The Google Panda update crushed a lot of webmasters this month and I think this might be directly relevant to some of that.

How to Walk the Fine Line Between “True Merchant” and “Thin Affiliate”

If you look at the leaked Google General Guidelines document that was made available a few months ago (Google search it if you don’t have it, its still pretty prolific), you’ll see that there’s tips in there for a G manual reviewer to try to decipher between what is a thin affiliate site (a spam site that gets penalized upon review) and a true merchant (which is really just a site that offers little content but gets a pass).

Right from the G Manual review doc. How can affiliates create sites which mimic these traits?

In my opinion, the SEO implications of having your affiliate site look and work like an ecomm site are potentially HUGE.

The last thing you want the reviewer to do is mark your site as MFA or “thin affiliate site”. Hello -50 penalty, right?

Having an affiliate site that walks, talks, and acts like a “true merchant” site can change all that. This is exciting especially for someone like me because I focus almost exclusively on product keywords. I’ve noticed some affiliates focus on high volume info keywords for adsense, so this stuff probably wouldn’t excite you if you’re in that realm.

Anyway, having your affiliate site work like an ecomm site is advantageous because it allows you to target product keywords and give the searcher exactly what they want: a legit-looking working ecomm site with a cart, buy button, and the best price.

The Shopperpress theme comes with everything a true merchant site would want. You can enable the cart or disable it (here it's disabled).

Now PREVIOUSLY and what I have been doing for a very long time is hitting this product-keyword searcher with an article and maybe some affiliate links inside the article or a product listing somewhere inside (Ebay listings or an amazon product). Of course this works however expect a higher-than-normal bounce rate unless your content is super-stellar.

Of course, when someone adds all the products in their cart and goes to pay, they’re going to get redirected to Amazon to make the purchase. That’s the single give-away that it isn’t really a true merchant, but I’m betting a manual review wouldn’t actually go that deep (I hope).

WordPress Merchant Themes to the Rescue

Over the course of the year a lot of blog style affiliate sites have been crushed while 0% content “true merchants” have seen a pass.

Easy-to-use merchant themes like the one shown in the picture can potentially change the game for many affiliates and its something I really look forward to getting more data on.

Oftentimes when people are buying aged domains they are usually using it as part of their link building network or maybe to drop into a network like Authority Link Network so they can get a decent daily post-queue.

I rarely ever hear people talk about the benefits of starting an authority site on an aged domain and this is exactly what I want to touch on today.

Why Build a Site on an Aged Domain?

Starting your website with an expiring domain name is like starting a marathon 1 mile ahead of everyone else.

Unless the domain was previously used for some kind of malicious activity, the domain comes with its own “old site authority” that you can take advantage of. This completely removes the time a new site is going to need to build up this trust, possibly avoiding any kind of new site filters (like the sandbox) which are a royal pain in the ass.

2 Visual Examples: New Domain vs Aged Domain

I’m going to share a couple screenshots of 2 different sites built around the same time. Each has had a relatively equal share of love regarding links and content and they were both started around the same time.

New Domain

Here’s a graph of a site I started building in late September. This was on a brand new domain name that I regged because I thought of a clever name. The only time I would recommend doing this is if you have BIG PLANS for the site and want to turn it into a real business, something more than an affiliate site. Only then would a good name actually benefit you beyond the benefits you’d get from getting an aged domain with a less-nifty domain name.

As you can see from the graph traffic has been just a few uniques per day, minus the part it jumped out and back into the sandbox. This was 3 consecutive days which the site earned around $20 a day off of around 20 decent pages of content. It gave me a good idea of what I could expect to earn from the site in the future when it does actually start ranking. If I could do it over again I would have started this site on an aged domain, I just didn’t realize how much of a difference it makes.

Aged Domain

Here’s a graph of a site I started building in late October, 1 month after the site on the new domain. The domain itself is 8 years old and came with a handful of links. It’s actually not even a .com, it’s a .net, but it works fine.

The steady rise in traffic corroborates with the weekly links and content added to it. In an alternate universe of affiliate marketing heaven, all sites built would look like this with a steady uphill slope of traffic.

The Biggest Downsides of Aged Domains

No good thing comes without a price, literally.

