It seems rather common practice to see the term ‘Affiliate marketing’ being described as ‘innovative’ and ‘modern’. To those unfamiliar with the practices of affiliate marketing then it may feel like a rather complex branch of advertising in what it is still a relatively new medium. However, those who have seen the significant financial rewards that affiliate marketing can bring will no doubt tell you that the best way to be successful is to embrace mainstream online marketing practices.

Today’s affiliates seem to fall into one of two camps (although many have a foot in both): either broad and shallow or narrow and deep. In other words, some will operate multiple sites (for multiple read potentially very large numbers); whilst others focus solely on one or at most a handful of web properties. Both approaches are valid and have been proven. Both approaches place significant demands on time and resource, with endless data, content, links, on-page optimisation, PPC campaigns, social media optimisation and so forth – all clamouring for attention. Successful affiliates in 2009 are those that manage this juggling act, focusing their attentions on those areas with the highest return.

Where high volumes of traffic may suggest good marketing, smaller volumes of traffic to the right customers suggests more effective marketing. Whether you have one site or 10,000, knowledge of the consumer is paramount. This doesn’t necessarily mean the detailed behavioural analysis seen in some of the large merchant sites. Rather it means a clear view as to what terms are driving traffic and how well that traffic is monetising. Understanding the correlation between visitors, click-throughs via your affiliate links and sales / commission is vital. Sounds obvious? Perhaps but the realities of tracking this data effectively and using it to refine your keyword and targeting strategies result, for most, in a bitter contest between “guilt list” action items.

Getting updates from your partners and colleagues in the industry should be a priority. Much of the ground will already have been covered: after all, you are not operating in a vacuum, with many other affiliates competing for similar traffic. Time spent researching top performing products and related search terms is absolutely vital: far more so than that pretty graphic you keep feeling tempted to implement on your 74th credit card comparison site. Moreover, good communication works both ways. The networks need input from the affiliates as much as the inverse is true. Whilst to some, sharing is an act of altruism to be avoided at all costs, many of the more established affiliates will happily trade relevant information with others, some of whom they would regard as – at least in part – closely connected with the competition.

We’re not suggesting you give away the crown jewels here. Merely that the exchange of information is becoming as much a currency as the financial exchange central to all affiliate marketing. Many of the better known blogs and forums bear witness to daily trades of valuable and up-to-date information – along with the usual selection of rants!

Maintaining a large number of affiliate sites may mean having to chop and change writing styles if they all have different core markets, and unless you have (or have access to) good copywriting skills to write with this flexibility, it is probably better to stick to sites around a manageable number of themes. If nothing else, you need sufficient knowledge of the space to ensure that any copy you may commission is suitable and accurate.

Copywriting in itself can be a demanding job, particularly for the production of SEO friendly copy. Not only must it be engaging for the consumer but syntax and grammar must be to the highest standard in ensuring search engine friendliness. Keyword density is a discipline in its own right as anyone who has ever tried to read “optimised” content from some sources will confirm.

Whilst the best text and imaging content in the world may attract relevant traffic, monetising it presents a set of challenges in its own right. Do you wrestle with the daily vagaries of multiple networks, retrieving text links by hand, battling with inconsistent data feeds? Or do you outsource much or indeed all of this area, using a solution such as Easy Content Units (ECU)? ECU, for example, allows you to search for those products that you think you will be able to ‘sell’ best (remember the information sharing from above?). With the right products selected you have considerable control as to the manner in which they are displayed. Images, logos, price comparison, special offers and so forth – all good engaging material for the consumer with monetising affiliate links. OK – end of pitch!

Ultimately, your best focus will be determined by those tasks that are most closely suited to your skills – and to your own preferences. After all, no-one gets into affiliate marketing to simply replicate a day job in which 9/10ths of their daily tasks are a much hated bind. It may feel like this in the earlier days but as you build a business you need to decide what to handle and what to hand-off. A seemingly easy decision that so many of us wrestle with on a daily basis.

We are told that to succeed we need to automate and outsource. In practice some tasks can even employ a degree of outsourced automation, combining the advantages of both. In broad terms, there are thus just two questions to ask of yourself: what are you actually good at and what do you enjoy? Map the (honest!) answers onto the tasks involved in running your affiliate business and then plan to hand-off the rest as time, knowledge, contacts and of course budget allows.

Goodbye juggler. Hello successful affiliate.

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

Sack the Juggler!

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Social Media Optimisation (SMO) has, over the last couple of years, become a significant discipline in its own right and we will be covering the subject in ever greater depth here at Lammo over the coming weeks and months. In simple terms, Social Media sites are, as the name suggests, sites that are designed to house and encourage interaction between users and the creation of one or more communities with a common theme or purpose.

Whilst many social media sites started life with non-commercial aspirations, the power of the approach has steadily attracted individuals and firms with commercial objectives. It has become a form of relationship marketing but of course entirely online, where website owners can interact and increase traffic to their sites. Social Media thus helps in having an effective ‘conversation’ with a site’s target audience.

Perhaps most significantly of all, SMO extends the “real estate” available to online marketers. There are only so many search engine first pages for given search terms. No matter how hard you may work at search engine optimisation (SEO), in many highly competitive categories and search terms it is becoming all but impossible to attain first page positions. SMO completely changes the game, with immediate access to a potentially targeted audience. No waiting for many months to see if your hard work in SEO will ultimately bear fruit – you can start conversations today!

We are not for a minute suggesting that you replace SEO with SMO. Rather that you do both! SMO completely compliments the foundation work covered in SEO and indeed is a valuable input into the ongoing refinement of your SEO strategy.

Why is Social Media effective in this economy?
Research already shows that recession boosts Social Media marketing spending as this is the time for brands and websites to differentiate themselves from competitors and truly engage with their customers in a personal (and cost-effective) way. SMO is therefore increasingly important in many established firms’ online marketing mix as it attracts a large number of users exposed to and entering into dialogues around information that is sometimes not accessible via search engines.

What can Social Media aim to achieve?

1. Brand Building
From an affiliate perspective, SMO personalisation allows more effective creation of a brand than via SEO where, as we all know, there is precious little in the way of loyalty and everything is driven by optimisation for terms, price and functionality.

