The SEO Benefits Of An Affiliate Program
January 11, 2008
Don't look so shocked! It's true, affiliate programs can have great search engine optimization benefits.
Now, I know that affiliate programs are often seen as a way to get around needing to do any search engine optimization. I'll be honest with you: for a long time that's how I saw them. "If I have an affiliate program," I thought, "then I don't have to worry about getting ranked in the search engines. All of my traffic will come from the affiliate referrals!"
There is some truth to that. Having an affiliate program for a product that converts well does ensure a steady flow of traffic even if you're not well ranked in the search engines. But if you play your cards right, your affiliate program can do double duty: send a steady stream of referrals from the affiliates and get you ranked for some solid keywords in Google.
Let me explain how this is possible.
How Affiliate Links Help Rank Your Product Page
Most affiliate links use 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is the technical term for a permanent redirect. Basically, a 301 redirect tells the search engine crawlers to count the affiliate link as a link to the final destination rather than the initial link.
For example, your affiliate link might look like this:
http://theproductdomain.com/?id=12345
But it contains a 301 redirect to the home page:
http://theproductdomain.com/
So when Google sees the affiliate link, it's not going to try and rank theproductdomain.com/?id=12345, but will apply the link to the ranking of the final destination instead (in this case the home page).
This also applies when affiliates use 301 redirecting scripts to "cloak" their affiliate links. A large portion of affiliates do this. Instead of using the affiliate link above, they will use a redirect that might look like this:
http://affiliatedomain.com/recommends/yourproduct.php
That script will usually use a 301 redirect to their affiliate link, which then 301 redirects to your site's home page. Google follows both 301s and applies the initial link to the ranking of the final destination (your product sales page). This is also true if the affiliate uses links from cloaking sites like TinyUrl.com or OffTo.net.
To get the maximum benefit from this, you need to make sure that your affiliate program links always redirect to the main product page. For example, a ClickBank affiliate link will result in referrals landing at a page like this:
http://theproductdomain.com/?hop=cbusername
That's not what you want! You want them to land at theproductdomain.com without showing the "hop=cbusername" portion, because Google counts those as two different pages. So you should make sure that the product page will check the url to see if the "hop=cbusername" is there, and if it is, perform a 301 redirect to theproductdomain.com. This will ensure that you get the maximum benefit from the affiliate links aimed at your product site.
If your site uses PHP, you can use an index.php file that looks something like this:
if(isset($_GET["hop"])){
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://theproductdomain.com/");
header("Expires: 0");
exit;
}
else{
readfile("salesletter.html");
exit;
}
?>
Thanks to whitehatcrew.com for the 301 header addition. Can't believe I forgot that!
What this will do is check for the "hop" variable in the query string. If it finds it, it will redirect to the home page instead. If not, it will show salesletter.html (which should contain your product's sales letter). That's an easy way to make sure that ClickBank affiliate links all end up in a 301 redirect to the home page. Don't worry, the ClickBank cookies will all remain in place so that the affiliate gets credit.
A side benefit is that this will make your affiliates happy. In the past I've had many affiliates write in and ask me to remove the "hop=" for my ClickBank products. They don't like to see it there.
Encourage Proper Keyword Usage In The Affiliate Links
As you may already be aware, having the keywords that you want to rank for in the links aimed at your site is incredibly important to rank well for those keywords. So, for example, if you want your product page to rank for "green widgets", it's not going to help you much if all of the affiliate links say "Go to theproductdomain.com now!" or something like that which is completely unrelated to "green widgets."
To encourage the use of "green widgets" in the link anchor text, be sure and provide the HTML code for your affiliates on the affiliate page. A large portion of your affiliates, especially the ones newer to affiliate marketing, will just copy and paste whatever you give them to use right into their web pages and blogs.
To illustrate this, do a search in Google for "search engine myths exposed" "holy grail". As of right now that will return 584 results.
The majority of those results are from people who just copied and pasted the example sales copy that I gave my affiliates to promote my new report, Search Engine Myths Exposed. In this particular instance I did not take my own advice and include the HTML code with the keywords that I wanted to rank for in the example copy (it was really meant for emailing, not posting to a web page). However, it clearly demonstrates that a large number of affiliates will copy and paste whatever you give them to use!
