Moose on the Loose

Are you DNS DuNceS?

Let me elaborate, quite simply. When a visitor types in www.yourdomain.co.uk in the url address bar, they obviously arrive at your website, now try omitting the “www.” prefix.

Do they still arrive at your website?

It’s surprising that there are quite a few affiliate & merchant websites which get an error. It’s a little embarassing if you made the mistake yourself, but if it’s your highly paid techie, you might want to wave a P45 jokingly in front of them.

We spotted this on a merchant recently & subsequently found some others, so we shall probably run a quick script testing all the merchants to evaluate what proportion suffer this basic flaw. The downside is that from tests carried out via paid paid search, we have noticed a rule of thumb that approximately 10-20% of potential visitors will omit the “www.” prefix. It’s certainly wasted traffic if they assume your website is down or a return visitor to a merchant during a cookie period.

To some of you the following may appear quite obvious, but it’s surprising the number of websites that have this fundamental error.

Dumbed Down Techie Bit

Here is the dumbed down techie bit, courtesy of my buddy Eric

The culprit is a missing entry in your DNS’s zone file. By adding:

yourdomain.co.uk. IN A 192.0.0.1

where yourdomain.co.uk is replaced with your actualy domain name (no ‘www.’ prefix – and don’t forget the last ‘.’) and where 192.0.0.1 is replaced with your IP address, this problem is solved.

From a Linux command-line, you can test this by entering the following commands:

> host xxxxxxxx.co.uk

If you see no response, that means it’s not configured properly. Compare that to:

> host www.xxxxxxxxx.co.uk
www.xxxxxxxxx.co.uk has address xx.xx.xx.xx

Which gives an answer. So if the administrator would add to their zone file:

xxxxxxxxx.co.uk. IN A xx.xx.xx.xx

Then their site would be accessible without the ‘www’ prefix.

Were you one of the DNS DuNceS? Ssshh … Don’t worry we won’t tell 😉

As you maybe aware Buyagift are running an awesome incentive this Christmas for affiliates. I was fortunate enough to be one of the lucky winners last year Click Here , it was without doubt a few of the best days in my life (not including time with my kids & family of course)

They have surpassed last years incentive with this below, click the link for further details.

Win A Fighter Pilot Trip to Las Vegas with Buyagift

Part of the Buyagift’s current incentive of being a Fighter Pilot for the day, is something I have always dreamed about doing, even when I was in the Royal Air Force.

And I would like nothing more than other affiliates to experience the generous hospitality of Buyagift in Las Vegas for a few days.

Therefore we have created a landing page for you below, we have used Crazy Egg to ascertain the better positioning & order of creatives.

Please feel free to download the following file, which you are free use for your promotions related to Buyagift Only. Courtesy of The Moose & My Wingman & Good Friend Eric.

Click Here to Download

Click Here to Preview Page

If you have any problems please get back to me.

We do intend on updating this by rotating images of various categories, to make it feel a little more dynamic, which we have already on Here , and we do realise something is required to fill space in the bottom right hand corner, we are working on ideas of a Happy Santa or Snowman there presenting the page.

PLEASE NOTE : There are a lot of our affiliate links in there, so please, please, please ensure you change the affiliate ID to your own, check & double check, as we created plenty of clickable points.

In the meantime, feel welcome to download, fill your boots & hopefully you will be one of the lucky winners of to Las Vegas with Buyagift

Good Luck !!! And One More for Luck !

PS We shall continually evaluate the landing page, utilising Crazy Egg, from a user/visitor perspective and update the zipped download when we intrepret changes are required.

There are quite a few things I admire about Paid On Results, and one of them is being innovators. There is one tool you may have neglected to use, forgotten about or just simply didn’t know about which we find useful not only for ourselves but possibly for you affiliates as well … and that is their

Deep Link Generator

Using their browser based Deep Link Generator you can now create Deep Links for any Paid On Results Merchant at the click of a button.