2. Reputation management
Brand reputation management has become a necessity when dealing with consumers especially in a competitive market. Whilst the search engines help in a great way to drive traffic, forums, social media, networking sites and blogs are all relevant to companies’ and products’ reputation. It is critical in this environment to know what people are saying about your brand / products / services offered.

3. Reach
Social media technologies provide scale and enable anyone to reach a global audience.

4. Low Cost Accessibility
Although there are time and resource costs associated with maintaining effective dialogues via SMO (much of which can of course be outsourced to SMO specialists if time is an issue), the costs and barriers to entry are far lower than with paid search or indeed a sustained SEO strategy.

5. Immediacy
With the best SEO strategy in the world, your visibility is only as good as the latest search engine index. As we all know, the time lag between SEO work and the results can be significant. This is a particular issue with fast-moving sectors such as vouchers and offers, cash back, finance, travel, electronics and so forth where offers come and go and products change daily. SMO provides a real time communication mechanism with your target market place although it is important to recognise that SMO presence takes time to build and the effects of your efforts will also take time to bear fruit in many cases.

6. Targeting Accuracy
You may have a very strong handle on the relevant keywords to drive targeted traffic to your affiliate sites. However, what you may not have is any level of real understanding of the motivation of the consumers entering those keywords. The more generic or competitive your keywords, the worse this is. The dialogues possible with a targeted audience via social media address this head on. Your consumers will TELL you what they are looking for. And what they are not looking for as well.

7. Money!
Simply stated, given the above factors an effective SMO strategy should drive highly targeted traffic to your site on a real time basis which should in turn result in increased conversions and commissions.

SMO Strategies
Specific strategies and tactics will be determined by your sector and target audience. Different social media sites have different target audiences and demographics and it is vital that you invest time in identifying the right venues – we will explore this in other posts here at Lammo. In general terms there are a number of effective strategies that can be put in place.

On-Page SMO
This includes on-page tactics through which a site owner can add content and links to services such as Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us so that their pages can be easily ‘saved and submitted’ to and for these services. These services use a rating and interactive system, so its very easy to know what consumers are saying about your site, products and services. You will now also see “follow us on Twitter links” on an ever increasing number of sites.

Off-Page SMO
This involves selecting the most targeted social media venues and creating a presence and opening dialogues with your target audience. It may include writing content that is unique, and newsworthy. This content can then be marketed by popularising it via other sites and getting involved in blogs, forums, and niche communities.

Social Media Venues
Social media real estate grows by the day. The following is a (very) generalised classification of social media venues:-

1. Internet forums
2. Weblogs (blogs)
3. Wikis
4. Podcasts/Pictures Video
5. Social Networks – LinkedIn, Facebook, Blogger, mySpace, Second Life, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Del.icio.us, BeBo etc.
6. Twitter – as covered elsewhere here at Lammo – this micro blogging site is almost in a class of its own!

Social Media tactics:
Plan bespoke content-based campaigns to introduce your site and brand to each relevant social media venue. The difference here is that the content is aimed and targeted directly to the consumer/user and not for search engines. It is therefore critical to create relevant, unique and useful content for the consumer. As with most things, first impressions count so ensure that you think through the approach in detail: word spreads fast – good or bad! Make sure that you have the resources lined up to respond to the dialogues that you open: obvious as this may sound, many fail at this early stage.

Planning a Social Media campaign
Again we will explore the key elements of SMO in greater detail here at Lammo. In essence, you need to:-

1. Ensure you have as much information as possible more information on your target audience – who are they, what are they looking for and where are they hanging out on the web.
2. Identify and prioritise the most relevant Social Media venues on this basis
3. Plan and create the initial content, focus and keyword strategy
4. Allocate resource to handle the dialogues
5. Create the necessary profiles
6. Post content and start the dialogue
7. Manage responses
8. Use responses as input to further SMO (and indeed SEO) strategy
9. Constantly measure the results including the reaction of your audience together with visitor and click-through / commission stats and add this as input to further strategy

Social Media takes time
Despite the immediacy of SMO in many ways, it is vital that you recognise that although cycles are far shorter than with most SEO activities, SMO also takes time to show positive results. Plan strategies and techniques that will raise awareness, engagement and satisfaction amongst your users. Utilise the information and feed back to your advantage to reap benefits in the longer term. Many of the Social Media venues are also continuing to grow in stature as audiences recognise their benefits and, as such, the overall SMO target audience continues to grow by the day.

Is SMO for Me?
Social media gives you an option to listen to your consumer and offer them exactly what they want. This facilitates lead generation and increased conversions. It also raises the feeling of community, sharing and connecting. Social media if used correctly can almost certainly work to your advantage. If you are willing to put (or pay for) the time and effort into identifying the right venues; creating the right content; managing responses and using the results to fine tune your SMO strategy then the rewards are there for the taking.

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

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Entrepreneur, billionaire and founder of the internationally recognised Virgin brand, 59 year old Sir Richard Branson bares all in his book Business Stripped Bare. Adventurers of a Global Entrepreneur, published on18th September 2008 by Virgin Books (who else!) and refreshingly written in a frank and honest style.

Branson’s latest literary offering charts the inside track of his business journey, and details the truth behind his most risky business ventures, primarily the origination and growth of the Virgin Empire, Branson’s globally recognised brand. The book lays bare astonishing facts, such as how Virgin Mobile USA became the fastest company in history to generate in excess of one billion dollars, how Branson became the only person worldwide to have created – from nothing – eight billion dollar companies in eight different sectors, and the truth behind the success of Virgin Blue. What makes it so readable is Branson’s use of stories to illustrate his points, which include his encounters with BA, Coco Cola, the set up of Virgin money, and the realities of Virgin’s bid for Northern Rock.

Personal facts and data are also included, such as which entrepreneurs Branson himself most admires, the characteristics he looks for in his employees to guarantee the success of his staggering and ever more diverse business empire and why Branson insists on businesses co-operating with governments to curb climate change and safeguard the future of the planet. Branson is at pains to correct any publically held notions of Virgin as a ‘monster sized company’ when in fact it consists of numerous smaller businesses, with the exception of Virgin Atlantic. Emphasising his choice for smaller companies, Branson claims that they avoid the risk of stagnation, thus ensuring that employees aren’t distracted from the tasks in hand, with small scale business having more positive impact on global situations, notably climate change.

