Jamdo Marketing Blog

Dear Writer:

Although it must be a thousand years ago that I sat in a class in story writing at Stanford, I remember the experience very clearly. I was bright-eyes and bushy-brained and prepared to absorb the secret formula for writing good short stories, even great short stories. This illusion was canceled very quickly. The only way to write a good short story, we were told, is to write a good short story. Only after it is written can it be taken apart to see how it was done. It is a most difficult form, as we were told, and the proof lies in how very few great short stories there are in the world.

The basic rule given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules. A story could be about anything and could use any means and any technique at all - so long as it was effective. As a subhead to this rule, it seemed to be necessary for the writer to know what he wanted to say, in short, what he was talking about. As an exercise we were to try reducing the meat of our story to one sentence, for only then could we know it well enough to enlarge it to three- or six- or ten-thousand words.

So there went the magic formula, the secret ingredient. With no more than that, we were set on the desolate, lonely path of the writer. And we must have turned in some abysmally bad stories. If I had expected to be discovered in a full bloom of excellence, the grades given my efforts quickly disillusioned me. And if I felt unjustly criticized, the judgments of editors for many years afterward upheld my teacher’s side, not mine. The low grades on my college stories were echoed in the rejection slips, in the hundreds of rejection slips.

It seemed unfair. I could read a fine story and could even know how it was done. Why could I not then do it myself? Well, I couldn’t, and maybe it’s because no two stories dare be alike. Over the years I have written a great many stories and I still don’t know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.

It is not so very hard to judge a story after it is written, but, after many years, to start a story still scares me to death. I will go so far as to say that the writer who not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium.

I remember one last piece of advice given me. It was during the exuberance of the rich and frantic ’20s, and I was going out into that world to try and to be a writer.

I was told, “It’s going to take a long time, and you haven’t got any money. Maybe it would be better if you could go to Europe.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because in Europe poverty is a misfortune, but in America it is shameful. I wonder whether or not you can stand the shame of being poor.”

It wasn’t too long afterward that the depression came. Then everyone was poor and it was no shame anymore. And so I will never know whether or not I could have stood it. But surely my teacher was right about one thing. It took a long time - a very long time. And it is still going on, and it has never got easier.

She told me it wouldn’t.

John Steinbeck
1963

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It’s a real pain in the ass when some affiliate networks (usually running DirectTrack) don’t allow international affiliates to view merchant pages due to their geographic location.

An English affilaite is just as capable of driving US traffic to a US offer as a US affiliate. I really don’t know why these affiliate companies persist with this idiocy. It is a real time consumer for affiliates who don’t live in the same geographic area as the offer they are promoting.

Usually it takes stuffing around with unreliable proxies to get around this.

Luckily there is now a dedicated affiliate proxy service and so far it kicks ass.

Check out the great new service from WorldProxy202.

It will save you a lot of time.

Thanks to Ruck at CashTactics for the heads up.

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Sometimes I am an idiot and miss something completely obvious and this may well be one of those times.

So I have a direct linking campaign happening in Google Adwords pointing to a .com.au merchant site.

Yet all of my ads keep getting declined for having an incorrect destination URL.

I have checked and rechecked. I have resubmitted.

Still they are all rejected!

Any tips or suggestions much appreciated cos I am about to crush a butterfly in frustration!

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I see a lot of people in forums and blogs asking how to start out in affiliate marketing with $0. Well, I thought I would lay out a plan for what I would do if this were me.

If I was starting over again and I had $0 to invest this is how I would do it.

Goal 1 - Capital

You need money for URLs, hosting and marketing. It ain’t sexy, but the way I would do this is to offer my services as a writer at every webmaster forum I could find. I am a fast writer, so I could probably whip out 3×500 word articles in an hour. On the lower end of the spectrum, that should get you $20-30 per hour. At an absolute total bare minimum slave wage, that would still be $15 per hour. Put in a couple of big days and you should have $500 pretty quickly.

