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[Peter Cruz Contribution Level: 1]

I did a search here and on my MS page.. and couldn't find an answer. So please help if someone knows =)

I purchased an adwords (Google) ad to promote my MS affiliate site.. but I purchased a domain from GoDaddy to make a more "professional" appearance... but Google won't allow me to use the new URL.. since it doesn't match the TRUE url of the actual site (if I understand it). Of course in the MS course, it says NOT to turn on masking the URL to prevent it from messing up the stats tracked by the affiliate program.

Anyone know any way around this? I'd like to use a pro type url.. and managed about 14 hits last night while I slept and 1 clickthrough.. but then I guess the Google nazi's picked up the ad and suspended it.. so it's not picked up any action today.. which has bummed me out.

Anyone have a clue?

Thanks
Peter

[Steve Rodgers Contribution Level: 3]

Hey Peter,

You might get better insight on this if it was posted in the PPC section, but I'll post and hopefully we can have some knowledgeable folks catch on and help you out here.

I definitely am NOT a PPC expert but I still may be able to steer you in the right direction...

From what I've come to understand, Google isn't exactly thrilled with affiliate links anymore mainly because they just go for the sale and don't really provide any value to the visitor.

What you may have to end up doing is creating a creating a content site with a blog. Instead of having people land on your MS affiliate page, you could write a review of the course on your blog and refer people to your affiliate link that way.

With this approach, you'll be providing relevant value to the visitor (if they are in fact looking for something related to magnetic sponsoring) and you'll be pre-selling the course by writing a shining review on the topic.

Google should reward you for providing value, and the reader may just reward you with a sale.

To take it one step further, you could have a way for readers to opt-in to an email newsletter, where you can keep providing value to them and keep your MS link in front of them as well.

Not only that, but a blog is a great way to get quick traffic and if you double up with PPC to that particular blog post, you may just find yourself pulling traffic from both the paid listing and the free listing (that blogs generate, sometimes on the first page of google). Plus the blog will start to rank higher as it gains popularity over time, especially if you write a relevant and value packed review.

There's going to be some SEO stuff involved, but the All In One SEO Pack plugin for wordpress will make that quite simple.

Like I said, I'm no expert, but hopefully this may help. There are certainly others in the community who could give you more solid insight than myself, but I'm happy to help any way that I can.

Best of luck,
-Steve

[JonMarc Wright Company: Usana Health Sciences, Inc. Contribution Level: 3]

good info steve.

peter - did you use godaddy's built-in tools to set up the redirect? can you give me specifics as far as the url you used for the redirect, where in godaddy you set it up, etc. (by pm is fine, or on here if you want to post that info) and i can look into it and see if i can help tackle just the redirect issue.

if you can get this issue fixed first, that's probably the way to go so you can go ahead and continue honing your adwords skills while working on other things. i would then recommend getting cracking on the techniques steve mentioned in his post, and any other creative ones you can think of or get recommendations for, especially methods for building your own list prior to sending them over to MS.

that way if they make a purchase, or at least download the videos, they are much more likely to come back to you for more information, they'll know who you are when you call them to follow-up during the boot-camp phase, etc. etc. etc., and even if they don't sign up for the videos or the book(s), if they got there as a result of signing up for your list, you can follow up with them and they're likely to come back to your site again at least once even if you don't.

good luck! like i said, feel free to give me some specifics on the redirect in a post on here or in a pm and i'll see what i can do!

take care,

jM

[Steve Rodgers Contribution Level: 3]

Yeah most definitely. Thanks for jumping in here, JM. Very cool.

Yeah Peter, it's probably best that you sort out the issue at hand before you scatter yourself into other things.

I would totally take JonMarc up on his invitation if i were you.

[susan coils Contribution Level: 4]

Hi Peter

this question has been covered previously in the ppc forum. You can check just one of the threads here.

Basically, google expects your display url to match your actual url. And your actual url should really be the final url (I think, lol).

You could try using Cenay's iFrame generator to create a redirect to the url of your choice. You then simply upload the redirect file. When visitors go there, your url remains in the address bar even though the visitor is redirected to your affiliate url, hence your display url, actual url and final url all look the same.

[Peter Cruz Contribution Level: 1]

Thanks guys..this is truly going to be an awesome experience for me. I just received BOAB and Black Belt Recruiting yesterday so I'll be reading thru those pretty hard core in the next few days.. esp BOAB.. and I noticed PPC is "Not" the panacea I seek. =) So I put the ad on HOLD for now.. and I'm working on getting a domain/hosted site and setup a BLOG is probably my first priority. Hopefully will have my first blog (a review perhaps up tomorrow.

My plans are to later create a "team website" for MY DOWNLINE as I begin expanding in my opportunity to offer them coaching and resources... should also enhance my position as a "leader" in my opportunity as well. =)

Stay tuned.. =)

[JonMarc Wright Company: Usana Health Sciences, Inc. Contribution Level: 3]

if you haven't got your domain hosted, you might want to look at 1dollar-webhosting.com they have some very efficient plans.

for $1 a month you can get 10gb of space, and they have fantastico (automatic script installer service) and cPanel (the most widely used and in my opinion, best, domain/website management software) so you can get wordpress (blog software, there are also a couple of other choices) and other very useful scripts like forums, more in-depth content management solutions like drupal - which i believe is what betternetworker.com uses (and what i use to run many of my sites/networks and those of clients as well), etc. installed on your site with just a few clicks of the mouse for free.

personally i use godaddy to host all of my domains as i've found their control panel is very comprehensive and easier to use than any others. I also setup up my domain mail with google every time and godaddy makes that process super-easy and google even has step-by-step instructions on how to do that when you set up google mail for your domain (read my article if you don't know what i'm talking about, it is awesome!). i personally manage web hosting accounts with numerous companies, but i like to keep the domain registration and the hosting separate for a variety of reasons i won't get into now.

in any case, you may have done that already, but that's just an overview of how i usually do it... and i've personally set up well over a hundred web hosting accounts and domains for myself and personal clients of mine, as well as the occasional client of my consulting group though someone else usually handles it when it goes through the business. anyway, feel free to get in touch with me if you need any help along the way with setup, etc.

enjoy it, you're about to start a journey that can be very fun, profitable, and open all kinds of new doors that you probably never considered!

take care,

jM

[Cenay Nailor Company: Nussentials Contribution Level: 2]

Thanks Susan, for the plug. For those that don't know what iFrameGen is, here's a short video showing how to use this free tool. Drop by my video site to get your own copy.

[David Allinson Contribution Level: 2]

Cenay,
Forgive my ignorance, but how does an i-frame redirect (great tool btw!) differ from simply using masking and forwarding a link instead? For example, I've used the free feature to forward and mask with GoDaddy in their domain manager many times with no problem.

[JonMarc Wright Company: Usana Health Sciences, Inc. Contribution Level: 3]

Yes Dean, that's correct, with inline frame you are pulling the other page and sticking it into your web page.
However, with GoDaddy's dns redirect service you are most likely doing the same. I'll double check that, but they most likely automatically generate a page with an inline frame when you do a redirect with the masking option, and they allow you to put in meta data like title, keywords, and description.

Though, given how poorly frames play with google, especially pages with no other content, what you put in the title, keyword and description sections are really of little consequence. I'd say the only one worth putting the time into adding anything into would be the title, as that is what the person will see up at the top in the firefox title bar while they are browsing the page/site you redirected to.