Posts tagged affiliate
Landing page recipe to gain quality score
Mar 22nd
As you may know, Google uses a “quality score” to help determine your CPC (cost per click) and ranking. Although the exact formula for this score is a big secret, there are several things that are known and that we can do to raise our quality score.
Google rates your score as either: Poor / OK / Great. The score is based on the ‘relevancy’ and quality of the keywords we use, the ads and the landing page.
Don’t worry too much about the quality score when “testing” a product, once you a find a product that is doing well, go back and optimize everything to try and achieve a “Great” quality score to reduce CPC and raise your position.
Basic techniques for your landing page:
- Have the keyword show up in your ad and in the headline preferably.
- Keyword in the domain name
- Keyword in the meta tags of the landing page
- keyword in the ad copy of the landing page (headline, first paragraph and last paragraph most important). Keyword index should be around 2-5% (use www.keywordDensity.com to measure).
- Having other content pages on your site
- Having “Privacy”, “Terms” and “Blog” links on your page
- Have a “Sitemap” on your website, in particular have a Google Sitemap
- Have a “contact us” link with email address.
More advanced techniques:
- Google doesn’t like affiliate links. Use Redirects or Cloaking to hide your affiliate links. (www.tinyurl.com)
- Have outbound “authority site” links on your landing page
- Google likes a domain that is registered as Public (not private) and the longer it has been around the better. It’s also said that if you reserve the domain for 5 years, its better then year by year. Of course only do this for a proven product.
- Internal linking within your landing page using “anchor text”. Having links from other quality websites to yours is great too.
- The “contact us” link is even better when you also put a phone number and address (doesn’t have to be real)
- Google isn’t a big fan of “opt in boxes” especially forced opt ins and strong language around the box. I think they are okay with a soft opt in box that isn’t so strong and demanding.
Keep in Mind
- These suggestions are only to keep your adwords payments low,
they are not meant to increase conversions (although it may
help)
- a better quality score means lower minimum bids
- every adwords campaign is manually reviewed by google
- remember the visitor is important and google will randomly
solicit visitor feedback on whether they like your website
Do
- Put a professional photograph of yourself on the landing page
- Include information about yourself, your team, and what you do
- Have a separate landing page for each keyword you use in your
campaign
- Design your landing page to be user friendly and professional
looking
- Use a unique looking landing page for each keyword you’ve
chose in your campaign
- Ensure that your product must be perceived to be of quality
- If you collect user information then tell the user why
Don’t
- Don’t say a report is free if the user must sign up for it.
Say that “signup” is free instead
- Don’t put any ads on the landing page you use for
promoting affiliate products – not even google ads
The Affiliate Code – review
Mar 11th
The Affiliate Code snagged the 2nd position in the sales top list and since there has been very few interesting products in the market lately I decided to take a look at it.
It is no secret that the info product gurus are copy cats and basically; if you buy one then you have seen them all. The Affiliate Code covers basically everything you learned from older products like Commission Blueprint and similar products.
There really is nothing revoutionary or new to be found in The Affiliate Code. The good thing is is covers basically everything you need to know about working as an affilite. So yes, it is a good newbie product.
To summarize, The Affiliate Code constists of training videos that will show you step by step all you have to do to make money online from affiliate programs by using free traffic techniques.
Modules:
Module 1: Picking A Profitable Niche
Module 2: Choosing The Right Product
Module 3: Affiliate Website Set up
Module 4: Using an Autoresponder
Module 5: Copywriting Secrets
Module 6: Getting Free Traffic
Module 7: Tracking Your Results
Module 8: Scaling it Up
For those who have been around for a while and bought info products in the past, the Affiliate Code is probably not for you. The little new information there is can be found on affiliate forums and discussion groups.
Overall Rating: 
Easy to follow – Rating:
Useful for newbies – Rating:
Useful for experiences marketers – Rating:
Price – Rating:
Check it out here
Hide your affiliate links
Mar 10th
Cloaking and redirects
In the SEO realm, it is well known that Google does not like affiliate links. To encumber the whole blog with banners, Adsense ads and other adverts is not a good move if you want to be on good terms with the search engine we all love to hate. Google dominates, and if you are in Google’s bad book your whole future as an internet marketer is wavering on the edge of a cliff. If you do not make radical changes on your blog / website and focus more on quality content, you risk losing your future income.
