Thursday, July 3, 2014

Ethics on the internet: Does it actually exist?

The biggest and most discussed internet story of the past week has been Facebook’s social experiment. A controversial research experiment where Facebook’s data team using an algorithm manipulated the news feeds of 689,003 users for one week in January 2012 to be either all positive posts or all negative posts. The research was done in order to evaluate whether users write more positive or negative posts when seeing only positive or negative content on their news feed (the research showed that they in fact did).


As helpful the research might be on a sociological scale to help us understand the behavior of humans in specific situations during a period of time, the research raised a serious question of ethics on the internet. How far are internet marketers, and web-masters in general, allowed to go for the sake of research or to simply get ahead of the competition on the internet - the land where anything and everything is possible? Most areas of the internet are so tough and competitive that it is the concept of survival of the fittest which rules, and in such an environment it is common to see all tricks in play; ethical or not. So is there a thing called ethics on the internet?

An obvious place to start looking at ethics when in the field of internet marketing is a place we are all familiar with no matter what niche we engage in, SEO. The internet overflows with websites and companies telling us how to get to the top of the search rankings, but many of these ‘tricks’ are seen as unethical or borderline. Whether it being keyword stuffing or invisible text, the internet community as a whole have agreed that this is unethical behavior, and during the last 5-10 years Google have been giving harder punishments for websites being guilty of black hat SEO techniques to the extent that it is widely considered as an offense as much as its considered unethical.


Where black hat SEO is being unethical to other websites and businesses by getting an edge over them in the search rankings, a much more grave, although less discussed, unethical behavior is the tricks websites use towards its customers or potential customers. That isn't to say that websites should advertise all their lacking and shortcomings, but isn't it unethical to pretend to be something you’re not? But most standard definitions is it unethical and the deceit will not go unnoticed, and in the long run it will hurt your business.

The responsibility we have toward the public goes much further than not being deceitful of course. On the website of the Internet Marketing Association (IMA), a Code of Ethics/Code of Professional conduct is presented. Here the 'do’s' are very general stating that a member shall “demonstrate a commitment to professionalism and diligence”, “exhibit the highest level of integrity”, and “continually strive to increase the competence and effectiveness of professional services”. What these vague expressions actually means is that it must be up to each person to decides what is right and what is wrong, but on the other hand a much more clear message is stated with the 'dont’s' being that a member shall “not engage in any illegal or unethical Internet marketing or cyber-fraud activities”, “avoid the practice of abusive spamming for marketing purposes”, and “not reveal any confidential information obtained”.

Similar to black hat SEO, there are many other black hat techniques for manipulating the people and the internet often for cyber-fraud activities that much more often considered an offense or a crime than unethical behavior. For example spamming and revealing confidential information, both which mainly hurts the internet end users. It is best to treat the people that are internet users and your (potential) clients with the respect they are entitled to. Most importantly if you are not sure whether your practices are unethical, take a step back and imagine how you would feel about your action if you were on the other side of the table.

In a crazy world the internet has become, it is important that we remember that on the other side of the screen sits another person, and that person deserves to be treated respectfully. In the end this will reflect on your website and business which will be seen as a respectful and valued member of the internet community.

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Short 1 minute survey - Please help improve VIP.

At VIP Affiliates, our main goal is to make our affiliates feel like VIPs. We do this by constantly improving our services and offers, as well as providing multiple reward systems.

However, as much as we try, we are not perfect!

This is the reason why we have created a survey where you, the affiliate, can tell us in which areas you feel that we can improve, as well as telling us in which areas you think we are doing well and should continue to do well in.


Thanks for your help!

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Review of OptionRally and Empire Option

VIP Affiliates is committed to providing only the very best offers to our affiliates. Because of this fact, the brokers we work with need to be of a certain quality to be advertisers with us. Two brokers that stand out from the rest are Option Rally and Empire Option. Each of these brands in their own way contain features that makes them some of the best brokers around.