Fortunately for me, many of my affiliates are linking to the report site with the keywords "Search Engine Myths Exposed." This has ensured my #1 position for the phrase in Google.
At first my report did not rank #1 for those keywords. Some of my affiliates were ahead of me, and I was down around #8 in the results. But after I announced the pre-launch and got a swarm of affiliates, my site quickly jumped into first place at Google.
Don't Limit Yourself To Your Product Name
You certainly don't want to limit yourself to rank for the name of your product. Research targeted keywords that will help generate sales. For example, my Instant Article Wizard software currently ranks in the top 10 for the keywords article marketing, which brings in steady traffic and sales direct from Google.
In Summary
Yes, your affiliate program will bring in a steady flow of referrals and sales even if you don't rank well in the search engines, but with a little forethought and extra effort, it can also get you ranked for keywords that will bring generate sales and increase your bottom line!
Please post your thoughts and comments below.
Avoiding the snare of trash traffic.
December 17, 2007
Let's face it: pay-per-click can be very expensive, especially if you're wanting to drive thousands of visitors to your site. There are few keywords that I've targeted with AdWords that cost less than 50 cents to a dollar per click that generate any real traffic. If the return on investment is there it may not be a problem, but what if you don't have thousands of dollars to float your costs while you wait for your affiliate commission check?
Because of how expensive PPC can be, many people turn to lesser traffic sources that promise a flood of traffic for pennies per visitor (or less). If you've ever been tempted to buy traffic from places that promise, for instance, "5,000 visitors for $67", perhaps my case study into these traffic sources will help you in your decision.
You see, there are a lot of brokers for this kind of "cheap traffic" at a popular forum I frequent. I kept seeing dozens of people buying from those vendors, and yet I knew that what they were selling had to be worthless. Why? Because why would anyone sell thousands of real, valuable visitors for a penny per visitor or less? Anyone who could drive that kind of traffic (if it was quality traffic) would be raking in the affiliate profits from it and earning (on average) a dollar per visitor or more.
So I setup a test landing page and started buying traffic from these brokers and redirecting the traffic to the test page. You can see the results here, but let me explain what you're looking at when you visit that page.
That page contains a list of 16 cheap traffic brokers. Most of the names in the list are the usernames of the broker from the forum, but a couple of them are other web sites I purchased traffic from to see if they were any different (or better) than the brokers from the forum.
The bottom line is that I ended up getting 41,499 unique visitors sent to my site (far fewer than promised by the vendors in most cases) and that I earned a total of about $25 from the traffic. Given that I spent around $200 for the traffic, clearly the return on investment (ROI) was not there.
In doing this, I tracked a lot of details about the visitors to find out what was going on. Here's a screen shot of the details I was keeping track of:
I tracked the time of the visit, the IP address, the host name of the IP address, whether or not the visitor's browser supported javascript and/or accepted cookies, the referrer, the length of time the visitor stayed on the page, and whether or not the visitor actually saw the page (meaning that the page loaded completely without interruption).
This list of "visitors" in the screen shot above is very typical of the cheap traffic vendors I bought from. First, notice that the referrer is the same for every single visitor. Most cheap traffic vendors do this, modifying the referrer so that you don't know where the visitors are really coming from. They do this because they know you would be a very unhappy customer if you saw where the visitors were really coming from (and how they were delivering these "visitors").
One broker forgot to turn on the referrer replacement, and so I got to take a look at the methods they were using to send "traffic" to the site. He promptly realized his mistake and replaced the referrer, but it was too late: I had seen the truth.
The truth is that what you're being sent are not visitors, not really. They're views, and not really even that. This particular cheap traffic source used what's called a "pop over", where a box appears on a 100% completely unrelated web site and displays your site in the box. It's very annoying, and promptly causes the "visitor" (who never asked to see that site) to close the box immediately.
That's why the above screen shot has a red "N" in the last column for 79% of the "visitors" — the viewer was so annoyed by the pop-over that they closed the box before it even completed loading my very small test page. Closing the box before the page completely loaded prevented the javascript I put on the page from loading (since it was setup to execute after the page was completely loaded, in order to track precisely this behavior).
