We just launched a series of special offers, which will run until January 5th. These special offers consist in giving several free e-books as bonuses to our customers. Not only did we increase the number of e-books we're usually giving away on all the resume writing pages but we're also giving away for the first time our brand new Military Transition e-book on our military conversion resume pages. Military conversion resumes are currently selling strong so if your site attracts military staff, make sure to promote military resume writing; In addition, commissions are high, from $31.13 to $62.25 per resume sold.

What does this Holiday offer mean for you? Well more sales as our reports show that whenever we give away e-books, affiliate sales increase. Some of you might have noticed a slowdown in sales this month, as it happens every year around Christmas, but I can already tell you that sales are actually higher than what they were the previous years around the same time. Some of our affiliates are currently earning up to $6.92 per click (conversion ratio) and seeing surprisingly strong sales despite being only 2 weeks away from Christmas.This is certainly a good sign and am anticipating very strong sales in January. So this a great time to improve the promotion of our resume writing services: not only will you get more sales thanks to our special offer but your site will also be ready when sales explode in January.

Finally, I'm leaving for vacation on Thursday night and will be back on January 6th. So if you have any question, make sure to hit me up before Friday!

Hey guys,

just to let you know that - as you ca notice - the blog is back up. Sorry for the delay but there were some technical issues. 

Google offers a new keyword tool at http://www.google.com/sktool/

This tool is pretty similar to the Adwords keyword tool, except that it includes bids, categories as well as links to Google trends and SERPS. From testing it and comparing the two tools, I would be careful when using the new sktool. I suspect this might be some beta version as the number of searches can vary widely from one tool to the other. In addition this tool suggests high bids for some keywords that do not have any advertiser.

Since it can also provide list of keywords based on your site, this is however useful to find keywords that you might have missed and which can be added right away to your account.

While I'm pretty sure that the data will become more accurate over time, to play it safe, I would use it as a complementary keyword tool for the time being.

For those who are not familiar with the term "bounce rate", this refers to the % of visitors that enter your pages and leave your site right away. The bounce rate can be defined for your site and for each individual page of your site. How can you know what's your bounce rate? If you're advertising with Adwords, you will find this data in the Analytics section, providing that you set up tracking. If you don't advertise with any PPC, you can still find that information by setting up a free Analytics account or by checking stats in the admin provided by your hosting company.

Why is the bounce rate so important? For two reasons:

- if you're advertising with Adwords, your bounce rate is taken into consideration to calculate your keywords' quality score; the lower your bounce rate, the higher your quality score will be.

-  in terms of SERPS, a lower bounce rate seems to be determinant as to get a higher position in Google's rankings.

What does it mean? Well, mostly that Google considers that a site with a high bounce rate is a site that offers a poor experience to its visitors; as a result, Google will give it poor rankings whether it's in its organic search results or in its advertising sidebar.

This particularly affects affiliates, as most affiliate sites are built to redirect traffic to third party sites. How can you get around this? Simply by pre-selling your affiliate offer on a single page of your site and have all your - organic and PPC - entry pages linking to that offer page.

If you follow me on twitter, you might have noticed that I was preparing your affiliate payments yesterday. Confirming what I was telling you a few weeks ago, resume sales don't seem to be affected by the bad economical news - quite the contrary actually, as most affiliates increased their sales in October, compared to September.

I also noticed some new trends about the types of resume services that are getting sold. The most noticeable trend, which I started noticing a couple months ago, is the increase in military transition resume sales, which are now accounting for more than 20% of our resume sales. This is especially good news for you guys as military resumes have higher commissions -- from $31.13 to $62.25 -- and less competition on the -- online -- market.

I'm also seeing an increase in nursing resume and lawyer resume sales while sales of our resume blasting service seems to be pretty steady, the low price and uniqueness of this service making it quite popular among job seekers.

What does this mean for you guys?