The Expense

Good domains can sometimes come at a hefty price. I’ve noticed especially in finance niches, domains with a decent name and thousands of backlinks can go into the thousands.

However, it doesn’t take that kind of investment to get by with this strategy.

If you’re like me and you want to get by on a budget, I will show you how to do that using one of my favorite programs a little later.

Limited Supply

You can’t cherry pick the name of your site, which I think a lot of people really like to do. The novelty of this wore off on me a long time ago, so I’d rather take the SEO benefits of an aged domain than a new domain thats going to take a lot longer to rank.

Good domains on the market can sometimes be few and far between and 99.9% of what you look at will definitely not suit you.

Where to Buy Aged Domains

Digitalpoint Domain Market

A lot of people discount DP and for good reason, the forum just isn’t what it used to be. However, I still like to browse their domain marketplace once in a while.

It’s laid out in a nice format so you can easily get what you’re looking for:

Dropday

I remember the good ol’ days when tools like Dropday and Freshdrop were free. These days they want a subscription from you but if you’re looking to register several domains at once it could very well be worth it. The data they give is invaluable and this is the easiest way IMO of picking up a good quality domain name without having to do a ton of manual research on it.

The Flippa Alternative

One thing I have experimented with is buying aged domains with a little bit of content on Flippa. These can be had for just a couple hundred bucks or less. What you can do is basically pick off where the original owner left off and create a diamond out of a piece of coal without having to do a lot of waiting for teh Google to trust your site.

If you’re looking to do something like this I would avoid the influx of EMDs on the Flippa marketplace. EMDs, in my opinion, for this will pidgeonhole how far you can really take a site.

My Favorite: Scrapebox TDNAM Scraper

Ah, one of the many uses of Scrapebox. They have a really cool scraper that I’ve been using for a long while to pick up little gems in the rough. The nice thing about these domains that you’ll find with the TDNAM scraper is that they are fist come first serve, there’s never any bidding.

You can find PR domains, domains 10+ years old, all for about $5-$10 plus the standard domain reg fee. It’s definitely a great option if you’re on a tight budget. This is actually how I bought my aged domain shown in the graph above and its how I’ve acquired domains for probably the majority of my now successful sites.

GLB

• This past month I’ve been spending 80% of my working time on Marketer’s Center. I’m developing a handful of neat services and selling them in a different way through upsells, downsells, and one-time offers. Nobody else as far as I know is selling services this way so its defintely very experimental. I might write something on it later.
• My other 20% I’ve been spending on creating a couple brand new sites. I’m now exclusively building my sites off of expiring domain names, I’ve found ranking with these domains is 1,000% easier than regging a brand new domain. I plan on writing something about this within the week.

Let’s Get to the Numbers: $4,623 for December, 2011

Naturally this was Christmas so I expected to earn a little bit more. Now that we’re almost done with January, I can tell you this month is a LOT worse than December. I’d take an educated guess that January is probably the WORST month for affiliate marketing, but we’ll see just how bad it turned out when the month ends.

Anywho, here’s December’s breakdown.

Adsense: $2,364
Amazon: $857
Ebay Partner Network: $1,282
Commission Junction: $113
Lending Club: $7

GLB

However, because of their public nature, wikis can be prone to “creative use” by pretty much anyone. If you’re anything like me, you’re no stranger to dropping your links on wikipedia. Links from wikipedia can not only drive a decent amount of traffic but they’re very powerful, too. A good link for extra reading on this is How to Get Wikipedia Links that Stick by Kingofsp.

If you’re not interested in jumping through hoops there is an easier way.

Here’s the footprint:

site:wikia.com -protected “target keyword”

This will draw up a list of niche relevant pages there for you to edit and drop your links in. Experiment with other wiki sites, I’m just using wikia as an example here.

While the longevity of this method is questionable because you can’t be sure when the next SEO will remove your link to drop his own, the sheer amount of wikis and pages you can play with makes this an interesting strategy to test.

P.S.

I’ve been seeing a handful of new Wiki related link building services over at Wickedfire. Only one of them sticks out for me and I just made my second order yesterday: g1c9′s new “Authority Bomb.” Although I believe at the moment the order form is closed, this will be a service to keep your eye on in the near future.