Goal 2 - Find a Product

Choose a product you know has a reasonable affiliate program and that you know something about. I’d probably choose something I knew about and something I could develop very specific keywords about. I’d also want something that paid AT LEAST $7 or $8 per sale/lead - preferably more. For argument’s sake, let’s say DVD Rewriters (probably a bad choice, but it will do for the sake of this post to demonstrate the point)

Goal 3 - Keywords

Next, you need a list of SPECIFIC keywords. The best keywords that are probably affordable in this case would probably be model numbers.

Samsung D537 DVD Rewriter
D5375 DVD
D5375 DVD rewriter

Also some price point keywords

Cheap DVD RW
Discount DVD Rewriter
Discount DVD Re-Writer
Cheap D5375

You should be able to get a good list together. If you are going after model numbers, then a few hundred keywords is easily possible.

Goal 4 - Find Out If It Converts

Next, I would set up a direct linking campaign with PPC and I would use SubIDs to track down to the keyword level so I know which engine and adgroup and keywords were leading to a sale. I would use Yahoo or MSN because their traffic is usually a better converter. Each ad group would have ONE of the keywords above and I would bid on phrase and exact match only. I would turn OFF content match (or at least put content match only in a seperate campaign).

You’re not trying to make an overall profit on this - you’re simply finding out if the product and merchant convert into sales/leads. If you make a profit at this stage, that is a bonus.

Goal 5 - Analysis

If the product is converting with a couple of sales, then I keep going. If it has no converions from my traffic, then I choose another merchant and product and repeat step 4.

If I am lucky, I should have a list of keywords that convert into sales.

Goal 6 - Website

Now, I would build a website around DVD rewriters, concentrating on the keywords that converted. Here the intention is to build a page for each keyword that converted. On EACH page is great content with a good presell for the specific keyword and product. Of course, each page would also have an affiliate deep link to the product on the merchant site.

Goal 7 - PPC

Next I would set up another PPC campaign to my new site from Yahoo, MSN and Adwords. Again, I would track it down to the engine, ad group and keyword level. I would link to the specific page on my site that coresponded with the keyword.

Hopefully my great new site converts even better than step 4 deep linking.

If not, I rewrite my pages with even better content and try again.

Goal 8 - Natural Rankings

If your website is converting ok on these products, then you should start to do some SEO on the site. Start building links etc. Submit it to Yahoo directory. Do some guest blogs with links back to your site. Try to get specific links to your internal pages. All of this will help your rankings in the search engines.

Step 9 - Rinse and Repeat

Note - you will probably only get past step 4 maybe 10% of the time (if you are lucky). If you are like 98% of people you will get discouraged at your second or third failure and give up which is great, because that means less competition for me.

If you get to your 20th failure and you are still trying to figure out where you’ve gone wrong, this is good news. It means you probably have the personality type to succeed in this business.

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So I got some spam mail from the guys at SocialSpark inviting me to join their new social network for bloggers. I have no idea how they got my email, but it got through the filters and I opened it. It pissed me off enough to actually click on the link and try to figure out how they got my email.

Imagine my surprise at finding a very nice (and dare I say expensive) design on the offending website. So nice in fact, that I actually decided to try and figure out what it was all about.

In effect, SocialSpark seemed to be another PayPerPost type of service allowing both bloggers and advertisers to connect. Now, I did sign up with PayPerPost back in the day, but I never felt right about taking on any jobs there so I never actually accepted any jobs from them. They were pretty clearly designed to trick Google and they kind of got off on the wrong foot by not requiring disclosure straight from the beginning. It wasn’t the sort of company I was comfortable associating my blogs with and the recent Google slap against PPP and their network of bloggers pretty much confirmed my suspicions.

