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affiliate_marketing :: Internet Marketing :: Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Income Optimization
Success with Affiliate Marketing, or Internet Marketing in general, depends on a lot of factors; the product
you decide to promote, the type of advertising you use, the size of your advertising budget, etc. One product
in particular has been around since the dawn of the World Wide Web. It has in the past, and still is making
small fortunes for many Internet Marketers. The product I am refering to is information. Throughout this site
you will find an abundance of information on affiliate programs, marketing, website building, advertising and
so much more. Enjoy!
In
my time researching the search engines, I've noticed something rather
strange. Literally millions of searches are made each month for "brand
names" and actual site names. For example, on Overture alone, last
month, there were millions of queries made for the term "internet
explorer". Having been on the internet for around seven years (running
sites for over five), I've naturally assumed that people use it the
same way I do. So, I know that internet explorer is a Microsoft product
so I just type http://www.microsoft.com into my browser.
Apparently, that's not what everyone does. Here are some other
examples from Overture: eBay - over 7 million searches, Google - over 9
million searches, Amazon - Over 800 thousand searches (OK, lots will be
for the river or the forest but still ...), PayPal over 340 thousand
searches and so on. Considering that Overture has only about 5% of the
search engine market, you can see that there are millions and millions
of people who actually use search engines to find sites when they could
just type the name in their browser and slap a .com on the end.
Now, on to the good stuff. Of those companies that I mentioned, all but Google have an affiliate program. For example, PayPal pays $5.00 for every person who signs up. 340 000 x $5.00= $1 700 000. Interesting!
So, what can we do to make the most of this opportunity? Well, it's easier than you would think. Obviously, trying to get traffic
from people searching for eBay or PayPal would be very difficult but
there are literally thousands of other companies that people search
for. For example, I just checked the three best known British sports
betting companies - about 20 000 searches are made each month on
Overture for these companies.
I have noticed that without any effort whatsoever, I am actually getting a lot of traffic from people searching for company names and script names. This is because they are listed in my affiliate and Script directories. An example of the process is - people search for a particular merchant, come to my affiliate directory and click on the link to get to the merchant. Therefore, even though they have no interest in the affiliate program, I'm making money just by linking to merchants who's content is completely unrelated to mine.
Remember, this is without even trying. When I do try, I'm getting even more traffic.
For example, I have a review of the FastClick ad network on my site. I
get 10+ visitors each day from people searching for phrases that
include the word fastclick. That's 300+ visitors per month, 15 000 per
year. As you could imagine, due to the fact that FastClick pay a
lifetime 5% commission on referred earnings, this is quite lucrative.
So, what do you need to do? Well, you probably already use affiliate
programs in some form on your site - either as a major source of
revenue or to make "backend" sales. I went for years just linking to
them with banners, buttons and text links. The odd short recommendation
here and there proved to be the best way to get the most out of them.
The problem, from a search engine perspective, is that just linking
to them from your site will generally not get your page up high in the
search engine rankings. A link to merchant "Acme Corp." just blends in
to the text on your page and is assigned no real relevance. Therefore,
you should put up an individual page on your site for each merchant
that you are an affiliate of. This page could just be a review of the products or services that they offer.
Just the fact that you have a content rich page about a specific merchant will almost automatically get you traffic from the search engines (once you are listed). The main point is "content rich". Also, write it yourself, do not copy content from the merchants site. Why? Well, even if they let you copy their content (lots do), Google has ways of finding duplicate content.
In fact, they will usually ban the page that they believe is less
important if two have the same information on them. So, write it
yourself.
Remember that if the merchant sells products that have gained recognition from the public, make sure you list their products.
If you already have a successful site, the search engines will
actually view your "review" of a merchant as being important and it is
no harder to get that page in to the top 10 listings than it is for any
other page on your site.
Often, the difference between doing well and being truly successful
online is just the ability to grab opportunities when they appear. You
could find that spending just 10 minutes to set up a couple of new
pages on your site could actually result in thousands of dollars in
extra income each year.
Remember, there are close to 600 million queries made on search
engines each day - this is an opportunity! Don't let it pass you by.
About The Author
Sean Burns is the author of the eBook Rankings Revealed which gives you a step by step guide to obtaining top 10 rankings on the major search engines - http://www.webmastersreference.com/rankings_revealed
We hope you found the information on this page useful and will return often to browse
the many articles throughout our site. We will be adding new material on an ongoing
basis in order to keep our visitors up to date on the latest promotion and marketing
information and tools that allow so many marketers to earn a full time living on the
internet.
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