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Affiliate Classroom Blog Archives

How One Program Gets MORE Affiliates Involved

Note: Check this out ASAP, since free access doesn’t last forever!

This Marketing Sherpa interview shows how one top merchant’s managers have developed an affiliate sales force that’s responsible for 50% of sales of the company’s key software line. Real insights on how affiliate communication, internal teams, and the right kinds of creatives can build a high participation - as well as high revenue - program.

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=3171

New Google Toolbar

A beta of the new Google Toolbar is now available and worth checking out. It includes time saving features such as online bookmark storage, click-to-send web pages via email, advanced search features, and many other goodies. Check it out here:

http://www.google.com/tools/toolbar/T4/

For Our Affiliates: January 28, 2006

If you somehow missed your email copy - or prefer to read it online - here’s the latest issue of our weekly News For Affiliate Classroom Affiliates. If you’re not an affiliate yet, and want to promote one of the highest conversion programs in the industry, sign up here.

Affiliate Classroom - News For Our Affiliates
Read by our 2,884 valued affiliates each week.
Published by Affiliate Classroom, Inc.
Anik Singal, CEO and Founder

Promote the Magazine - Get Results!

As you know we released the January 2006 edition of the Affiliate Classroom magazine around a week ago and it’s a HUGE hit. Passing this magazine around is a great way for you to grab a cookie on Affiliate Classroom. If the person you refer comes back and signs-up, you will get your affiliate credit.

All you need to do is log-in to your affiliate account and promote “Product #6″ under “Links/Ads”

Click here to log-in to your account…

Best Ever Marketing Seminar?

If you’re a serious affiliate who’s ready to rub shoulders with the greats - and learn the REAL secret tactics known only to a few under-the-radar marketers - this is probably the best seminar of the year. I attended this event, hosted by Yanik Silver, last year, and it was worth every penny. By the time you read this, it may be sold out - so hurry to check it out here…

http://blog.affiliateclassroom.com/2006/01/18/great-internet-marketing-seminar-maybe-the-best/

Linkbaiting - “New” Tactic?

The term may be new, but linkbaiting’s been around for a long time. It’s the fine art of viral link attraction, and it’s generated a lot of discussion on some of the web’s most popular search engine blogs, including Search Engine Watch and Matt Cutts’ Blog.

So even though the term may be new, the tactics are timeless - and it’s search engine safe. So if you want to boost your natural backlinks in a hurry, grab some fresh ideas here:

Link Baiting Case Study

Under-Utilized Adsense Advice

It seems like a lot of our affiliates are also heavily into building AdSense content sites. Which isn’t surprising, since AdSense is a great add-on for article pages that contain an affiliate marketing article or Affiliate Classroom review with inline links.

So here’s a tip that’s worth AdSense gold. It comes from Joel Comm, the master of all things AdSense:

http://blog.affiliateclassroom.com/2006/01/16/under-utilized-adsense-advice/

Speaking of AdSense… Check Out Our Affiliate Marketing Product of the Year

If you want to build beautiful content sites fast… sites that are harmonious with sound search engine principles… it’s time you got learned XSite Pro.

If you’ve used this software the way it’smeant to be used - to build and manage multiple niche content sites incredibly efficiently - then you nwo why Affiliate Classroom consulting faculty and staff gave it the Affiliate Classroom Magazine Product of the Year Award. To read our review of this outstanding piece of software, click here to download your copy of the January issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine.

Until next time,
Anik Singal

Weekly eNewsletter: January 28, 2006

If you somehow missed your email issue - or prefer to read it online - here is the latest Affiliate Classroom Weekly. Sign up here.

Affiliate Classroom Weekly
Read by 35,000 hard working affiliates each week.
Published by Affiliate Classroom, Inc.
Anik Singal, CEO and Founder

Quick Tip: Some Unfamiliar Terms Defined

An Affiliate Classroom student recently asked for definitions of some terms in the latest issue of our Magazine. Since many beginner affiliates may not be familiar with terms like “backlinks,” “organic results,” “ping,” or “upsell,” I posted the definitions here:

http://blog.affiliateclassroom.com/2006/01/24/some-questions-from-the-magazine/

Affiliate Marketing Product of the Year

Seems like every day a new marketing product hits the streets, doesn’t it? Most are so-so, some are useful. But a rare few are absolutely indispensible tools - especially for beginners who are new to the whole online marketing scene.

