How to Become a Panda Friendly Affiliate

By

-

2012-02-29

Most of the affiliate marketers know the value of organic search traffic. Many even strive to strike an SEO home run. And why not? After all, it’s free exposure if you manage to get ranked for the right keywords. However, things don’t seem to be that rosy after Google’s Panda update – reaching the first page of the search results has become plain difficult.

So how does a regular affiliate marketer cope with the situation without resorting to any unethical practices? The answer lies in becoming friends with the Panda, rather than trying to game it. And how do you do that? By showing Google that you’re worth it.

Be a Creative Juggernaut

The Internet has a lot of junk floating around. There’s a massive amount of useless content created only for the sake of procuring artificial backlinks. Google created Panda to combat this very problem – so that it could filter out the good from the bad, and give quality results.

If you’ve been involved in the affiliate marketing industry even for a while, you should know to what extent some affiliates can go to achieve top rankings. Right from creating fake product reviews to spamming the web with low quality articles, it’s all happening. So if you want to make an impact and build a long term relationship with the search engines, you have to be creative in your approach.

Do Things Differently

Take targeted action in a way that sets you apart from the rest. Go a step ahead than the other affiliates in your market. Stop following the crowd and pave your own path. If all the others are after making quick money, you aim at delivering value. Here are a few ideas to help you inject creativity in your affiliate marketing to boost your search engine rankings:

Create a highly detailed video review of the product, rather than writing a short overview of it.
Talk to customers, take their feedback on how the product worked for them, and publish real case studies on your blog.
Educate your prospects about the ins and outs of your market with in-depth content in the form of reports, blog posts, videos, etc.
Interview an expert from the industry or the product creator itself, and publish it on your website.
Spread useful ideas by leveraging social sites such as Facebook and Twitter and build a list of prospects that you can promote to later on.
Add a forum to your niche site and get your visitors involved – understand the importance of user generated content.

Gain Natural Backlinks

When you give real value, you no longer struggle to get backlinks like most affiliates. By creating content that appeals to your target audience you will have relevant websites linking to you. One big advantage of acquiring backlinks naturally is that you start to see quick results.

Every single creative step that you take towards making your affiliate marketing campaign unique will propel you to new heights. As your content gets popular, you not only get traffic from Google, but also via social media sites.

8 Smart SEO Tips for Your Twitter Profile

By

Mustafa Khundmiri

-

2012-02-29

10

Twitter is turning out to be one of most useful social tools for online marketers. Regardless of what niche you’re targeting, you should leverage Twitter to the maximum to stay ahead of your competition. Besides driving direct traffic to your main website or blog, you should also try to get as much exposure as you can to your Twitter profile. This ultimately helps you boost your web presence, build a brand and of course, get more sales/leads in the long run.

Given below are eight smart SEO tips that you can use to get your Twitter profile high up on the SERPS for the right keywords.

1 ) Pick a username that makes sense SEO wise. In other words, your username should contain the keyword that you want are targeting. Try to keep it short and meaningful – something like @easywaystogardenandhavefun is not only hard to read, but also looks unprofessional.

2 ) When it comes to your name, make sure you use your real name. You may get tempted to use your primary keyword again, but avoid doing so. Why? Because you want people to see you as a real person, not an automated spam bot.

3 ) The website URL space shouldn’t be left empty. If you don’t have your own site or blog, create an personal page at http://About.Me – so that your visitors can learn more about you. Also, drop the “www” from the URL and avoid using a link shortening service. People are particular about what they click on these days. So the more clarity you give them, the more they trust you.

4 ) The bio is where you write about yourself, and include your keywords, which makes it integral for SEO. How you write your bio depends on who you are, but try to be interesting, witty, humorous – make it personality driven. Don’t stretch it; say more in a few words.

5 ) Your Twitter profile needs link juice just like your website – the off page SEO rules are no different. So make sure you’re linking to your Twitter profile from where ever you can – with your main keyword in the anchor text. If possible, get others to link to it too. Remember, the higher number of links you build, the better it is.

6 ) If you’re doing extensive SEO then you will want the search engines to pick on your primary keyword. This is why it makes sense to include them in your tweets whenever you can. In addition to that, use #hashtags from time to time as search engines are starting to give them importance.