Business Stripped Bare offers invaluable business advice for other would be entrepreneurs, besides its true and open account of the set backs that plagued some of Virgin’s greatest developments. Described as being ‘dynamic’ and ‘inspirational’, Branson succeeds in stripping away business myths and lays bare the essential facts that can make a world of difference to business, whatever your background. As one reader put it, ‘unlike other business book writers, he [Branson] has the first-hand experience in Virgin.’ Speaking from his own experiences means that Branson can offer deep insights gained by one very experienced entrepreneur. As Branson succinctly puts it, “So all I can do for you now (and I firmly believe that this is all anyone can honestly do) is map the territory I’ve seen. The good news is, I’ve covered a lot of territory.”

This is an insightful read for anyone interested in Branson the man as much as in the building of Virgin, including the hindrances and challenges faced along the journey to its seemingly unassailable position in today’s international business landscape. As another reader observed, ‘Richard Branson oozes charisma, energy and vitality’ and it is these qualities which are reinforced throughout the 300 plus pages of this book, wherein Branson deals with a collection of subjects related to key business and managerial themes, including leadership, brand and social responsibility. Vital elements which become the focus of specific chapters include the emphasis on Virgin as a brand wherein he writes principally about Virgin Blue and the competition he faced in establishing Virgin in Australia; the positivity of learning from one’s mistakes – a lesson Branson writes about against the back drop of his failure to acquire Northern Rock; the importance of innovation as a drive for business which introduces Branson’s plans for Virgin Galactic; and the wider corporate responsibilities of any seriously sized business including Branson’s Virgin fuels and the Global Elders project. An essential strength is Branson’s approach to business – as one avid Branson fan put it – ‘not as an entity detached from his or our everyday lives’ but rather a concept used ‘as a source of great change.’ A successful business for Branson is clearly a social and humanitarian enterprise, the point of his final chapter which centres firstly on eliminating HIV and AIDS from Africa and secondly on climate change.

Not only is this literary, insightful and practical book a credible easy-to-read business guide but it is innovative in that it encourages its reader to put forward their own business idea for Branson and Virgin’s consideration by visiting their ‘Got A Big Idea’ page. The best message to be gleamed from Business Stripped Bare is this – that “the brave may not live forever – but the cautious do not live at all”. As Branson said, “…enjoy your life. You only get one.” A very apt message coming from a man who has so successfully and visibly lived his life to the full.

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

Business Stripped Bare: A review of Richard Branson’s new Business Book

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As we have discussed in a number of posts here at Lammo.net, much of the work involved in good SEO is about building links and relationships with appropriate partner sites.

Getting a decent number of inbound links is one of a number of key factors in building your ranking within the search engines’ natural results. This may be achieved through your own hard work or you may have used the services of a decent link building firm. Either way, anyone who has ever run a linking campaign will know that it is extremely hard work.

Unfortunately the challenges are not at an end when someone confirms that they have linked back to you.

Firstly, we are assuming for a moment that they will be kind enough (and organised enough) to actually remember to tell you that they have linked back to you. Assuming that they get this far, it might be useful for you to know from WHERE they have linked to you and yet surprisingly few volunteer this information on a first pass, perhaps assuming that you will be so overcome with excitement at getting a return link (and that you have so much time on your hands) that you will be willing to hunt through what may be an immense site to find that hard-won link.

Let’s assume that you get to the eureka moment of finally discovering that link. Be pleased – of course – but don’t allow the ensuing rush of endorphins to cloud your judgement when checking that the link is valid and of any value. As with so many things in life, the vast majority of link partners will be as honest and hard working as your are. They were, after all, awake enough to realise that linking still has value. Some, however, still feel that by employing some trickery, they can hoodwink you into giving them a link by offering a link of absolutely no value in return.

These characteristics are, to some extent, exacerbated by the fact that we are all operating online in a relatively anonymous fashion. As we all know from some of the bizarre (and in some cases certifiable) responses that we all see to emails, forum postings and the like. It is easy to be brave when hiding behind a laptop in a bedroom somewhere. It is equally easy to be deceitful.

What this ultimately boils down to is not that some link partners simply won’t link to your page — as you’ll be able to check this pretty quickly — but rather that they will use sneaky forms of web trickery to APPEAR to link to you whilst actually devaluing or hiding the link to your page as far as the search engines are concerned. The following are the primary means by which partners attempt to achieve this but new and innovative forms of trickery are almost certainly in the pipeline as web technology becomes ever more complex.

Accidental Trickery
It should also be emphasised that many partners will INADVERTENTLY employ one or more of the following tricks simply through lack of knowledge or because of the publishing software they use. It is therefore important when contacting partners to ask them to correct the link, that you always do so in a friendly and never accusatory style!

1. Nofollow Links
If rel=”nofollow” appears anywhere within the A HREF tag for your link, this is a problem. Originally designed for blogs and forums to prevent unnecessary page rank leakage and to minimise spammy link posts, the nofollow tag is used by the search engines in determining whether a site owner wishes a link to be treated as a ‘full’ link and thus to confer ranking and indeed page rank to the linked-to site. The nofollow tag will defeat many link checking tools as these will find the HREF tag associated with your link and assume it to be valid.

In most cases the only way in which to accurately check for this is to view the source of the page from which the partner is linking to you. The engines’ treatment of this tag varies. Google, for example, states that the nofollow instruction is interpreted literally and the content of any hyperlink with this prefix is completely disregarded. However, several studies have been performed and the results seem to suggest that in fact Google MAY follow the link but will not index the landing page. Both MSN and Yahoo on the other hand openly interpret a nofollow link as a page to be visited, but they do attribute any “link juice” to the linked to page as a result of this link.

Other valid links elsewhere may of course still confer ranking. This is a frustrating but relatively easy to spot issue. Many Content Management Systems (CMS) and blogging / forum solutions may by default change all links to nofollow so don’t assume your new link partner has done this deliberately!

2. Client Side JavaScript Links
It is quite possible to add a link using client side JavaScript. Although the link will function correctly and your page will open when you click on it, there is a good deal of debate as to how well the search engines will index and rank these. Certainly enough debate for them not to be considered as a ‘safe’ return link.

