The Biggest News Story IN THE WORLD…Brings Back Less Than 800,000 Results On Google

I think I must be going for the worlds longest post title, how did I do? 😉

Unless you have been living under a rock the past few days, you will already know about the worlds biggest scientific experiment that started today. I’m no scientist, but in short, scientists are going to re-create the “Big Bang” that created the universe. (Allegedly)

Depending on who you listen to, this will either tell us how the universe was formed and lead to better cancer treatments, or it will go horribly wrong and we’ll be sucked into a huge black hole and spend the rest of eternity floating around in “black matter” whilst hungry aliens feast on our humble remains.

The story is so big that even Google are getting in on the action, if you are reading this post today (Wednesday the 10th September 2008), head on over to the Google home page and take a look at the Google logo.

If you are reading this after the day it was written, here’s a screen shot of the page so you don’t feel left out:

The image around the logo isn’t some kinky S&M device, it’s actually an image of the “Large Hadron Collider” (I think) from which the experiment will be run. If you then click on the image on the Google home page, it takes you to the search results for “Large Hadron Collider”.

And this is where my search engine marketing mind kicked in.

This is the biggest news story in THE WORLD today, no matter where you live, if you put the news on TV you will see something about this experiment. So you’d expect Google to be overflowing with millions of organic search results, and loads of Adwords ad’s selling books and DVD’s on related subjects.

BUT on Google there are less than 800,000 results, and even more surprisingly there are ZERO adwords ad’s! (On google.co.uk, .com had 1 ad)

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but can you imagine if you had started to build up a site containing information on the project when this was first mentioned a couple of years ago? With less than 800,000 results on Google, an old website with a good domain name and content would be absolutely overflowing with traffic today.

You could have monetized with Google Adsense or sold related products via the Amazon affiliate program, your main concern would be if your server could handle all the traffic!

I think it’s probably too late now to jump on the LHC band wagon, but you can see how easy it is to miss out on an opportunity. This project has been no secret, yet it seems that very few people had the hindsight to profit from this massive worldwide event.

I for one will be keeping a very close eye on any future worldwide news items!

And to finish off I’ll put your mind at ease by saying that the actual “Collision” that will re-create the big bang isn’t due to happen until mid-October, so there are a couple more blog posts left before the end….and if you want to check the current status of the project to see if it has destroyed the world yet, you can do so here:

http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/

Thanks for reading, and as always feel free to leave a comment!

Regards,
Dan

P.S. The website link in my closing paragraph is an awesome example of a viral website, just a shame they haven’t monetized, they could have made a killing!

How To Run The Perfect Affiliate Program

How To Run The Perfect Affiliate Program

Hello and welcome to another article. This weeks article was actually supposed to be a video showing you around one of my affiliate programs and how it is all run, I recorded the video last night but whilst it was being produced the program crashed and I lost the recording, so you’ll have to put up with my writing instead 😉

It’s no co-incidence that I am writing this article at the same time as my Boomerang List Builder affiliate program launch, but I was going to tell you about the launch anyway so I figured I would kill 2 birds with 1 stone and write a newsletter on the same subject.

Running your own affiliate program for your product can be the difference between 10 and 100 sales, if I didn’t have an affiliate program in place, I wouldn’t have sold as many copies of the Boomerang List Builder as I have done, but setting up an affiliate program isn’t all plain sailing. Let me take you by the hand (UK Hell’s Kitchen viewers please note that I am in no way affiliated with Marco Pierre White!) and guide you through setting up your own affiliate program.

Now regular readers will remember that I did a very similar post in February of this year, you can view the article here:

https://elpassoblog.com/how-to-set-up-your-own-affiliate-program/

So I won’t be going over any of that again, if you don’t understand some of the things in this article, refer to the older one above and it should clear a few things up!

Step 1

The first thing that you need to do is decide how you will be running your program, will you be using an in house program, or will you be using someone like clickbank to manage affiliates and commissions?

For the Boomerang List Builder launch I used clickbank, this was because they have a huge affiliate network and they handle all affiliate payments for me. However, due to circumstances beyond my control, clickbank were unable to support the Boomerang List Builder after the launch, so I decided to use my own hosted solution, I use the script “Post Affiliate Pro”.

Step 2

The next step is to set up the tracking, different scripts have different tracking and integration methods so check the instruction manual for your script. Most will require you to add some sort of code to your landing pages, and to your thankyou pages so sales can be tracked. When you are confident everything has been set up, do some testing, I can’t stress how important this is, you need to make sure sales are tracking before you offer your program to the public!

Step 3

This step is something that a lot of people miss out on – customize your affiliate area and affiliate pages! I lose count on the number of times I have joined an affiliate program and I am presented with the same generic sign up pages, it’s only a small thing but it makes me think that if the product creator can’t be bothered to integrate a sign up form into his site design then he obviously doesn’t think much of his affiliates!

Take a look at my sign up page, it’s integrated into my site design and only took 10 minutes to put up:

http://www.boomeranglistbuilder.com/affiliate/affsignup.php

Step 4

You need to give your affiliates a reason to promote your product, when they go to your page, they don’t know how the product converts or anything about the product. You can see that on my sign up page I have added a screen shot showing affiliates how the product is converting. With a product that converts at 4.7% (The Boomerang List Builder) they would expect to get, on average, about 5 sales for every 100 visitors they send to the website.

I used DLGuard to process payments and handle the software delivery as it includes a cool little feature that shows you how well your products are converting! You can see my conversions here:

http://www.boomeranglistbuilder.com/affiliate/affsignup.php

Step 5

Give your affiliates some resources! And by “resources” I don’t just mean the odd affiliate banner. With the Boomerang List Builder program I have provided affiliates with a range of banners, articles (created just for the affiliate program), promotional emails and even a couple of text links that can be used as forum or email sigs!

Here’s on of my “different” banner designs, don’t worry, there are also some conventional
ones in there as well!

Step 6

Ask existing subscribers and customers to kindly sign up for the affiliate program and help you promote the product, this is where you guys come in 😉

http://www.boomeranglistbuilder.com/affiliate/affsignup.php

Many thanks for reading, I do hope that you have found some of this article useful. As I said at the start, if you need to know about things in more detail, including how you go about starting an affiliate program, check out the article here:

https://elpassoblog.com/how-to-set-up-your-own-affiliate-program/

Until next time,
Dan

« Previous Page