Direct Response

Over the past 8 weeks our team has tested Rich Snippets on a select group of sites.  We’ve seen our CTR and organic rankings jump BIG TIME!!!  On the sites that don’t have Rich Snippets, using the same SEO techniques, we saw very little movement.  Bottom line:  Rich Snippets, when used properly, have a significant impact on organic traffic.

Here’s what a Rich Snippet looks like:

Here’s a few solid tips on how to use Rich Snippets to improve CTR:

1.  Install a Rich Snippet on your site and test to see if you have it installed properly.  Here’s Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool.

2.  Lock in a compelling author that is dedicated to creating original, compelling content daily.  Another option is to find a celebrity “author” and have somone ghostwrite original, compelling content on their behalf.

3.  Have your author spend several hours a day posting, connecting, and adding content on Google+.

4.  Link all of your sites to your Google+ account.

5.  Create a group for the main keyword you’re trying to rank for.

6.  Invite people to that group that are associated with that keyword.

7.  Join groups that are associated with the keyword that you are trying to rank for.

8.  Have conversations with people in groups that are associated with the keyword you’re trying to rank for.

9.   Use a good Author picture to increase CTR.  It’s to my understanding that you have to use a picture of a real human being.  Google isn’t allowing company logos etc.

Through our A/B tests we’re seeing huge results with Rich Snippets.

NOTE:  Backlink building is still critical to ranking online.  Most important though is to build links through 100% natural advertising:  non-paid guest posting, press releases, earned media, etc.

Just got back from another successful trade show in NYC!  The event we attended was the Health & Beauty Expo, which pulls together some of the best brands and service providers in the world.  If you’re interested in building a brand in the H&B vertical, then I highly recommend this show.

At any rate, one common mistake people make at conventions in NYC is to locate their hotel near the Javits Center.  While Javits is a great convention center, the hotels and night life in the area aren’t all that great.  It’s for that reason that I recommend you lock in a spot in the Meatpacking District, which is a short taxi cab ride away from Javits.

My favorite spot in Meatpacking is The Gansevoort.  While the Park Ave. Gansevoort is off the chain, the night life and overall experience at the Meatpacking Gansevoort is second to none.

This past show the Gansevoort staff comped a sweet penthouse for our team…Solid!  We had an amazing time and closed some HUGE deals.

And to our team that spent time was us at the penthouse, cheers to domination of the next vertical!!

Here’s some pics of the Meatpacking Gansevoort Penthouse.  Totally badass!

My comfort zone in business is living outside of my comfort zone.  I’ve found this zone allows me to take on new challenges and never become complacent in my success.

What’s your comfort zone?

Over the past year I’ve seen a lot of solid advertisers/networks leave HitPath, HasOffers, and other tracking platforms for Cake Marketing.   Just about everyone in the industry is buzzing over the dominance of Cake Marketing.

A few weeks ago I was introduced to Cake by Pace Lattin from Perform Insider (excellent publication btw).  I asked Cake to provide us a background on their company and to shed more light on their recent success.  Below is a guest post that Brittany Edmonston provided me.  I asked her to make it salesy and I hope Cake Marketing gets some good leads from this.

DISCLAIMER:  This post was NOT paid for.  Moreover I do not have a referral agreement in place with Cake, so if you happen to contact them, it makes no difference whether you mention that you heard about them from me or someone else.  Enjoy!:

How Did Cake Marketing Get Its Start?

