Remember the days when you could upload content that was spidered and getting great traffic in a fews days time? As Carol Oconnor and Jean Stapleton sang “Those were the days!” A few sites still enjoy that kind of status these days, but not many.

I got an email recently from an affiliate manager speaking of “hitting the ground running.” I didn’t say it but my first thought was that hitting the ground running is pretty much not possible in the affiliate marketing world. SERPS take time to gain steam. Even a thorough PPC campaign is an ongoing project for months (for large projects) sometimes before optimization can be achieved on a large scale. To me, hitting the ground running makes me think of hours or a day at most before results start rolling in.

While there have been projects in the past with small numbers of keywords for PPC, the majority of my PPC campaigns took some time before the keywords, both positive and negative, and ad copy were what I call completely in sync and reaching who they need to reach. Some of these campaigns I have been tweaking for a year or more. We all find the gem now and then that is a really cool site that sells one thing in one color and has little or no competition. The market dictates that such an occurrence will not last long.

Don’t sell yourself short on your ability to produce results quickly if you are a PPC marketer. But at the same time don’t think you are killin’ it if you start making positive results right off the bat. Well targeted PPC can drive instant results. On items where search volume is low and margins are good, it often takes time to find a way to make it work but it can be done.

This particular manager was not pushing, they were only using a phrase we all use. It just made me think about how things are and how they once were.

As I was cruising my merchants’ site this morning looking to see who had the best post-holiday deals, I took a look at LandofNod.com. They are currently running a good sale with up to 35% off many of their products. While not heavy on coupons, LandofNod.com has a strong affiliate program with strong numbers. When they have a sale, it is worth promoting.

They sell a really nice mix of children’s furniture and most anything else people who have one or more children will need sooner or later. In my test purchase with them, I found their fulfillment to be outstanding in time of arrival, packaging and throughout the checkout process.

We are relatively new to the LandofNod program. We met them at Shareasale Think Tank in November and have been anxious to get started with them since then.

See all LandofNod.com coupons and deals.

Update 02-02-08-2008
Since the original post has been made regarding LandofNod.com, they have opened a parallel program at CJ and now have every cookie-stuffing adware affiliate under the sun in their affiliate program. I have notified my affiliate consulting clients of this because this was a program I told them to look at. Now it is just another affiliate program where you drive traffic to the merchant and there is a good chance that it will be diverted to another affiliate through an adware application.
Why merchants do this is completely beyond me. It is not hard to see that the adware applications monetize traffic the merchant has gained on their own or traffic that other affiliates have sent them. If you are one of my consulting clients, forget that I ever recommended LandofNod.com to you, especially if you are spending money driving traffic to their web site.
Are they still worth promoting? Yes. Their site is great and their product mix is unique, clean and well-thought-out, but be very careful as this is not a completely affiliate-friendly web site any longer.

More and more quality web sites are featuring Google Adsense on their sites now. A crafty affiliate can leverage this into some affordable traffic.

Now calling it “Placement Targeting”, Google allows you to actually search for a site, a category and several other ways to find relevant sites with the Adsense ads you can target.

This traffic is not as targeted as keyword-based traffic, but it can add substantially to your bottom line if it is used correctly. Gone are the days of having to weed through hundreds of sites in order to find sites to target. Google makes this easy and setting up such a campaign is simple and takes very little time.

Check out Placement Targeting today and get your share of inexpensive traffic!

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Every girl wants a pony for Christmas…right? I absolutely love this commercial. It is not only hilarious, but it also successfully merges Verizon’s message with a humorous ad that is very memorable.

The Holidays are over, many Americans have spent a lot of money on gifts and Holiday parties etc.. It seems like the mindset most consumers get in after the Holidays is a mindset of looking for big discounts and coupons for their favorite stores.

In past years, I have seen conversions actually increase in some instances after the Holiday shopping frenzy. This happens on merchants who offer the deep discounts and large coupons on the inventory they did not sell over the fourth quarter.

For instance, iFrogz.com offered 40% off all purchases from December 25 to January 1. Stack this with the 15% off coupon available at CouponPouch.com and you save 55% on any order. That was enough to trigger me to order an iFrogz skin for all of the iPods in the house.

Another good example is Lids.com offering a 20% off coupon on orders over $75 plus free ground shipping. This is indeed a great offer with the NCAA Bowl season in full force.

Keep an eye out for these special deals. They usually last throughout the month of January and are often one of the best promotions of the year for some of your best merchant partners.