Monthly Milestones Reached

• I finally launched Social Media Supremacy and have been working on perfecting some last minute details. The final package includes 200+ social votes (tweets, Google +1s, facebook likes/shares), a ton of social bookmarks, and LSI posts on a stealth network I put together. You can find the WF thread here.
• I mentioned last month I was studying analytics, an aspect of internet marketing that I was pretty green with. This month I ended up getting my Google Analytics IQ certification. I learned a ton in the process.
• My custom subscription panel for Marketer’s Center is 99% done but we’ve run into a problem regarding Paypal’s limit to only one IPN per account. How are you ecommerce guys that run multiple stores getting around this? Going to try a multi IPN script, hope it works out fine.

Let’s Get to the Numbers: $4,210 For the Month of August

Total is +$356 from last month, which is nice.

Adsense: $1,817 (+$136)

Finally an up month for Adsense. That’s a good sign.

Amazon: $608 (-118)

E-bay Partner Network: $1,467 (+$192)

EPN has been going up and up for me. Earnings per click has been solid @ 9 cents a click.

Commission Junction: $281 (+230)

A few leads and a big sale, not a bad month for CJ for me considering how sparsely I promote it.

Others: $37

Infolinks was $10 and Chitika was $22. I’m starting to remove these units when I see them, I just don’t want them clogging my sites anymore. The revenue they both bring is negligible. Lending Club interest is $5.

Priorities

I mentioned inthe last income report that I’m going to start building authority sites again. I eventually did find a designer, a tech guy to set them up, and a couple writers to fill it with decent content. I’ve already got 1 site that’s 80% done (needs more content) and I purchased an aged domain 5 days ago to start up another. Ideally, I would like to jam these out 1 every 2 weeks.

Hopefully these figures will move up consistently in the coming months now that I’m building sites again, instead of looking relatively stagnant.

However, so much has changed since I last built a decent quality site (it’s been a while for me, since some time last year) that I’m experimenting with a few new things. Heck, each section I’m going to cover each has some new site-building element about it.

With that said, let’s jump right into it.

The Domain

The first thing I want to do is reveal the domain to you so you can check it out:

Know Oscilloscopes

2 things before you visit:

1. Please don’t click on any of the affiliate links (they are designated by an /out/ folder in the link)
2. This is still a work in progress. I haven’t put a lot of time into the site and I’m not half done yet, but I still want to show you what’s going on so you can refer to it during this post.

My Content Strategy

If you recall back to my first post about this niche site challenge I was going to have my cousin complete some of the content for this site because he has direct experience with the topic of the site. Life sometimes has a tendency to remind me not to mix friends/family and business. I paid him for some content and didn’t get anything in return, after 2-3 weeks of waiting for something I just said forget it and scratched it off as a loss.

LSI Content

I then started to look at LSI content services to do the content.

There has been a lot of discussion about Google Panda and the quality of your content. Especially since serpIQ released that little piece of data which revealed the average #1 Google ranked site has over 2,000+ words on the page.

I got a review article from Mitchell’s (aka Kaedus) LSI content service and was really pleased with what he sent me, so I ordered more. The content you see on the site now is 100% from Mitchell’s LSI content service. So far I’ve had the chance to test out about 3-4 different LSI services, and his service blows them all away in terms of quality and turn-around. (You can find my original review for his service here.)

Why use LSI content for your site? There’s a few reasons I can think of off the top of my head:

1. You can hit more long-tail terms with a properly researched LSI article. They are going to throw in terms your competition is using and thus terms people may be searching for.
2. Google Panda. Since Panda has emphasized the quality of your content, LSI services which deliver well-researched 1,000+ word articles are coming in high-demand. It’s no coincidence that there’s been a slew of new LSI content services launched on Wickedfire in the past month. People recognize the new changes and are adapting to them.
3. Engagement. One of the things Google is measuring and taking account for is your user engagement metrics. Time on page and bounce rate, especially, in my opinion. A well researched article is going to keep people reading and clicking around on your site.