OptionRally has become well known by its loyal customers because of their simple trading platform suitable for both the experienced traders and beginners in Binary Options trading.

OptionRally's most notable feature that will help affiliate marketers find success in promoting this brand is a compressive education that has helped countless inexperienced binary options trader find success in trading online. Offering new traders with webinars, training videos and one on one support, OptionRally provides everything needed for skeptical new binary options trader to feel comfortable.

As well OptionRally maintains homepage that is frequently updated with new offers, sales promotions and seasonal offers. Most recently they redesigned the homepage to capitalize on football frenzy with the World Cup
OptionRally WorldCup Homepage

OptionRally is best for Arabic campaigns where they show off the highest conversion rates, but it  has great customer support and conversion rates from German and English speaking countries as well. With offices in China, OptionRally is also a great place to focus on Asian language campaigns. Additionally OptionRally is CySEC regulated binary options broker.

OptionRally’s highly experienced financial professionals give the top customer service and provide a website that also has a great deal of video tutorials for both beginners and advanced traders. The VIP Affiliates affiliate program with OptionRally is an excellent choice in online marketing promotion.


Empire Option is the best offer when it comes to potential Spanish traders. Based in Uruguay , this brand offers its trading services and tools that help improve results in binary options trading and provide affiliate marketers some of the best conversion rates possible.

A great standout feature of EmpireOption is their customers ability to fund their binary options trading accounts using all major credit card including VISA, MasterCard, and Discover.

EmpireOption Payment Options


EmpireOption offers tons of cutting edge features to its customers to help them find success
Similar to OptionRally, EmpireOption offers its customers a wide variety of training tools. Some of these include webinars, one on one training, trading simulator and financial events calendar. The most interesting tool EmpireOption offers its clients is a signals service. VIP accounts have up signals in up to 10 assets available to them. Another exciting feature that is unique to EmpireOption is the social trading functions built into the platform. You can actually see exactly what other people are making trades on!

When working with the EmpireOption Affiliate Program you can expect really high conversion rates! This binary option brand is one of the few offers still available with a minimum $200 FTD (First Time Deposit) which is the CPA action. EmpireOption has utilized the SpotOption 2.0 trading platform and developed it further to provide unique features that makes one of the best experiences in binary options trading.

Take advantage of the availability of both these brokers by contacting VIP Affiliates today, and get the highest possible commission!

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Grand Option Review

A new binary options broker by the name of GrandOption has entered the market. New in name maybe, but with a lot of experience already as they are owned by as the long time established and regulated company 24Option. Their background experience really shows on their website which is welcoming and pleasant to the eyes of the traders, and easy to navigate and with highly informative updates and analysis page with daily news.

GrandOption’s customer support and sales team is exceptional and helpful. Providing support in five different languages (English, French, Italian, Russian and Turkish), expect the highest conversion rates from the countries that speak these languages. GrandOption constantly has sales representatives at the ready with a live chat feature ready to help both new and old traders, and in comparison to many other new brands, you don’t feel like you are dealing with inexperience customer support.


Another great advantage for traders is that their minimum deposit is one of the lowest of all binary option brokers we promote. This is done primarily to reach the crowd of traders who are not willing to put hundreds of dollars to start learning how to trade binary options. The value of each trader might therefore be lower, which leads to lower general CPA for the affiliates promoting the brand. This is more than made up for by some of the highest conversion rates we have seen with this broker! Thanks to the great job of the sales team to follow up on the leads, 30% conversion rates is an easy expectation. This is especially true with leads from affiliate networks such as VIP Affiliates where centralized management will make sure your leads get the focus they deserve. In the end of the day the affiliates promoting this brand will see commissions as big as some of the brands offering higher CPA.

The technology behind GrandOption is the same as its 24Option roots. Utilizing and customized TechFinancials platform trading binary options never looked so good. Traders used to trading on SpotOption brand binary option brokers will be impressed with the responsiveness of the platform as well as its ease of use. In addition trading binary options using GrandOption feel more professional and sleek than many of its competitors.

