So now onto the good news!

Got one of these in my email today:

Dear advertiser,

We are writing to let you know that your Google AdWords account has been disabled due to one or more serious violations of our advertising policies related to Landing Page and Site Quality. As a result, your ads will no longer run through the Google AdWords system and we are unable to accept advertising from you in the future. Please note that future accounts you open will also be disabled.

What ghastly things have I done to deserve this tragic fate? Well, the ONLY campaigns I EVER ran in that account were for 2 Amazon affiliate stores that I had written about earlier. One of those I had bought and know that the previous owner ran Adwords campaigns for (hey, I knew why he was getting rid of it and knew what I was buying, as I explained before) and the other is one that I made myself. I only ran the campaigns for a short time before they got ‘google slapped’, but I was going to turn them off anyway, as they were not profitable and I was doing better with organic traffic.

A google slap for a thin affiliate site I can understand. But a permanent ban from Google? Seems a little excessive. Again, there were never any other campaigns in that account, which I opened around the beginning of this year, but never used until August. I also have two other accounts, which do not appear to be banned and are connected by an MCC account, which includes client accounts (campaigns for local small businesses). Only the client campaigns are currently running in the MCC and I’ll have to keep an eye on whether they keep running. The only other campaign I’ve personally had running in those accounts was an old Clickbank campaign which I turned off about a month ago. Might see if I can reactivate that one. Another funny thing I noticed – a couple of campaigns that had been google slapped a year ago and got zero impressions on for months have been getting a trickle of impressions again after months of inactivity. I have no idea why. I think I’ll delete all those slapped campaigns anyhow, before I get these accounts banned also, if anything they’re the ones I would have expected to be hit for. I’m not sure I’d be able to create new campaigns in them anyway, will have to try. As you can tell, its not like I’ve been doing much with Adwords this whole year anyway, but this still complicates things for the future, if I cant run campaigns for local business clients.

One other reason for the ban hammer may have been that I didn’t have that account added to my MCC, which technically it should have been. Who knows. From the experience of others its useless trying to argue or even ask why the ban occured. Chasing it up will likely simply get my other accounts disabled, if their days aren’t numbered already.

In a previous post I wrote about recently buying some Amazon Affiliate (or Associate, as they call it) stores to play with. Since then I’ve built one more and have been working on PPC campaigns for the sites. And I quickly hit yet another problem – Amazon’s tracking absolutely sucks. Actually, its absolutely non-existent. There is no way to pass subids from your site to Amazon so you can tell which keywords in your Adwords or other PPC campaign are converting, ie generating sales. Driving traffic blind like that you are guaranteed to be wasting money on non-converting keywords, instead of pushing more traffic to the converting ones. Not a situation any self-respecting affiliate marketer would want to be found in.

Well, just as I hit this little hurdle my friend and fellow affiliate marketer Net-Entrepreneur emailed me with a solution. He’s come up with a simple step-by-step method to add subid click tracking for Amazon Affiliates at the keyword level and then laid it all out to help out fellow AM’ers.

So if you’ve found yourself in the above situation, head on over to Niche Fever and grab his report and the other resources it comes with. Without it you’re most certainly leaving money on the table! And don’t worry, there’s really not much more to it then some copy-and-pasting, and you’ll be pretty much walked through the method by the hand.

Last, but not least – reader’s of this blog get a 10% discount, just use coupon code muaffiliate10 and you’re good to go. Enjoy and make some money!

Recently I bought three fully built Amazon affiliate stores. It is often said that the secret to success in Affiliate Marketing is to keep testing and trying new things and when you find what works keep diversifying your income into new areas. Hence I bought the sites to diversify, but even more so to learn from the experience. What I wanted to learn is the following:

- Learn to spot opportunities in this area. My experience running 3 stores should help me better spot and think of ways to make these types of stores or similar work. There are better ways to work with affiliate stores then Amazon or the eBay Partner Network, but Amazon is an easy place to start.
- Whats involved in actually buying an existing site like that? As expected completely unexpected hitches came up. Next time I’ll be much better equipped to make a cost/benefit analysis on a similar purchase. For example, not surprisingly, the process took far longer than I thought it would. Thankfully the seller was very helpful along the way.
- I wanted to take a few of the features of these stores apart, so I can use them on other sites.
- I want to use the sites to learn about the SEO side of things. I’ve been pretty much focused on PPC until now, through affiliate networks and working direct with advertisers.

In this post I just want to go over the second point above – what was actually involved in buying the sites and transferring all its components to my relevant accounts. Here’s the rundown:

1. The domain name registration was transferred to me, which was fairly simply as we both had GoDaddy accounts, so the seller just pushed the domains into my account.
2. Transferring the physical site. FTPing the files across is a no-brainer, but where I hit a slight hitch was transferring the databases. The seller gave me access to his hosting account and I used phpMyAdmin to export all the databases and FTP them to my machine. Then in my hosting account I had to import the tables into my database. The databases were for the Wordpress blogs which each site came with. So at this point I had to modify the Wordpress install to point at the new databases. Thankfully this worked without any surprises. This is were I half expected things to go wrong, so I was pretty relieved.
3. And this was were we hit a hurdle neither of us had foreseen. The sites have Amazon aStore blocks on them. Unfortunately Amazon does not offer any way to export your store or move it to a new account and its certainly not as simple as just changing the Amazon ID to mine, as I had hoped. At first I thought I’d have to regenerate the stores from scratch in my Amazon account. There are a number of ways generate these – for example you can add items one by one or you can add whole categories. And you need to configure it’s features (colours, size, layout etc) to suit your site. These stores had been created item by item… and there were pages and pages of these. This looked like it was going to take a while. The seller had not foreseen this issue either, but fortunately he was able to simply give me his Amazon account with the three aStores in them. I then just changed all the info in the account to mine and voila. Phew. I was damn grateful at this point.
3. The sites have dozens of Adsense blocks on them. The blocks are specific to an account and have to be generated in the account. It was not as simple as just changing the id in each to my own. This was tedious and time consuming. There were also some other affiliate links and ad blocks to change over in the blogs.
4. The sites also had Google Analytics code on every page, which I also had to go through and change to mine, after adding the sites to my account and verifying them.
5. Changing over the contact forms to my email addresses. As I had moved the hosting I had to create new email accounts for each domain (ie support@myamazonsite.com etc).
6. Likewise the Wordpress blogs needed the contact info changed over to mine, including the info in certain plugins.
7. I changed the AWeber email list forms on each site to my own. This included creating the new lists on AWeber, with the subscription confirmation emails etc and generating the form for each. Then I took the form code from my new form and modified the existing form on the site.
8. Last but not least, once I had the sites setup, Chrome and Firefox 3 both flagged exploits in two of the sites. They were flagged as ‘attack sites’, because they had been hacked (XSS exploits most likely or someone had captured the FTP login details from the old owners machine) and malicious code with hidden iFrames had been inserted. The seller had no idea about this problem. Thankfully simply removing the malicious code was enough to fix this. I was more worried that this was an SQL injection and the code was being rendered from the database. The browsers are no longer reporting a problem. I had added the sites to my Google Webmaster Tools, were the problem was also reported. I submitted them for a re-evaluation and its ok now.

So there you go. I certainly got the learning process I was hoping for and then some.