Adult Affiliate Guide

Alright, so the title sounds extreme but this wayward reference to a popular skating game from the 80s illustrates the point that backlinks are a vital part of your overall SEO strategy. Without them no amount of on-page search engine optimization will get your site ranking. In fact, some SEO experts claim that about 80% of your ranking is determined by backlinks to your site, and where those backlinks come from.

A little while back we talked about how authority sites were like well-connected people, and this attracted a higher PageRank status from Google. Essentially this highlights the important role that backlinks play in getting your site ranking.

Ok so you know that already but how exactly should you go about implementing your backlinks? Here are some suggestions to make sure you get the most from your backlinks.

It's true that not all backlinks are created equal. Which is why Nike doesn't have Joe Average doing endorsements for them, instead choosing someone well-known, well-liked and, up until a few weeks ago, well-respected to 'vote' for their products. Backlinks are exactly the same. The more well-known or reputable the site that 'votes' for you or links to your web page, the more that link is worth.

Of course your average golf charity event would find it difficult to get someone like Tiger Woods to personally endorse their tournament, but it has been known to happen. On the rare occasions it happens one of the organizers has got very creative, very lucky or both, to secure a personal nod from the man himself. Likewise your chances of Google, Facebook or Amazon linking to your site with a dofollow link are slim.

Don't let this discourage into conceding defeat. Like our parents told us as we grew up through those awkward teenage years and hated looking in the mirror, we need to make the most of what we've got. This means maximizing your backlink opportunities.

Here are 7 ways to maximize your backlinks

Last month we wrote a post of some techniques to avoid the dreaded Google Slap which were very well received so when I received an email from the VP of Sales, Marketing & Business Development at Clickbank the other day. I thought it would well worth passing on. It contains some pretty good advice and is well worth reading.

Here it is...

Many of you have experienced difficulties with your websites’ quality ratings being downgraded by Google, or your AdWords account being shut down or suspended recently, in what has come to be known as the Google Slap. We have been approached by a number of vendors and affiliates asking for further information on what may have caused this and what can be done to have their sites’ quality ratings restored or their AdWords accounts re-activated. To this end, I have had a number of conversations with Google and have managed to gather some information.

I am providing below the information provided by Google, in the hope that this will be helpful to you. We are continuing our conversations with Google and I will pass on any fresh information that we learn through these conversations.

1. Duplicate Mini-sites

The issue is often that affiliates create sites for the purpose of circumventing Google’s affiliate link policy. This policy states: "We'll only display one ad per search query for advertisers sharing the same top-level domain in the display URL. This means that if you're an affiliate advertiser, your ad may not show for a query because another affiliate or the website that runs the affiliate program also has ads using the same (or a similar) domain in the display URL." (http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=14844)

When one site is essentially the same site as another, while the product is fine, promoting it with different domains is against the rules. It violates the requirement that a site's content be unique.

2. Use of trademarked terms in the Ad text:

Sales are not the only number that matters. "What?!" I hear you say... sales aren't everything?

In a word... no.

Of course sales are the ultimate goal - but the problem with only worrying about the number of sales is that if something changes - the number of sales suddenly decreases, or even increases - people have absolutely no clue why!

So they guess and make assumptions. The trouble is with guessing is you're putting an awful lot of faith in your own ability to understand what the market is doing without any empirical evidence or data. Trust me - you're not that good.

Don't worry though because neither am I, and neither is virtually any other marketer in the world. Sure some have really good instincts - but usually those instincts are have been honed on reams of data. They weren't born with them, and neither were you.

You need data.

That's where analytics comes in. Now I've used Google Analytics as the example for a few really simple reasons. It's free, it's easy to use, it's Google (which means it's pretty damn reliable) and did I mention it's free?

Google Analytics is a program that allows you to not only collect a bunch of data about everyone who visits your site and what they do when they get there, but it also allows you to process that data and make deductions from the data - which is actually the important part.

Installing Google Analytics on your website simply involves placing a small bit of Javascript on every page of your website. This is particularly easy if you have a CMS like Wordpress as you can use a plugin that does it for you.

So for starters, let's have a quick look at the data that Google Analytics gives you.

For each page, Google Analytics tells you

* The number of page views
* The number of unique visitors
* The bounce rate (number that arrives on the page and immediately leaves)
* % that are new visitors (never been to your site before)

For many new affiliates this is the biggest hurdle on the path to success. Remember these selling points for affiliate marketing?

* There are many different affiliate programs you can promote
* There are hundreds of different markets you can promote to
* There are lots of different methods for promoting products

These are all great points, but with so many options you have a perfect recipe for indecision. Which market should you choose? Is there a lot of money in that market? Is there a lot of competition? What sort of site should you build? How should you promote your site? Which products should you promote? Or should you just stick to ads?

Let'stackle these one at a time.

First on the list of paralyzing decisions for new affiliates is what topic to focus their affiliate efforts on. You could find something suitable after just a day of brainstorming, or it might take you a couple of months before you settle on something. Here are some ideas for approaching this task:

1) Do you have any interests?

The first thing you can do is sit down and brainstorm. Write a list of your interests. Write a list of your hobbies. Write a list of the subjects you know stuff about. Write a list of the subjects you'd like to know stuff about. You don't need to be an expert on a subject to build a website... you will learn along the way. But it is reasonably important that your subject is something that you can at least develop an interest in.

Why does it need to be interesting?

Think about this: You're going to be spending a lot of time immersing yourself in this subject. You're going to hang out on forums related to this subject, and read blogs that talk about this subject. You're going to compile articles about this subject and review products related to this subject. If you're not remotely interested in the subject, regardless of how profitable it may seem, you're going to be sticking pencils into your eyeballs after about a month.

What is Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is where people save links of web pages that they want to keep to remember or they want to share. Most social bookmark services allow users to organise their bookmarks, you can view other people's bookmarks, usually by category or tags or via a search engine.

Social bookmarking has grown more popular, with extra features including ratings, comments and the opportunity to have more control and manage your bookmarks with the ability to import or export from browsers.
History of Social Bookmarking

affiliate marketingShared online bookmarks date back to 1996 when itList which allowed you to store both private and public bookmarks. In the following three years online bookmarks became a competitive field with companies such as Backflip and Blink etc taking a share of the market.

These newcomers introduced folders to create a more organised bookmarking structure, with some offering automatically sorted bookmarks into folders, the features to email your bookmarks to others. When the dot-com bubble burst these social bookmarking sites were not viable enough to survive.

A few years later social bookmarking was back in a big way with the release of del.icio.us with several competing social bookmarking sites joining them including Furl and Connotea.

Submitting

Sites such as http://www.socialmarker.com are a powerful way to promote your website, making it easy to bookmark without the need to download every toolbar.

Firstly you need to register with all the social bookmarking sites, this includes a user name, email address and password.

After registering yourself with the bookmarking sites you need to decide what inner page you would like to bookmark on your site. In the top right corner of the Social Marker site there is a place for a title, link, text and tags. Fill in these boxes with relevant content and tags and then you are ready to submit.