All this makes Grand Option a very recommended broker for affiliates and traders looking for a different and interesting layout, an experienced and dedicated support team and a cheap way into trading binary option.

Monday, June 2, 2014

Get rewarded as a VIP!


At VIP Affiliates we like to reward our affiliates and provide a truly VIP experience. Perhaps the best way VIP Affiliates does this is by providing reward points by earning CPA commissions. For each FTD (First Depositing Customers) coming from your affiliate referrals you earn points towards great prizes. This program is unique to VIP Affiliates and provides you additional earnings just for being our partner!  This is all explained at our website.

But one way of rewarding our affiliates is not enough though! Therefore we also have a different, but no less valuable, reward system which earns our affiliates money by referring new customers to us.

Also known as a "master affiliate" program, the way it works is that every VIP Affiliates affiliate has their own referral link which can be found on their account ( just click on the referral report tab ). Once another person signs up using that link, you automatically start earning 10% of all the referral affiliate's earnings. As our CPA can be up to and over $400, every conversion from a referred affiliate can earn you $40. Imagine 20 conversions a month from 10 referred affiliates - 40 x 20 x 10 = $8000! That is $8000 of passive income! All you need to do is provide people your referral link, its just that easy. Even better, it is on top of the money an affiliate can make from their own promotions!

Maybe promoting binary options trading is not your thing and you would like to promote just VIP Affiliates instead. No problem, we provide creative materials for promoting VIP Affiliates. You will have access to banners, landing pages and more! All you need to do is promote VIP Affiliates just as you would any other affiliate offer and you can start seeing huge rewards from a passive income today!


To sum up, with VIP Affiliates not only do you earn the highest CPA promoting over 20 of the biggest binary options brokers from one place, the conversions also give you great additional rewards as a bonus, and if you on top of that refer other people to promote these high paying offers, you get 10% of their earnings too!
 
                                                 That’s what we call VIP treatment!


Thursday, April 10, 2014

Nofollow vs. Follow: How Google treats with Guest Blogging.

During the past month there has been a lot of news and talk on guest blogging. To be more exact, the talks and discussions have been on the penalties various guest blog networks have gotten from the Google spam team, most of them manually. For the average internet user it can be difficult to figure out what the outcry (both from Google and the guest blogging community) has been all about.

The center of all this has been nofollow links. Or the lack of them to be precise. In order to be able to explain what a nofollow link is, first we should understand what a follow link is.

When a website gets an inbound link, it gains a boost towards its Google ranking helping the site get higher up in the search results - also known as the SERP. The more inbound links a website gets and the more reputable the website posting the inbound link is, the bigger a boost the linked-to site gets in terms of Google ranking. A link of this kind, which is counted towards the Google ranking of the site, is called a follow link.

On the other hand, an inbound link which is NOT boosting a website’s Google ranking is called a nofollow link. Google simply ignores the link completely and it is seen as what it is; a link that gets the reader to a different website. The way a nofollow link is created is with a non follow HTML tag which looks like this:          

<a href="http://www.website.com/"rel="nofollow">Text</a>

Prior to the introduction of nofollow links, websites - (blackhat) SEO minded websites in particular - were spamming the internet with follow links which would artificially make them rank higher on Google to an extent that blog comments and forums almost solely consisted of self-promotions and a massive amount of links. In 2005 Matt Cutts from Google and Jason Shellon of Blogger realized that something had to be done to stop the madness of spam, so they introduced the nofollow attribute which has helped limiting the link spam on the internet a great deal. Many blogs and forums don’t post follow link, while reputable websites like Wordpress and Wikipedia automatically assigns the nofollow link to all user-submitted links.


This takes us back to the controversy which we have seen in regards to guest blogging. When Matt Cutts on March 19 announced that Google “today took action on a large guest blog network” it quickly became common knowledge that he referred to MyBlogGuest, a guest blog network which had more than 73,000 users in 2013, with an average of 256 articles posted per day. Despite being against paying for links, as Ann Smarty who runs the site pointed out confirming that MyBlogGuest had been hit, it should not have come as a surprise to the blogging world.

