A little longer blog post than usual today… We're in a funny sort of business. From the inside, affiliate marketing is in its boom phase. Our industry is growing tall and wide and strong. An estimated 30% of shoppers will buy holiday gifts online, and some percentage will click through affiliate links. We're not just flexing our muscles in the retail sector. We're power-lifting. Yet from the outside, affiliate marketing is a misunderstood child still. Amidst our cherished holiday memories are images of distant relatives casting us a suspicious glance and asking "What exactly is it you do for a living?" It's as vivid as a YouTube vid. You: Keen, animated, sparkling with enthusiasm. Aunt Jane: Polite, wary, skeptical, bored. (Final cut: Auntie's desperate dive into the punch bowl.) The disconnect between the way insiders and outsiders perceive affiliate marketing won't destroy your self worth or your bank account. But funny, it's hard not to feel rattled when your nearest and dearest assume that you're in a "fringe" business because they can't grasp the concept of "cookies." So at this most wonderful time of the year, when I become aggressively grumpy ... Read More →

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a buzzword that most people associate with websites. However, it's just as important to optimize your blog! There are some similarities between the two. But there are some particular things to keep in mind when you decide make your blog search engine friendly. RSS Using RSS is key to getting links back to your site from other blogmasters. To encourage link exchange, write good content that they will feel is relevant to their site. A blogmaster will not just link to your site because he or she wants to do you a favor. You have to write something that will benefit their readers. Because RSS is such an important way to encourage linking, be sure your content's URL's are archived and easy to link to. Remember, these will be long-term links. Do not decide to revamp your site someday and rename all of your articles. You'll lose all of the backlinks you have built up. Keywords When you create the categories for your blog, you need to really think about what information people are looking for. Keyword research for blogs is no different than for websites. However, many people just randomly name their cat... Read More →

An affiliate marketer’s best friend is the website; it’s the primary means for selling products or services. And if you want to increase your customer base, you need new traffic to it.

So, enhancing your website’s search engine ranking is critical. This is where the acronyms SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) — two terms that tend to be mixed together in a sort of alphabet soup — come in.

A search on both terms will result in lists of websites for companies promising to increase the number of hits to your site – for a small fee, of course. One such website offered its services within the content of its title tag: “Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing.”

Now, if you’re new to... Read More →

The November issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine features our cutest cover ever, plus an overview of the topic of Viral Marketing, including the hottest trends like viral video. Articles include:

• Tips and trends in viral marketing for affiliates - how to get started and today's best practices.
• How you too can spread the word about your site using viral video to generate buzz and grab free traffic form sites like YouTube.
• Social Search, a Web 2.0 trend that's becoming a quick and easy way to generate traffic immediately.

As always, Affiliate Classroom Magazine is free and available as a downloadable PDF in full color or printer-friendly black and white. Click here to download your copy now.... Read More →

Join us on January 24, 2007 (The day after The Affiliate Summit) for a 1 day intensive Affiliate Manager Boot Camp! Take Your Affiliate Program To The Next Level! Over 6 Expert Speakers... Only 150 Seats Available - Register Today...

Boot Camp Training Sessions:

Affiliate Communication Learn the most efficient and effective ways to communicate with your affiliates and keep them engaged and loyal to your brand. Affiliate Recruitment Tools We reveal the best tools and software you must have in order to find the biggest super affiliates in your industry - know exactly who promotes your competition! "He Recruited 3,500 Affiliates In Less Than 30 Days!" Learn how one of our speakers launched a new CPA network and recruited over 3,500 affiliates in le... Read More →

How much content does your affiliate Web site have?  In the wake of Google’s “cleaning” of AdWords by changing its landing page algorithm, this question could have greater relevance for you. As Anik stated in his blog posting of July 26, such “cleaning” has led to advertisers who have in the past spent tens of thousands of dollars a month on AdWords essentially being shown the door by Google.  And it means that advertisers wishing to stick with AdWords will have to pony up more money to do so if their Web content is deemed insufficient. How do you stay in Google’s good graces?  According to Google, you become more of a “fat affiliate” as opposed to a “thin affiliate” – terms coined by Google, of course.  What does this mean?  Let’s start with the definitions:

• A fat affiliate is an affiliate site that provides sufficient high-quality content to provide a satisfying user experience.
• A thin affiliate is an affiliate site that contains no real content value and serves only to send Web traffic to a merchant site, to pages containing only affiliate links, or to pages designed primarily to obtain A... Read More →

As affiliate marketers, we sometimes develop a very large number of sites, with a lot of pages on each site. So, I feel compelled to warn everyone about the importance of backing up software web files. A couple of months ago, my computer decided to give me the Black Screen of Death! This is the first time in my history of computing this has happened to me. Fortunately, most of my files were backed up. However, my program files were not. Read More →

I was surfing the Internet the other night when I ran across one of my affiliate marketing sites in the Google natural results page.  To say that I was horrified would be an understatement! I thought that I had covered all of my bases when putting my sites together, but this one had a title of _HOME.  That's not going to help my search results much.  I'm most likely losing out on a lot of affiliate sales. Fortunately, I did have the description area filled in, so I felt like I had done one thing right at least. I use Xsite Pro to build my sites.  There is a little box on the Website Information tab where you are supposed to enter your Title information. That's good to know! If you have not searched for your web site(s) by doing a Google or MSN search to see how your tags are being displayed, you might want to do so.  You could be missing out on a lot of natural search results if your tags are not displaying correctly. Here are a few general guidelines to make sure your site's search results show what you intend:

• Each page should target only three keywords.
• Your Title Tag should include a combination of those keywords.
• Use Hea... Read More →