Once you’ve been punished for keyword spamming, link spamming or affiliate-link spamming it may take a while before your site’s reputation is recovered. Better avoid that punishment from the start, right?
As a blogger, you don’t need to worry about this as much as if you have a regular web site. Your position in the blog charts will not change regardless of what Google thinks. However you lose the organic traffic from search engines and it can sometimes be quite a lot of traffic involved.
How unlikely it may seem for us bloggers people are, first and foremost, searching for information in the usual way; via search engines. This is easy to forget sometimes.
There, thats was problem number 1; Google’s reluctance to affiliate links.
Problem number 2 is the visitors who do not think you should earn commission from your links and they remove tracker code from the URLs. On top of it all, there are hackers who like to hijack your affiliate links and steal commission from you.
It’s a cruel world we live in. 
Sure, but then we can just use cloak links, right? Cloaking means hiding affiliate links using other links. In other words, you get another link pointing to the correct link.
There is only one small catch … Google does not like cloak links, either.
Plague or cholera? Or maybe a little of each? Sometimes you only get bad options and have to make the best out of the situation. My suggestion is not to exaggerate in any direction. Use a little of both and stay alert.
Here are some simple ways to cloak and redirect links:
HTML, PHP and Java – redirecs
One way is to make a so-called HTML redirect. You simply create a page on your own domain, and that page will redirect the traffic on to the sales page.
<meta http-equiv=”REFRESH” content=”0;url=http://www.link.com”>
Simply replace www.link.com with your affiliate link.
The problem is that the code for redirects to be added inside <head> and </ head> tags, which complicates things when you have a blog.
Instead, you can use a simple javascript:
<script type=”text/javascript”>
<!–
window.location = “http://www.link.com”
//–></script>
This redirect show no trace on the page, but is making it difficult to keep statistics. The same applies for redirection with PHP. The code looks like this:
<?php
header(“Location: http://www.link.com”);
?>
You can also use redirect with htaccess, but that topic is a bit over the top. However, I will raise the subject at a later date.
Cloaking services
I do not recommend online cloaking services because many of them are just trying to take advantage of all the free traffic they get and there are also scam sites that replace your links with their own. It may take a while before you even realize it and who knows how much money you’ve lost then?
As if that wasn’t enough, Google will immediately find your cloak links and start frowning.
If you still want to use a cloaking service you can visit TinyURL. From what I know they do not hijack affiliate links, but it has happened that they delete links so they no longer work.
I strongly recommend that you use the tag rel = “nofollow” on your cloak links, so the search engine crawlers don’t start sniffing about. This also applies on your redirect pages.
Targeted Marketing For Affiliates
Aug 9th
Focusing of efforts is necessary in all forms of business, and affiliate marketing is no different. In marketing, a well-defined audience, or target audience, that you write for, advertise for, and try and connect with on a daily and weekly basis is essential if you hope to achieve any sort of monetary gain and success. Identifying and focusing your efforts on this target audience will help with all factors of your affiliate campaign.
Arriving at your target audience has everything to do with the product(s) you have chosen to promote and what sorts of customers would be interested in them and the market they are a part of. This distinct market your chosen products reside within is known as your targeted niche market. A smaller market existing within a larger one, an example of this could be nursing mothers. Nursing mothers is a niche market within the larger group that includes all mothers. Admittedly, nursing mother numbers are growing each year, yet it is still a subsection within the group of all mothers in general. By tailoring all of your content towards nursing mothers specifically, you will greatly increase your chances of higher returns. Whatever subject matter you have picked to focus on, you must educate yourself as to all the ins and outs regarding it. The followers of the niche you pick will surely have a breadth of knowledge concerning it, so it will be a large part of your job to stay informed and inform others in return.
This increasing knowledge base will be a large part of the development of yourself as an expert in your field and is essential in branding yourself thus. When you gain the trust of your readers as someone who is “in the know”, they will be sure to check your site for developments and new information related to your subject matter. Building a community of readers that value both your opinion and the information you provide is an excellent and essential step towards encouraging them to purchase your promoted products. Why would anyone purchase anything you suggested if they didn’t believe what you wrote or represented contained anything of worth or value? It is your job to sell yourself as much as it is to sell the products you are promoting in affiliate marketing. By selling yourself as an informed expert in your field and tailoring and catering your content to the target audience you have chosen, you will increase your chances of being a successful affiliate marketer.
Author: Peter Ryan