Well if your site appeals to military or nursing professionals, make sure to promote prominently the appropriate resume services and you should get some good sales and commissions. If your site does not appeal to professionals from these categories, don't bother, unless you create content and pages for these fields. 

However, when it comes to resume blasting, this is a good match for any site getting job seeking traffic, whatever industry it is ... so go ahead and promote it!

If you read that blog regularly, you might have noticed that I recommend using blogs to promote affiliate programs. However, after reviewing a few blogs, I wanted to clarify a few things.

First, you should choose wisely the type of blog you're using. The best option is of course to have your blog hosted on your own website, which will allow you to do whatever you want with it. If you're serious about making money online, it is actually a quite cheap investment as, with hosting sites like godaddy, you might be able to get your own blog and url for around $10 a month. The other option is to create a freely-hosted blog. While there are plenty of choices out there, from blogger to wordpress, you should however make sure you know their guidelines before starting your promotion as, for example wordpress does not allow affiliate links.

Now that you got your blog platform, let's talk about content. Too many affiliates turn their blogs into spammy-looking promotional messages. If you go that way, only promoting products, you certainly won't dupe readers who, not only will be turned off right away but will never come back to your site. What you should instead do is create a conversation to gain the trust of your readers and make them come back for more. How can you do this? Simply by writing useful posts. For example, if your blog is about employment, find out what are the most common questions regarding employment; then do your homework and answer them. How would you get to promote an affiliate program by doing this? Well, just mention a service you're promoting and that is related to what you're talking about. For example, if you blog about job search, you might include a paragraph about resume writing, where you could mention using our professional resume service. 

 What's great about this, is that you can blog about anything and can promote any type of affiliate program. And if you're not a good writer or are not a specialist in anything, you can still hire ghost writers to pen articles for you - you will find several sites where you can get an article written for as low as $5. 

If not, you should do so; and I'm not saying that because I have stocks in Twitter

It's just that I'm using Twitter to give some real-time updates and tips that you won't find in this blog or in the newsletter. 

So, if you want to follow me, just click http://twitter.com/employment911af and you'll know what's going on with this program in real-time!

I just wanted to remind everybody that the url to login to your affiliate accounts is http://www.employment911.com/affiliatewiz/default.asp

I know some of you guys have been trying to login using the login form on the top left of Employment911 pages but this is actually for job seekers, not for affiliates. I know it might be confusing as this form is also located on the affiliate program page, so to make it easier I added an affiliate login link at the bottom of the affiliate program page, right below my name!

As a reminder, your affiliate account link is also located on this blog, on the right side, as well as in all the affiliate e-mails and newsletters you get from us. Also, since we're doing some house cleaning, in case you lose your username and password, they are also listed at the bottom of all the affiliate newsletters - you would be surprised on how many affiliates reply to the newsletter to ask for their username and passwords while their login info is already included in the e-mail they're replying to

I'm sure some of you have been wondering if our affiliate program would work during the recession and the answer is Yes!

By looking at our current affiliate sales, I see that lots of affiliates currently have higher conversion rates. With the current situation, it seems that job seekers are more eager than before to get a job fast, as they can't afford being unemployed for long. This results in an increase in resume writing sales, especially as we're guaranteeing job seekers interviews with our resumes.

In addition, reports show that the employment activity goes up when a new president is elected so expect a surge in resume sales next month!

Hola,

Just wanted to let everybody knows that I got back from Spanish vacation yesterday ... I'm still a bit jet lagged though ... and I miss that great Spanish food ...

Anyway, if you e-mailed me while I was gone, you should have received a reply from me by now as I finally went through all my e-mails. Talking about e-mails, I apologize if you guys got some non-related affiliate e-mail from us while I was gone. Our e-mail broadcast provider has been updating its system and there are still some bugs that they need to fix (so, don't worry we were not trying to spam you, it was just some technical issue).

I was looking at the affiliate sales reports and was pleased to see that lots of you were able to earn more than $1/click this month (conversion rate). Since this month is already coming to an end, I will have some detailed reports for you in a couple of days ... but I can already tell you that most of you guys will get bigger checks this month 

That's it for now!

