AffiliatesNeeded.Com What's New In Affiliate Marketing

Augie Ray’s recent blog for Forrester, a technology research firm, raises a key issue all marketers should be thinking about as they navigate the ins and outs of social media.

Ray wonders “whether rewarding people with freebies for the purpose of gaining followers is authentic” when it comes to brands that manage to attract a great number of fans on Facebook. He cites the example of Bing offering FarmVille players three units of “Farm Cash” for friending the search engine on Facebook. The result of the promotion? A gain of 400,000 new fans in a single day.

A Look at Loyalty and Black Hat Tactics

The question of course is how many of those fans are “actionable” and while its apparent that they are loyal to FarmVille, how many of those fans have any loyalty to Bing.

But Ray goes a step further, questioning whether such a strategy resembles “Black Hat” SEO tactics that were in vogue before search engines figured out how to stop the manipulation of search results. (Black Hat tactics refer to mostly unethical activities that are designed to get better search rankings.)

Drawing a comparison between unfairly loading the dice in search results and making enticing offers to consumers to get them to “like” a brand may be comparing apples to oranges.

Personally, I think Black Hat SEO tactics were intended to mislead in a pre-meditated fashion, creating an undeserved advantage in the search game. I’m not convinced that a brand marketer who makes a compelling offer that generates a high degree of interest resulting in a large number of Facebook fans is doing something quite as manipulative.

It seems to me that the main difference is deception (rigging search results) vs. perception (rewarding consumers for a behavior). With search results, the consumer has no choice but to see the results that appear first (although he doesn’t have to click on them). With a Facebook-related offer, the consumer can legitimately choose whether or not to take action.

The Value of Friends, Fans, and Followers

Plus there is the question of what being or having friends, fans, or followers actually means to consumers. Nearly everyone has one or two “friends” in Facebook who they don’t really know. The distance from true personal relations is even greater for “fans” of groups or pages or “followers” on Twitter. The likelihood of you knowing all your fans or followers is significantly lower.

From a brand perspective this brings up the question again of how many of those friends, fans, or followers can you consistently engage, because only those you can engage are actionable.

Reasons for Brands to be Cautious with their Social Media Recruitment Strategy

For a moment, though, let’s go along with Augie Ray’s argument. In urging brands to be cautious in their recruitment of Facebook fans, he says,

“…if buying links was considered to be an inauthentic way of increasing inbound links and improving search engine traffic, it’s hard for me to imagine that compensating new fans for doing something they wouldn’t otherwise do absent the reward will be treated any differently.”

While I’m not in complete agreement, the underlying point Ray makes is worthy of some consideration. After all, bulking up a brand’s Facebook following to buy their way into social search engine relevance really does call the practice into question if, in fact, that is the intent of the brand marketer. What was Bing’s real motivation in “buying” almost half a million Facebook fans by offering them virtual cash?

Yet the notion of making a compelling offer to attract a prospect is not very different from getting a legitimate response to a well-constructed direct response ad, direct mail piece, or emailing. It’s a pretty traditional and accepted practice for generating interest.

Still, social media marketing is a fragile game subject to easy abuse. That’s why brand marketers need to run social media campaigns with a certain degree of responsibility. A smart social marketer should act like any other good marketer, someone who knows the difference between deception and perception. If he doesn’t, his actions may come back to haunt him.

After reading Adam Viener’s recent question, I thought I’d take the bait by asking “What’s changed in affiliate marketing since 2003?”  Given all the buzz about the subject it’s important to consider the “real” question, if you will, behind it.  At the root of Adam’s post lies another vital question:  “How has our industry grown its piece of the pie?”

Moreover, how has this industry matured?  How has the performance marketing industry dealt with its ongoing image problem?

My answer is that it, yes Angel, has failed to adequately deal with it.  And saying “nobody has ever gotten the value we deliver” or that internal politics is costing merchants opportunities hasn’t hastened change.  Respectfully, Adam.  I think we can agree here.