7 ) Stay focused and regularly publish tweets that are relevant to your market. It’s okay to go off-topic once in a while, but try to stick to your subject as much as you can. This also helps you get more re-tweets from your followers.

8 ) See to it that you submit your Twitter profile to directories, a small step that can get it noticed by the search engines.

Digital River CEO Responds to DirectTrack Crash

By

Pesach Lattin

-

2012-02-28

16

In a letter to customers, Digital River’s CEO has responded to the issues that DirectTrack faced this week. Of course, since they could face possible legal actions and more obviously, loss of all their customer base, they did not address what happened.

Full text of letter is below.

As CEO of Digital River, I want you to have a clear explanation of the events that occurred over the past few days. Digital River experienced an abrupt and rare hardware failure late last week that impacted an array in one of our eight data centers. As a result, some of our marketing services, including DirectTrack, were offline.

We know that DirectTrack is a key component of your business and central to your success. Restoring service to all customers is a top priority. Our technical experts along with our vendors’ top engineers have been and will continue to work 24 hours a day until we return service to every client. As you read this email, service to virtually every DirectTrack client has been restored.

If your service is one that remains affected, the DirectTrack team will contact you directly and continue to provide updates until your service is back online. For those whose service has been restored, thank you for your patience during this recovery process.

Digital River values each and every client who has entrusted their businesses to us. We acknowledge that this is a very serious situation – one that has had the full attention of my entire leadership team – and I want to assure you that we consider it a top priority to restore service to every customer.

I want to reiterate that our DirectTrack platform was and continues to be supported by a redundant system. However, the rare and far-reaching extent of this storage failure prevented us from being able to quickly recover processing of your services in our secondary environment. To provide you added assurance in our infrastructure and technology stack, we are working with an industry-leading consulting firm to further validate our solution.

On behalf of the entire Digital River team, I pledge that we will work tirelessly to regain the trust you placed in us. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Joel Ronning
Chief Executive Officer
Digital River, Inc.

Bodog Raided by Feds, Founders to be Arrested

By

Pesach Lattin

-

2012-02-28

8

Online Gambing Giant Bodog has been raided by the feds late last night, and its founder billionare Calvin Arye and associates have been indicted and/or arrested. Arye has been accused, under a grand jury indictment, of operating an illegal gambling business in the United States involving sports betting and committing money laundering

The Bodog website domain has been seized and shut down, although the company points out that they no longer use that domain, and all have been using Bovada.lv for deposits for US residents. This happened the day after several other gambling sites were shut down by the feds, and their domains seized.

“Sports betting is illegal in Maryland, and federal law prohibits bookmakers from flouting that law simply because they are located outside the country,” U.S. AttorneyRod J. Rosenstein said in a statement. “Many of the harms that underlie gambling prohibitions are exacerbated when the enterprises operate over the internet without regulation.”

The indictment accuses the founders of illegally transferring money from accounts all over the world in order to pay gamblers and more importantly for this industry, their affiliates and advertising networks.

“Today’s indictment of Bodog Entertainment Group S.A. and its founder and operators sends a strong deterrent message to those that facilitate illegal online sports betting operations and commit crimes against our nation’s financial system,” said William Winter, Special Agent in Charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Homeland Security Investigations in Baltimore. “The proceeds from illegal Internet gambling are sometimes used to fuel organized crime and support criminal activity. ICE HSI, together with our law enforcement partners, will disrupt and dismantle organizations that commit these crimes, regardless of their location, whether here in the United States or abroad.”

A representative of Calvin Ayre posted that

This seizure of Bodog.com is a bit odd as the domain name hasn’t been operational for quite some time and isn’t in use for any active commerce anywhere in the world. Other Bodog Brand properties won’t be affected by the seizure of this inactive domain.

I asked our publisher and Bodog Brand founder Calvin Ayre about the seizure, “Not sure what to say. BodogBrand.com is a brand-licensing organisation based outside the US. The brand left the market last year and the domain in question has been dormant globally for longer than that. We are only currently doing brand licensing deals outside the US so this domain had no place in any of our current plans.”