Hey guys, just wanted to let you know I am leaving on vacation and will be back on September 29th. I will be in Barcelona so I won't be able to answer any e-mail. If you have any question while I'm gone, you can still send them and I will get back to you when I get back.

Also, make sure you keep promoting our resume writing service. I was looking at our conversion rates and they doubled compared to August. If you watch the news, you know the unemployment rate is at an all-time high, which means that people are flocking to our site to get their resume prepared. So now is the time to make affiliate sales and get bigger commission checks 

That's it for now - see you at the end of the month ... 

There are several programs out there allowing people to get paid to click links or sign up for offers and I just wanted to emphasize that using these types of programs to send us free resume posting leads isn't allowed. You shall not use incentives as well as false claims such as "Sign up and they will give you a job" to get us leads.

Not only are the people enrolled in these programs mostly located in foreign countries, which is worthless to us, but they usually enter false information just to get paid. We therefore do not allow affiliates to advertise our services through these programs and will cancel the accounts of those who do not follow our guidelines. 

In case you're new to this, these programs have been around for a while: not only can we recognize them easily but we can also quickly spot any unusual traffic pattern coming to our site ...

As a reminder, the affiliate game ended a couple days ago. I've been compiling affiliate sales reports and I can already tell you that 15 affiliates won and will be getting a 20% bonus at the end of the month. Congratulations to all the winners who will receive an e-mail pretty soon.

Of course, you might argue that 15 winners out of thousands of affiliates is not a lot. Well, you are right, especially as conversion rates have been pretty high lately, partly thanks to the extra bonuses we are giving away to customers. While some affiliates missed the mark by just a few bucks, which is too bad, the bottomline is that:

• the affiliates that won the game are "active affiliates". By active, I mean that they have affiliate links in the right places and are actively promoting their websites (through SEO, PPC or any other mean) to get targeted traffic, which converts into sales.
• as for the affiliates who didn't win, this is in lots of cases mostly because they were too lazy and didn't make any changes to their site to either promote more prominently our services or simply bring qualified traffic to our offers.

Remember that if you enroll with affiliate programs, it's to earn money online ... but this requires work ... and you won't achieve this by just placing a random banner on a site and wait for the cash to roll in. You won't earn money online if you don't bring qualified buyers to your website.  If you need some tips on how to successfully promote an affiliate program -- including ours -- check out the tip section of this blog or visit other blogs and forums that are specialized in affiliate marketing. 

Just wanted to remind you guys that the affiliate game is ending on September 12th ... You only have 3 days left to increase your sales and earn a 20% bonus!

As I was mentionning before, for most of you guys it means making one simple additional sale over your weekly average to get a 20% bonus ... 'Nuff said!

Hey guys, I just wanted to let you know about what happened over Labor Day weekend. If you read some of my previous posts or the newsletter I sent on Thursday, you might have noticed that I was emphasizing the fact that, following a logical slowdown in summer, sales would pick up in September, marking the beginning of job hunting season.

Well, guess what? Not only sales suddenly started to increase as early as Friday but we had one of our strongest weekend ever and are on the way to get one of our biggest week in years. Of course, you guys are bringing a big chunk of these sales and those of you who followed my advice and started promoting prominently our resume writing service a couple of weeks ago will get big commission checks at the end of the month.

Here are some numbers to give you an idea of how much money some of you guys are currently making:

• In only 4 days, some affiliates already doubled what they earned the entire month of August
• Some affiliates are currently making around $3.50 per click (conversion rate ratio) this month
• One affiliate is currently earning as high as $16.44 per click 

The good news for those of you who are playing our affiliate game, is that you are pretty much guaranteed to win that 20% bonus as with such high conversion rates, you will have no problem making one simple additional sale over a 3-week period

And if you haven't increased the promotion of resume writing yet, it's of course not too late as these strong sales will be around for several weeks!!