I slipped this little secret out today on a blogger’s site and figured I would post it on our blog to be fair. We buy a lot of ads for our managed accounts each month and there is an ordered process we follow, which is searching for similar themed sites and preferred partners. We’ve experienced a huge growth in partners the past couple of months and it helps if our staff is familiar with your site. “How can this be done” you ask?

linkHelp us create a buzz about LinkWorth! We have alerts for our name and as soon as they show up, everyone up here reads them. As our staff read these glowing write ups, they make note of the website url. Then as they’re buying for clients, the process is something like this: search for same themed preferred partners, search for partners who have written about us. This isn’t anything we’ve put in place internally, it’s just how we have noticed our account managers spending money lately.

In summary, here are a few things you can do to catch the eye’s of advertisers (and our staff)

1. Upgrade your listing to be “Featured” and stand out from the rest.
2. Make sure your pricing is competitive to others in your niche.
3. Make sure your site is fresh with content and readers.
4. Help create a buzz about LinkWorth on your site.

Just checking in from sunny Miami on our last day of the Affiliate Summit. It’s been a great trip so far and we learned a lot from this conference in how we want to restructure our own affiliate program. We listened to several super affiliates in how they view affiliate programs and how they like to see them setup to make it attractive. It was close to what our original ideas were, but definitely more input and ideas to add to our restructuring. If you’re a current affiliate or just plan to be an affiliate in the near future, keep a lookout for our new program. There will be commissions paid on both advertiser and partner referrals. We’re also going to make it as lucrative as possible.

Also along the way we flew through D.C. to see our boy Juan “The Colombian Crusher” Gallego get married off. The wedding was great, the families were great, the hospitality was more than it should have been and most importantly, the bride and groom looked awesome! A HUGE congrats to our developer Juan and his lovely wife Julianna on their marriage. Now if we can just get them back to Dallas!

Tonight, our last night in Miami, we’re headed to Dolphin Stadium to see The Police. We picked up the tickets last minute and somehow scored some really good seats. I’ll chime back in and let you know how the show went. Until next time.

Being a good blogger requires having all the right words. Personally, I often have a hard time putting the right words together and saying it like it is. If there was an award for typos, I’d win hands downd! (I purposely did that by the way) Sometimes when you want to describe your own product and/or service, you can be so married to it, words just do not give enough justice. You might have the sensation of drawing it out on the whiteboard or creating a Photoshop image that will better tell the story. Of course, I have never done this because I don’t have a whiteboard or Photoshop. . .

My point is sometimes allowing another person review your own products and/or services with an unbiased review can help put things into perspective. Rob StGeorge at TextLinkBuzz threw up a great review of LinkWorth and “all” of our products. Most people put us into the class of “link broker” but we are a jack of all trades. We compete not only with Text Link Ads, but also with Intellitxt & Kontera and the many other companies that do article submissions and press releases, not to mention SEO consulting.

Thanks for the kind words Rob!

How has LinkWorth helped you? We want to hear from all of our customers by way of a testimonial. If you’ve noticed on our home page, in the bottom right corner, we feature a testimonial with each page view. We would love include your comments about LinkWorth too, so if you have something to say, please say it!

To submit a testimonial, just login to your account and click on the TOOLS menu option, then click on the TESTIMONIAL menu option. Further directions on on the submission page.

Use it as a way to say something nice about LinkWorth or use it as a way to say something nice and get a free plug.

Changing your website design can sometimes be well worth it, sometimes be a wrong move and other times be a big waste of time. How do you know if it is the right thing to do? I’m definitely not here to tell you I know the exact answer, but I’ll definitely fill you in on what we did to decide it was time.

1. Ask your customers for suggestions to improve your site. If you find customers having a hard time getting around or quite a few make comments about the look and feel, it might be that time to either improve or redesign.
2. Track the traffic and conversions. If you notice you’re getting one conversion with thousands of visits, there is something that can be improved to convert a higher percentage and a new design could be the trick.
3. Compare your site to other sites within your market. I compare it to my senior year in high school when I was looking around at all of my friends hair styles one day during lunch and realized I was the only one sporting a mullet. At that point, I realized it was time for a redesign of my hair. If your site is the mullet of your market, stop feathering it and try a younger, more hip style.
4. Read up on new technologies and see if there is a more proficient way to display your content. For example, designing with tables is a thing of the past and CSS is now the cool kid on the block.
5. My last tip is a simple, but great idea. Ask a family member, friend or business associate that has no idea what your website does and have them to go through and make notes about parts they find confusing or difficult. This might cost you a case of beer or maybe a few bucks, but it is well worth it. As a webmaster, what might be trivial to you, could be the most complicated task to a typical visitor of your site.

