Negative Keyword Lists

Negative keywords are so critical to your campaigns, and it’s a topic that is pretty overlooked in my opinion – especially by newer affiliates. What is a negative keyword? A negative keyword tells a search engine NOT to display your ad if a person searches for a string with your negative keyword in it. For example, if you have an ad group with the only keyword being “ringtones” and you broad match it, your ad will show up for “Nelly ringtones, mobile ringtones, buy ringtones, free ringtones, etc.” Now say you don’t want your ad showing up when someone searches for “free ringtones”. Go into your ad group and type in “-free”. This will add “free” as a negative term, and your ad will never be displayed when someone types “free” in along with their keyword. Is this all that adding negative keywords can do? Nope, you can take this to an even larger and more important keyword.

Let’s talk basic buying philosophy for a second. When you’re advertising online, do you want to advertise to somebody who’s looking to buy something, or somebody who’s ready to buy? The obvious answer is you want somebody who is ready to buy. There are browsers, and there are buyers; we want the buyers as they are much more likely to convert and fill out the entire offer. Negative keyword lists can help us tremendously in this aspect. Let’s look at an example. Say you’re running the DentalPlans.com offer, and you put in the broad match term “Dental Plans” in your ad group. This could be a good term, your ad will show up for keywords like :

• affordable dental plans
• fast dental plans
• cheap dental plans
• buy dental plans
• family dental plans

These all may be great keywords, it looks like they’re all people looking to purchase a dental plan. Aside from that, your ad will also show up for the following keywords :

• information on dental plans
• about dental plans
• research dental plans
• browse dental plans
• dental plan help

In these keywords, it looks like the user is much more of a browser. They’re not ready to buy, they want to surf the net and research what’s out there. That’s great for them, but they’re going to click on you’re ad to research dental plans and you’re going to be the one paying for it. We want to show up for all the good keywords, but not the bad ones; here’s where we make a negative keyword list :

• information
• about
• research
• browse
• help

Adding all those as negatives will eliminate your ad showing up when somebody searches for them. Never though negative keywords could be so helpful, did ya?

Where did I find this little gem? Right Here!

UberCamp tutorials were written by Uberaffiliate (no not me) Paul, and one other undercover super affiliate who may or may not have his own affiliate network.  But seriously, this is good for seasoned affiliates to just brush up on the basics or someone wanting to get into am, this is a must read.  It will guide you from the basic information about “What is affiliate marketing” to actually showing you how to build your own campaign and do it the right way.

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I had waited for almost 25 hours before sending Myspace an email regarding my campaigns, that were still in pending for approval state.

I just received an email from them, and it has been over 30 hours since I made those campaigns.

Here is what it says -

Hello,

We apologize for the delay but as you are waiting for your ad(-s) to be reviewed, please keep in mind the following:

1. Ads are reviewed in the order in which they are received. During the beta test of this advertising platform, we have MySpace SSAP Specialists approving ads Monday thru Friday,10:30 AM to 6:30 PM (Pacific Standard/Daylight Time).

2. The Self-Serve Advertising Program is becoming more popular and as popularity increases, so does ad volume. This also increases wait time.

3. Ads are not reviewed by an automated system. Each ad is given personal attention and reviewed by a real person to ensure that it meets our editorial guidelines, the Music guidelines (if applicable), and the MySpace Terms of Service.

Likewise, each of your emails is also read and answered by a human being–not a computer.

Your participation is important to us and we will continue to do our best to serve you. Thank you for advertising on MySpace!

Thank you,
MySpace.com

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I have this shared hosting plan with The Worst Web Hosting Company since November of 2006.  Today I got an email saying that they have suspended one of my domains due to excessive MYSQL usage. WTF???  Do you know what that site was running?  It was a PHP Bay site, which ran a single MYSQL db. This pisses me off that there is no warning, no time period for me to switch servers or hosts.  Now, I am not relying on this domain, and it does not make much money.  It is on autopilot, and thats it. But it still pisses me off that they would just up and suspend the domain.

I sent them an email to be able to atleast FTP my stuff, and they denied it. I am paying $20 a month, because I am too lazy to switch all my sites to my $200/month dedicated server, or other cheaper webhosts.

Fucking Assholes!

ps. for those readers that have a problem with my foul language, Fuck Off!

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So I have been trying to advertise on Facebook, and unlike with Adwords or MSN, their guidelines are just fucked up.  There is no way to contest a disapproved ad, or no way of really telling what needs to be changed to get them approved.

One of the problems I ran into was, when direct linking to the offer, and if the offer is geo targeted, the ad would get disapproved.  Because whoever was checking the merchant page for approval was not in USA, and would get redirected to a different product or unrelated product page.  So, I set up a shitty landing page, and once the ad got approved, I would just redirect the landing page to the offer.  So, SCREW YOU FACEBOOK.

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We are aware of most tricks regarding increasing converions on our landing pages – tricks like prominent and above the fold call to action.  Or keeping the colors similar to the merchant’s landing pages etc.

Here is a little trick that I have been using and it works well for me.  If you have testimonials on your landing pages, try this trick.  Go this site -> www.ip2phrase.com/ and instead of using some bullshit city and state for the testimonial, use the reader’s city and state next to the testimonial.

Eg.

“I lost 100lbs in 2 weeks. Thank You.” – Amy, R – <Add the city and state from the code on the above site here>

Hope that helps.

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I came across this blog today, and loved this post.  Here are a few examples of Social Media pickup lines.

You have really nice “tweets”

Wanna go back to “myspace?”

Why don’t we get together and form our own “community”

Can I “tag” you?

If you do my “RSS” I’ll do yours

You can read the rest of them here

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