However, no one from the company has addressed the criminal prosecution of Mr. Ayre as part of this investigation. At the moment, Mr. Ayre’s whereabouts are unknown, but it is likely that already there is an international arrest warrant issued, and he will fight extradition to the United States on these charges.

Facebook Owes Us Billions Claims Yahoo

By

Pesach Lattin

-

2012-02-28

5

In an interesting twist, Yahoo has come out with a claim that Facebook is infringing on up to 20 different patents that they own, including advertising, the personalization of websites and social networking and messaging. This potentially is a huge windfall for Yahoo, and more importantly an enormous issue for Facebook.

So far, all that has occurred is that Yahoo sent Facebook a nasty note saying that Facebook might have an issue, that they own a bunch of patents and that Facebook needs to pay them licensing fees for those patents. At the same time, Yahoo called the New York Times and let them know of this potential show down.

The actual patents aren’t identified, but since Yahoo owns thousands and thousand of them, I’m sure Facebook is definitely worried. The problem with the patent process is that it’s very open to interpretation and extremely expensive to defend. Many companies instead of fighting, will often license patents in order to prevent a long legal process and then risk losing and potentially having their business shutdown.

The value of these patents obviously isn’t known either, but looking at other cases recently including Google paying $12.5 billion in licensing fees, one can assume that this is a multi-billion dollar case also. In fact, with Yahoo loosing market share everywhere and making really bad business decisions, many people see that Yahoo’s huge patent database is perhaps their biggest value and they’ll grow into a licensing company, forcing most of the the internet to somehow negotiate with them on licensing things we take for granted including instant messaging, email within social networks and more.

There is currently a huge debate on software patents, since many of them are extremely vague and can be applied anywhere. Some people have called for software patents to be invalidated by the supreme court, because of this and other issues.

Report: Affiliates Can Make More Sales

By

Pesach Lattin

-

2012-02-28

0

A new report by Affiliate Window strategist Owen Hewitson answers the question if Affiliate sales can ever be incremental. Basically some people have questioned if affiliate sales are often being sent to people who would have bought the product anyway, and that affiliates are doing nothing more than piggybacking other promotions and advertisements.

Hewitson points out in the study, found here, that when asking this question, merchants and advertisers need to be more aware of what people’s online shopping habits are like. That means that while people might be curious about an item, they will still do comparison-shopping and look at other options.

On top of that, they need to look at the number of new customers that came through an affiliate channel, plus look at the difference between affiliate customers and new customers through other channels.

He also examines how to monetize high traffic affiliates more, by providing them with special offers and the use of abandonment codes. According to the study, as much as 87% of online shoppers sometimes do not purchase a product while there are items in the basket. This could be used to give the affiliates a way to push those customers through other methods, discounts and behavioral targeting.

HasOffers Bashes DirectTrack’s Downtime

By

Lucas Brown

-

2012-02-27

0

I thought it would be appropriate for HasOffers to respond to the recent Digital River catastrophy, more specifically how it relates to DirectTrack. Most of the world already seems pretty confused about the extremely low level of redundancy described in their statement on DirectTrack.com, or if in fact the situation was caused by other factors. We have even received some inquiries from clients wanting to know if something similar could happen to them on HasOffers.

In this email I would like to cover four things:

1. What does it mean that HasOffers is on the cloud.
2. HasOffers ad server redundancy
3. Our fault tolerant databases
4. How to quickly rescue any traffic that is suffering from the DirectTrack outage.

HasOffers on Amazon Web Services
The single largest project our engineering team has undertaken was migrating our services to the cloud. Rather than hosting our tracking technology, databases and application in co-location facilities with our own hardware, we migrated to Amazon EC2 instances located in four facilities around the world. We chose AWS because they operate state-of-the-art, highly available data center facilities with the highest level of reliability, as well as for the extreme flexibility they provide to build our own configurations.

