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Tuesday, April 21, 2009

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PROTECTING YOUR COMMISSIONS

As I mentioned in an above section, there are many problems that can occur at the merchant end of commission tracking. I also briefly touched on the issues associated with affiliate links. Many people are a bit nervous about clicking on an affiliate link like this one:

http://www.johndoe12345.com/affiliateid?345

I don’t really know why people do this but it is just that they do likely not know of the fact that if a site owner has gone to the trouble of providing valuable information on their site for free, that there is nothing wrong with them receiving money for that effort.

Simple Fact: Best affiliate networks actually do make $$

You have to create revenue with banners, pop unders and in-vue advertising networks whether you lie it or not when using affiliate marketing. Advertisers on average pay by impression (up to $14 CPM) & click (up to 50c CPC) & you're paid 65% of all of that advertising revenue. Sounds great doesn’t it? Prompt payments, control over ads, stable revenue stream is highly recommended.

The fact of the matter is that some people will have a tendency to move their mouse over an external link and then view the URL that is in the status bar of their browser. If an affiliate code or URL is in your view; your visitors will simply mark the top level of the domain and manually type that into their browser address bar on their own, or if you've mentioned the company name they may just carry out a search to locate the home page of the company. Protecting your affiliate commissions.

There are like a million different premium software products on the market that are ranging in price from US$15 - $50 for special software that will assist you in protecting your affiliate commissions. Their effectiveness and ease of use ranges just as much, so before you pay for one of these software applications, you should try out a few of these suggestions. I've listed the strategies from least effective to most effective. Install a banner server: Banner servers just don't serve banners; many of the newer ad servers will also display text links as well. The link coding that is often associated with served ads is usually so long, that your visitors wouldn't be able to see the status bar where it was directing them to. However, when you think about how hard it is and how much time that installing an ad server takes, this is probably the least effective means if you just have a few associations.

Click tracking software and scripts: Nowadays, you can get a click-counting software application will not show the target URL as the links point inwards to the software which is usually installed on your own site. After you have clicked on the link, the click tracking application then redirects the visitor to the URL you specify within the script. Click tracking software also provides a great way to monitor how effective your ads are and not just having to rely on the reports provided by merchants which can be false.

These scripts can be easily found on any search engine by using the following search request:

“click counting scripts that are FREE”

These are usually pretty easy to set up. The most effective ones I've used are
based on php scripting.

“JavaScript link cloaking”

You have to be able to see it in the first part your affiliate link, the second part shows you what will be displayed in the browser status bar and the last part is the link text. The link is set to open in a new window, so that you will not lose any visitors from your site.

This method isn’t foolproof and depending on the affiliate software being used by the merchant, the affiliate link may still show in the address bar once the merchant’s page has loaded, however the visitor would have arrived on the merchant site and the cookie from the merchant with your ID in it should have set. Using this kind of link, you can usually see an improvement in the
conversion rates.

Using Keyword Articles and reviews to boost Revenue

As I have said before, you will have to generate traffic to your site, and one of the best ways to do this is by offering keyword rich articles and reviews on your website because that is how you will establish a bond of trust with your visitors. When your website has content rich articles and real reviews, your customers will know that you know what you are talking about and they will begin to depend on your website for information and that is when you can approach “like” merchants who are selling similar products, services or ideas as yours. Doing this will also keep your website filled with new content for your regulars.

Your regular site visitors will view you as an authority on a particular subject, so it simply makes sense that you should write a review on a product or service that you are advertising. Many websites like www.cnet.com offer product and service reviews for the things that they are selling because this makes it easier for surfers to decide between products. I will admit that I rely heavily on this stuff. This also supplies excellent content for search engine spiders to latch onto because the information often changes regularly.

If you are going to use this particular ad article concept to promote products, you need to believe in what you are writing because if you don’t believe it how can you expect visitor’s to believe it? Research the product and company well and try it out if you can so that you can offer specifics. Contact the company and let them know what you are doing and ask for further resources and assistance if you need it. Once you have created the review, send them the link because you may be surprised at the response you get this way.

