SEO: A Peacock Tail?

This is interesting: A website is like a peacock sometimes. A peacock (your website) can attract peahens (your visitors) in many ways. For example, begging the zoo-man to bring him a peahen or asking other peacocks to introduce him to their sisters. And of course you have many choices to drive traffic to your website: paid search, Google Adwords and media buy etc. However, for a peacock, there is always one way, one self-service, free and effective way to attract peahens: showing his beautiful tail to peahens.

And SEO is your website’s tail.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's (such as Google) unpaid results - often referred to as "natural", "organic" or "earned" results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search result list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users.

Characteristics of SEO

As a method of website promotion, SEO is different from other methods for these characteristics:

1.
It’s free, basically. You can polish your website and make it more preferable for search engines by yourself if you are not hiring someone for that.

2.
It’s not a one-sided job. SEO concerns your website content, your website keywords, backlinks of your website from other sites, how users value your website, etc.

3.
It’s not a one-off job. A search engine such as Google always keeps changing it’s algorithm about ranking search results so you should adjust your SEO to keep pace with these changes.

The formula of SEO

There’s a basic formula for SEO: SEO=C1+L2+K3+O4. What does this mean?

C1 means website content: you need to keep updating your website with original and excellent content from time to time.

L2 means links: the more links to your website from other websites are considered by Google that other websites are “voting” it as a good website. Of course, a vote from a great website means more.

K3 means keywords: you may put some specific keywords (such as “dating”, “date”, “mail order brides”) in your meta tags, your anchor tags and bold texts. In this way you are telling Google that: hey, we are more concerned with these keywords so list us earlier when people are searching for these words!

Finally, O4 means other factors: As we said, a search engine keeps changing algorithm about ranking search results and how users value your website also affects a lot, there are always factors your don’t know and you cannot control.

The meaning of SEO

SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO. White Hat SEO obeys Google’s rules and aims to provide content that make sense for both users and Google while Black Hat SEO tries to “cheat” Google into ranking the website in the front by creating “spam pages”, fake links etc., which means nothing for users and will be punished by Google sooner or later.

So the meaning of SEO means that only cooperation with Google to provide original, authentic and useful content for users can bring your website long-term and stable traffic. Do not take shortcuts when you are doing website SEO: You have to work to earn your traffic. And by keeping doing this, you will at last have a stunning peacock tail.

For more dating offers and dating affiliate related info, please refer to the Qpid Network Affiliate Program.

How To Add Sub IDs On The QpidAffiliate Platform

Adding Sub IDs

Select the offer you want to promote：
Login > My Account > Offer Links > My Offers > Click the offer you want to promote

Select the promotion material you want to use in “Links & Codes”.
For Text Links and Banners, you just need to select the material you want to use and input the sub ID name in the field.

Simply click the “ADD” button and take your current sub affiliate links in Direct Link and the link below the creative.

For the article, you also select the material you want to use, and then click the “Get Code” button. You will see the field for inputting your sub ID name.

Simply click the  “add” button and take your current sub affiliate links in the link.

Qpid Affiliate will automatically begin tracking that SID once it’s been clicked on and start showing it in your reports.

Viewing your sub ID stats

For CPS/ CPL account, you could find sales/ leads details of your sub ID here:
My Account > Reports > My Offers’ Reports > Sales Report-Detailed/ Lead Report-Detailed. Set Offers and Create Report, then you can see the “Data Options” button.

You can add and apply the “Sub Affiliate ID” column in your report table easily.

About What Affiliate Sub IDs Are

Sub IDs are one of the most crucial and robust part of affiliate marketing. “What are sub IDs?” is one of the most frequent questions our customer service team are asked online. Optional and often overlooked by new publishers, sub IDs are an important tool to utilize when you start to scale your campaigns. There are many uses for the affiliate sub ID, but the overall objective is the same: storing and passing values, they are typically used in the following situations.

Subdividing traffic

Suppose you’re running an offer through multiple traffic sources or have placed a banner in a few places across your website. Understanding where your clicks and conversions are coming from is key to running a successful campaign. You can add a unique sub ID to your affiliate link and then view the segmented information under related reports.

Tracking Value

Many traffic sources provide placeholder variables that you can append to your affiliate link that will then allow you to pull information onto your reports.

Placeholder variables are provided by your traffic source and can usually be found with a quick search.

We hope the use of the Sub ID function can help you make more money!

How to Use PPC in Affiliate Marketing

PPC is an effective tactic in maximizing your profits in affiliate marketing for its flexibility in budget control, market control and channel control. Google Adwords is the top PPC platform for its high accuracy and details. But no campaigns could be accurate and effective without constant monitoring and modifying. And beforehand, a PPC strategy is required.