Wayne Porter’s Legacy

But forget my opinion.  Let’s turn to an old friend and award-winning Affiliate Marketing Legend Wayne Porter (the premier industry award is after all named after him).

Wayne’s motivation has always been pure.  As far back as 2003, he yearned to change things; hasten the maturation of an industry that,he felt, had far more potential.  I did too.  We were working for Scott McNulty, at the helm of over a billion dollars in revenue data, running a company called AffTrack.  We were seeing it all.

Wayne’s idea was to present the world with a book titled 15 Hidden Dangers of Affiliate Programs for Merchants. No.  Really.  It was his idea! (not mine)

The book, he said, would be groundbreaking.  It would acknowledge that affiliate programs can be good for merchants.  But it would also demonstrate how out of touch top marketing executives were with what was happening inside their programs.

Yes, Adam, how they “didn’t get it.”  But what they didn’t get was how affiliates were taking advantage of them.  What I’ve grown to refer to as the digital Ignorance Economy.  This book, said Wayne, would create awareness of issues like cookie stuffing, adware and the like.  It would prompt action, change, and improvement.  Fairness that lead to increased revenue for all by removing barriers.

Of course nobody would buy this book.  Nobody wanted to really know.  Not the advertisers or their internal marketing teams, not the affiliates, and definitely not the networks. This has been my position for many years and is why I’ve not written a book on the subject myself.  Ignorance is bliss.  And in rare cases where it’s not, there is consulting for the likes of Kellie Stevens, Ben Edelman, etc.

So I ask ReveNews readers: Have the barriers to growth been removed or dismantled since 2003?  Are we even moving in a direction that would?

A Few of the Hidden Dangers of Affiliate Marketing

Let’s look at Wayne’s 15 hidden dangers… what he saw as the hurdles our industry needed to clear nearly 12 years ago.

1) Control over brand experience.

Wayne posited that outsourcing lead or demand (sales) generation to a herd of affiliates (that most merchants didn’t really know) was risky.

This risk still exists today.  But our industry has done a pretty good job of reigning in control over how ads are presented.  Most of this has come at the expense of affiliates as large brands trimmed back their affiliate bases.  Additional credit goes to some of the networks who require affiliates to verify themselves as established business entities.  Tech tools have emerged to help make sure banners don’t end up on adult sites and the like.  Generally, control over brand isn’t a hurdle for most advertisers today.

2) Control of marketing messages.

Wayne had a lot of great ideas that didn’t get implemented.  One was a tool that helped ensure out-of-date promotions would not appear on affiliate sites and/or prices were kept up-to-date.  The biggest issue was how affiliates (and members of affiliate sites like FatWallet.com) were “misappropriating” promotional codes and coupons that merchants used in offline channels.  Customers would take them online and share, shop with them, etc. and “mess up” tracking of the promotion’s effectiveness within its original channel.  For instance, coupons that were meant to induce a repeat sale within 7 days were constantly available due to sharing (thus removing the incentive).

To a large degree the industry has dealt with this problem well enough to encourage growth, in my eyes. Again, we’ve trimmed back the masses and tend to know our affiliates better in most cases.  And networks have come a long way in helping feed the latest coupons/promo codes, plus their are now services that have sprung up like ForMeToCoupon — thus eliminating the out-of-date factor.

Yet members of affiliate sites are much like consumers of any other kind of content.  They love to share and share they will.  And the courts have upheld their right to, against the complaints of merchants.  But they’ve also begun to share expiration information of coupons.  And this has proved helpful to affiliates and merchants.  It’s a double-edged sword.

3) Competition in pure SEO environments.

Wayne believed that giving affiliates blanket access to product data feeds was problematic on a few levels.  One being that affiliates could dominate SEO results on keyword terms vitally important to a merchant.  Then it could essentially bribe a merchant into getting what it wanted.