Once again, some partners will not be aware that this is an issue and will simply code it this way just because that’s the way they have always done it. There are further variations on this theme including the creation of JavaScript and flash applets wherein it is a near certainty that the links may appear correctly but are very unlikely to be indexed.

3. Redirected Links
This is another old favourite. In many cases these are fairly obvious: when you hover over your ‘link’, the link location displayed in the status bar on your browser will show you that the link is to another page on the link partner’s site rather than to your page. That said, it is easy to manipulate the contents of the status bar using script so the link may appear valid when hovering over it. In all cases, when you click on the link, it will work correctly and your page will open.

However, this is simply because the page on the link partner’s site to which the link is directed will perform a server-side redirect to your page, in much the same way as the affiliate tracking URLs with which we are all familiar will land on the network’s page and then redirect to the relevant merchant page. However, as with affiliate redirect URLs, the redirected link has no SEO value for your site and will not confer ‘link juice’.

Once again, many link partners implement this way quite innocently, assuming that you will gain value from the link and because that is the way in which their publishing software automatically handles it. Others may of course do so for more cynical reasons.

4. Orphaned Pages
Another equally irritating trick (or naive action depending on your interpretation) that link partners sometimes employ is to place a link to your site on an orphaned page on their site. An orphaned page is quite simply a page on a site which isn’t linked to from any other indexed page. Note the use of the word ‘indexed’ here.

A common approach is to provide the link, stating ‘this is linked to from the XYZ page’. Many people will be happy with this, little realising that the XYZ page which may appear to be a credible page, is not itself linked to within the site’s navigation structure and thus has no value to confer to the page on which your link appears. As a result it is impossible for a browsing visitor (or more importantly a search engine spider) to EVER come across this page.

In all cases there must be a traceable path from the site’s home page to the page on which your link is placed. Nothing else will do. Yet again, many partners do this simply because they are out of date as to their own site’s structure, particularly with larger sites so don’t assume this is a deliberate attempt at cheating.

5. Other Issues
As scripting languages and techniques become ever more sophisticated there are a host of other potential issues although most of these are marginal at present. Some sites may use a combination of scripting, HTML and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) techniques to make certain parental controls and standard browser protections result in the non-display of links. This will mean that the link to your page will ‘disappear’ whenever anyone views their page, so though they have technically provided it, in reality it will never be seen and never be used.

In most cases, however, it should be indexable and remember that the primary objective of any link building campaign is not the additional traffic such links may generate in their own right but the ‘link juice’ that they confer in helping your long term rankings.

In some cases partners will simply get the code wrong and the link won’t work; they will link to another page other than the one you have asked for (some have a rigid policy of only linking to a home page); some will use the wrong anchor text in the link; some will use 3-way linking which is fine if not used excessively, wherein you link to their site A and they link back to you from site B. If the sites are on-theme this is generally OK but may also be the hallmark of link farms and ‘link networks’ which are far from fine. We have covered other wider linking issues elsewhere here at lammo.net.

Conclusion
When it comes to linking partners it’s not all cloak and daggers antics despite the warnings above, but there should be a fair exchange of value within each linking relationship. In addition to checking for the above issues (which is far quicker than reading this article!) and requesting any appropriate changes, if you have given them a decent link, you shouldn’t be afraid to request that the link to your site is placed in an appropriate area of your partner’s site, preferably within a well written piece of content that is relevant and original, and not just placed carelessly in a vast list of links on a uninteresting or hidden page where it is pretty much worthless.

Finally, do remember that most link partners are honest (and will expect you to be as well!) and that when you encounter any of the issues above, there is a very good chance that the culprit is their publishing system rather than any deliberate deceit — and tone your requests for change accordingly.

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

Oops I deleted your link again!

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Though the Shakespearean reference in the title may seem a little out of place when you’re talking about creating an affiliate website, when it comes to the subject of keywords and site names then it’s more apt than you think. Having to choose how to present your hard fought-for keywords and choosing whether to dash, underscore or leave them as is can inspire in some indecision on a level that Hamlet himself would be proud of. There is a constant argument raging around this whole issue, and it’s not just the address of your site that will need to be scrutinised but also the names of your individual page titles that will have you gnashing your teeth, especially if your decide to trawl through the thoroughly treacherous and numerous forums on the web. To save you the hassle of doing this, we have put together a few tips about keyword use in both domain names and page titles that should help clear things up a little bit.

Dash the Site Name?
There are many domain names out there with rich, profitable keywords that have yet to be tapped, but a question that comes up again and again is whether it is better to go for two words run together, for example redclothes.com, or to separate the two with a dash, e.g. red-clothes.com. The short answer is that you should almost always make sure that you set up your main site with the two words running together as not only does this look more professional and make your site look like an original idea, but if you’re going to be using more than two words the argument for getting rid of the dashes is even stronger. We have all seen the www.here-is-another-site-with-loads-of-keywords-stuffed-into-the-domain.com type examples – although rarely high up in the results pages!

The slightly longer answer is that you will however need to consider things a little more deeply if your site is going to have two keywords in the domain name which when side by side form an ambiguous third word which can easily confuse – or even offend! An obvious example would be something like experts-exchange.com, in which the dash removes any sense of ambiguity and the potentially confusing sexual connotations of the unhyphenated domain name.

Dash the Page Name?
There are a couple of major considerations in naming pages. Firstly, remember that the page name is part of a longer URL and avoid excessive repetition. Say you had opted for ladders-expo.com (to avoid the dodgier connotations of the non-dashed version), you probably want to avoid URLs such as www.ladders-expo.com/ladders/ladders-for-sale.html as these may be counter-productive. Whilst keyword-in-URL is still seemingly a significant factor with Google (some would argue too much so), overdoing anything in SEO terms is never a good strategy. Thus when naming folders and pages, think about the whole of the URL rather than just one element. A better URL could be www.ladders-expo.com/aluminium/6ft-folding-ladder.html. This is more meaningful and less keyword-stuffed than the previous version.