The way it works is you add a special page to your browsers Favourites or Bookmarks menu and then, when you want to create a Deep Link you simply browse to the Merchants web site, navigate to the page you want to deep link to and click the link in your Favourites or
Bookmark menu.

You’re then be taken to the Paid On Results web site and shown the Affiliate URL you’ll need to deep link to the Merchant!

This tool requires either Internet Explorer or Firefox, with Java Script enabled.

Log into your affiliate account and see Tools > Deep Link Generator for full information and another demo video showing how it’s installed

It’s been around since December 2005! Try it out at least & see for yourself.

As you can tell from this Blog, myself like almost anybody else, whether blogging or posting on a forum am prone to making occasional typographical errors, even when I have proof-read it several times over, and then go back at a later date to identify yet another mistake, I guess that’s why we have spell checkers.

However, this no different to anyone typing a keyword phrase into a search engine, thus this can be exploited to a certain degree in any search marketing activity, whether it be generic or brand terms. A few pay per click search engines are gradually identifying some of these typo errors, but not most.This provides an opportunity for a small income to be derived on cheap traffic with a decent ROI, whether you are arbitraging or sending directly to a merchant.

These are known as QWERTY keyboard ‘typos’ (typing mistakes) which consist of various forms & degrees of errors like Transposition, Slip, Omission, Repetition, QWERTY Substitution, QWERTY Repetition.

• Transposition > Adjacent pairs of letters are swapped over.
• Omission > Individual letters are missed out.
• Repetition > Individual letters are entered twice consecutively.
• QWERTY Substitution > Letters are replaced by each of their QWERTY keyboard based physical neighbours (e.g. ‘h’ gets replaced with y, u, j, n, b, g)
• QWERTY Repetition Type 1 > Letters are followed by each of their QWERTY Keyboard Neighbours
• QWERTY Repetition Type 2 > Letters are preceded by each of their QWERTY Keyboard neighbours

Most of the time, we think as many up for ourselves as possible, but sometimes my minds creative juices are not always flowing. One site we occasionally utilise which is pretty useful is this free tool called the Free Online Typo Generation Tool

Their URL is http://www.typos.org.uk

I hope you’ll find the tool useful & that maybe it will take some of the strain out of thinking, more importantly I hope it makes you an extra few quid.

A simple little tool we occasionally utilise is Mike’s Adwords Wrapper, something I guess in time we will knock up something similar, but it’s useful nonetheless and only fair I mention it with a customary link. I haven’t yet explored the rest of his site to see what other useful tools are available, but this one is a little time saver if doing a number of Google Adword Campaigns / Adgroups.

Mike’s Adwords Wrapper

“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.

Duplicates are automatically removed, and the list is sorted in character code order. Options include change to lowercase, remove bids, and remove URLs.”

As an affiliate we should be continually looking at what our users / vistors are habitually doing on our websites, by analysing statistics & tracking conversion rates & then optimise these sites accordingly to try and enhance these figures & user experience, however this is often a trial & error exercise requiring much patience & quantify of data to batch test theories & principles.

However, there is one powerful application / tool we have given a trial to which I think it is absolutely Cracking, where it allows me to actually visualise what my users are doing in the form of a Heat Map for any given web-page. It’s called Crazy Egg.

• We can test different versions of a web-page to analyse which works better.
• Discover which ad placement provides the best results.
• Find out which design encourages visitors to click deeper.
• Analyse CTR’s (Click Thru Rates).
• Establish whether the web-page is rich enough in content to improve user experience.
• In conjunction with the all the aforementioned, leads to definite improvements in the optimisation of a website, improving it’s monetisation & ROI (Return on Investment).
• Plus it’s quite fun interpreting the results & making inferences from them.

For us Crazy Egg does have the WOW factor & will absolutely blow your mind away.

Quote: Crazy Egg – “Track, Evaluate, and Improve Your Site”