Seems fair to me, to beat out a merchant in SEO.  This demands respect.  But some affiliates would get testy.  Pushy.  Heck, they’d switch their links over to a competitor in a heartbeat.  Or threaten to at least.  Is this kind of an approach to partnership a mature one?  Not really.

This tension still exists today as a growth challenge.  Competition is tough.  But many affiliates and merchants have struck that chord.  They’ve learned to each dominate “natural” search results in ways that benefit both parties in ways that truly satisfy.  Paul Moss provides us with insight with this happy balance in his experiences at Insurance.com.

4) Competition in the paid search market.

Aah, yes.  The old “letting affiliates in increases your media costs because it increases gross competition for search terms” argument.  While it’s one that I used to argue often it’s filled with nuance.  As an example, can we really tell if it increases media costs when Google and Bing operate “black box” style auctions?  Pricing isn’t really auctioned off (as it once was at Overture) to the highest bidder.  Now we have a handful of other factors that Google won’t reveal, playing into how much an ad actually costs.

From what I see (what about you?) this issue still exists but only because of myths spread by merchants who have some kind of axe to grind with affiliates.  Or who just plain don’t want to compete with third parties — ever, for any reason.  It’s simply easier for them to believe the myth.

For the rest, and I suggest the bulk of merchants, they’ve trimmed back the number of affiliates allowed to bid on search engine traffic and have more control on the ad copy being presented.  Tech tools have emerged to bust the most prominent of CPC and CPA affiliate partners, like shopping comparison engines who relied for years on geo-targeting ads in places that merchants couldn’t monitor from.  Or bidding on forbidden terms on weekends when marketing managers were at home resting.

Today, there’s nowhere to hide and competition for paid ad space seems to be less of an issue.

What are the other 11 “hidden dangers” that Wayne saw?  Any guesses?  I’ll be back with those shortly but in the mean time do you agree or disagree with the progress (or lack thereof) we’ve made with these four?  Thanks for your thoughts.

Building high quality links to your website is one of the most important things that you can do to improve your SEO rankings. You can equate these links as votes in favor of your site (this is the way the search engines see it). Acquiring high quality links for your site is very time consuming, however it is a very important thing to do if you want to get great search engine rankings.

How Link Directories Can Help You

Using a link directory is one of the best ways to get quality links to your site. A link directory is basically a site which has a huge collection of links that are sorted by categories. People who are searching for a particular type of web site will use links directories as an alternative to doing a search engine query.

There are thousands upon thousands of link directories out there to choose from. Many of them FREE, but many of them not. Generally a paid link directory is the one you want to target as you are paying for service.

When you submit your site to a link directory, your submission will either be accepted or rejected, depending on the quality of your website, and whether it is relevant to the directory you are submitting to. If your site gets accepted, the users of the link directory will consider your site to be credible. Also, the search engines love links that point to your site from quality link directories.

You will want to have your link placed on as many link directories as you can. There are a number of reasons why you want to do this. Initially, you will get targeted traffic to your site when people search the directory for your type of site. Second, you will increase you search engine rankings as your link popularity increases. Third, having links from link directories will help your website pages to get indexed quicker in Google which drives the most traffic.

Some Features Of Link Directories

When you submit to a link directory, you are usually given 3 choices that look similar to this: Featured Links, Regular Links or Regular Links With Reciprocal link. The featured links will normally keep your listing towards the top of the list. There is always a charge for featured links and this is the main method that link directories monetize their sites. The trouble here is that if a lot of web owners are buying featured links for a particular category, you may still be pushed quite a way down the list. With a lot of link directories, the regular links and the regular links with reciprocal are offered for free. If you are just starting out you generally won’t have much budget and would need to make sure your expenditure gives you a direct return. So choose regular links and any that offer to you for FREE. There are an overwhelming number of link directories if you start paying for your submissions, you will quickly overspend without much return. There are countless free directories to choose from. Finally, always choose the regular link option rather than the reciprocal link option if possible. Some directories will charge for regular one way links but there are enough web directories out there that should give you a FREE link. These days, search engines consider one way links to be more valuable that reciprocal links (reciprocal links are still OK, but they are not as good as one way links).