Secondly, whereas combining names results in URLs that are easier to recall when visitors type them directly into the address bar, the inverse is true for page names. Almost no-one will type in a full page name into the address bar so page names should be as descriptive and as search engine friendly as possible. If you think about it from a programming point of view, it is going to be far easier for a search engine to parse (read and break down into its constituent components) a dashed URL – the dashes “tell” the search engine where the boundaries of each word are. Otherwise the poor thing has to (and may not bother to) perform a dictionary look-up for every possible grouping of characters within the page name in order to determine the constituent words and, as we have seen above, this can in some cases be ambiguous.

Let’s assume for a moment that you have a riveting page demonstrating the capabilities of some ladders, perhaps using some videos. You could send the search engine robots into a spin by calling the page findemosnow.html. Possible interpretations of this are:-

fin + demo + snow (something about demonstrating fins in the snow?)
fin + demos + now (something about demonstrating fins right now)
find + demos + now (which is what you intended – but you may be lucky to get there)

OK, a bit of a daft example but it does illustrate the point: find-demos-now.html should eradicate any confusion. For those of you who prefer to avoid dashes at all costs, you may be able to create a folder structure which will include all of the elements needed e.g. /find/demos/now.html

Dash or Underscore
When it comes to giving titles to the individual names of your pages the choice of separator until recently was clear, as Google did not recognise the lowly underscore as separating two keywords because of its use in various scripting and programming applications. Thus, historically the best option for everyone was to stick to using the dash in order to separate keywords in a page title. However, the busy beavers at Google have rectified this issue and now both dashes and underscores in page titles are given the same value, so from an SEO point of view, theoretically either a dash or an underscore is going to result in the same thing. However, things aren’t as black and white as this, because of course you’ve got to take into account the fact that the average consumer is going to be far more comfortable with typing in a dash rather than an underscore on the rare occasions on which they may be entering an entire page name. As a result, the general consensus is that when deciding upon the name of a page it’s best still to use dashes if you have SEO in mind, at least until trends in searching change and the underscore is higher up in the mainstream typing psyche.

The Third Way
There is of course another way to approach this problem and cover all of your bases, if you’ll excuse the overused baseball metaphor. If you’re fretting over whether to buy the dashed or non-dashed version of your domain name then why not just buy both? This will allow you to develop one domain as your main site with all of your content, then simply 301 redirect (the safe way) the second domain to your main site. Not only will this cover the dash or no dash problem, but it will stop anyone else buying the other domain name and leeching from your traffic.

Ultimately, different people have expressed different opinions on the question as to whether adding a dash to your domain name choice will help or hinder when it comes to SEO, but in general it’s probably most sensible to stay away from the dash, unless it is necessary to clarify the keywords which might otherwise be confusing. And domain names can be bought for a relatively small amount so there shouldn’t be too much of a problem with buying both domains and removing the debate entirely.

As for page naming, all but the simplest single word page names will generally benefit from dashes to make interpretation and keyword identification as easy as possible. If you are in any doubt as to which way to go, take a look at a good cross-section of sites ranking for your target terms and see what approach they have taken. Whilst we all know that there are a ton of other factors which will affect their rankings, you may find that there are some common themes.

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

To Dash or not to Dash?

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So you’ve scoured this site for every tiny bit of advice out there to help you boost your site’s page ranking. You’ve sifted through all the SEO tips and techniques, you’ve set up a perfect PPC campaign and are adding new content daily and have spent hours and hours getting some relevant links. And yet your site is stuck in the back end of Google (or is nowhere to be seen) and is not showing any signs of moving. You could be tempted, as many new affiliates are, to ease off on all SEO activities, cancel your PPC campaigns and in some cases give up completely.

Stop!

This slow start is perfectly normal and you could be throwing away a thriving business of the future by not keeping the faith.

Time for a reality check. Perhaps we should be blaming Bill Gates with his notion of “business at the speed of thought” for creating the illusion that online businesses can open and flourish in a matter of moments. Let’s be honest: you wouldn’t expect to just open a brand new shop on the high street and to be reaching the level of turnover not expected until year 3 in the first six months. You need to wait for customers to realise you’re there, you need to gain their trust and you need to keep offering new and exciting reasons for them to shop with you, as opposed your competitors. This is EXACTLY the same with online business. In fact, because of SEO your online business has the potential to see the kind of business a high street shop can only dream about FAR SOONER, but not immediately.

Search engines are extremely fussy and temperamental mistresses, as I’m sure you’re already aware. If you do something right they reward you but if you do something wrong they punish you so you really have to make sure you’re playing their game. Worse than that, some of the current search engine algorithms grant new sites a “honeymoon period” in which they may see rankings rise – perhaps impressively so – only to tail off after 3-4 months. An illusion of rapid growth followed by a long period of growing despair.

Rather than checking AdSense and your affiliate accounts for the latest 0.0002p increase in in earnings, there are a number of very positive things you can do during this tough period.

First and foremost, ask yourself some hard questions. What differentiates you? Why SHOULD the search engines give you space. Are you yet another price comparison, affiliate mobile phone, broadband, credit card or bingo site with little or nothing to distinguish you from the zillions of others already out there — some more established than you and all chasing the same traffic and the same keywords? Google can’t see pretty pictures or graphics on the site and it certainly doesn’t know or care that you are the nicest person in Britain and have worked more hours than the rest of your family put together. Can you answer these questions? Really? If not, de-risk your strategy. Apply everything you have already learned to a sector that may not offer such exciting commissions but for which the competition is less insane and for which earnings per thousand clicks are still reasonable.

As you will have seen from the biographies of some of the UK’s most successful business people, the ability to adapt and to recognise when something isn’t working are among the many keys to success. And all of them have failed at least once, in most cases many times.

Assuming that you have concluded that your strategy IS sensible, the best thing you can do is start monitoring your progress, because you’re bound to be making some if you’re putting the time and effort into SEO and the like. Think about using analytics providers such as Omniture as well as using SEO Quake-style toolbars to measure page ranks, indexes, keyword density etc. Using the site ‘Who is’ is a great place to start too because it will tell you your SEO percentage for your site’s META data. A lot of sites put a lot of effort into the SEO on individual pages but not on the site as a whole. NME.COM, one of the most successful music news sites on the web, was recently re-launched purely with SEO in mind and they hit over 3.5 million page views in November 2008. Granted they’ve been going for over 15 years but it took the re-launch to see the kind of progress they’ve been waiting for. That’s not to say a complete re-launch is necessary. Chances are you did your research before you set the site up but it can’t do any harm to just check it out.

