Author: Jon Izzard

Becoming involved in affiliate marketing is not an enterprise to be done on a whim. You will very likely have been inundated by spam emails, tweets and I imagine text messages as well, promising amazing income for working at home on the internet. Now, it’s become so common that comedians are able to make gags about them in the awareness that the audience will know what they are on about and receiving a giggle. And quite right too, since for the most part, these adverts are intended at getting a few mugs to join for a period, have a go, stick at it for a few months and then cancel when they acknowledge that they haven’t and probably won’t ever, make any profit.

However, executed properly, there is no explanation why with affiliate marketing they wouldn’t have been profitable, possibly not to the level that sends them running off to the Aston Martin dealers with credit card in hand, but adequate to put a few extra quid in the bank. What they did not comprehend and most likely could not have understood (as they would not have been told), was that there is no possibility that anybody was going to find their site, let alone purchase anything from the advertisers whose adverts graced the page. The reason for this is that most people with a website they create themselves have little or no idea about search engine optimisation.

SEO is a system by which a website is made amenable to the search engines so as to make it easy for them to be indexed, graded and assessed for relevance. This is worked in combination with the setting up of the affiliate marketing site by identifying the keywords which describe the site, what it does and what it offers. Suppose, if you were to choose your niche marketplace to be a shop for fishing tackle supplies, your keywords may be along the lines of maggot drowning, fishing tackle, fishing rods, fishing reels, fishing line, fish hooks, fishing books, fishing DVDs and so on. These keywords then have to be included into the description of the webpage in the HTML header area which is not shown on the screen to users, but is noticeably to search engines, but they also want to be included in the text written into the page that people do view. This binds the two parts of the pages together and achieves the search engine approval for relevance.

You then join plenty of affiliate marketing schemes and find as many firms selling goods and services in your niche market as you can. Pick the links that you like and will look good on your page, and cut and paste the code into your site, sort them into some kind of logical order such as by country (because you can use affiliate marketing firms in any country, not just your own, target markets all over the world to maximise revenue). Once you are pleased with the page then you can begin the SEO and a useful way to begin is getting links to your website added on business directories all over the internet. The easiest way to do this is to look for a site that will help you add hundreds through them rather than track them all down individually. Careful though, this is a long and very dreary task.

However it is worth it since search engines love links and they want to find them to your webpages in association with the correct keywords so you have to check for ways to do this. Directory listings are a good one and also utilising social network sites to boost your site with links is another because hopefully, as well as creating links for the search engine robots, humans will see them and hopefully follow too. These are all good, solid SEO techniques which can be used in the early days of affiliate marketing, the subsequent piece will cover more ways to get your site visitied.

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Until now we have analysed how the search engine optimisation for our affiliate marketing shop starts as the keywords are identified and inserted in the hypertext of the pages, we have viewed how we can employ social networking to publish links to our website and how we can produce articles which will have links to the website together with keywords allied to what the website does, and how we can post 100’s of individual copies of the pieces around the internet for the search engines to read and build the number of links back to our site.

This is fine, effective SEO. The search engines will increase the ranking of the website against the competition and slowly, our affiliate marketing site will scramble its way up the results tables in response to users searching on our keywords. The trouble here, is that is takes time. It is not a quick operation and here is a sticking point, because during the period we are climbing the rankings, we are paying cash to our service providers and if you are shelling out for article insertions access, that too. What we want to do is discover a shortcut that gets us to the eyes of the shoppers in the meantime.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising will manage this for us. As the title hints, it does cost. It’s advertising, what do you expect? But it can be strictly controlled so that it does not get out of hand. We must also bear in mind that people (like me for certain, how about you?) would rather to click links in the ‘organic’ results on the page which is what most SEO is aimed at doing, paid for ads, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing because folks will choose them, visit your affiliate marketing shop and hopefully spend money which generates you revenue. So, how to manage this?

You may employ a specialist, but my concern is that because they charge you a commission for every click, the cynical person in me wonders if they don’t get folks to click the links. The simplest way is, like the rest of your SEO, to perform it yourself and employ something like Google Adwords. You are going to need a Google id anyhow for the tools illustrated in Part 5, so if you have not already, go and sign up now through Adwords. What you need to do is to open a fresh campaign for your affiliate marketing website and you will be guided through.

Choose your target territory (go with “All” if you have affiliate marketing partners in other countries and check the languages that may be relevant), keep the defaults for the other options and enter how much you want to spend as a maximum per day. Ignore the rest and then click “save and continue”.

On the following page, give the Ad Group a title and then write in the advert text in the boxes below. CHECK YOUR SPELLING AND GRAMMAR! Now the most crucial part. Open a new tab or window in your browser, go to your affiliate marketing shop and then someplace in the page, right click and choose ‘view source’ from the list which will open another window with contains the HTML code for your site. At the top, look for the meta name=”keywords” text and copy the keywords shown between the quotes. Go back to Adwords and paste these into the keywords box for the campaign, which instructs Google to show the advert when customers search on those words. It also obviously compliments our search engine optimisation campaign, and as customers follow them, again the affiliate marketing rating score goes up.

The following requirement is to bid on the keywords. Remembering your daily limit, you have to decide how much you are prepared to pay every time someone clicks on your advert to go to your affiliate marketing website. For now, just put in your default bid. If you are really keen to be on the front page each time, put in a high sum but do remember that lots will visit your shop which will cost, but not purchase. You won’t pay that amount each time, you will pay the next amount up following the next highest bid, so if you bid 1.00 and the next best is 25p, you will most likely pay 30p. For now, be conservative because the Adwords monitoring tool will be able to help later.

So now, when you save it, the ad will be reviewed by Google and if there is an issue you will get an email. But by selecting the Campaigns tab at the top of the screen, you can view how your advert is getting along, how many times it’s been displayed and how many times selected. All useful stuff, but check out the Adwords tool and get familiar with it, learn the FAQs and the rules and find out better exploit it to promote your affiliate marketing shop and boost your SEO program.

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