So start submitting and all the best with your linking campaign. Remember the importance of using link directories as a part of your strategy for gaining targeted traffic to your website. It is not the be all and end all.

“Content is King” is a frequently repeated saying that acknowledges the significance of appropriate and unique content on web sites. The certainty of this saying is underscored by Google’s sustained efforts to improve search algorithms to deliver results that best fit the customer’s requirements. Google judges the merit of websites by the quantity and the quality of links that point to them. While you can generate a high volume of backlinks, quality links can only be acquired with beneficial content.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is necessary for good page ranking and hits on websites. SEO techniques are constantly evolving for superior results. You should also keep an ear out for the guidance of Google to optimize your website for more clients, increased business, and stronger brand image.

What does Google suggest for search engine optimization?

Google’s Webmaster Guide talks about the importance of link building tactics for SEO. Link-based analysis used to determine a website’s standing involves the quality estimation of sites that link to it. Websites with more superior backlinks are allotted a higher page rank. Google has the knowledge to recognize websites that consist of genuinely useful pages of content and natural backlinks. It also does not appreciate an abrupt spike in backlinks as this is usually the outcome of artificial or commercial means. Websites that exhibit a consistent rise in backlinks that come from different IP addresses and name servers are considered reliable.

What sort of backlinks win points with Google?

Google counsels website administrators to stay away from backlinks from spammy link farms and excessive link exchanging as this may bring disrepute to your website. Enlisting on lesser known directories and websites that are not pertinent to your business or industry contributes nothing to your PageRank. The one solution to get natural backlinks is to develop content that is can be used by customers. This alone would encourages other websites to link to it.

Matt Cutts of Google’s search quality team suggests a few simple strategies to get quality backlinks:

* Get involved in blogs: Take part in subject oriented discussions and blogs. Come up with writing pieces and tutorials that genuinely help people. If you have something of value to offer, comment on other blogs and give users the benefit of your know-how and practice. Work towards achieving an authoritarian standing.

* Write a blog and make posts easily accessible: Send out bulletins to regular blog participants so that information is easier to access.

* Unique content: The internet is clogged up with similar content. If you make the effort to develop original articles or talk about an original subject, you get more attention.

* Social media networking: Be a regular and interactive member on social media networks that bring together communities of information seekers and niche users that can take advantage of your valuable inputs and convert into faithful patrons.

* Simple web design: Simple navigation is an important element of website design. Ask your website designers to ensure that all web pages are easy to get to and can be arrived at through direct URLs and bookmarks.

* Register in directories: Consider registering your website in quality directories. Concentrate on those that have a high PageRank (3 or 4 at the minimum) and are reviewed by humans and not software. Some of these directories are Business(dot)com, DMOZ, Yahoo!, GoGuides(dot)org, etc.

From the above discussion, it is clear that for successful SEO and resulting high page rank, your focus should be on quality backlinks rather than quantity. This can be done by publishing matter that holds customers’ attention because of its authenticity, value and relevance to their requirements.

I’ve been playing the search results game for a while now, and I’ve seen the world of SEO go through a lot of changes over the last 5 years. Well, last week I was at SES (Search Engine Strategies) Chicago and I got to chat with some of the best and the brightest in SEO, as well as some of the sleaziest. And over those few days in Chi-Town, I got to reflect on how, in some ways, SEO has changed a lot, and in other ways, it’s still the same old game.

Targeted Anchor Text Isn’t Enough

Back in the day, if you wanted a page to rank well on a targeted keyword, what you had to do was build a lot of links to the page that featured that keyword as the anchor text. But Google has gotten a lot smarter, and that’s not enough anymore.