Amazon EC2 Service highlights: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#highlights
SLA for Amazon EC2: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2-sla/

HasOffers Ad Servers (Tracking Configuration)

The greatest advantage to hosting our ad servers on AWS is our ability to deploy servers in multiple data centers at the touch of a button. Currently, our ad servers are deployed in four regions of Amazon Web Services. Within each region, the ad servers are deployed in at least two availability zones. These zones act as isolated data centers, sharing the same geographic location but different equipment and hardware. We designed our ad server deployment so that instances distributed across multiple availability zones failover to each other. This provides eight fold redundancy to ensure tracking uptime.

Beyond our cloud infrastructure for tracking, our ad serving technology is built to operate independent of database connectivity. If there is ever an issue with external databases, the ad server continues to track campaigns and will update the databases when connectivity is restored.

Fault Tolerant Databases

Each one of our clients have their own independent database. These databases are then configured on master-master database server deployments. One of the masters in each deployment is located in the Amazon East facility and another is either based in Amazon West or in Amazon’s facility in Ireland (depending on location). We then provide a layer of database slave servers that replicate each master server in the Amazon facilities. If there is ever a problem with a slave or master database server, there is always an active secondary database server. HasOffers makes hourly backups from a dedicated slave server in each configuration, replicating incrementally. We also take daily snapshots of each master. These backups are stored separately on Amazon S3 and are also transferred to a remote co-location facility. Additionally, we use HA Proxy monitory scripts to manage real-time failover across database servers.

Moving Traffic to HasOffers
Current HasOffers clients have all the redundancy described above. If you want migrate to HasOffers, the process is very simple and automated. You and your technical team can create an account on your own and be up and running in minutes. You may also email sales@hasoffers.com for assistance. You don’t need to pay a setup fee, there is no required contact, and you can use the first 30 days for free. All of this is pretty important when you need to get the ball moving quickly.

Here are some support documents to assist your initial configuration:

1. Import Advertiser Information Via CSV:
http://www.hasoffers.com/wiki/Application_Support:Importing_Advertisers

2. Create Offers or Use CSV Import
http://www.hasoffers.com/wiki/Application_Support:Importing_Offers

3. Import Affiliate Information Via CSV:
http://www.hasoffers.com/wiki/Application_Support:Importing_Affiliates

Spread the Word
Please feel free to forward this email on to any affiliates, advertisers, and/or partners that may be concerned about the reliability of HasOffers tracking. We are also happy to answer any additional questions you have regarding our redundancy and reliability.

And remember, you can always check status.hasoffers.com to view the status of each server pool on the HasOffers platform.

Bevo Media Launches First CPA Ad Exchange

By

Pesach Lattin

-

2012-02-27

1

Bevo Media, an online marketing technology company based in San Diego, is set to launch the first ever exchange for the performance marketing industry in March 2012. The platform will give internet marketers the opportunity to display their highest converting ads, landing pages, and affiliate offers for any given impression. This technology, although present in the Cost Per Milli (CPM) sector of online marketing, has yet to be created in the Cost Per Action (CPA) industry.

“Our objective has been to bring every side of the performance marketing industry together since day one of building Bevo Media. The new Bevo Media Exchange platform is what our team has envisioned every step of the way,” said Michael Chambrello, Managing Partner at Bevo Media.

Bevo Media launched it’s initial tracking platform in 2010. In February 2011, Bevo launched a platform made exclusively to facilitate affiliate networks ability to recruit publishers. Since their initial launch, Bevo Media has become one of the most popular tracking platform’s in the affiliate industry, servicing the tracking needs of thousands of affiliate marketers.

How to Become Rich In CPA Affiliate Marketing

By

Pesach Lattin

-

2012-02-26

3

It’s always funny to me all the affiliate marketers who post photos of themselves with bling, money coming out their month, and then post a photo of their 2002 Toyota Camry. It makes you wonder first how much money they are really making, but more interesting, what exactly they are spending their money on. It seems to me that something isn’t right here, if they are making money, why are they having trouble paying repair costs on their clunker?

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve made a lot of money in this industry, sometimes millions a month on CPA Arbitrage, CPA brokering. From making money, I’ve made a lot of mistakes that have cost me a lot of money also – and those lessons are worth almost every dollar that I lost. I thought I’d share a bit about what I’ve learned and hopefully some affiliate out there can think about.

