AdWords and Affiliate Programs

Google sold close to a billion dollars in advertising in 2003. Advertising on search results pages is very targeted – the ads can be matched to what you are actively looking for. Google also shows ads on Web sites across the web – with ads target to the content of those Web sites. In either case, advertisers are charged per click. Web sites hosting the ads are then compensated proportionately.

The great thing about Google is that they provide tools for setting up and managing targeted ("AdWords") ad campaigns. Within a few minutes you can input a list of keywords, a short advertisement, and a credit card number. Your ads will instantly show on Google.com and across their advertising network.

Affiliate programs are another advertising concept that has been around for a while. Most e-commerce Web sites (Amazon is the most famous) have affiliate programs. If you have your own web site, you can become an affiliate of another site and earn money for every customer you send to their site.

While I was researching tools for automating the creation of AdWords campaigns, I came across an advertisement for an e-book which described the idea of combining ad campaigns with affiliate programs. The idea is this - if you don’t have your own Web site, you can identify niche search areas without a lot of ads and buy ads acting as an affiliate. You pay for each click, and hopefully earn for each sale.

Here are a couple examples that I tried:

Eminem’s new band, D12 just released a new CD. Just before they did, “D12” was one of the most popular search terms on the internet, and Amazon did not have any ads running on Google for this search term. I set one up and sent over 500 people to Amazon in a few days. Unfortunately, only 4 of them bought the CD. I might have had better luck if I only ran the ad after the CD was released.

A more successful example is Brecks Bulbs. Brecks had a great sale and was passing 30% of each order on to their affiliates. I spent about 4 hours setting up an ad campaign covering all of the different types of Dutch flower bulbs that Brecks sells. I came out ahead on this campaign – making about $100 in commission for $50 worth of advertising. I did this without setting up any kind of web site, just a bit of research.

The math is simple enough for choosing your “keyword niche.” You simply need to make more in commissions per click than you are paying on Google. The table below shows the sort of numbers I saw for these two examples.

	Cost Per Click	Commission Per Click
D12/Amazon	$0.05	$0.01
Brecks	$0.15	$0.30

I haven’t mentioned yet that ads on Google are ranked according to your bid. So an ad created with a maximum bid per click of $0.15 will show above an ad with a maximum bid per click of $0.05 (the minimum). The site Commission Junction (www.cj.com) allows you to manage multiple affiliate relationships and provides statistics on the Commission per click you can expect.

Another useful tool is the overture search word recommendation tool (inventory.overture.com). This tool will give you an idea of how popular a given search keyword is. Overture is another search engine and advertising company – their ads show on MSN and Yahoo.

Hunting for keywords and crafting ads for random products has been fun. Google’s text ads are like Haikus. Everything under the sun is sold on the internet and is a candidate for this “AdWord Affiliate” technique. However, it was quite difficult to find the right niche and turn a profit. Although I broke even in the end, there were several other combinations I tried that were not successful.

Most keywords worth advertising on are saturated with lots of ads. Affiliate commissions are for the most part quite tight, and don’t leave much room for buying ad placement. I’ve seen the best results with seasonal or sale items. I will probably have another try at Christmas when shopping on the internet goes way up.

DidTheyReadIt.com – How it works

This Web site allows you to track whether your email is read by the person you sent it to. To use it, you first sign up the site, then send emails to whoever@wherever.com.didtheyreadit.com. Your email travels via their server on its way to your recipient. You then get an email back from DidTheyReadIt telling you when the recipient opened it and some other details about the internet connection they used to open it (including a guess at their city).

In this case, email tracking is accomplished by inserting a tiny image into your email. When the destination email program (or Web browser) opens the email, this image is requested from the DidTheyReadIt.com web site. The HTML image URL has special parameters to match it to your original email. This is similar to how page counters work on normal Web pages.

You can tell if you have been sent an email from someone using DidTheyReadIT by looking at the email message headers. This is usually available under the options for your email client. Try checking the properties of the message, or viewing the “full source” of the email. Look for something like:

Received: from 69.90.152.224 (HELO dtri1.rampellsoft.com)

This tells you the message traveled through RampellSoft – the makers of DidTheyReadIt.

You’ll also see the image tag for the invisible image:

<img src="http://didtheyreadit.com/index.php/worker?code=d410bef96e7ca16da181fccd1f17a181" width="1" height="1" />

Another interesting thing is that they claim to report how long your email was viewed. I’m not sure how this works – but perhaps they keep the connection open between the viewer’s Web browser and their server while sending the image. I haven’t seen the length be greater than 2 minutes 15 seconds.

This technique won’t work if the person you send the email can’t view HTML emails. Also, many email applications (like Hotmail) allow you to turn off images in HTML emails. This is useful because Spam can contain “image bugs” like the one used here. When you open the email, the spammer knows he has a good email address and can follow up with lots more spam.

It would be interesting to use this for one of those false and misleading emails that get sent around saying “Bill Gates is tracking this and will give everyone who opens it $25.” Forwarding a DidTheyReadIt.com email could almost make this sort of tracking feasible, but in my experiments forwarding HTML emails, the content and images are quickly lost or reformatted.

Lazy Web Request

I would like a meta-search of downloadable music for sale online. I would like to search the iTunes, Napster, MusicMatch, Rhapsody, and Walmart music catalogs for a particular artist, track, or album. The search results would do a price comparison when the same track was found on two different sites.

My initial research shows that only one or two of the sites listed make their artist lists public. Otherwise, to get this information you have to sign up and download their client application. In some cases, the catalog data may be available by using a packet sniffer to track the client communication with the server. In other cases the data is encrypted. To build the meta search service without the consent of the companies involved would likely require a hybrid screen scrape, packet sniff, and maybe even OCR approach.

Here is a side by side comparison of Music download services.

	Subscription	Per Song	Number of Songs	Preview	Requires Application Download
Napster	$9.99/month	$.99	500,000	Full download for most songs	Yes
iTunes	(none)	$.99	700,000	30 seconds	Yes
Rhapsody	$9.95/month	$.99	600,000	?	Yes
MusicMatch	(none)	$.99	500,000	?	Yes
Walmart	(none)	$.88	300,000	30 seconds	No

Why I Like the new Napster

This year purchasing music online has finally begun to take off. Downloading songs, burning CDs, and paying for a file or subscription – not a packaged CD -- is a paradigm shift. I recently subscribed to the online music downloading service Napster, and I love it. There are a number of places you can buy music online, here is why Napster is so great.

1. Listen to the whole song before you buy

With Napster, songs can either be streamed or downloaded. In most cases you can listen to the whole album, pick out the songs you like and only pay for those. The songs you don’t want to buy, you can still keep on your computer and listen to them over and over again. Before Napster, I would normally buy 5-6 CD’s a month but only like 40% of the songs. With Napster, the $9.99 subscription pays for itself because I only buy the tracks I like.

2. Enough Selection to make it worthwhile

You can’t find everything on Napster, but there are certainly more good tracks than I have time to listen to.

3. Exposure to the latest music

I don’t watch enough MTV to know my Hoobastank from D12. With Napster, I can hear the latest artists “on demand” and decide if I like them.

4. Surf the Billboard Charts – all the way back to 1955

Some of the most fun I’ve had with Napster is surfing back to the 80’s to listen to songs I had long forgotten about. It is like having a music library in your living room.

In the next 5 years, stereo systems will begin to be able to play internet radio stations and play music from your PC (they already can, check out this mini system from Philips). This means you should always be listening to exactly what you want to hear.