You see, if you have too many targeted links, Google knows that you’re link building, and they don’t take kindly to third-parties trying to game their search results, so they’ll penalize you. So it’s important to shake it up a bit, and build links with a variety of anchor text, ranging from your brand name to much longer tail variants of the keyword you’re targeting.

For example, if I went out and got 1,000 links with the anchor text “marketing blog” pointing to Revenews.com, Google would get suspicious, and start penalizing the domain. Rather, I should be getting links that include “blog about marketing”, “new media marketing blog”, and even “Revenews”. This creates a more organic linkscape, one that looks like it occurred naturally, by really human beings/users, and not some SEO douche bag such as myself.

Target Anchor Text Is Still Important

At the end of the day, though, you’ll never rank on a competitive search term unless you have a decent amount of links with targeted anchor text. So as much as you shake up your link building, you still have to make sure that you get a certain amount of links with that targeted anchor text.

But you have to be careful not to raise any flags with Google, so this is where the long-tail keyword link building comes in. What this means is building links that include your targeted keyword, but other words, as well. For example, if you’re trying to rank for “marketing blog,” instead of just building all “marketing blog” links, you should also consider anchor texts such as “check out this marketing blog” or “marketing blog by so-and-so”, etc…

Social Links Are Key

Social media has become such a big part of the web it’s nearly impossible to rank well on competitive terms if you don’t have any social presence. Basically, social media is an important part of SEO because Google trusts links created by actual users/human beings, and social links are integral to creating an organic linkscape.

The strongest social links come from social news sites, such as Digg and Reddit, and you build them by developing engaging content and pushing it viral. Of course, these links feature anchor text that is completely untargeted (e.g. the page’s or post’s title), and are sometimes nofollow or redirects instead of direct links. But when one of your pages amasses hundreds of them by going viral, Google takes that as a strong indication that the page in question is, indeed, popular and relevant.

So while these virally popular pages won’t be your product pages, they’ll amass PageRank which will boost the overall trust and authority of your domain, and help all of your pages rank better.

People Are Still Buying Links

For years now, Google has warned against buying links. Well guess what: a lot of SEOs still rely on purchasing links.

I’ve always known SEOs who buy links to pad their linkscape or quickly amass targeted anchor text links. But working the rooms and parties at SES Chicago, it was hard to ignore that link buying seems to be the rule rather than the exception.

In fact, the more I talked tactics with people, the question wasn’t whether or not they buy links, but rather, how they go about it in a way so that they don’t get caught by Google.

People Are Still Selling Links

And, of course, wherever there’s demand, someone is willing to step in and fill it with supply. The reality in the SEO world is that there seems to be no shortage of paid link networks.

On the one hand, you have the publicly open networks such as Linkworth, Blogvertise, Sponsored Reviews, and Text Link Ads. These are all networks you can sign up for online and start buying links right away.

On the other hand, you have the more savvy SEOs operating completely private networks. These are networks of sites that are controlled by or have partnership arrangements with SEO shops, and sell targeted anchor text links on both new and old pages.

While the public networks tend to be cheaper, most of their sites get flagged by Google pretty quickly. With the private networks, you’ll pay through your nose, but they’re more tactfully managed, meaning that their sites are much less likely to get flagged.

The point is that a lot of folks are still selling links, and making some big money off of it.

SEO and Snake Oil

SEO still gets a lot of flack in some circles. Say what you will, though, without SEO, you’ll never rank well on competitive terms. And while, in some respects, SEO’s gotten more sophisticated, in other respects, it’s just as black hat as it was 5 years ago.

On the one hand, social media has become a big part of SEO and Google has gotten very efficient at sniffing out those who game their SERPs. On the other hand, there’s still no shortage of people that sell and buy links.