It’s not how much you make, its about how much MORE you make. Having a good lifestyle is not how much you make total, but how much extra you are making. If your cost of living is $2,500 a month and you are taking in $10k a month, which means you have $7,500 before taxes to spend on whatever you want. You can get a loan on a $1M house for $4,000/month if that’s the most important thing you want. Think about it.
Save Each Month. Put aside a set amount of money each month, I recommend 10% of your income. This means no matter what 10% should be going to to savings that you don’t touch, except to make smart investments outside the industry including buying a house. I keep on mentioning a house, because right now housing prices are at a all-time low. Did you know that if you put only $100/month away for 10 years at 5% yield, you’ll get $15,00. Increase that to $500/month and you’ll have $77,000+. How about $500 at 30 years, it’s almost half a million. Make some good investment choices with that money, that $500/month in 30 years alone is $1.1M.
Keep to a Budget. Decide what you’ll spend on essential needs, don’t touch that each month, then do your savings, and then figure an amount you’ll spend on “fun.” Never go over that amount. People don’t realize how things add-up. You’ll think spending a few hundred here and there isn’t much, but then you’ll get a credit card bill and realize that you spent thousands.
Open a Corporation/LLC. Simply put, you need your company to pay all business related expenses before you get income. Figure an amount to pay yourself each month on the budget you determined, don’t use the business for personal expenses ever, and then pay all business expenses out of the business. I’m going to talk more about taxes on a later date.

You’ve probably heard the stories: Guy wins $1M, and within 24 months he has nothing. You need to realize when you make money in this game, the best bet is to save, budget and plan. While I’m not going to tell you not to ever waste the money on “silly things,” I am going to tell you from experience, you need to make sure you thinking about what you are doing, and make sure you can really afford it.

Ben POF Reveals Secrets of POF

By

Ben Louie

-

2012-02-25

13

People ask me all the time how to get started with Plenty of Fish Ads. In fact, they usually send a message like “You’re totally like the Jeremy Lin of Online Marketing, how do I get started making slam dunks with POF.” Of course, the references are really accurate, and POF is definitely Lin-Tastic. Instead of having to reply to thousands and thousands of fan mails that I get weekly, it seemed to me that I should simply lay it out so everyone knows how to get started to making money with affiliate offers on POF.

1. Pick a niche demographic and stay with it until you get a positive ROI. It’s no secret that with every new traffic source, there are going to be some growing pains as you learn the ins and outs. Minimize the cost (and the risk) by choosing a smaller demographic. Choose ad copy and images that relate to your demographic to increase believably and, hopefully, performance.

2. Split test ads. I recommend between 5-10 different ads to start. 5 images and 2 ad copies is ideal so you can see which ad copy performs better with each image. Newer advertisers tend to put all their eggs in one basket by only uploading one ad. DO NOT DO THIS!! Even the most seasoned POF advertiser is consistently trying to outperform themselves.

3. Split test demographics. Just because your offer accepts traffic from the US, Canada and UK, does NOT mean all those countries should go into 1 campaign. Why? Because if you spent $100 on traffic, you’ll have no idea which country took up the traffic and thus, will be unable to associate performance with any country in particular. Same goes with gender and age (5-10 year increments is ideal). It’s best to split things up so you can identify what is making you money and what is losing you money.

4. Split test bids. POF delivers your ad according to how much CPM you bid: the highest CPM ads get shown to the user first, followed by the second highest and so forth. So while you may want to bid low to minimize initial costs, you may be shooting yourself in the foot by having your ad delivered after the user has seen 25 similar ads already. I’ve had many times where advertisers would increase their bids and all of a sudden their campaigns became profitable because of the priority in delivery.

5. Landing Pages. In my opinion, always start with the direct link for a week. This establishes a baseline of performance for you to compare your landing pages too. I would say almost all of POF’s top guys are using landers so it’s a skill worth learning and mastering.

5.5. NEVER GIVE UP!

For more FREE information, check out the POF advertising blog at https://blog.ads.pof.com where I post the best tips, tricks, tools and case studies to help you make the most out of your advertising venture at POF.