The "TOP" column that shows the time a viewer spent on the page also reveals that virtually nobody spent any time on it at all. Why should they? It was an annoying pop-over that had nothing to do with the site they were visiting. There are a few really high TOP values that apparently are from the javascript failing to execute that ends the "visit."
Another thing you'll notice if you look through the list of host names and IPs is that many of the "visitors" are from the same hosts and IP addresses. This means that the broker was claiming to be sending, say, "5,000 visitors", when in reality it was the same visitors being shown the same pop-over again and again. No unique visitors here, folks.
The bottom line with traffic is that you get what you pay for. Yes, AdWords is expensive, but it is operated by a reputable source. My opinion is that any source of "traffic" that hides the referrer is really a "trash traffic" source and should be avoided like the plague. It's most likely a rip-off. If it wasn't, why would they need to hide the referring page?
I originally performed this test to help the members at that forum who were buying this trash traffic because they didn't realize that it wasn't real or quality traffic. I posted a long thread with my results from all of these vendors and got a lot of very positive feedback from doing it. I thought the information would be useful to you as well, in case you were considering buying from these cheap, bulk "traffic" vendors.
Please post your thoughts and comments below.
Quick-Start Business Idea
December 12, 2007
A member at the Warrior Forum who's new to Internet Marketing sent me a private message yesterday. He heard about a few of my very successful launches and wanted some tips on how to get started in IM himself. I wrote back and gave him a few tips and pointed him to my post on cutting through the fluff.
But today I was having a conversation with Alok Jain (of recent Project Quick Cash fame), and out of that discussion came a great idea about how to get your business off the ground if you've created a product — whatever niche the product is devoted to. Neither I nor Alok can claim this idea as our own. In fact, I got this idea from members at the Digital Point Forums.
You see, any time somebody posts a new product for sale at Digital Point, inevitably a number of DPF members will post a reply asking for a review copy (or review access, as the case may be). If the vendor is smart, he'll give review copies to some of the better known DPF members who have a good reputation (reputation is measured on DPF through what's called iTrader points: when you have a good, or bad, experience in a business transaction with a DPF member you can leave feedback).
Now, if you're thinking, "Why would the vendor give away free copies?" — think again. The copies aren't free. They're given with the understanding that the DPF member will post a review of the product to the thread. A long-standing DPF member's reputation will inevitably kick-start a string of sales for the vendor. I see it happen there all the time.
So if you're trying to get a new product off the ground, the first thing you want to do is go establish yourself at a popular forum related to your niche. Post advice, quality information, answer people's questions, etc. Build up a good reputation.
Once you have a bit of reputation, then post information about your product (if it's allowed) and offer a few top-members review copies in exchange for a review and/or a testimonial to go on your sales page. That will kick-start sales, which will lead to you having an even stronger reputation, which will end up in more sales, and so on.
Another related idea is to send a private message to the potential reviews ahead of time. Get their feedback before you ever post a thread selling anything. Listen to their suggestions for improvements and make your product better. Then post a sales thread and ask the members who gave you the feedback to post their feedback to the thread.
What this does is builds your reputation through the reputation of others. And in the virtually-anonymous online world, reputation is very important.
This approach is not limited to Internet Marketing products. Let's say you wrote an ebook on herb gardening. There are some huge gardening forums online. Go build up a little reputation there, enough to get the long-standing members to take your private message asking for a review seriously, get some testimonials, and so on. This will build momentum.
Momentum in business is very much like momentum in nature. Once a plane gets off the ground it takes a lot less fuel to keep it in the air. It takes a lot less power to maintain a car's speed than to accelerate to that speed. That's just natural physics.
Those same principles apply to getting your business going. The hardest part of running a successful business is starting a successful business. But you can piggy-back your way to success by inviting well-established experts in your niche to provide feedback on your product in exchange for a sample copy.
(A word of caution if this post motivates you to go to DPF and work on your reputation: you can only post sales pitches to the boards under the "Buy, Sell, Trade" category. So be careful about where you post!)
Please post your thoughts and comments below.
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Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. 
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