I just got  my latest newsletter from the fine folks at Practical eCommerce and they featured a great ecommerce tip from Greg Laptevsky:

Did you know that 587 people search for “googles” instead of “goggles” each day? If you don’t mind attracting customers who are not spelling gurus, consider adding misspellings to your search marketing campaigns. Microsoft’s adCenter Labs has an excellent tool to research misspellings.  Don’t expect to get thousands of clicks from misspellings however they are often a great way to get some cheap traffic.

I wanted to throw  some caveats on this:

Merchants - you should definitely look into pricing on your misspells and see if it’s economically viable to bid on them yourself.   If you have savvy competitors, they may already be either buying these words or looking into it.  Not being there yourself to capitalize on your brand would be a mistake if the pricing is reasonable.  People “fat finger” search queries all the time and who would you rather have them find - you or your competition?

If you are protective of your trademark, you will want to take this into consideration on your affiliate terms as well and not only restrict affiliates from bidding on, or outbidding you for your properly spelled trademarked keywords, but also the common misspells.

Affiliates - before you go thinking that you have uncovered a potential goldmine here, make sure that you read and understand the terms and conditions when it comes to trademark bidding with any merchants you promote.   Some allow it and encourage it, and some (like my client C28.com) are very protective.   If you have any questions - ask the merchant.  I think it’s the right thing to do and it can save you some nasty cease and desist letters.

General terms and ideas are usually okay to bid on unless the merchant over reaches and trys to restrict thouse as well - but please honor any restrictions on trademarked keywords or their misspells and iterations if a merchant requests it.

God Bless,

Wade

I’m definitely recharged after the long weekend, and I was excited that I had an early appointment this morning to chat for a while with Josh Wexelbaum of PositionLeap and the Scrappy Business Blog.

Josh is a Believer and an affiliate who makes his living promoting merchant offers via paid search with Google, MSN and Yahoo.  His affiliate work has enabled him to see the world through some really far flung travel that will be continuing shortly as he heads off to Shanghai for 6 months (have laptop, will travel)

I met Josh through some of his travels - he had actually rented a room with a former employers sister in Cape Town. South Africa.  We had the chance to meet in person at Affiliate Summit - with Josh joining us at one of the Christian Affiliate Marketing Association events.

Josh and I spoke today on a range of topics surrounding affiliate marketing using paid search - here are some bullets on what we covered:

• Josh’s entry into the business
• The travel friendly lifestyle affiliate marketing has made possible
• The basics of paid search based affiliate marketing
• Some of terms and conditions he likes to see from merchants and networks
• The importance of merchants placing conversion tracking code for Super-affiliates using paid search
• Some of the techniques he uses to test offers, then profit big from the ones that work
• Why merchants shouldn’t fear paid search affiliates if well regulated

I had a great time and we chatted for about 30 minutes - I hope you enjoy.

If you’d like to follow Josh and his writings and videos on online and affiliate marketing, you can check out his blog at www.scrappybusiness.com

 

 CAM Blog Podcast #8 with Josh Wexelbaum [32:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (235)

I was going through my email box today and an email from Search Marketing Standard caught my eye.  If you aren’t familiar, Search Marketing Standard is a magazine that  focuses on the world of paid and organic search.  Today’s email had an offer for a free whitepaper from one of their advertisers that caught my eye and I thought I would check it out.

Seven Ways to Stop and Prevent Click Fraud  is of course a pitch for the services of ClickForensics, a Search Engine Auditing firm that provides services to help merchants optimize their paid search.   They site some interesting numbers in their report including:

72.4% of all sites in the Yahoo Publisher Network and Google Ad-sense are parked domains or Made for Ad sites

That translates to “low quality sites- nothing to qualify or compel high quality visitors” in my book.

They also talk about the different sources of click fraud including “botnets” and competitors and some steps you can take to maximize ROI on your paid search campaigns.