Start by writing down all your SEO data for your site on a specific date. Do it again on the same date the following month. Then the following three months and so on. There are so many elements and aspects that you can measure and so many ways in which you will notice progress, even if sales and page views aren’t rising the way you want. And seeing keywords that you’ve optimised moving up the keyword list will show you that your efforts are indeed paying off.

Whilst you are busily tracking progress, don’t forget to continue with ongoing SEO activities. If you don’t feel that you have necessarily followed best practice with the SEO for the site itself, keep researching and make sure you have all the main factors properly under control. However, don’t keep constantly fiddling with the site – constant change can potentially be counter-productive and in extreme cases it can create an over-optimisation penalty.

Most importantly, keep adding fresh content, especially once you are out of the honeymoon period – this is when so many webmasters give up and their sites die. You CANNOT add too much content too quickly. Keep building link relationships with other sites (see our other articles on link building here at Lammo.net for key points). The search engines are sensitive to the history and the ongoing performance of a site. Constant addition of content and new links signals to the search engines that you are a serious, valuable resource in your space.

The point is that building your site is going to take patience, time, a bit of trial and error and a lot of faith. If you’ve done your research and you’re not trying to cut SEO corners then all your hard work will pay off, and when it does you will notice how much of a difference it really makes and will continue to make.

The very fact that you have bothered to find and to read this post all the way through indicates that you almost certainly have the tenacity to cut it as an affiliate!

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

A crisis of faith – the first six months

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Calling all newbies! Do you struggle to know where to start in your Affiliate Marketing career? If so, then worry no more, Affiliates4u member smingle (real name Frank Paul) has over the last few weeks been providing step-by-step guides and advice on the a4u forum, and it’s proven to be so popular that it is now the most read thread in the history of the forum, also containing more replies than any other thread in a4u history.

Click here to read the thread in its entirety – Be warned, at the time of writing, it contained nearly 850 replies spread over 57 pages, so you’d better grab yourself a LARGE cuppa, and settle down to read everything you need to know to get started (and more importantly MAKING MONEY) in Affiliate Marketing – As the thread title (help and advice for newbies and people who need a kick up the backside in 2009) suggests, it’s also useful for those Affiliates who may have lost their way a little over the years, and need a kickstart to get them back earning decent money again.

Who on earth is Frank?
Frank is an SEO professional based in Swansea, who does the SEO for some major Blue Chip companies. He’s also a natural entrepreneur, and owns more than a thousand domain names (would hate to see his renewals bill!), and not just the crap that the rest of us buy when drunk.. He’s got some top Premium names, and is developing some really amazing looking sites.

What is Frank saying?
Well, if you’re stuggling to read the thread in its entirety, then the general gist is that Frank offers some sound advice on the basics of SEO (meta titles, use of H1 tags etc), but also real-life examples of how to build a mini site around a niche that exists, and even includes the domain name that (for at least 10 milliseconds after he posts it) is available to register, and an idea of how much traffic you’d be likely to see, and how much you could earn by converting that traffic well.

Why the hell is Frank giving this information away?
Of course Frank could very well keep this information to himself, and keep registering the niche mini sites himself. Frank appears to be a very selfless person though, always happy to help out, with advice, motivation, a little hand-holding or just some kind words. The only thing he’s asked for in return is a return link to some of his larger projects (such as Diets, Lollipop and Underwear) from the mini sites – a small price to pay for information that could earn you thousands of pounds a year.

But does it actually work?
It certainly does – many of the domains given out at the start of the mammoth thread are now ranked really highly in Google, and have already started to make sales for the affiliates who built them – Amazing going really for just a couple of weeks – Imagine what results we’ll be seeing in 6 or 12 months time!

I built a couple of similar mini sites last year, and they’re right up there at the top of Google for their chosen keywords – all with basic on-page SEO and a handful of inbound links. They’re not going to make me rich, but they do earn me a nice bit of beer money every month.

Can I do it myself?
Of course you can – Frank has given you pretty much all the information and tools you need to be able to go away and do your own research to find the niches and the domains to go with them. As soon as you see that there are literally thousands of untapped niches out there, you’ll start to think outside of the box, and find some brilliant ideas.

And of course, you can always do what everyone else does – If you’re unsure, run it past Frank first – He is incredibly helpful and always replies to people personally, whether on the a4u forum, via PM or emails.

Lammo’s Soapbox
For me, Smingle’s thread has been a throwback to how the Affiliates4u forum used to be 6 or 7 years ago – Really nice guys helping each other out, with no back-stabbing, bitching, flaming, or questionable motives. It’s just a shame that threads such as this are the exception to the rule: 90% of the posts on there these days are from people who use the forum solely as a promotional tool to push their programs, and what little conversation survives on there is soon drowned out by another hundred “Merchant X Discount Code” threads..

Finally (I really need to get off the soapbox), it would be really nice to see Frank getting some recognition at this years a4uawards – It appears they’ve done away with the rather fluffy First Annual A4U Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence (or whatever it was called), but I would argue that Smingle’s thread has contributed more to the future of Affiliate Marketing than several networks have in the last year, and it would be nice to see his efforts are appreciated, both by a4u, and by the affiliate community as a whole.

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

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Terms such as Affiliate Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Pay Per Click – they make the Internet and all its jargon seem like a members-only club; if you don’t have any technical expertise or knowledge you’re not allowed to join the party. It can make earning money online, or simply running a website, seem a bit intimidating but it doesn’t have to be.

People, regardless of their background, are making money, and in some cases lots of it, by becoming affiliate marketers. You don’t need any previous knowledge or experience of web design or marketing and you can even do it from the comfort of your own home or simply boost your income from your day job.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?
The concept is straightforward enough too. In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is when you take a service or product that’s available on the Internet and you promote it to someone else using a special trackable link. As an affiliate marketeer (also called an affiliate publisher — or simply affiliate) you put a link on your site or sell a product on behalf of another company (a merchant) and receive a share of the products. Or, as a merchant, you get other sites to include links to your products and then you give them a share of any revenue you make as a result of the traffic sent through their links to you.