Step 1: Knowing your market

Not everything sells well over the Internet. Any product or services that require a high level of trust, or high levels of “touch” - a car, for example - may be difficult to sell online. What types of products or services sell well over mail order? What products or services are telemarketable? Chances are these products and services will sell well over the Internet, too.

Besides, you need to know the specific market (don’t tell me you want to sell to all over the world), understanding if your products or services are sellable there or not.

Step 2: Sketch Out your PPC Campaigns

• Keyword Research

With it being the smallest unit in your PPC campaigns, you need to attach great importance to keyword research and selection. Employ some keyword researching tools, like Google AdWords Keyword Planner, to expand your base and gain ad group ideas. With Google Trends, you could easily find out what keywords are hit among your market. Put together lists of keywords your potential audience is likely to use to find your products or services and place them in small, tightly focused ad-groups.

Please pay close attention to the type of query, namely, exact match, phrase match, broad match. Each has its own purpose, with broad match being the widest way of chance for receiving clicks and conversions, and exact match the most accurate way of getting conversions from the most sincere customers, but you may be missing great opportunities.

FYI, Negative Keyword could stop search engines from showing your ads on certain search terms that are irrelevant to your products or services, which are always used alongside with keywords.
 

• Commit to your Ad Creatives

Ad Creatives are tiny little themes of your ad groups. There are text ad, image ad, video ad, etc. Mind you! There are only 25 to 40+ characters in text ad depending on various PPC platforms. Character limits is one great feature of it. With that said, you need to stand out your USPs (Unite Selling Point) in your creatives. Always include more than one creative per ad group and test out the better one.

There are some other tips in writing text ads:
 

    -Write an appealing headline (use an active verb, where possible).

    -Include keywords in your text.

    -Try to use a URL that contains the keyword.

   -The landing page must closely match what you want to sell and use similar words or phrases (your landing page selection, design, wording count).

    -Capital letters stand out more. Use them where permitted.

• Build your Ad Groups and Ad Campaigns

Sort keywords of same product or service and their correspondent ad creative together, this is your ad group. With various ad groups of the same market or same series together, you actually build your ad campaign. With various campaigns together, you are creating a powerful account and can get more exposure (and competition maybe). Budget permitted, you could do affiliate marketing with PPC 24/7 and wait for fruitful conversions!

Step 3: A/B Test Your Campaigns

No platforms are perfect, even Google AdWords; no campaigns are permanently effective, even if it’s built by the most seasoned marketer. Optimization is time-and-energy-consuming work. Split test or A/B test is a way to test out if your optimization is workable or not; it is a must for every marketer. Always do split tests or A/B tests and develop for the better ones, and do it constantly - you will find your campaign more effective and profitable.

Closing Remarks

PPC is perfect for every affiliate marketer. If you are new to it, learn it; if you are exploring it, explore more! There are no limits in PPC. The secret of it lies in how well you harness it and how well you understand the market.

10 Paid Traffic Sources to Recommend in 2015

Paid traffic is the quickest way to send traffic. When it comes to targeting management, it’s so effective and very easy to optimize. If you’re new to this part, you may start with a small budget to start with platforms like 7search to learn how media buy works. Anyway, when QpidAffiliate’s offers focuses on the international dating niche, you should skip the chance to try every platform but start with some of those that have been proven to work.

To help you on this, I’d like to list 10 paid traffic sources that our affiliates have been working with. Even though we’re not going to endorse them and encourage you to spoil your budgets with them, at least they’re worth your attention and consideration.

1.    PlentyOfFish Ads
2.    Facebook Ads
3.    Google AdWords

4.    Bing Ads

5.    TrafficVance

6.    LeadImpact

7.    50onRed

8.    BuySellAds

9.    DirectCPV 

10.    InfoLinks

So set up your media buy plan and make your traffic today!

P.S. Qpid Affiliate does not need adult traffic. Remember to discard these sources though they’re excellent ad networks: JuicyAds/ExoClick/AdultModa/TrafficJunkcy/AdXpansion...

Where Media-Buyers Can Get Traffic Source for Dating

With competition of Internet products and services becoming increasingly intense, product and service providers launch affiliate marketing campaigns because of their cost performance. They recruit qualified affiliates to drive traffic, among which media-buyers could be the main force. Media-buyers have to take their sole discretion to buy traffic and take all risks to balance cost and gain. As a niche market, media buying for dating offers might be different from the mass market. If you just go into some high volume media buying without focus, it is less likely to increase the conversion rate. Herein, we would like to give some tips about what aspects media-buyers could take into consideration when driving traffic for dating offers.

