One of my favorite Affiliate Gurus, Jeremy Palmer of QuitYourDayJob, has started a new project, called The Black Ink Project. The main feature of this project is free affiliate support and coaching by Jeremy himself. If you do not know Jeremy Palmer: he is the guy who made $100K in his first year as an affiliate and $1M in his second year. He primarily works with Commission Junction offers. A few of his affiliate websites are:

• www.audiobookhub.com
• www.trysuperpass.com
• www.gamestoyourdoor.com

So what is the Black Ink Project really about? What better than to quote Jeremy himself:

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, the Black Ink Project is an affiliate success course designed to help new affiliates bridge the gap between my e-book and making a profit. Some find that the book and forum support is all they need to succeed, but others need a little more hands-on training to connect all the dots.

The project focuses on four key areas:

1. Setting realistic goals, based on your time and budget. You’ll discover how much time and money you need to invest to achieve your goals.
2. Researching prospective opportunities. You’ll learn out how to avoid potential pitfalls and find the right niche and the best advertisers.
3. Learning the software, scripts, and tools to help you create your site. You’ll not only leave the course with a complete tool belt, you’ll learn how to use your tools alone and together to create beautiful high-converting sites.
4. Develop and launch a campaign from start to finish. At the end of the course, you’ll have a complete action plan and checklist you can use for future sites.

Right now the first 1000 ’seats’ are booked, but Jeremy wrote that there might be some more available in the near future. So check out the site and join him on Twitter or Facebook and subscribe to his blog feed, so you will be in-the-know as soon as new registrations are possbile.

To learn more about Jeremy, here is a link to an interview with Jeremy Palmer by Andrew Wee, where he talks about his stairway to succes and gives free affiliate advice and examples.

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One of the most visited posts on this blog is a post on tools to spy on competitors websites. As this apparently is a hot topic, I will share three more free tools that I visit frequently online, either to:

1. check on backlinks of my or other peoples’ websites
2. see quickly which Google ads are being displayed for a certain (set of) keywords, per country
3. ’study’ the ads and keywords that other affilates are using, per domain, or per keyword !

Number three returns only ten results in the free version, but is still very interesting to do a quick research on new projects you are considering. Take the displayed numbers more as a direction than as an exact result though …

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So april 1st has come and a lot of Adwords advertisers are being confronted with the new display url policy change. From now on Google will be enforcing that the display URL will be the same as the destination URL. So does this mean there is no room to play anymore?

In previous months publishers were getting more and more creative in using the display URL to their advantage. For example when www.domain.com is already taken by an ad, they would use www.domain.co/m or www.domain.com.uk as the display URL so as to avoid the double serving rule. So now Google is finally taking action.

When looking at some examples in the Adwords Help Center posting about this topic, it seems they are being very strict:

For example, the following would be acceptable:

• Display URL: www.google.com/adwords
• Destination URL: www.trackingurl.com/google123
• Landing page URL: www.google.com

However, this example would be unacceptable:

• Display URL: www.google.com/adwords
• Destination URL: www.trackingurl.com/google123
• Landing page URL: www.trackingurl.com

Quite straightforward, isn’t it? But the second example already shows more space for creativity:

For example, the display URLs below would be acceptable for the landing page URL of http://sub.google.com/miscellaneous, as the top-level domains match:

• sub.google.com
• google.com/extratext
• www.google.com/extratext

So the main thing seems to be that display URL ‘domain.com’ should go to destination URL ‘domain.com’. But everything before (a subdomain) or after ‘domain.com’ can be different between display and destination URL. For example you are promoting a product and the destination url is www.domain.com/strangedescription.htm then the display URL could still be product.domain.com. Or www.domain.com/product. Or domain.com/anything-product-related … as long as domain.com goes to domain.com!

Tip: You do not see the URL product.domain.com being used very often, but I have found that it usually converts very well.

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