DirectTrack Still Down, Says it Was Scheduled Maintenance

By

Pesach Lattin

-

2012-02-25

2

Almost 48 hours since the original crash, Performance Marketing Insider has learned that there are still networks facing significant or complete network outage. As reported yesterday in Dozens of Networks Shut Down: DirectTrack Suffers Massive Failure, DirectTrack reported a massive SANS storage failure. However, several insiders have pointed that this type of failure is highly uncommon, especially when almost all major modern systems have multiple points of redundancy and backup plans in-case this happens.

What makes this story even more strange is that DirectTrack itself, while issuing a statement that there was a failure, also claims something completely different on its website. According to its website, and a Google search confirming it, DirectTrack is claiming that this was a “Schedule Maintenance.” This raises a lot more questions than answers.

Performance Marketing Insider has also learned that one of DirectTrack’s largest CPA Networks has already made plans to move from DirectTrack to another platform. They have asked that we don’t reveal who they are, in order to allow them to download data and make the transfer seamlessly.

How to Spot a Backlink Worthy Website

By

Mustafa Khundmiri

-

2012-02-24

10

Google Panda’s on the prowl, and it may just get you for linking to bad neighborhoods. It’s about time bloggers and webmasters realize that quality link building is serious business. Low quality backlinks will only make things worse. If you want a sturdy, long term relationship with the search engines then build links more intelligently, naturally – the way it’s supposed to be done. Focus on getting backlinks from sites that the search engines think are ‘good enough’.

So how do you really determine the value of a site when it comes to link building? Here are a few things to keep in mind before you say “I do” to any new backlinking opportunity that comes your way:

1) Great Content – Gone are the days when you could submit a bunch of articles to a few article directories and get a quick link. Today, you need to look beyond, and make sure the content on the site you’re planning to get a backlink from is worth it. Is the content targeted and value oriented? If the answer is yes, then you don’t need to think twice before linking to it. Any website that strictly keeps out low quality content and encourages SEO friendly content can prove to be a valuable backlink opportunity.

2) Niche Authority – Even though getting a link from any authority site carries weight, backlinks specifically from niche authority sites are more powerful. Quality and relevancy are two factors that make a good niche site. Any authority website that is relevant to your niche and offers real value is backlink worthy. The aim here is to try and acquire links that are laser targeted.

3) A Clean Look – Google loves websites that deliver value and offer clear insight. A site that gives top priority to quality content is much more valuable than one that is bogged down with all kinds of ads. For instance, linking to a mediocre blog that has AdSense plastered all over it is a bad idea. The site has to have a clean look and feel.

4) Link Building Practices – Do a little background check on the website you want to gain a backlink from. Analyze its link building practices to get a fair idea about how valuable the site is. Typically a good website that is known for its quality will have lots of natural, relevant links pointing to back – and that’s exactly what you should be looking for. Taking this one small step ensures that you don’t ‘connect’ with sites that use questionable backlinking tactics.

5) Spam Control – No matter what site you use for link building purposes, see to it that it has an active spam control. A website that keeps a regular tab on its user activity shows how serious it is about maintaining overall quality. For example, a blog that on an average has 30 spammy comments under each post is not worth commenting on. After all, you don’t want to link to any web property that may get you in the bad books of the search engines. The more you work on associating with the ‘right’ sites, the better results you’ll get.

Creating a More Engaging SEO Landing Page

By

Mustafa Khundmiri

-

2012-02-24

1

In the SEO world, any page that your visitor lands on is your landing page. And if this page isn’t engaging enough, you lose points, and the visitor. Here’s how to create a more engaging SEO landing page that gets people interested in what you’re offering and makes them take action.

Connect to People, Not Bots

Getting your website ranked is only the first part of the equation. The real challenge is converting your visitors into leads or sales. If your traffic isn’t giving you business, it’s as good as nothing.

The search engines have evolved over the years. They are a lot more intelligent than what they used to be. In the early days, you only had to focus on a few simple factors to get top rankings in the most competitive markets. Things have drastically changed now; there’s more to SEO than stuffing your page with keywords.

If you want to get some real world results with SEO, impress people, not the bots. Writing good copy is imperative if you seek to connect to your target audience, and at the same time solidify your relationship with the search engines.

