You are here: Home » Archives for March 2009

Affiliate Marketing for Increasing Sales

March 18, 2009 Leave a reply

I recently got in touch with Andrew, the Affiliate Manager for autoanything.com, a leader in providing auto parts online. I wanted to get his thoughts on a few questions I had concerning the sellers side of affiliate marketing. Provided below are a few questions that were asked.
Read this post

Affiliate Marketing

Google and Private Registrations

March 9, 2009 Leave a reply

I recently did a study on how Google treats pages that have their registration set to private. For my research I have not found anything that mention there is a problem with having your registration set this way. From a number of articles I read some have mentioned that having your domain registration set to private helps in securing the domain name itself. Doing this can also cut down on spam as well. Others say that there should be no reason for a business domain to be set to private. What does Google think about all this is what I’m trying to figure out. From my research it seems as if Google is keeping a bit quiet on the subject. I do know that search engines use the length of registration and the age of the domain to determine trust. I can only assume more trust will be given to those who do not set the registration to private. I haven’t found any concrete evidence that says better ranking will be given to those who provide their registration information nor have I found anything that says private registration can hurt your rank. Read this post

Avoiding Penalties

25 Affiliate Marketing Tips, Design Tips, Affiliate Strategies

March 4, 2009 2 Comments

Affiliate marketing can be exciting yet time consuming. At times it can also get tedious and frustrating. I’ve been marketing online for quite some time and I stepped into affiliate marketing a little over a year ago and have had a decent amount of success with it. The thing I like most about affiliate marketing; no shipping issues and no returns.

Below is my list of affiliate marketing website tips and ideas.

1) Continue learning your product, your goal is to become the best resource for information on that specific product.

2) No following your links is a must. You don’t want to send juice to your affiliate links.

3) Become the affiliate of more than 1 single “related” company. Choice is always good. With valuable content this will help build your authority. Using a single Affiliate Company can make your site look like a doorway.

4) When writing about the topic, don’t ramble on; make sure the information will be useful to your readers. Make it useful enough to come back to.

5) Be patient with your link building. Focus on your content and your website’s unique purpose.

My Affiliate Marketing Time Management

70% content, design, Onsite-Focus,
30% Link Building and Marketing – Offsite Focus

6) Become a registered Business. I will write more about this later.

7) Provide a related service. This is where you need to be creative. If you are a web hosting affiliate, offer a software installation service or, even better, free add-on scripts. (Fulfill that Unique Purpose)

8) Dedicated Hosting IP will help engines see your time is dedicated to that one site.

9) Also stretch out the life of your domain. I prefer to keep my business domain expiration over 4 yrs. Shows search engines your in it for the long run.

10) Purchase and upload tracking software. You may need to add code to the final page of the other website. Work this out with the affiliate company you provide leads/sales to. Implementing tracking and/or affiliate software will show your Affiliate Manager that you are serious and usually the Manager will help you get things tracking properly. If they don’t, another company will.

11) As marketing Guru Seth Godin says, “Be Remarkable”. Remarkable just doesn’t mean really neat. It means something worth making a “remark” about. Dedicate time into creating a resource that not only is “remarkable” but better than the sites currently ranking for the keywords you want top rank.

You can find a few keyword research tools by visiting this link.

http://seinternetmarketing.com/2008/seotools/

12) Earning trust will earn you more conversions. I mentioned on #6 to register a Business. If you’re a registered Business for over a year, consider registering with the Better Business Bureau Online.

13) Continue earning trust by investing in mcafeesecure.com and etrust.org services. These services will also help protect your site as well as insure privacy to your visitors. This will also help your site earn credibility with the search engines.

14) Design comes before marketing. Make sure you’re set on all logos, site design, etc. You cannot gain trust by changing your site’s template or logo once a week. Keep your design changes minimal. I’ve considered redesigning this site’s layout. I won’t make a change until I find something I can be satisfied with for the long run.

15) Use a secondary site for your grey hat techniques. One grey hat technique I believe can bring some good business is paid reviews. However the links that come with paid reviews can be seen as paid links which may affect your rank with Google. Your main site may be the one that feeds your kids. Don’t gamble with the site that feeds you.

16) Get familiar with code. I believe learning at least a little about code can really help. I tend to focus on xhtml, javascript and php. Extending your knowledge on databases can also help. You don’t need to be a guru, just learn as you go. As you learn more, you’ll find benefits to having this knowledge.

17) Get familiar with syndication. By providing daily content in a blog, other webmasters may syndicate to your articles. Some may pull the text through rss but not link to your article. Consider placing a url like http://seinternetmarketing.com somewhere within your article text.

18) You should already know by now, you must build links as well as trust. Links from directories, press releases, and related websites will help your rank. For Directories like DMOZ, the only way to get an affiliate website listed here is by staying within the Strict DMOZ affiliate guidelines.

19) Make sure the company site you work with are leaders with a competitive offering. The internet makes it easy to shop around and people will do just that. If your company has the best prices or the best service, the shopper will probably come back to make a purchase. Cookie and IP tracking is used to keep tabs on who gets commission for the sale. Cookies or IPs are usually set to expire in a month or even a few months. This way if your shopper revisits the company site and not yours, you can still get paid depending on how long it took the shopper to return because of this cookie or IP.

20) Better traffic gives you better leverage. The more sales you can convert, the better position you are in to request commission adjustments. Remember, loads of traffic doesn’t necessarily mean its better traffic. When I say better traffic, I mean traffic with a high conversion rate. Ask your affiliate manager who they target. If you provide leads to a lender, they’ll probably let you know they see higher conversion rates with applicants over 40 years of age. Purchasing advertising with sites like Facebook will give you the ability to target specific age ranges.

21) Make your affiliate site pages easy to bookmark.

22) Consider offering a free service related to your affiliate services.

23) The more times the average user will visit your page, they more likely they will bookmark the site.

24) If you haven’t already, maybe its time to think “community”.

25) No affiliate links should be present on the homepage. For an affiliate website I will generally keep all affiliate links about 3 clicks deep. Good content should be primary.

Below is a common structure of an Affiliate Website.

affiliate website structure

Check out some more seo tips.

Affiliate Marketing

Sitepal for your Business Website

March 2, 2009 Leave a reply

So who uses Sitepal’s Characters Animations? For those who haven’t heard of this, Sitepal.com provides animated talking characters for your website. There are a few good things as well as few drawbacks I found about this service. I went ahead and added their youtube video to clearly express some of the benefits to using Sitepal.

Read this post

General