Simple Niche Site Architecture and Internal Linking

Traditionally I didn’t put a lot of thought into the architecture of my sites but these days I am. Taking care of internal links and your overall site architecture is important if you want to build your site into a niche power-house. WordPress does take care of the architecture aspect for you a little bit, but you’ve still got to mix in a little bit of strategy too.

Here’s a mindmap giving you a general idea for my basic plan:

Homepage

The homepage targets the most competitive keywords. These are usually general, high traffic keywords. In my experience, these are usually single keyword brand names and/or your best buying keywords.

Example: My homepage is targeting the keyword Oscilloscopes.

When a user lands on your homepage its direct responsibility is to get the user to stick around long enough to click on another section/page of your site and go deeper to find exactly what they’re looking for. The homepage should link to each of your Pillar Pages directly – this is where internal linking comes in.

The last thing you want them to do is visit, puke, and leave. My homepage bounce rates are usually 40%ish.

Pillar Pages

Your pillar pages really start to narrow down some of your best keywords and should be dedicated to just 1 or 2 of those.

For example, on my site I’ve got pages dedicated to the most popular brand of oscilloscopes: Tektronix Oscilloscopes, Fluke Oscilloscopes, etc.. These will hopefully rank for those keywords overtime, sending targeted visitors looking for those branded products.

Besides the sidebar (which doesn’t perform well in my experience anyway) the Pillar Pages is where I’ve started to monetize.

Relevant Long-Tail Posts/Articles

This is where your individual posts and articles come in. These will target the most long-tail keywords of them all. However, don’t neglect these because of that fact. They are going to be the most highly-targeted pages of content on your site delivering highly targeted ads/products so they will perform the best because of that. Usually these articles/posts drive the majority of your sites revenue.

As you can see I haven’t started with any long-tail articles on my oscilloscope site yet, but I will be dropping some soon.

These pieces of content should internally link to their relevant parent page somewhere in the article thus help boost the Pillar Page up in the SERPs (minimally, but it helps).

Testing a Different Monetization Method

When I usually do an EPN site I am a heavy user of the PHPBay plugin. I’ve been using it for years and I’ve got a lot of mileage out of it. If you want a good tutorial on creating PHPBay sites then check out this one from buildandearn. It’s been around for years and you can still follow it to produce a quality site.

For Amazon, I like to use the Amazon Product in A Post plugin. It’s a sweet little free plugin that allows you to put Amazon listings into your posts. I experimented with all the Amazon plugins on the market and found this one to be the best, even better than paid-plugs.

Anyway, getting back to it.

Save for the sidebar I won’t be using these plugins very much on this niche site I’ve built. The reason why is I want to experiment with a strategy I saw on a blog post from Ian Lopuch entitled “How I Earned $4,874.26 on the eBay Partner Network.”

You can get the jist of the strategy here:

…I don’t have a ton of links to eBay on my authority website. I almost make my visitors look for them. This is really important. eBay is measuring results (in the form of account sign-ups and also winning bids) and will pay you higher EPCs if you drive higher quality traffic. In fact, they tend to over-reward their highest quality sources of traffic….

When it comes to SEO, my strategy is one of keeping it very simple. As such, the majority of my eBay links are text links. Of course, I sprinkle in a few widgets too, but those represent the minority of my EPN clicks. My advice is to not overlook the simple, text link strategy because it works really well with Tip 2 (keeping your traffic quality high).

What’s intriguing in the post is he’s leaning primarily on contextual links and he says not to overdo it with the links.

It seems very counter-intuitive at first. Not a lot of links, no linked up product images?? But it’s definitely working for him, he’s getting an average earnings per click of $1.33! That’s pretty stellar considering this month I’m looking at an average of $.07.

No doubt I am doing more clicks, but he’s driving more quality and getting rewarded heavily for it. In the end that’s what’s most important: Driving a quality visitor.

I was able to contact him on Twitter and ask him a couple questions, he was nice enough to respond:

I think that’s a nice little golden nugget right there. He tells the clicker they’re going to E-Bay, he doesn’t trick them into visiting. In turn he gets a visitor that’s more likely to convert.

So this is the primary monetization strategy I’m going to test out on this niche site. I’ll also throw up Adsense after I get a decent amount of affiliate link click data too. The niche seems to be pretty competitive Adwords wise (which means decent Adsense click values).