As Matt mentioned in the previous post, we recently launched a new front end of our website. All of the suggestions above were used and it all pointed to the fact our old website just sucked. And to prove the differences between our old site and our new site, I pulled our tracking info we have for the month of May ’07 compared to the month of June ’07. We launched our new site on June 1st.

This first screen shot is for the month of May. You will see we had a fair amount of “pay per click” traffic over the month.

Now this next screen shot is for the month of June. Our new design was up and running on June 1, so this is our PPC conversions after we chopped the mullet off. Traffic is pretty much the same, but notice the conversion numbers:

So in summary, if you currently sport a mullet, I am not saying it doesn’t work for you. I’m just suggesting maybe you ask your friends how it looks and if they understand it. Oh yeah, (a shameless plug) make sure you notice the conversion rate of our LinkWords program. It is our highest conversion percentage of all marketing techniques we use.

. . .blame it on the next guy! Some of you have been asking us about the first LinkInTxt crawl and we have good news and bad news. Which do you want first? Ok, ok. I’ll give you the good news first. The good news is we were just a few hours away from a successful complete crawl with literally thousands upon thousands of keywords ready to be bought up. During a test, we found the most unique keywords one could imagine, meaning it will work for almost any niche website out there.

Now I guess the time has come to announce the bad news. Did you hear that business.com is for sale to whoever has a spare FOUR HUNDRED MILLION in their pocket? Oh right, the bad news. 🙂 Unfortunately, there was a miscommunication with our server administrators regarding a routine hard drive corruption test that required a restart of our operating system. This restart occurred this morning about three hours before the entire process was going to end. We expected there was a way to simply resume the process, however, since it was ended abruptly, it corrupted all of our data. Can you say “BUMMER!”

Where does this leave us? “On the road again . . .” crawling again. Smarter. Wiser. Faster. If we want to go tech-talk, we might call this LinkInTxt v2.1.

We just wanted to update everyone on our LinkInTxt crawl that began Friday evening. So far so good, but we’re still going. We had quite a few big sites opt into the program and our lwbot is making his way through them as fast as he can.

We’ll let everyone know once this is complete and it will also allow us to spot any improvements we can make for the next crawl. Just be sure to utilize your robots.txt file to guide our lwbot through your site how you see fit. Here is part of our email sent Friday regarding how to setup your robots.txt:

You can direct our lwbot in your robots.txt file with something like this (ex: excludes directories and files):

User-Agent: lwbot
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /admin/login.php
Disallow: filename.html
Disallow: /html/secure.php

You can look up any document on proper formatting of your robots.txt file to tailor it to your needs. Here is great documentation:

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

We recently launched our product LinkInTxt and based on great feedback from our customers, the setup for Partners was just too difficult for large sites and very time consuming. We quickly went into brainstorming mode and came up with a brilliant idea that would take all of the setup out of our Partner’s hands.

Now, if you wish to participate in our LinkInTxt program, it’s as simple as including it in our “crawl list”. From that point, there is nothing else for you to do unless an advertiser decides to purchase a keyword(s) from your web page(s). We now have our own search engine that will crawl your site and index all possible keywords we were able to find. This will give Advertisers the ability to search for any keyword on your site. As always, Partners will have the final decision if the keyword will be placed or not. We do not force the link and then make it your job to remove it after the fact, like some places. If your site has hundreds or thousands of pages, you would not want a competitor plugging in their links throughout your site before you can say no.

We’re still adding a few upgrades to version 2, but it should be in full working mode by the end of this month.

After much anticipation, our first phase of the new website is up and running. A few little bugs here and there, but I think we gave it a thorough walk through to find anything that might cause problems to our customers. We’ll be monitoring support to answer any questions or issues that might come up.

A HUGE “Thanks” to our “Colombian Crusher“, “NEO” and the man behind the look, “The Eclecticist“. These guys are making it all happen. (Side Note: Dustin wants everyone to know he has nothing to do with the design you see once you login.) 😐

If you have any of our old pages bookmarked, consider updating the bookmarks because any pages that have changed names or were deleted, will be removed permanently within the next day or two. If you come across anything out of the ordinary, please report it so we can make things right.

Our next phase will be upgrading the part all current customers see daily, the Control Center. This is what most will be happy to see updated, including us!

Tomorrow, Thursday, May 31, 2007, we will be locking account access between the hours of 3:00-5:00PM Central Standard Time. During this time we will be applying upgrades to our website.

Our support system, blog and message forum will not be affected during this time and can be accessed for any changes or updates during the upgrades.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and urge all customers to report any bugs/issues found once we turn the site back online.