The most common method is Pay Per Sale (PPS) or revenue sharing. In practise this means if your website features an article on fitness DVDs, for example, you can sign up to an affiliate program that sells them. You can then include a special link, with a URL specific to your account from your review to the product. Every time one of your users clicks through and buys the product you get a percentage of the sale.

Less commonly, some affiliate programs also offer Pay Per Click (PPC) so will give you commission for every visitor they receive, or Pay Per Lead (PPL) where the merchant will give you commission for every contact detail they get from a visitor who found them through your site.

Now, it’s not quite as simple as that in practise but it certainly isn’t as difficult as the acronyms and jargon would suggest. The fact that people from all walks of life: butchers, HGV drivers, call centre staff and ex-civil servants (present company included) are getting involved with it means it’s not just for a select group to reap all the rewards.

There’s a wealth of information throughout this site on learning all about affiliate marketing. Every day someone brings out an affiliate marketing book full of so called ‘secrets’ that promise you the world yet charges you the earth but its pretty easy for you to teach yourself. All you need is a bit of patience and a lot of passion. Oh, and an Internet connection.

Getting Started
First and foremost if you’re starting from scratch you need to decide what you want your blog or website to be about. You can set up a blog pretty easily, websites take a little bit more work but both are relatively straightforward. If you buy web space and a domain name for a reliable host they can offer support all the way through and most web design programs that you’ll use will have prompts throughout to help you. And if you have a bit of capital you can even get someone to design and build your site for you.

If you’ve already established your site and you want to get started with affiliate marketing check out the affiliate marketing networks that are out there and see if any of them and the merchant programmes they offer are a good fit for you. The benefits of signing up to a network include access to many more merchants than you’d be able to find on your own and they provide support and helpful advertising material, tips and even vouchers and offers, some of which are exclusive to a particular network. Some of the most popular UK networks include Affiliate Window, TradeDoubler, Commission Junction (CJ), DGM, Affiliate Future, Paid on Results and Webgains.

The best way to teach yourself about affiliate marketing is to do research, research . . .and more research. Don’t just take the advice of one source, get a full picture of the successes and more importantly, the failures other affiliate marketers have had. It is a lucrative way of making money online but it can also be easy to fail at it if you don’t do properly or you’re not willing to have a bit of patience and put in the hard graft in the early days.

There is a wealth of information on various search engine optimisation techniques including content writing and link building here at Lammo.net. We also cover paid search marketing (PPC) and explore various affiliate programmes and networks in greater detail. You should also be able to find everything you need online for free – just try searching for any of these areas in Google and you will find a range of helpful sites and forums.

In addition to this make sure you ask lots of questions. There are loads of affiliate marketing social networking sites and message boards that offer advice and support. The benefit of this is you’ll get honest advice (sometimes brutally so — but better to be a little battered than to waste months going down a blind alley) from people in the same boat as you. Believe me there are thousands of people sailing alongside you, all hoping to get a slice of the affiliate marketing pie.

Finally, don’t be deterred by the current gloom and doom with regard to the UK and global economy. In many senses, this is accelerating online spend as people move away from the high street and look to low cost online providers of goods and services. Whilst there is little doubt that growth rates will slow, the forecast in the affiliate marketing industry is generally buoyant.

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

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Website owners everywhere are starting to realise the money-making potential of having blogs attached to their site or incorporating them into their web pages. They are extra pages to post your content onto, build up your users and in which to promote all those lovely affiliate links and advertising, hence boosting your online revenue. If you’re new to all this blogging malarky or want to maximise your money-making capabilities then it’s worth publishing your blog through a platform such as WordPress.

What is WordPress?
Word Press is a publishing platform that has developed a strong reputation in the publishing/blog market. First launched in 2003, it has grown to be the biggest self-hosted blogging tool in the world. Hundreds of thousands of sites and web developers use it and it’s seen by tens of millions of users every day. It’s also classed as an Open Source project. This means that there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it, hence you are free to use it on any site imaginable and you don’t have to pay anyone a license fee.

This, coupled with the support network it offers, is one of the reasons it’s one of the most successful and popular blog technologies out there.

What’s so great about WordPress?
Firstly, it’s super easy to get set up on. WordPress claims that you need only take three easy steps and you’re ready to go. If you’re looking to place a WordPress blog within your own site, then you obviously need your own site, but it needs to be hosted by a web host that meets a set of minimum requirements. If your host meets these requirements, listed on the WordPress site, then you can download and install the software script.

The software can be completely customised to suit your site’s design or branding. They also offer a free service at WordPress.com which lets you set up a WordPress-based blog but it won’t be as flexible or as advanced as the software you download and install yourself.

Secondly, it’s completely designed and set up ready for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Many web editors end up with a content rich site and have managed to find that niche which could make them a lot of money through affiliate marketing — but consumers can’t find them! And if they’re not getting the page views then they are not generating the revenues. Getting a WordPress blog may be ideal for situations like this, or for brand new site owners, who are just getting to grips with SEO and blogging.

How do I make money from my Word Press blog?
Once your blog is set up, you still need to make the effort to promote your site through natural search, social media and, potentially paid PPC search, discussed elsewhere in detail here at lammo.net. Once you have the traffic, you can monetise it through well chosen affiliate links. One of the best places to start is by signing up to Google’s AdSense marketing programme. The programme puts relevant text and image ads that are precisely targeted to your site and your site content, providing a revenue share for every visitor that clicks through on an advert.

Your WordPress blog can also make money through other forms of advertising, such as RSS syndication and even sponsorship if you are able to drive sufficient traffic volumes. Always, however, be careful regards the way in which you promote paid advertising as the search engines, particularly Google, are notoriously hard on sites seen to be charging for links and advertising. Smaller sites may struggle to attract the kind of sponsors that make them a lot of money and many may not see a huge increase in their online revenue by using these. A further approach is through developing digital assets, namely e-books and course material being sold through peoples’ sites. if you’re offering advice; anything from relationships to business studies, by providing e-books you’re reaching another market and it’s another way of making money.

The WordPress software lends itself well to incorporating all these elements, and it’s easy to add relevant, new content to your WordPress blog which will not only help with your SEO but also provide you with more opportunities to place those links and adverts.

