Affiliate Marketing

Reciprocal Links

A reciprocal link, as the name implies, is where two websites link to each other. A few years back, reciprocal links use to be a good way to gain inbound links to your website. I use to spend hours e-mailing other webmasters asking them if they wanted to swap links. In essence, you were voting for each other's websites, hoping that both websites would receive a boost in the search rankings. In recent years the value of reciprocal links has declined steadily. There is still some debate over...

Link Popularity

Link popularity measures the quantity and quality of the inbound links that point to your website. It's not enough to have a lot of websites linking to you they must also be considered important websites. In other words, websites that have inbound links from important websites are also considered important. The graphic in figure 5.1.3.d illustrates this point Figure 5.1.3.d Link Popularity Example Figure 5.1.3.d Link Popularity Example In this illustration the important websites are marked with...

Submit to Directories

Submitting your website to a directory is a good first step to building link popularity and helping the search engines discover your website. There are literally thousands of directories online. Some directories are considered general topic, while others focus on a specific category. Some directories are free, but others may charge a review fee to be considered for inclusion. Here is a brief list of some general topic directories that you can submit your website to Yahoo Directory (http...

Yahoo Search Marketing

Yahoo Search Marketing, formerly Overture, was one of the first pay per click search engines on the market. Their reach extends to over 90 of active Internet users. Yahoo Search Marketing is much more transparent than Google. When you advertise on Yahoo you can see exactly who is bidding, what they're paying, and their ad position. This means that you must adopt a different strategy to be successful with Yahoo. There are some specific bidding techniques that I will discuss in Section 5.4.2 that...

Additional Notes about MSN Ad Center

MSN paid search results are only displayed on MSN Search (www.msn.com). Because MSN does not currently have any syndication partners, you can expect considerably less traffic from MSN AdCenter than Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. MSN does not offer content match. Both Google and Yahoo offer their advertisers contextual advertising. I suspect in the near future MSN will offer something comparable. MSN AdCenter still has some bugs to work out. At the time of this writing (June 2006),...

Commission Junction Example

To use keyword tracking with Commission Junction you must add the SID (Shopper ID) field to your affiliate links. The SID field allows you to track keywords and variables up to 64 characters long. For more information about the SID field login to CJ and reference the help section You may have already noticed the SID field while you were generating affiliate links for one of your merchants. The graphic below shows the page where you generate links in CJ (The SID field is highlighted) To use the...

Additional Keywords to Consider

If you scroll further down the page (screenshot below), you will see a link titled Additional keywords to consider . When you click on this link Google returns a list of related keywords. (Screenshot on the following page.) Google Ad Word 5 Keyword Tool - Microsoft Internet Explorer File Edit View Favorites Tools Help Address I https adwords. google. conn select KeywordTool Google found 116 additional related keywords. Some of the additional keywords suggested by Google are highly relevant,...

How Does an Affiliate Earn Money

There are four basic actions in which affiliates are paid when they send their visitors to a merchant's website. 1. The visitor buys something from the advertiser pay per sale . 2. The visitor completes a lead form pay per lead . 3. The visitor downloads, installs, or uses some product or service pay per action . 4. The visitor clicks on a link and visits the merchant's website pay per click . Below are detailed explanations of each action Pay Per Sale Pay per sale is the most common type of...

Yahoo Keyword Suggestion Tool Example

Let's continue by using the credit card example from earlier. Remember, in order to find the most possible keyword combinations, you need to start with the general keywords from your list. As you exhaust your list of general keywords, you can use the specific keywords from your list to find even more variations. I'm going to start by using the keyword citi. This search will yield the most keyword variations (Screenshot on the following page ) Figure 3.3.2.a Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool 3 http...

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO, also known as search engine spamming, is when someone creates web pages that have little or no value, that are intended to trick the search engines into offering irrelevant, redundant, or low-quality search results. Black Hat SEO's disregard the rules and the goals of the search engines in an attempt to lure visitors to their website through deceptive practices. They often take pride in gaming or outsmarting the search engines. Black Hat SEO's will heavily leverage technology and...

Web Browser Emulator

It's impossible to guarantee how your website will look in different web browsers without having the specific browsers installed on your machine. AnyBrowser.com does provide a tool called the Web Site Viewer, which is not an emulator, but will show you potential problems your web page display may have. If possible, I recommend testing your website in these popular web browsers 1. Internet Explorer - by far the most widely used browser. Accounts for over 80 of the market. Download Internet...

Yahoo Paid Search Example

Yahoo offers one of the most helpful tools for evaluating the competition. Yahoo has developed the View Bids which allows you to see the bid (price per click), and the position for all of the advertisers for a keyword. Let's use the keyword slr camera from our previous example. (Screenshot on the following page ) Type ill a Jr'L-,irh tRmi and we'll Jih'w yau 1li'L M.ih HihK and IhlJiiiji 1er thai tcmi. 1. iUlftniiw M-nrmfliri Hritr -Jii frtlihi-K hkH yiu buy. Kii i it CaiOS. vit havi a (6 pi*ra...

Landing Page Elements

As I mentioned in the previous section, there are 4 basic elements essential to every good landing page. This section will focus on those elements in more detail, providing suggestions and tips for each element. I have included a landing page from one of my live campaigns as an example. This will help to illustrate the landing page elements (Screenshot on the following page ) Figure 4.6.1 Audible Landing Page Screenshot Get 2. FREE Audio Cooks Risk-FREE at Audible.com Get 2.