Affiliate Link Tracking

I’ve got every single one of my affiliate links (except the sidebar widget) feeding me referral keyword click data. If you read the tutorial on how to do this with event tracking in Google Analytics then you know just how useful this kind of data can be.

Especially when a website is in its early stages, this kind of data is very revealing when it comes to where you should focus your promotional efforts. Does one keyword drive more affiliate clicks then another? Then spend more of your SEO budget on ranking for that term over the weaker converting term.

This is something I haven’t done for a new site before, so it will be nice to set up this kind of tracking from the ground up. It’s also going to do a lot for my ROI. It will allow me to cut costs and ignore keywords that don’t perform, while focus my energy and earn more from keywords that drive affiliate clicks.

What’s Next

For my next part in the series I will talk about the final part of the equation: driving traffic.

I’ll be using Google Analytics in this series because I believe that’s what most use, even though there is a section of webmasters who advise against it. My thoughts on the matter is this. If you site stinks then hide it (even though G still collects tons of data with Chrome), but if your site is better than most why try to be secretive about something like that?

What You’ll Learn From This Series

My biggest beef with 99% of the analytics articles you’ll find online is that they tell you exactly how to set up and use the different features found in G Analytics, but they don’t tell you how exactly how you can use the data that you’ve gathered. Sure, you’ve segmented your incoming organic traffic by > 10 seconds on page but what does that _mean_ and how can you use it to make your site/income/engagement better? This is the vital piece of the puzzle that I think is far too often left out.

I will hopefully answer some of those questions and more here. If you’re looking to next-level your IM skillset then read-on.

Event Tracking For Affiliate Marketers

Event Tracking is a feature within Google Analytics that allows you to track specific “events” within your website whether it be a click of a link, a video play, or some kind of download.

Event Tracking can get really complex but one of the simplest ways to start using it is to track outbound link clicks (ie affiliate link clicks). This is what I am going to explain below.

1. Do You Know the Answer to This? “What Keyword or Traffic Source Is Driving the Most Affiliate Clicks for My Website(s)?”

What I’m going to show you is how you can auto-insert event trackable keyword links into your WordPress sites. You’ll be able to see what incoming search keywords are driving the most affiliate link clicks and get a general measure of how valuable a search term is for your site.

Why This Is Important

I finally got fed up last month with not knowing what exactly was driving my Amazon and PHPbay conversions. I didn’t want to be inefficient anymore; as a consequence of my “see what sticks” strategy I would be optimizing for a handful of keywords that are near worthless while potentially leaving golden keywords in the dark.

After searching and experimenting for about 5 hours with some way that I could accurately track conversions from these programs on a keyword level I came up short.

The next best thing to tracking conversions is tracking clicks. Using event tracking you can see what incoming keywords and traffic sources are driving the most affiliate clicks. This is incredibly helpful for two reasons:

1. You can see what keywords you should be optimizing the most for. This is important when we’re working on a limited SEO budget every month. You don’t want to throw money at ranking for a keyword that isn’t driving a high % of revenue generating actions, right?
2. You can see keywords that you haven’t optimized at all for (but they still trickle in over time). When I started doing this I was able to look at my event tracking report and pull up a good handful of keywords that were driving 25%+ visits to clicks. That’s not bad, 1/4 visitors that comes from that keyword will eventually click on an affiliate link and potentially earn me commission.

How to Automate and Track Your Contextual Affiliate Links on a WordPress Blog

Because there was no way in hell I was going to go back through all my sites and switch out all the links for event trackable links I found out a much better solution.

This is a technique I’m using for automating the insertion of in-content affiliate links and then tracking them via event tracking. It took me a couple days to figure out exactly how to do this, so enjoy.

To do this we’re going to need 3 plugins:

1. Google Analytics for WordPress by Joost de Valk

When you install and activate this plugin make sure you remove your old analytics code because this plug inserts the code for you automatically.

There is a spot on the plugin’s page for internal link tracking, I just put the prefix of /out/ like shown in this example here.