Having previously owned and operated a successful lead generation company in the finance vertical President of Cake Marketing, Jeff McCollum understands the significance of an accurate tracking infrastructure to power your performance-based marketing campaigns. As President of Accelerize in 2007, a division of Accelerize New Media, Inc. (also Cake Marketing’s parent company) McCollum worked with outsourced tracking providers to run his day-to-day tracking operations. He and his team of affiliate managers experienced multiple incidents of network downtime, inaccurate tracking, and insufficient reporting that continually threatened the relationships with their publishers and the integrity of their proprietary offers. With continual frustration and a mistrust of outsourced technology available to performance marketers at the time, Jeff partnered with Dave Stewart, Founder and Head of Technology and Product Development of Cake Marketing to lay the blueprint for what Cake Marketing is today. After a year of initial development and a year of in house testing, the duo released the Cake Marketing tracking and analytics platform to the public. At this time, Cake became it’s own entity and the Accelerize Network was sold to an industry-recognized lead generator in the performance marketing space. The success of the Cake Marketing tracking solution today can be traced back to McCollum and Stewarts combined years of industry expertise, months of beta testing, and continued innovation and cutting edge technology. In less than two years the Cake Marketing team has more than quadrupled with a strong development, customer support and sales team.

Increase Revenue And Reduce Costs With A Solid Tracking Platform

Within the performance-based marketing industry there are numerous ways to increase revenue. What it comes down to is the following:

1. Explore new distribution channels
2. Continually tweak and optimize your offers
3. Work with top converting and proven affiliates
4. An accurate tracking and analytics platform

Cake Marketing is a tracking and analytics platform founded over 5 years ago with the goal of providing performance based marketers a scalable, accurate, and innovative infrastructure to run their online campaigns. The Cake Marketing platform can track your online campaigns from click to conversion with precision, efficiency, and innovative technology. With its feature-rich interface, exploring new distribution channels, optimizing offers, and narrowing in on top converting affiliates is now a simple, efficient, and profitable task.

Reporting is a key feature when running a successful business. With Cakes accurate real time reporting, clients are well aware of any and all traffic that occurs. The Cake platform has built in tools and features to protect and alert against fraud with customizable email alerts to notify you of any suspicious behavior. Additionally, if you are on the Cake tracking platform you will ONLY be charged for UNIQUE clicks. If one of your affiliates generates duplicate or fraudulent clicks it will not be your burden. You will not receive end of the month bills with astronomical click fees that were clearly the doing of some 3rd party fraudulent source.

Looking to get into mobile marketing and tracking? Look no further than CAKE! Our platform tracks in APPS and PPI (Pay Per Installs) with robust reporting available in a single dashboard. Use in conjunction with your web based campaigns or on it’s own.

Ever consider Lead Generation? It’s the perfect way to optimize your traffic and increase your revenue by selling and distributing your leads. Cake supports ALL methods of lead validation and delivery including; Ping Post, Host/Post, Dynamic Pricing, a Review Queue, and even third party integrations with lead validation sources.

5 Reasons Why Cake Should Power Your Business…

1.    Accurate

Ability to collect more data fields per offer which provides a detailed analysis on each individual click and the opportunity to increase the quality of traffic generated.

2.    Ease Of Use

Easy to use software and wizard based navigation system caters to both the experienced online marketer, and the entry-level affiliate manager. Leverage the platform to fit your needs.

3.    Connect

Cake Marketing offers full API integration customizable to your needs.

Take advantage of the numerous 3^rd party integrations including offer marketplaces such as Bevo and oDigger to leverage your company’s recognition and build your referral base.

4.   Support

When you sign up with Cake Marketing you receive free 24/7-customer support, a dedicated account manager, follow up trainings courtesy calls and new feature rollout webinars for the duration of your contract. We pride ourselves on developing relationships with our Cake clients and partner with them to help achieve their business goals.

5.   Innovative

Cake Marketing is constantly building out new features to increase efficiency. Whether it is outbound marketing tools, a mobile app to check stats remotely or built in fraud alerts; Cake does it all.

The Cake Marketing platform can successfully manage both the start up affiliate network in addition to large-scale brands, and agencies alike. We provide the tools to power your business and make you a key player with your competitors. We are continually releasing new features that not only increase productivity but also enhance the value of your business and put you one step ahead of the competition. If you would like to learn more about Cake Marketing and how it can help your business, please contact info@cakemarketing.com or call 949-548-CAKE to schedule a demo.