So this year our Affiliate Classroom consulting faculty got together with the staff of Affiliate Classroom Magazine to choose a Product of the Year. And I honestly don’t think they could have picked a more worthwhile tool - or a more versatile one.

To read our review of this outstanding piece of software, click here to download your copy of the January issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine.

Recent Usability Studies Can Help You Choose Merchants

When it comes to choosing merchants, it’s important to promote programs that are likely to close sales - after all, if your merchant isn’t doing a good job of encouraging purchases, you won’t make any commissions!

On the Affiliate Classroom Magazine section of this blog, we’ve reported on some recent studies that can help you judge whether a merchant is encouraging your visitors to buy… or just confusing and distracting them. Check out these posts:

http://blog.affiliateclassroom.com/2006/01/18/youve-only-got-3-seconds/

http://blog.affiliateclassroom.com/2006/01/23/does-your-merchants-site-make-visitors-want-to-buy/

Remember This Case Study?

Those of you who are Affiliate Classroom students may remember a case study we featured in the private training area more than a year ago. We interviewed Stephanie Hetu, who had just fired her boss to be a full time affiliate marketer.

Stephanie went from having a website with no traffic at all to over 40,000 visitors a month - all from search engines. But you may also remember Stephanie’s little “horror story” about her first high traffic success:

“I received tons of traffic very quickly, but that traffic DROPPED dramatically 2 months later. I did not panic because I know already WHY this happened. But this is often what people do. They see a change in their traffic, they panic, and they start to change things on their site. This is the LAST thing to do!”

If you remember, Stephanie had some excellent advice about how to not only correct this situation, but avoid it in the future - all by using the one SEO strategy that will never fail you because it never upsets the search engines. It was great advice, and worth reviewing.

We also revisted Stephanie in June, 2005, to find out about a new strategy she was experimenting with - marketing in a foreign language. For those of you who are bi-lingual, you can learn a lot from Stephanie’s incredible success is this area.

If you’re not a member of Affiliate Classroom, click here because we’re still running our enormously popular Trial Offer.

Coalition Forms to Shine Cold Light of Day on Spyware Cheats

If you’re as incensed as I am at the spyware cheats who hijack your hard-earned commissions, here’s some good news. With funding from Google, Lenovo Group, and Sun Microsystems, Harvard and Oxford Universities have teamed up to fight “badware” - spyware, adware, and parasiteware.

Click here to read all about the organization they’ve created: StopBadware.org.

Until next time,
Anik Singal

New Google Search Engine in China…

Google launches a new search engine in China to gain access to their over 100 million searchers. However, the catch is that they will have to censor the results according to rules set by the Chinese government.

Google will censor searches related to, but not limited to:

- Human rights
- Tibet
- The word “democracy”
- and pretty much any other topic sensitive to Beijing

MSN reported that within minutes of launching, Google was already finding themselves blocking tons of websites related to the exact topics that were censored.

Google has been known to have the motto “Don’t be evil.” Given that, they’re coming under quite a bit of heat for having agreed to this deal.

But, let’s face it - 100 million searchers!

For the entire article, click here…

Announcing the Stop Badware Coalition

Here’s some good news for affiliates everywhere. With funding from Google, Lenovo Group, and Sun Microsystems, Harvard and Oxford Universities have teamed up to fight “badware” - spyware, adware, and parasiteware.

The purpose of StopBadware.org is to expose companies that create or use spyware, adware, and parasiteware to the cold, critical light of day. So far the “brain trust” at the Stop badware Coalition has been praised by affiliate management consultant Shawn Collins, as well as Wayne Porter, Senior Director of Greynet Research at FaceTime Security Labs and long-time affiliate advocate and crusader against evil spyware.