2. Pretty Link Plugin

Using Pretty Link Plugin we can append our affiliate links with the /out/ prefix so that the Google Analytics plugin can accurately track the link and send the data over to Event Tracking in Analytics.

Note: I don’t know the benefits of paying for this plugin, I’ve always used the lite version.

3. SEO Smart Links

Using SEO Smart Links we can define keywords that we want linked up automatically in all of the articles across our site. This is the key to getting our affiliate links to show up without having to go in and place them into each article manually. As you can imagine, it’s an enormous time saver.

Link up your desired keywords with your newly created Pretty Link cloaked affiliate links.

Creating an Advanced Segment and Digging Into the Data

After a week or so you should have a decent amount of data to play with.

Before we can really get our hands dirty with the click tracking data we have to create an advanced segment that will separate our desired events from the rest of the traffic.

It is actually a lot easier than it sounds.

When you go to your websites profile click on the top right corner that says Advanced Segments. Here you’ll find some default segments you can tinker around with but what we want is to Create a new advanced segment found on the lefthand side.

Click on the Content dropdown from the green menu on the left and drag Event Category to the top. You’ll be greeted with a dropdown box that will make selecting the necessary values easier for you.

Here is what mine looks like as an example:

Give it a name and test it if you want.

As you saw from the colored menu on the left, you can do a lot of interesting things with Advanced Segments. I will get into it a little more later on.

Apply Your New Segment

After you’re done creating your new segment, click on Advanced Segments again and apply it to your traffic. Change the date to see only the traffic from the time you started gathering tracking data till now, we don’t want the data getting skewered.

Go to your Traffic Sources > Keywords. What you should see will look something like this:

The black outs are incoming search terms. Had to hide them, this is one of my money sites.

What you might find so far could surprise you. Keywords you originally thought worth targeting might not be as valuable as you once imagined, while other keywords you looked over before because of their low traffic numbers now look a lot more appealing because they are driving an enormous % of clicks.

The book “Getting Real” is a culmination of everything they have learned from building a successful SaaS business from the ground up.

If you saw how much I spend every month on SaaS apps, then you no doubt understand what a lucrative (and growing) industry this is becoming.

But even if you have no interest in web applications or development, the business principles behind what they teach is useful in many ways.

Overall, I found the book to be very enlightening. Before I was pretty lost when it came to planning and drawing up what I wanted, now I have a much better understanding of the path to a good application. It’s certainly a lot more fluid that I originally expected.

The principles behind the book also help me rethink what I’m doing with my link service business, especially when it comes to creating and launching products.

My Notes from Getting Real

Here are a bunch of core ideas that you’re going to get from this book.

1. The starting line

• Build less. Do less than your competition to beat them, solve simple problems and leave the nasty problems to someone else.
• Build software for yourself. When you solve your own problem, you create a tool you are passionate about.
• Fund yourself. Constraints drive innovation. Run on limited resources and you’ll be forced to innovate earlier.
• Scope down. It’s better to make a half product than a half-assed product.
• Have an enemy. The best way to know what your app should be is to know what it shouldn’t be.
• The less your app is a chore to build, the better it will be. Keep your app small and managable so you can actually enjoy the process.

2. Stay lean

• The leaner you are, the easier it is to change. The ability to change on a dime is one thing small teams have by default that big teams can never have.
• Let limitations guide your to creative solutions. Constraints drive innovation and force focus.
• Differentiate yourself from bigger companies by being personal and friendly.

3. Priorities

• Define your app in one single sentence, it will guide your decisions and keep you on a consistent path.
• Work from large to small, ignore little details early on.
• Don’t waste time on problems you don’t have yet.
• Find the core market for your app and focus solely on them, if you try to please everyone you won’t please anyone.
• Scale later. Create a great app and then worry about what to do once it’s wildly successful.

4. Feature selection

• Pare features down until you’re left with the most essential. Take whatever you think your product should be and then cut it in half.
• Make features work hard to be implemented, don’t be a yes man.
• Build products and offer services you can manage. It’s easy to make promises, but much harder to keep them.
• How to manage feature requests: Read them and then throw them away.
• Ask people what they don’t want: “If you could remove one feature, what would it be?”