Are there any downsides?
Inevitably, with any technology designed for mass use, there are a few constraints as to formatting and the degree to which you can actually customise your site, particularly if you plan — as many do — to use WordPress to construct the entire site. Historically there have been a few instances of penalties applied to WordPress sites because the site structure has created some degree of duplicate content although WordPress fixes are regularly released to deal with these issues. Similarly, there have been instances where a vulnerability in WordPress has allowed unscrupulous low rent link building firms to post spammy hidden links, resulting in ranking penalties.

With the size of the WordPress developer community out there, however, none of these issues should prevent you from seriously considering this proven technology as, at least, an initial step to blogging and to a high quality web presence. There are numerous extensions or WordPress “plug-ins” which, as an example, allow you to run PHP code on specific pages so you can effectively do what you like. We have used this to good effect in publishing reciprocal links managed by an outsourced link building partner. As with any blog, whilst user generated content (UGC) is vital, always ensure that it is policed and that inappropriate content isn’t automatically approved to become a live post.

There are many blogging hosts out there and it’s possible to monetise any blog but WordPress’ success speaks for itself and if you’re going to put precious time into making your site and blog the best it can be, you can get a bit of a head start by using WordPress.

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

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Affiliate marketing is one of the most lucrative ways of making money online but it is a competitive space. So how do you get started?

Choosing Web Hosting
The first step, if you haven’t already done so, is to get a website. You’ll need to buy the web space, and there are hundreds of companies that can sell you space or in other words, host your site as well as support you as you get started. The price of web space can vary from as a little as £1 a year for a very limited, basic hosting package right up to hundreds of pounds a month for an all singing, all dancing service; it all depends on what your site will offer and what you actually need. The cost of the production of the site itself will of course be determined by what you want it to do. More on this in a moment.

You’ll also need to find and pay for a domain name. When sign up for your web space, the hosting provider may point you in the direction of where to get one or you can do some research and find one yourself. Many hosts will offer domain registration services but do be careful that in using these, you are not tied into the host in question for a protracted period — there are some sneaky tricks out there! Equally spend some time researching web hosting – offerings range from the good through to the bad and the cosmetically challenged.

Choosing a Domain Name
The choice of domain name can be a little trickier than choosing hosting services. Choosing the right domain name can assist in optimising your site and thus in developing your reputation. Google, in particular, still seems sensitive to the presence of keywords in the domain name which is why some sites of questionable value are still appearing high up in the rankings. In general terms, it’s a good idea to choose a name which is short and easy to remember. Don’t choose one that is too similar to another company, especially one that offers similar services to you. You can check Companies House online to ensure you are not registering a domain name that matches an existing company name. Similarly, don’t choose a name which contains words that people struggle to spell. Doing your research into your competitors’ services and domain names should, in the long term, greatly help in building the popularity of your site. When considering keywords, it is worth using the Google AdWords keyword suggestion tool to identify terms the are both relevant and actually searched for — an essential activity in any search engine optimisation (SEO) exercise.

Creating the Site
The type of site you need and are able to produce will be determined by your budget and / or web development skills and of course the required functionality. There are endless templates out there, some of them are free. However, most are unlikely to be particularly search engine friendly so you may want to shop around for a developer to produce the site. Whatever you do, get several quotes and ALWAYS get references from happy clients. If you are tempted by off-shore developers, you need to accept that there will be a management overhead, time difference and language barrier – whatever you are told during the sales pitch! That said, many off-shore developers are of good quality and can provide significant savings.

Many successful sites also have a blog. Blogs are an extension of your site, providing you with yet another platform to sell from, post content and reach audiences who may not otherwise find you via the search engines, especially in the early days. Using a pre-built solution such as WordPress to create your site can help you get started and, with many plug-ins, the options are almost infinite. The more people who read your blog and click through to the sales areas of the website the more chance of making money via affiliate referrals. Furthermore, by pushing more clicks through your site the better your ranking on Google will be, and the higher up the list you go – a virtuous circle.

Choosing Affiliate Networks and Programmes
Once your site and blog is up and running the best route to take, especially when you’re starting out, is to join one or more affiliate networks such as Affiliate Window, Affiliate Future, Paid on Results or DGM. These established networks act as middlemen, connecting affiliate publishers with merchants and providing tracking, reporting and marketing support to both parties. Once you are established and are driving significant traffic, you may decide to enter into some direct merchant relationships but in the early days, the networks make it easy (ish!) to get the relevant code or indeed data feeds if you are set up for those, so that you can publish relevant products or services on your shiny new site which will monetise when visitors click through. Most affiliate programmes are pay per sale (PPS) although a few will still pay for leads and, far less frequently these days, clicks. The major affiliate networks provide plenty of statistics so you can work out the average earnings per hundred (EPC) or per thousand (EPM) click-throughs and thus determine which is likely to work best for you.

Content Content Content
Once all of this is set up you need to start filling your pages with relevant and unique content. The more relevant and unique your content the better your search engine ranking. Whilst other SEO factors such as links and the basic code optimisation of your site are also essential (see some of the other posts here at lammo.net for more on these subjects), content is absolutely essential. Product or service content from affiliate programmes doesn’t count as unique content (all of the affiliates and the merchant will have it for starters!). Content needs to be handwritten – if you can’t do this yourself, pay someone decent to do it and make sure you use Copyscape to check that the content they provide is indeed unique. Predictions are that content affiliates — i.e. affiliates with content-rich sites — will thrive over the next few years. Those with little or no unique content are likely to struggle. With the right content, your site should gradually feature ever higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and thus drive visitor numbers. This will in turn increase your chances of converting your carefully chosen affiliate links into real money.

Arguably the best part of becoming an affiliate publisher is that you don’t need any particular expertise or previous knowledge. Anyone from butchers to lorry drivers to call centre staff can make money online; all you need is a bit of patience and a lot of passion. You don’t even have to quit your day job to do it. By joining the right affiliate networks, choosing the right programmes, building a decent content-rich site under a well-chosen domain name and putting your back into learning and practising good SEO techniques (and avoiding the bad ones!), you really can start on the road to becoming master – or mistress – of your own destiny.

Just don’t expect it to happen overnight.

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

How can I earn money with Affiliate Marketing?

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