If you want more out of your organic traffic then tell your visitors what they want to hear. Give them the value that they’re craving for. Show them the problems they’re facing and then lead them towards solutions. It’s no longer about creating web pages – it’s about creating experiences.

The Power of ‘You’ Over ‘I’

The moment you realize the power of ‘You’, you’ll outrank your competition. It’s as simple as that.

Ask yourself, what exactly does my page convey? Is it focused more on I, me and myself? Or it’s more about the people I’m targeting? Is it talking to them? About them?

Remember, no body’s interested in how amazing your company is or how it took you 3 years to create the best software tool on the planet. People are people – they’ll always focus on themselves before anything.

If you want to make your SEO landing page more engaging, then grab them by the eyeballs. Don’t waste your time trying to be too mysterious – get to the point. Talk about what they want. Elaborate on their desires. Stop them from hitting the back button.

Get their attention with a big, bold headline. Break down your content into digestible chunks – smaller paragraphs and short sentences. Use a call to action that makes an impact and is crystal clear.

Structure It the Right Way

If your page fails to grab the attention of your visitors in the first ten seconds, it simply fails. Structuring your page the right way is crucial – it can make or break it.

Look at your page as a funnel, where people narrow down towards the call to action. Your main content goes above the fold, and everything else below it.

Finally, the performance of your SEO landing page depends on a number of factors, which is why you need to keep testing. Restructure it from time to time, make changes and play around with different ideas. Sometimes even a tiny tweak can make a big difference to your page’s engagement level.

Dozens of Networks Shut Down: DirectTrack Suffers Massive Failure

By

Pesach Lattin

-

2012-02-24

13

According both DirectTrack and it’s customers, DirectTrack has suffered a massive failure to its entire system, that has no “immediately resolution.” Those in the industry first attributed this to server severe Denial of Service Attack, but recent emails between the customers and networks show that the failure is much more serious.

The following correspondence was sent by direct track engineers and client services explaining the failure

Unfortunately, the efforts to restore operability of the storage area network (SAN) have stalled. This is impacting all Digital River platforms, including DirectTrack. Senior engineers and technicians from Hitachi and Sun Microsystems, the SAN vendors, are on site in the Digital River data center. All possible measures to restore operability of the SAN are being taken.

While all teams and resources are working to correct this problem as quickly as possible, we do not anticipate an immediate resolution. Should the current status change in the immediate term, we will provide an update. Otherwise we will update you on the progress of the corrective action as such progress is made.

Whether or not DirectTrack could have prevented this is unknown for certain, but some insiders have pointed out that this was caused because DirectTrack does not use a fully mirrored system. A single point of storage system means that when a failure like this happens, there is not another system “mirror” to keep the structure up. Several systems such as Cake Marketing, HasOffers, and Google, Yahoo and Amazon provide this to all their customers which would prevent this serious disaster.

UrbanObserver

ADOTAT

How to Become a Panda Friendly Affiliate

8 Smart SEO Tips for Your Twitter Profile

Digital River CEO Responds to DirectTrack Crash

Bodog Raided by Feds, Founders to be Arrested

Facebook Owes Us Billions Claims Yahoo

Report: Affiliates Can Make More Sales

HasOffers Bashes DirectTrack’s Downtime

Bevo Media Launches First CPA Ad Exchange

How to Become Rich In CPA Affiliate Marketing

Ben POF Reveals Secrets of POF

DirectTrack Still Down, Says it Was Scheduled Maintenance

How to Spot a Backlink Worthy Website

Creating a More Engaging SEO Landing Page

Dozens of Networks Shut Down: DirectTrack Suffers Massive Failure

Other Great Reads

Data, Dance, and Daring Campaigns: Erin Levzow’s Approach to Building Loyalty

Streaming’s Big Lie: The Future of TV Is Already Broke

How to Narrow the Scope of Information Sought by an FTC Civil Investigative Demand (CID)

Did Your Company Receive a Letter From the FTC? FTC Warning Letters and Notices of Penalty Offense

The Good, the Bad, and the SPO-ly

Must Read

About Us

Follow Us