So back to the SocialSpark spammers and their offering. How was this going to be any different? Well for starters SocialSpark made a big thing on their site of requiring nofollow in any links (in fact they provide the linking code for links) and full disclosure about the nature of a paid post. This is heading in the right direction in my opinion, if you are trying to keep your blog nice and whitehat. It seems they care enough about their blogging partners to try to protect them from any slap similar to the one that PayPerPost suffered. In fact, it intrigued my enough to actually sign up in order to check it all out.

Now, once you’re signed up, SocialSpark asks you to verify the ownership of your blog by placing some code on it. You can also opt to have some extra code that takes your stats into account so potential advertisers can see what they are getting. Hmm, not something I am usually interested in offering up, but what the hell? It’s a good metric for advertisers to measure the true value of a blog and I have nothing to hide. SocialSpark then does a human review of your blog to give you final approval (which is currently where Jamdo is at at the time of writing this post).

You can also put up your profile on SocialSpark and include information and tags about your niches, brands you’re interested in etc etc which is a good little opportunity to really sell yourself. This allows advertisers to know a little more about you. It also offers you the chance to presell yourself and get put infront of a wide variety of potential advertisers.

After this, you can browse through the offerings of advertisers who are looking to create some blog buzz. Some payouts seemed reasonable and others were pretty shabby. No big surprises there.

The thing that really caught my attention what that there were also jobs on offer where the payment was a return blog post ie. you blog about me and I will blog about you. That seems like a pretty good way to find other bloggers to connect with. The problem as I see it would be the quality of bloggers who you were connecting with, but SocialSpark seems to have thought of that too. Advertisers can leave feedback about the quality of the posts they receive, meaning you can also leave feedback if you swap posts with another blogger. A great way to build up (or destroy) your reputation within that community. I nice little feature as one of the main problems with PayPerPost was the absolute attrocious quality of posts that advertisers received. It really was the detritus of the inernet in many cases. At least SocialSpark seems to have realised that problem and gone some of the way towards solving it.

Members can also leave comments under each of the jobs. I guess if they get a reasonable community happening then this will help police the quality (especially of the free jobs and reciprocal blogging) of the listings as members comment on their experiences of the job.

There were also some charities asking for posts which I thought was a nice touch.

I also noticed that under each job posting were links to blog posts that were done for the job. This might be a good little opportunity for a (dofollow) backlink to your blog post. It can also give you a bit of an indication of what the quality of your competition is (remember, advertisers can leave comments on your post’s quality) so you can beat it and establish a reputation as a blogger who offers real value to advertisers.

So what’s the verdict?

Well, we really got off on the wrong foot with the spam message. I would really like to know how they got my email. Perhaps I was on the list for another of their services or something, but some indication of that would have been nice in the original email.

On the other hand, SocialSpark seems to really address a lot of the negative issues that I had with other pay-per-post services and the whole promotion of the “web 2.0″ and “community” elements of their site is not the usual hollow BS. In fact, it is done a lot better than I would have thought possible and actually has a practical reasoning behind it.

Now, I am going to give these guys a chance. An initial look at the site has me tentatively positive about its potential and I will certainly be looking at how other bloggers react to the service. I especially like the social element of possibly connecting with other bloggers and knowing enough from their feedback to know I can expect some quality.

In short, it’s worth checking out. I won’t make a final recommendation for a few months, but have a look and let me know what you think too.

NOTE: This is NOT a paid review and all links are DOFOLLOW.

Edit: I just read that the parent company (Izea) of Social Spark is also the parent company of PayPerPost. I guess that means they are reformed spammers! It also explains where they got my email address.

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photo credit: racreationsJust thought I would quickly share a great little time saving plugin for Wordpress.

Photo Dropper save a LOT of time if you want to search and use images from Flickr.

It Even automatically puts in all the attribution and links that are required to use the photos legally (you are still restricted to using Creative Commons licenced photos for commercial blogs that stipulate it is fine to use them for commercial purposes.)

Anyway, it’s a great plugin and I will be using it a lot on some of my other sites.

Check it out.

Warning - as you can see above it will also put a link to the site that developed the plugin, though that doesn’t really bother me.

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