1.Social Network. Social networks are the easiest and best way to drive traffic, more likely to drive the young or middle-aged users. Social networks, especially the worldwide ones, such as Facebook, Twitter, Flirchi, etc, possess a large number of users, which mean abundant viewers’ impressions and huge potential leads. In normal case, buying traffic on famous social networks work better if media-buyers’ budgets allow.

2.Dating directory and review. They collect and give various dating related website lists for visitors. On the one hand, the intended visitors are supposed to be interested targets. Traffic on the Dating Directory could be considered relatively high quality. On the other hand, competition between dating websites on the dating directory is fierce. Media-buyers should pay more attention to provide more attractive promoting materials (banners/text) in order to stand out. Visit some of them to have a brief look: nichedatingdirectory.com, wowaylove.com, datingcastle.com, datesites.com etc.

3.Dating Tips Website or Blogs. Dating tips websites or blogs normally run as emotional communication between writers and readers. Readers tend to act as fans of the website, thus more easily accept the suggested dating website links by the editors. You could just keep your eyes on those who have more followers or fans. It could be better if you could cooperate with them to recommend your ads. In this way their followers would become more interested in your ads without feeling being pushed to do this.

4.Other dating websites. Different dating sites have different focuses on their regions, supply different services, show and attract different members and users. Their website contents may supplement each other. Based on this, media-buyers could cooperate with these dating websites even when they are also operating dating offers. Take Qpid Affiliate’s sites as an example, which focus on international dating and building bridges for cross-nation relationship. So those dating websites focusing on regional dating could be one of the media-buyers’ choices. Just spend some time to search and sort them out. Plentyoffish, as a popular dating website, is also mostly mentioned and referred.

5.Video ads. Various videos are about live show dating. This is also a channel which media-buyers can place ads and get the banner noticed.

Practical Media Buying Tips

Generally, a media buy is whenever you buy advertising on a site, but PPC (Adwords, Bing) is often not considered a media buy. Direct site media buying is one of the highest ROI advertising methods online. It is simply buying banner ads and text links on high-traffic websites and forums and sending them to affiliate offers. There are a lot of misconceptions about display advertising, mostly that users have “banner blindness” and ignore ads on websites. Many advertisers are finding huge success with the massive amounts of inventory and little to no competition which means cheap traffic. However, as with any large scale media buy, profits don’t always come without conducting some split tests. If you go into a high volume media buy with just one or two landing pages and creatives, it’s likely you’re going to lose money.

Here are some key essentials that will allow you to optimize and scale your media buy:

1) Pay attention to your budget. This is a very important step when it comes to media buying. Having a budget will let you determine what type of methods are compatible with what you’re trying to achieve. There are ads that run hourly, monthly, by the clicks or as frequent as your budget allows. Start off with an initial small budget and do test runs on different campaigns. When you can see which ads work best and on what websites, then go ahead and invest more to keep them running.

2)  Don't place buys on default pages. People often do not change the default page on their browser. They launch a Web browser and then, as the page starts loading, they jump elsewhere. Depending on the way sites measure an ad served, you may actually be 'charged' for ads that a user never sees. Sites often ask for a premium on default home pages, a spot where I loathe buying even at a discount.

3) Identify your target market. If you have a specific product or service that you’re trying to promote, you have to make sure you’re reaching the right audience, otherwise all your marketing efforts will be wasted on low quality traffic and tire kickers that will only result in wasted time and money. Look at the demographics of the site you want to advertise on; take into consideration age, sex, status, and location of the visitors. This will help you to tailor your ads to the interests of potential leads and customers. Alexa is a good tool for find the demographics of a website.

4) If you’re promoting a CPA offer with a media buy you need to make sure you have multiple alternatives. Not only should you split test them to see which converts best, you should also have one ready if you’re winning offer goes down. If you own the entire back-end to your offer, you want to split test several different pricing structures. If you have any customer retention data, consider that when setting your price points.

5) Creatives – For performance marketers, click through rate is the saving grace. This is what bumps down the competition and gets the cheap traffic for solid ROIs. Go in with at least 10-20 different creatives and see what yields the highest. Split test different borders, different colors, new calls to action, etc. There is ALWAYS room for CTR improvement.

Generally speaking, media buying (if bought on a flat-rate) can be extremely profitable. The advantages of this method are that you have direct relationships with several high-traffic website owners. You can start on a relatively small budget, and you’ve effectively cut out the middle man (the ad networks). Once you have a few placements running, it can be a very stable source of traffic since you’re not competing with other affiliates and have diversified your risk.