer in mind. Here are some things to consider while deciding which offers to run, how to run them and when to run them.

• Good weather = less people at their computer
  If you are running search ads, you may want to consider dayparting. My guess is that less people will be surfing the web from the time they leave work to the time the sun goes down. In general, be sure check out when your highs and lows are during the summer months.

• Kids are out of school
  This means that kids are home during the day and when they aren’t at camp or staying busy, parents have to find something to do with them. This is where a parenting site would work well. Provide parents with ideas on how to entertain their kids and throw in some summer offers.

• Swimsuit season
  The return of summer means the return of the bikini. This is a good time to build or promote diet and weight loss sites or healthy eating sites.

• Summer getaways
  Summer is a good time to travel and people are always looking for cheap vacations. You may also want to consider to those looking for staycations and cater to local searches.

• Summer reading
  People like to read at the beach, by the pool or on vacation, so provide them with book reviews and offers for book clubs.

• Bar-B-Ques
  Everyone loves to bar-b-que when the weather gets nice, so they may be looking for new recipes or new summer cocktails. This is also a good time to offer them some coupons and other ways to save money while entertaining.