Choosing the Right Keywords

As I stated before, keywords are used to help you generate traffic to your website. This is why it is so important that you choose the right keywords for your own website. When you are choosing keywords, you should choose words that are not simply related to your website’s content, but that actually describe the content. When you do this, you will avoid getting the wrong kind of traffic and actually get the kind of traffic that may bring you some business. For example, if you are using your website to sell dog food, you will want to get traffic from people who are looking for dog food and not those who are looking for dog collars. If you choose ‘dog’ as your keyword, you will end up with a great deal of traffic on your website, but you are not guaranteed to get any sales out of it.

Think about it, how many times do you conduct a search on the web, only to find yourself smack dab in the middle of a website that has nothing to do with what you are looking for except that the site uses a common word or word phrase that you used in your search query? It happens to me all of the time and I just end up leaving the site automatically and just a little bit angrier than when I began the query in the first place.

The key point I am making in this section is that you could find that it is easier to get affiliations when you approach sites with a certain quote of regular traffic already established. It will certainly make it easier for you to link up with other websites because it shows progress in your effort. This will be particularly great if you are seeking pay per click.

You might be wondering just how any of this is going to help you with your affiliation quest in real life. Well…incoming links from sites that are related to your topic may give you a fair boost in engines such as Google and Yahoo!. Google has a tendency to group related pages in clusters that are devoted to a specific topic. At the center of these clusters are pages with a lot of inbound links from sites in the same cluster.

If you can get a link from one of these major sites, you are in luck, as the search engine will find your site more relevant for queries related to this specific topic. What is this really called—Affiliation! It helps a lot if the text of the inbound link contains the keyword phrase that you are optimizing the page for. Search engines such as Google try to find out what the main topic of your page is. One way of doing this is to analyze the main subject matter of sites linking to yours.

You should also avoid link farms. Links from free-for-all link farms that are set up to increase the participants' link popularity should be avoided at all costs. The reason why is because those clever people out there have found ways to spam the link popularity ranking, by establishing link farms where the members are guaranteed links from the other member sites in return for adding a similar link page to their own site. Basically a link farm is a public affiliation. If you are trying to use this method to get more business, you want to go with a private affiliation because that is not as open to spam artists. Those guys as Google are very clever too because Google has started punishing sites that have link-farm pages, and other search engines are expected to do the same thing because it is the ‘IN’ thing to do. If you are a member of one of these schemes, you have to delete the important link page and ask to be removed from the others.

There are also a lot of free-for-all link collections, “directories,” and “search engines” out there, that are set up to harvest the e-mail addresses of webmasters. That is why it is also not recommended that you post your email addresses on your website either. These harvesters search for the ‘@’ symbol that is used in the email address and add them to spam lists.

It is for this reason that you will likely loose points on your website with the search engines so you would be better off just avoiding these automatic search engine links at all costs. Genuine website affiliation requires that you do more than just add a link, so be on the look out!

You have to look for related sites

When you are hoping to get your website’s name out there, you should try to get your site listed at the most important sites in your field of interest. In order to achieve this, you should do these things:

1. To find sites that are related to your own, search through the categories in the Open Directory. Then study some of the most promising to find out which sites are the most popular in this field. You can also check out sites that have links to your major competitors too.

2. Make a content-rich site that is filled with high quality that is bound to interest the editors of the sites you are approaching. This just means putting any and all relevant and up to date information on the subject that you can find.

3. Make a “recommended links” section at your own site with sites that might interest your visitors. Keep in mind that each link should be accompanied by a description. Usually, the most effective link pages are those that include short reviews of the relevant sites. You should optimize these pages by adding specific keyword phrases, and you will get some extra legitimate doorway pages for free.

In the end, all of this website optimization just leads to one place…….affiliation. There’s that word again. As you can imagine, we are finally at the stage where we are going to actually talk about website affiliation. I’ll bet you weren’t expecting it so soon.

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