Click here to check out the StopBadware.org website. And if you’ve had your computer - or commissions - trashed, stolen, hosed, or hijacked by evil software, make sure you tell your story at the Stop Badware site.

You can also get involved by joining the Stop Badware community and helping with the investigative process. If nothing else, simply sign up for the Stop Badware newsletter to get new badware reports.

“Linkbaiting” Case Study From Search Engine Watch

Search Engine Journal’s Loren Baker has written up a case study on “linkbaiting.” According to Baker’s interesting post:

“Link baiting (or linkbaiting) is the emerging art of building a useful tool, writing an interesting article, or running a newsworthy ‘event’ on a web site which naturally attracts links.”

The case study cites examples of linkbaiting:

“…running a contest which includes multiple sites (such as blog contests or niche site award contests), testing a new advertising format… and throwing a wrench into a breaking or popular news story via attacks, a new spin, or a dash of humor. If anything, the social web and blogosphere have made linkbaiting a reality which only existed for a select few who already enjoyed broad reach and incredible viral marketing skills years ago.”

In other words, linkbaiting is simply viral marketing that attracts backlinks quickly - something that’s an integral part of the business model we use for our step-by-step virtual training in Affiliate Classroom.

The case study goes on to explain how Search Engine Journal organized a “Best Search Engine Blogs” contest that generated tons of traffic - and got backlinks from all over the web, including the blog of Matt Cutts, Senior Google Engineer.

What can affiliates learn from this case study? How about a clever way to generate plenty of incoming links and targeted traffic - without investing anything more than time? It’s also a great strategy for bloggers who need to generate buzz - and gets links - from sites outside the blogsphere.

Matt Cutts even came up with some terrific examples and creative ideas for linkbaiting.

And if you’ve developed a mailing list or an upsell, you can combine these simple ideas with the more detailed strategies outlined in our November Case Study on “Do Affiliate Marketing Contests Pay Off? YES!” available in our members only training center. In it we explain how our recent Thanksgiving Competition generated a 15% sustained sales increase - and 6 new joint venture strategic partnerships - for very low cost.

Some Questions From The Magazine…

Today I fielded some great questions a student had about the magazine - mostly some terms they wanted defined. I realized later on that the beginner affiliates may not be familiar with some of these terms. So here they are!

=========================

Backlinks = Websites linking to your website. This can be checked by going to Google and typing in, link:www.yourdomain.com or going
to yahoo and typing in linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com

Ping = An Internet utility used to check the connection with another site.

Permalinks = Permalink is short for “permanent link”. It is a link that readers can use to bookmark the current blog post.

Data feeds = A file that a merchant provides you that has all their product, pricing, reviews, etc… all in one file. You can then integrate that file
into a program/template and it builds you an entire website with all their products in it.

Upsells and Cross sells = When you sell someone something, an upsell is to sell them something more expensive later. A cross sell is similar, it usually has you selling them something else in conjunction with what they are buying.

Podcasts = Basically a web radio show. You record a file, mp3 and then make it available for others to download and listen.

Organic = When talking about search engines, you will find either organic or “paid” - organic are the results that show up in the middle.
Those are search engine rankings and are not PAID placements.

Hope this helps!

Anik Singal

Do You Buy Adwords PPC?

Then you may be interested in a new Adwords desktop editing tool that allows you to do much of your ad writing - including bulk changes - offline. According to Search Engine Watch:

“…Google is testing (via a private beta, you’ll need a login and password) a desktop AdWords editor that allows you to work offline, make bulk changes, export snapshots, and more.”

Read the full story here.

Is Targeting Unique Keyphrases Worth It?

According to a fascinating article by Patricia Hursh of Search Engine Watch, half of all search queries are completely unique. In fact, Google estimates that almost 50 percent of its searches - 100 million unique queries per day - “are one-of-a-kind.”

If you’re wondering whether targeting these unusual keyphrases is worth all the trouble, this was the topic of a session at the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago, Illinois. Hursh reports on what the experts said here.

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