FAC-SEO a new SEO company would like to introduce our selfs to you. We supply services such as pay per click advertisement, this can be through Google Adscene or Yahoo and Bing Adscene. Web optimization is achieved through Keyword Analysis, what are your potential clients searching for in the major search engines? and is your web site optimised for these searches? Link building, not only do you need to have a website that functions within itself when links and buttons are pressed but you need to have out bound links to other websites. More importantly you need to have back links from other websites which are relevant to your content, the more links you have to your site from external sites the more a search engine will trust your site and believe your site to be what it says it is. After you have optimized your web site with these Three key elements you will begin to climb through the rankings and eventually reach a page one result on the major search engines.

We will complete FREE SEO analysis on your website and e-mail the report to you so you can get an idea of what is required to make your site a page one contender. As mentioned above we are a small start up company who already have a lot of clients wanting to procure our services and we were pushed along by the tide of our own success when starting our Search Engine Optimization consultancy business and quitting our jobs working for other larger organisations.

This is our first blog and yes, you have guest it, it is for the purpose of advertising our services and back linking to our site. We are like many people reading this blog, we are blogging to make links to gain a first page outcome on the main search engine’s such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Thanks for reading this blog and we hope to hear from you soon.

Gaining a better web page rank as well as growing your website traffic numbers may be achieved by getting backlinks to your web site. Establishing quality backlinks is possible when you put in a little bit of work. The best source for quality inbound links is actually going to have weblogs pointing to your web site. If you have quality blog and websites directing to your website, this can help you get much more traction force with the search engines.

Quality backlinks provide a way for a website owner to gain traffic to their webpage. The number of backlinks one gets is often a favorable concept in and of itself. Backlinks which are of the highest quality are often ones which bring customers to a sales website, for example. The following will describe some ways in which website owners can obtain beneficial backlinks to improve their web traffic.

It may sound like a ton of work attempting to build high quality backlinks to your website. That would indeed mean getting in touch with numerous website owners and getting them place inbound links to your site. But although doing it the old fashioned way still works, it’ll really take a lot of time getting other websites to direct to your website. But obviously in a era of automated software, there’s an easier technique.

Even so, you will find very efficient software programs which help your web site get better rankings, but constantly remember this: Written content is king! Written content is really king to this game. So, to really get your site ranked, one of the most critical elements which really counts to the search engines is getting very good, quality written content on your webpages. What the majority of folks don’t understand too is in order to truly control your market, you really need to get as many written content webpages as possible and get links lead in to those written content pages.

Although you can’t really do this with an opt-in web page, you will be able to do it in some other areas of your web site. The more backlinks to a page, the better the page will rank in the search engines. And so that is one thing to consider since this really is a big factor you could do to really see great end results. Can you easily do this yourself without having to rely relying on sites backlinking to your site?

Well, in fact the majority of people don’t understand this, but you will be able to take your webpage and simply link to it. For example, let’s say you’ve a few of your own content or web sites and stuff like that, it is possible to have your own pages link to your other pages that you want to get ranked better for. This method can do wonders for your ranking. So, if you are not currently employing this strategy, it is definitely one that we highly suggest you consider using. Finally, make certain that the quality backlinks you get get found by the search engines, so they all really count in the balance.

The relevance of buy backlinks to help search engine optimization can’t be overlooked. As per the consultants this is probably the most reliable and efficient strategy of search engine optimization. Buy backlinks are positive to increase the enterprise and revenue margins considerably. There are a number of methods to build backlinks to your web site like:

1. web site directory submission
2. weblog posting
3. weblog commenting
4. discussion board posting
5. article submissions
6. affiliate marketing
7. social media
8. press release

Most of you can do this yourself but the entire process is quite time consuming and hectic. To help you save from this botheration nowadays you’ll be able to conveniently buy backlink. This allows you to concentrate extra on your small business and different vital tasks. However you want to be very cautious whenever you got down to buy backlinks. That is true that backlinks helps you improve the rating of the website but unauthentic buy backlinks can hurt your online business reputation. So, learn below to learn to buy quality buy backlinks:

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For better of the outcomes rent some good buy backlinks specialists and see what you are promoting develop multifold times.

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