In the past 6 month’s I’ve saved ( or made depending on how you look at it) a total of $2,587,200 by building out an offshore development team, that, KEY, I have managed onshore.   My offshore developers are beating the living shit out of my onshore team.  In fact, it’s getting SO BAD that I’m seriously considering divorcing myself from all onshore development.

Here’s how I cracked the dev. code and brought my development costs down from $400 per hour ($64k a month @ 160 hours) to a measley $15 per hour ($2400 a month @ 160 hours), while improving quality and efficiency:

In order to understand how we got to the present, it’s important to study the past. 

When I first started running offers in 2001, I was paying $400-600 an hour for onshore developers via Verisign’s dev. team.  Like many other overcharged advertisers, I had tried to find quality developers offshore…all to no avail.  

Stymied by the overbearing development costs, I spent years trying to make it work with offshore development companies such as eLance, oDesk, Yellow Brick, etc.   Every time things started off well and quickly spiraled out of control.  The language barrier was impossible.  Moreover the developers I’d worked with just didn’t seem to “get it.”

Left with no other options, I succumbed to overpaid, mediocre onshore developers to get by.  Weighed down by the costs and lack of urgency in our work, our internal dev. projects seemed to lag for years.

I was at an impasse until last year when I started working Kinkar Saha.  For all of us who work with Kinkar Saha and his crack developement team in India, we can all say the same:  Kinkar is second to none in the world of offshore development.   His team of developers work faster, smarter, and better than any development I’ve ever worked with HERE IN THE USA!!!

That’s why a number of seasoned internet marketers that I know outsource nearly 100% of development to Kinkar.  Kinkar’s team completely built out some of the most impressive technology in the Direct Response space.

Enticed by the talent that Kinkar’s team brought to the table, my partner Ron Gamble and I brought Kinkar into Direct Response Agency to start offering development services to our friends in the industry.    In less than 1 year we’ve taken a team of 7 full-time developers and have grown it to 34.   Now for the first time ever we’re opening up our agency to select advertisers in the industry!!!

We provide dev. seats on a month-to-month basis.  Bottom line: $2400 buys you a full-time developer that will grind it out for 160 hours a month - Monday through Friday, 8 hours a day.  You also receive a domestic manager as a point of contact, or work directly with Kinkar himself.

One developer alone can handle all of your LL integrations, html conversions, pixel placing, and a solid portion of a larger dev. project.  Much like mechanical turks, these developers follow orders and don’t give you any lip (HA!).  The biggest difference is that our development team is highly experienced in running the backends of campaigns and undergoes extensive training / QA.

We’ve been able to sustain the growth of our development center in India by opening up a satellite office here in the US that actively manages the India team.  With everything in flow, the developer’s productivity rates are improving by the day!!!

So here’s the MILLION DOLLAR QUESTION:  Why Is Dev. So Important?

Solid development will turn your vision into a reality.  Creating higher levels of value on the backend of your offer will improve retention rates, increase new acquisitions, and proliferate your brand via viral marketing.  It’s all about KNOCKING THE SOCKS OFF your clients.

By lowering the barrier-to-entry SIGNIFICANTLY to tier-1 developers, Kinkar’s team allows advertisers of all sizes to take on higher-level dev. projects.  When you have 30 bad-ass developers plugging away for you from sunrise to sunset, you get shit done at a higher level.

Please note that our design and development agency needs 2-3 weeks notice prior to launching a project.  In order to pass the savings back to the client, we run a low-overhead operation that runs at full capacity.  Once we take-off on a project you’ll enjoy our Bazooka Effect:

- Highest Converting Offers

- Massive Volumes Of Traffic

- Tier-1 Developers At Anti-Competitive Rates (sorry competition, it’s a free market)

To learn more about our development services, click here.

P.S.  Guess what I did with the $2,587,200 that I save in dev.?  Duh, I put it toward advertising

SEO is evolving and I LOVE what’s I’m seeing.  It’s all about quality!

White-Hat is simply becoming synonymous with…M A R K E T I N G!!!!  Here’s a must-read article on the subject that was just released today on Search Engine Land!