5. Process

• Get something real up and running quickly.
• Let the app morph and evolve, don’t expect to get it right the first time.
• Go from brainstorm sketches to rough HTML to coding.
• Avoid customer preferences. Decide the details so your customers don’t have to.
• There’s no substitute for real people using your app in real ways. Test your app via real world usage.
• Break down time frames into smaller chunks. Instead of a 12 week project, think of it as 12 week long projects.

6. The organization

• People need uninterrupted time to get things done. The alone time zone is where the real development magic happens.
• Avoid meetings. Every minute you avoid spending in a meeting is a minute you can get real work done instead.
• Long, drawn out release cycles are motivation killers. Seek and celebrate small victories.

7. Staffing

• Hire less and hire later.
• Work with prospective employees on a test-basis first.
• Judge potential tech hires on open source contributions.
• Go for quick learning generalists over ingrained specialists.
• Go for happy and average over frustrated and great.
• Hire good writers. Good writers know how to communicate and then make things easy to understand.

8. Interface design

• Design the interface before you start programming, the interface is your product.
• Start from the core of the page and build outward, design the most important piece of content first.
• The customer decides if an app is worthy at the blank slate stage.
• Design for when things go wrong.
• Copywriting is interface design, speak the same language as your audience.
• Incorporate admin functions into the public interface.

9. Code

• Keep your code as simple as possible.
• Listen to your code when it pushes back, it can guide you to fixes that are cheap and light.
• Put data in your customers hands via RSS, APIs, etc. Don’t lock them in. Think Flickr, Google Maps, etc..

10. Words

• Don’t write functional specs. They don’t let you evolve, lead to feature overload, and force you to make important decisions when you have the least amount of information.
• Build, don’t write. Eliminate unnecessary paperwork.
• Write stories, not details. Want to explain a new feature or concept? Write a story about it.
• In order to get a better feel for what your app should look like, use real copy instead of lorem ipsum.

11. Pricing and sign-up

• Give something away for free. Example: free itunes software, free Writeboard and Ta-Da List to get people to use other 37 signals product.
• Make signup and cancellation a painless process. Keep your signup form as short as possible.
• Avoid long-term contracts and sign-up fees.

12. Promotion

• Go from teaser, to preview, to launch. (Note: For more in-depth stuff on product launches find Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula.)
• Build an excellent promo site that introduces vistors to your product: overview, tour, videos, case studies, social proof, blog, etc..
• Blogging can be more effective than regular advertising (and a hell of a lot cheaper).
• Solicit early: get advance buzz and interested signups ASAP.
• Share your knowledge with the world: give something back to the community that supports you and score some nice promo exposure at the same time.
• New or interesting features are a great way to generate buzz for your app.
• Study your analytic data to track your buzz.
• Promote upgrade opportunities from inside the app: existing customers are your best bet for sales.
• Give your app a name that’s easy to remember.

13. Support

• Don’t outsource customer support to a third party, tear down the walls between support and development.
• Use inline help so your product doesn’t require a manual or training. Keep everything as simple as possible, the easier it is for people to use your software the more subs you’ll keep.
• Quick turnaround on support tickets should be a top priority.
• Be willing to say no to customers.
• Consider using forums or chat to let customers help each other.
• Publicize your screwups, get bad news out there and out of the way.

14. Post-launch

• Issue a major update 30 days after launch.
• Show your product is alive by keeping an ongoing product dev blog post-launch.
• Don’t use Beta as a scapegoat, it passes the buck to your customers.
• Prioritize your bugs (and even ignore some of them).
• Wait until knee-jerk reactions to changes die down before taking action. Don’t foolishly backpedal on a necessary, but controversial decision.
• Sub to news feeds about your competitors.
• Beware of the bloat monster: more mature doesn’t have to mean more complicated. Don’t infate your app just for the sake of inflating.
• Be open to new paths and changes in direction. Example: Flickr began as a multiplayer online game, its creators soon realized the photo-sharing aspect was a more plausable product.

I just decided the other day that I’m going to get back into creating new sites. These authority sites will be created around these new quality guidelines:

• 700-1,000 words per post, LSI content.
• Awesome designs, low bounce rates (hopefully)
• Solid social media profile backed by a “real” persona.

