the richjerk's copy

For those affiliates who are building websites, one of the most important elements is copy. Copy has 2 major objectives.

 

Firstly, the copy will result in a visitor who spends more time on the site and who meets the requirements of the site. So if you have the right copy, the visitor will be grabbed by the headline which draws you into the site, and then the copy will close the visitor so that buy whatever you are selling, or click on whichever link you want them to click on.

 

Secondly, the right copy gets the search engines to rank you higher on more keywords which results in far more traffic to your site. If you don’t have enough copy on your site, the search engines won’t know what your site is about, and if you haven’t written the copy in a search engine friendly manner, then the search engines won’t know which words are the most important words on your page.

 

So it’s a round circle, as the better you write the more visitors you will get from the search engines, and those visitors (and the other visitors you are driving to your website) will convert even better.

 

Now, a new site called the richjerk has launched – click here to see the site – the richjerk site has turned the rules of copy on its head. The objective of the copy is to insult the visitor so that they feel compelled to purchase the eBook that the richjerk is selling. The richjerk site looks professional, and many hours, (or days) must have been spent analyzing the words on the richjerk site. This isn’t just a case of lets insult the visitor and everyone else in the world – the richjerk site has been carefully planned to extract an emotion from a visitor. Sure, some people will find it offensive and will leave the site immediately, but others will take up on the challenge to purchase the eBook and see what the richjerk knows that they don’t know.

value of building an affiliate website

It has been reported on a number of sites that a UK affiliate site, Empire Online potentially being sold for £700 million pounds.

The business of Empire Online is described as follows in the Guardian Unlimited:

“Empire operates as a "skin", or white-label, poker and casino site and is the most successful of this new breed of online gambling companies.

In effect it is a marketing business that recruits online gamblers and then directs them to third-party websites, such as Party Poker and 888.com, where the poker and casino games are played.

Empire makes its money by claiming commission from the host operators - in some cases, this commission is thought to be over half the revenue generated by individual players. Payments from PartyGaming represent two-thirds of its revenue.”

This is good news for affiliates developing websites rather than doing ppc, contextual, or email marketing as it means the affiliate is building long term value from the site in addition to the revenue they make on a monthly basis.

Interesting though, all the sites mention EmpireOnline.com or EmpireOnline.co.uk as the acquisition. Having looked at both of these sites, they are both redirecting to the same content based movie and music review site owned by the eMap group. So I’m wondering whether there is truth in the rumour that an affiliate site got sold for such a large sum of cash, and if so, what the url of the affiliate site is? Any one know?

 

comment spam update

Well, sure enough, a few minutes after I posted the last comment on the trafficsynergy blog about comment spam, there was another posting which was a comment spam. Now, I can’t believe that someone would read the posting about comment spam, and then comment spam the posting! So I looked at the composition of the comment spam posting.

 

It read as follows:

 

“Your blog is thorough If you have a weight issue, I'm sure you'd be interested in xenical diet purchasing xenical diet”

 

It suddenly hit me that the comment spam was computer generated. I’ve looked at blog software before for generating blog postings, and it is useful in very specific cases, as you don’t want to create blogs with meaningless information. But this is different – this is software that creates comment spam on new blog postings. So I’m assuming what it does is it finds a list of blogs with new entries, and then adds a preformatted message like the one above (I took out the hyperlink from the comment spam above, as I don’t want it to gain any page rank).

 

Anyway, I’m now testing a new feature on the blogger software called “word verification” which means that you have to type in a sequence of letters and numbers before you can post your comment – this will prevent automatic scripts like the one which I believe is being used for the above posting from “littering” the traffic synergy blog with meaningless comment spam. So any comment spam which now appears on the traffic synergy blog will actually have been entered by a real live human being!