Affiliate Marketing Is Dead?
Affiliate Marketing Is Dead?
I have been working with a client to optimize his new website and generate buyer traffic. The site is about six months old and was a cookie cutter site from an affiliate program. The client recently entered the world of online marketing and was disappointed that he had not realized any sales and barely any trafffic in six months. He was the victim of the syndrome I call “The Microwave Millionaire”.
The Microwave Millionaire syndrome is the Get Rich Quick scheme that’s caused by an unwavering belief in the bullcrap that tens-of-thousands of internet gurus and mavens send out each and every day in emails. The next greatest launch of a product that you just can’t afford to pass up.
He has come to realize that being successful in an internet marketing business is pretty much the same as being successful in any business. That it is hard work, long hours and diligence in applying good business acumen.
He ask me an interesting question the other day: Is affiliate marketing on the web dead?” I believe he was having second thoughts about the affiliate program he joined and perhaps a slight tinge of buyer’s remorse.
From a keyword perspective, there are always going to be popular terms that are very competitive and very highly promoted, but the market is never going to be saturated because there’s no limit to the number of search terms there are out there. There are always going to be new search terms coming into popularity.
Even for very popular terms it’s still possible to rank. I had a client that made it into the top ten search results for “Learn Spanish” within three months, and that’s an extremely popular and competitive search term. I need to mention that this not a typical result. I sound like the small print at the bottom of the TV screen for the diet commercials.
Another thing you can do is to look for the longer tail search terms. While one long-tail search term might not give you much traffic, if you can rank well for 50 of these terms then you’ll end up getting more traffic than if you ranked well on one very popular keyword.
Keeping your content fresh
I’ve mentioned in many previous posts for the need to keep updating your site. You can also just move your content around to make it look fresh to the search engines. I often take the pages of my website that are really making money and I just change a few words around every month or so.
Even if you just move your content around, grab an image and move it to somewhere else on the page. But it needs to look natural.
A few years ago when people were getting into RSS feeds they would insert an RSS feed into their site with the idea that every time the RSS feed updated, their site would be updated, and the search engines would see fresh content and give you “fresh points”.
The search engines got wise to this and now they know that if the same section of a page changes while nothing else on the page changes, something fishy is going on. You need to change your site in a natural way. You could maybe even change your template, although that’s a lot of work! The search engines really do look at all the code on your page. Another warning here, every time I change a template the site loses at least one page rank point for a short period. It’s usually back within 10 to 14 days. So, don’t be surprised if it happens to you.
While we’re talking about the content of your page, here’s another thing. It’s very important that your website title and description are unique. If you simply duplicate the title and description across all your pages, the search engines look at that and say “According to your title and description, this page is exactly the same as your other page. So we’ll only rank one of them.”
The same is true for your Web 2.0 sites. Don’t use the same content on all sites. Use different titles, different content. If you have ten great, unique articles on ten sites you can nab the top ten spots in the search engine results.
Watch your stats
By watching your website statistics (and again, every hosting company will provide you with a basic package) you’ll often find that people are arriving at your site through keywords you hadn’t planned for or even thought about. When you see this information, take it and start building links to that page using that keyword.
Should your landing pages for PPC and organic traffic the same?
No. With PPC you need to pull your visitors in and get them to take action immediately. What I do is work on building the perfect PPC landing page, and then take that and modify it from a SEO perspective. Your PPC landing page is unlikely to be a good fit for SEO because it won’t tie in with the content. SEO requires lots of content, while PPC doesn’t need as much. You can pretty much duplicate your PPC landing pages and modify them slightly for each keyword you target, but with SEO all your content needs to be unique to rank well.
With SEO what I would do is have all my unique content point to a pre-sell page, so the content is unique and can rank well, but you still get that call to action from the pre-sell.
What’s a pre-sell?
In SEO it could be simply a product review. It’s the page that calls on your reader to take action, whether it’s clicking through to the merchant site through your affiliate link, signing up for your newsletter, whatever.
What’s an “intermediate sales page”?
When you’re posting content on the internet, whether it’s on the Web 2.0 sites or your own website, it needs to have a purpose. If I’m promoting Hostgator, for instance, I might write an article on Web Hosting for Marketers. By itself that article isn’t going to do much, I need to build a purpose into that article and tell them that they should check out Hostgator, and give them a link to click through to my Hostgator review (my pre-sell page). My article is now an intermediate sales page.
Whatever you do, don’t ever just put an affiliate link to a product in your sidebar and think that you’re promoting the product. Always create a pre-sell page, or a review, or something that pre-qualifies the traffic.
Make sure you use at least half the words in your PPC ad in your landing page, and preferably use ALL the words in the headline of your PPC ad. Google makes sure that your website is relevant to your ad, and while there are some human reviewers, a lot of it is based on algorithms. And if you don’t want your PPC landing pages appearing in the search engines, put “noindex, nofollow” in the metatags. (You can also block spiders in the robots.txt)
Another point about PPC pages, while we’re on the topic. Make sure that your landing pages go up on a good quality site with at least 20 good articles accessible from the homepage. You don’t need to link to them from your landing page, but Google will spider the homepage and check if it’s a good quality site. If there are relevant keywords in there you’re unlikely to be Google-slapped. Google slapped means you’re made to pay ridiculously inflated prices for each click on your ad. The idea of course is that you’ll end the PPC campaign and Google won’t be sending people to a junk site.
To be continued…
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Comments
6 Comments on Affiliate Marketing Is Dead?
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Noah from internet marketing blog on
Thu, 6th Aug 2009 1:39 pm
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Hal Major on
Fri, 7th Aug 2009 4:52 am
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Sara on
Tue, 11th Aug 2009 12:38 am
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TigerTom from Affiliate Internet Marketing on
Fri, 13th Nov 2009 5:15 pm
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Jim from Tom Horton @ StartOutOnline on
Mon, 21st Dec 2009 6:38 am
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Kevin from Affiliate Marketing Tips on
Mon, 8th Feb 2010 3:53 pm
Very nice article. I had an interesting experience with landing pages and ppc. I know its recommended by everyone including google that you place as few links as possible on a landing page, but I\’ve seen my quality score in adwords go up by adding some links to the bottom of a landing page before. Just some food for thought.
Hi Noah,
I believe a few quality links on a landing page is okay. The key is not more than 2 or 3 and they are to authority sites relevant to the landing page topic. The primary reason marketers say not to include links is because they don’t won’t the visitor to have an easy exit except doing what the site owner wants them to do. You defeat the purpose of taking your action if the visitor has an easier exit.
Take care,
Hal Major
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Sara
I think a key thing is choosing good quality products to promote.
A lot of products on the smaller affiliate networks you wouldn’t buy yourself or recommend to friends, ever.
Hi
Great post, very informative with good advice, getting traffic and subscribers can be a difficult process but with these tips it should be easier.
Keep up the good work
Tom Horton
http://www.Increase-SignUps.co.uk
Hey man Great post. Like most marketers I think I know it all (well a lot but not ALL haha). Anyhow you just showed me that I am a blind and dumb idiot.
I look at and work with and through my stats all the time. The cool thing you just showed was … I always find it INTERESTING the keywords that get people to my page that I never tried to rank for.
So now I am thinking if these keywords are getting ppl to my site by accident then I guess I should OPTIMIZE for them and get a whole bunch more ppl on purpose! DUUUUHHhhhh
Cheers,
Kevin
Kevin@Affiliate Marketing Tips´s last blog ..Influence The Psychology of Persuasion 
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