Archive for November, 2006

Win a Free Pass to Affiliate Summit

Thursday, November 16th, 2006

Beginning next week, we will be having a contest for all affiliates to win a free all-access pass to Affiliate Summit 2007 in Las Vegas next January 21-23

Affiliate Summit 2007 West is taking place January 21-23, 2007 in Las Vegas, NV. See the agenda and the list of speakers for the show.

There will not be any combination deals of conference passes and hotel rooms this time around. All hotel rooms will be booked direct with Bally’s Las Vegas.

The Affiliate Summit conference starts on Sunday, January 21 at 2 PM EST with the Affiliate Meet Market & Vendor Showcase and runs through the evening of Tuesday, January 23.

The rules are simple and anyone can be qualified to win!
Simply send us your favorite marketing/PPC/SEO article to affiliates [at] hometownquotes.com. Each article (up to 5 per affiliate) will earn an entry into our drawing to be held December 6th. You can also earn 1 entry for every 100 leads or each agent referral sent between November 20th and December 3rd.

Even if you do not win but want to take Affiliate Marketing seriously, I highly recommend Affiliate Summit.

We will be there and hope to see you too!

The Beginner’s Guide to SEO

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006

This is a slightly old thread at ABestWeb, but I just found it.

Check it out at -

http://forum.abestweb.com/showthread.php?t=78464

Affiliate Tool of the Week - AdWords Wrapper

Monday, November 13th, 2006

According to their web site:

The Google AdWords Wrapper is a FREE time saving tool that wraps keyword phrases in “quotation marks” (phrase match) and [square brackets] (exact match) for use in Google AdWords campaigns.

Keywords entered in Google AdWords Wrapper and Negative Keywords Maker are systematically changed to lowercase, with duplicates removed, and sorted in character code order.

Check it out. I have spent a little time with it and it is very impressive!

http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/adwords-wrapper.html

Need a Review of Your Site or Banner?

Sunday, November 12th, 2006

For a while now, I have been an active participant on the affiliate forum ABestWeb.

I strongly suggest signing up and becoming an active member in general but wanted to point out the Site review and Banner Review section especially.

It can be found here -

http://forum.abestweb.com/forumdisplay.php?f=146

So if you need some feedback, feel free to contact us here but also post it on there as well for some great feedback.

Send Us Your Tracking Codes!

Friday, November 10th, 2006

Just a quick note to our affiliates…

Want to keep track of your keyword performance? Send us your tracking codes for Google, Overture, or MSN and we will place them on our thank you pages. Not sure how to do this? Just give us a call or shoot us an email and we will be more than happy to help!

Another Adwords Quality Score Update

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006

From Revenews.Com

It wouldn’t be Christmas without a nice gift for affiliate marketers from our friend Google.

This year, in a few events that have sent many affiliate marketers reeling, Google has instituted Quality Score ratings to their Adwords advertisers’ landing pages. Pages and sites with low scores were rewarded with through-the-roof minimum bids for keywords, effectively pricing them out of the market.

With the introduction of a policy nearly two years ago from Adwords that only one ad would show per display url, affiliate marketers turned to creating their own landing pages for advertising traffic. These landing pages, typically a short way-point on the way to the merchant destination, have become a target of these quality score updates.

Read More Here

Conversions By Day and Hour

Tuesday, November 7th, 2006

We are currently on some serious upgrades to our reporting features on our in-house side of things.

The biggest upgrade is the ability to view conversions by day and hour for use with day parting / ad scheduling. Sneak Preview: WORST DAY - Sunday BEST DAY - Thursday (this kind of surprised us) WORST HOUR - 1:00-1:59am central time BEST HOUR - 13:00 - 13:59 central time.

I do want to note that due to some of the changes and what will inevitably some errors on our part, that the reports section may be a little slow at times. Usually when this happens, we are able to fix it within 2-3 minutes at the most, but if you run any big reports and it is very slow, I apologize If for some reason you need something urgently and it won’t run, call me and I can run an internal report right away.

If you want the overall reports on conversions by day and hour, shoot me an email at matt /at/ hometownquotes.com and I will send it to you.