Already in 2012 Matt Cutts warned against spammy and low quality guest blogging, and continued to do so until january 2014 where he announced that guest blogging is done due to the fact that it’s too spammy. Truth is that this could probably have been avoided by MyBlogGuest if they didn’t insist that links cannot be nofollowed. Even if they did have a lot of quality content from the guest blogging, the potential of link building for SEO is still there, and even though it’s all speculations on why MyBlogGuest actually got punished, a few spammy blogs with nofollow links is all it takes for the whole network to be affected by it. On top of the penalty to the actual network, many users received warnings and penalties despite not being directly responsible. Although it can be argued that anyone blogging and adding a follow link is responsible of artificially boosting its Google ranking.

The best advice there is for guest blogger is simply to stay on the safe site and nofollow your links. Yes, its a shame i you are a legitimate blogger and don’t get the credit you deserve from Google, but a nofollow link is not completely useless either. If the content is good enough, the nofollow link can still create traffic, and hopefully conversions, to the website. As for other ways to do SEO, social media activity is definitely to some extend affecting the SERP, while it is a good idea to have a look at these 4 effective SEO techniques for 2014!

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Calling to action! How to improve your conversion rates

An important aspect to any website whose importance is often overlooked is the call-to-action (CTA) button(s). Whether the aim of your website is to have people buy a product,  sign up for newsletters or downloading a product, the CTA button is vital for your conversion rate. All your hard work of getting visitors to your website and getting them interested in your product will have gone to waste if it is not followed up with an action by the visitors.

When you think about how easy it is to improve the CTA buttons on your website, and how big a difference it could make to your conversions, it is surprising how little attention it gets. There is plenty of focus on SEO and content (which granted are very important aspects too!), but if you want to see a vast improvement of conversions with little effort put in it, follow these 5 simple tips on how to improve your conversion rates by optimizing your CTA buttons.

Effective usage of negative space

In order to really have your CTA button stand out from the rest of your content and grab the attention of your visitors, you need to make use of negative space around the buttons. There is no exact measurement of how much blank space is needed for a certain size of button, but it is worth having principles like the Rule of Thirds of the Golden Ratio in mind when deciding the ratio.

Size and Color

You wouldn’t automatically suspect the two to be related, but in fact they are. When speaking about the size of the button, size definitely matters! If your button is too small it won’t get noticed enough, however, if your button is too big it may overpower everything around it. Somewhere in between will catch the attention of the visitors without overwhelming them.

The color can work as to balance the size of the button. For big buttons you don’t need a very dominant color but instead a color which flows with the design of the page while still standing out (as an example see VIP Affiliates’ CTA button). If you opt to go with a relatively smaller button you should consider using a much more impactful color to really catch the eyes of your visitors.


Language

The words you choose for you CTA button can make it or break it in terms of whether the visitor ends up clicking on it or not. The wording should be straight-forward and simple, but still with an urgency. Like for example: “Buy now!” or “Download now!”. The wording is simple yet with a clear message which is impossible to misunderstand.



Provide extra information

When needed, provide extra information to the CTA button. The extra information can be anything from the price if it’s a call for purchasing (preferably with an ‘only’ in front), the size of the file if it’s a call for downloading, or the length of time for a free trial. What these kinds of information have in common is that they add to the user experience. That being said, it’s important that the extra information text is not nearly as prominent as the text appealing to the visitor to act.

Click Triggers

Sometimes the call, even with the extra information, isn’t enough to get a conversion. Click triggers are basically extra boost you put close to the button to convince people to click it.
Examples of click triggers are:
- Guarantees
- Ratings
- Payment option
- Reviews
- Security message

Try out a few at the time and see what trigger works best for the CTA button on your website.


With a few adjustments there is no doubt that more visitor will take action on your website, and all the hard work you have put into bringing them in the first place will not have gone to waste!