I already have 3/4 positions filled on my list for these projects (2 previous hires and my tech guy) but finding a good designer is more difficult than I expected. I would like to have them pump out 1 good site every 2 weeks, I think that’s a very conservative goal.

This would make a positive impact on my affiliate revenue but it will take months before anything substantial is realized.

Monthly Milestones Reached

In terms of productivity, July was a good month. I got a lot of important things done like…

• I’m on the brink of launching a brand new service for Marketer’s Center called Social Media Supremacy, something I have been working on for the past 3-4 months. Excited about that, but it takes a seriously long time to put together something of quality.
• I got all the wireframes, program spec, and hired a Ruby developer for my subscription panel. Talked to the developer on the phone today actually. He sounds super sharp and had a list of questions, glad I hired him.
• I’m now testing a lot of new analytics stuff that I never bothered touched before. Analytics books by people like Avinash Kaushik have so far been gruelingly long reads (these suckers are 500+ pages) but so far I’m learning a ton. P.S. That man is a genius.

3 Important Things I Learned in July

1. Web analytics almost comes naturally for many of you guys involved in PPC, but for SEOs it’s a seriously neglected skillset. Relying on free traffic can really make you complacent in this area. I’ve decided to bone up on analyzing click, conversion, and referral data. I’m already excited by the possibilities behind the more advanced stuff which I will be sharing later on in the month.
2. Keep a close eye on your sites…even the crappy ones. One of my sites that gets around 300 visits a day has been down since July 4 till today, an entire month. It was an internal server error. I must have missed out on a good $100-$200 a month because of it plus not to mention the damage it’s done to my rankings. Oh well, lesson learned. It should bounce back.
3. Finding a good designer at a decent rate is very difficult. There are a million and one designers with average talent and just a handful of great designers. Plus, when you find a good one he’s usually very busy.

Let’s Get to the Numbers: $3,817 For the Month of July

Adsense: $1,681 (-$149)

This figure keeps going down with pretty much every update that rolls around. I have one of my top earning sites in particular that I’ve been neglected that is usually a very good Adsense earner. I was looking at the charts for it just the other day, look at this traffic slump:

I think part of the problem is there’s been only 4 new posts for the entire year of 2011. All my good bloggers are spread so thin, I need more.

Amazon: $726 (-$129)

Not a great month for Amazon either.

Ebay Partner Network: $1,275 (+285)

Woo hoo at least EPN spared me mercy this month and softens the blow a little bit. That is something I like about diversifying where your money comes in from. When other streams tank hopefully something else can pick up the slack.

Commission Junction: $51 (-$131)

Infolinks: $48 (-$19)

Chitika: $31 (No Change)

Lending Club $?

Hit over $1,000 in my Lending Club account, so that’s a nice little milestone. As far as interest goes, no idea since the statement isn’t up yet. I would guess around $5-$6 bucks maybe.

Coming Up in August from Passive Profiteer

Here’s what I have planned for you for the month of August.

• Case study for the top 3 automated linkbuilding services: Drip Feed Blasts, Backlink Genie, and Dripable.
• Hopefully showcasing my first web application project near the end of the month.
• Finally revealing my site from the Niche Site Challenge (it’s about time) along with everything that goes into turning it into an earner.
• Book review and notes for 37 Signals’ “Getting Real”
• Advanced analytics and click tracking for affiliates.

If you don’t want to miss any of this stuff, subscribe!

Because the Panda update impacted me so severely (30-40% revenue loss from my affiliate site earnings across the board) I’ve been researching the Google Panda update for the last 3 months and have literally put tons of hours into finding strategies to fix and avoid it. This webinar here jam packs all of that current Panda research along with some actionable strategies that you can use today to try to recover from the update if you’ve been targeted.

If you were on my list then you got the pre-registration link for this, but if not then don’t fret because the replay is here.

You can also find some info like the history of Google Panda updates, factors, and more at DFB’s Google Panda Discussion page.

I’ve also written a extensive post about link-building post-Panda that you might be interested in: The Ultimate Post-Panda Link Building Strategy and Mindmap

P.S. There is a Q&A video that has yet to be posted yet. I will embed that video here when it’s ready as well.