Companies realise that a product recommendation made through social networking websites is simple; it can be embedded within a post/tweet and it can reach out to all of the users’ followers. This route has had a powerful impact on the affiliate marketing industry, with a progressive increase in the use of blogs and social networks meaning that virtually anybody can become an affiliate. Domino’s Pizza recently launched a trial “social affiliate” widget that enables anybody with a network page or blog to advertise a selection of brands. People using the widget can plug products and subsequently earn commissions from sales. The idea was developed by BLM Quantum in partnership with Domino’s. Publishers simply sign up and download the dashboard to track generated sales, which works through the Affiliate Window network. Dan Clays, Managing Director of BLM Quantum says “Brands benefit by aligning with sites run by fans who are more likely to drive a sale, while site owners can generate revenues from their Facebook page or blog”.

Domino’s is the first brand to integrate affiliate marketing and social media this way, although similarly social networking site Facebook has launched their own tools to connect their users with the affiliate marketing industry. At their most recent regular F8 conference, the connection between social media and users respective interests was examined and as a result, 3 unique tools were launched which would also connect social media with affiliate marketers. One of these is the new Social Plug-in which includes already recognisable features such as the current ‘Like’ button. This is has been extended to publishers to allow users to see when their friends have clicked the ‘Like’ button on a site outside of the Facebook network. With this tool affiliates can bring a bigger level of social media to their sites in a more cursory way. There are also graphs to enable users to see how promoting a product can reach out into the user’s circle of friends and Facebook can then offer targeted recommendations according to what the user’s interests are, based on their promotions. One of the most significant developments will be the consequence this will have on Google. In theory it should reduce a websites individual reliance on Google for traffic, and ultimately rank higher in future Google searches.

On face value, the launch of the new tools would appear to be a positive move in creating an effective Facebook relationship with affiliates; however, it is clear there will be challenges associated with this new form of marketing.

It will be interesting to see how users react to both the Facebook tools and the new Domino’s ‘social affiliate’ test. The way they form a relationship with their sub-affiliates could be crucial. Communication is essential to maintaining a healthy relationship between the brand and affiliate and if this overlooked it could have a detrimental effect on the payment process. Social media users are unlikely to remain committed to the brand if they have no form of commissions for their referrals, therefore an ordered system of payments would be effective as a reward for the affiliates work. The brand also needs to effectively manage these new affiliates so that they continually drive traffic and in a favourable manner. Social media is becoming increasingly significant to affiliate marketing. Once these challenges have addressed then the benefit of this new form of sub-affiliate could be a big advantage to an expansive range of brands.

For more information go to:

• http://www.utalkmarketing.com/Pages/Article.aspx?ArticleID=17035&Title=Domino%E2%80%99s_Pizza_trials_world%E2%80%99s_first_%E2%80%98Social_Affiliate%E2%80%99_tool
• http://www.affiliates4u.com/news/2010/04/what-do-facebooks-new-tools-mean-affiliates/

It’s a simple fact: affiliate sites require traffic.

There are many ways to drive traffic to your site, but the one that comes above all else is natural search engine optimisation (SEO). There are plenty of strategies and tactics that you can employ to push your traffic up and this article contains some tips and tricks which you might find useful.

Starting with the basics – why is SEO important? Quite simply, your site will gain more exposure if it has a higher position in the search result listings for your target key phrases. When you use a search engine to find out information, how often do you browse past the first page? If your site isn’t listed there, chances are it won’t be found by the vast majority of potential users.

You have to consider just how key SEO is to your web marketing strategy. If you are considering placing all your eggs in one basket and looking for big results then obviously you will need to think about your how site is structured and how content is written and presented. Building your site in standards-compliant code is crucial, as is populating it with original, unique content. Google (and the other major search engines) doesn’t like cookie-cutter sites made up of the same content as every other affiliate site. If you are serious about being highly ranked, you should be thinking of ways to generate unique content that your competitors simply don’t have, and filling your site with it. This is the first major step towards achieving that page one listing.

Original, interesting content isn’t just good for the search engine spiders – it will also attract human attention, generating those all-important inbound links and further viral traffic through word-of-mouth recommendations.

Careful thought should be given to the keyword phrases that you choose to optimise the site for. Consider the terms that your users might enter into a search engine to find the products/services that your site contains information on. It’s better to target 3-4 word phrases than those consisting of only one or two words. Working in this way is known as targeting the “long tail” – those terms where search volumes are low, but competition is also low. The long tail is where the money lies.

So what is a long term keyword? Take the term “marketing”, or even “affiliate marketing”, which is extremely broad and would be very difficult to achieve a page one raking for. If you were to add on a couple more words to make it “affiliate marketing services” however, the level of competition might decrease. If you were to further specialise to “affiliate marketing services teacher”, page one is looking much more realistic. The number of people searching for this phrase will be a lot lower, but if you build pages and structure your site to cater for a multitude of similar long tail phrases, your traffic volumes will increase accordingly. These keywords need to be littered all over your website to increase its visibility.

Another idea is to create a supporting blog and fill it with original content, linked to your website. If you create the blog on a sub-domain e.g. blog.mydomain.com, you will squeeze more ‘SEO juice’ on the inbound link front; if you put the blog in a subfolder e.g. mydomain.com/blog, then you will benefit from a better internal linking structure. Whilst having different web pages for your website is fine, a sub domain paves way for a new category, topic or blog. So how does this benefit you? Well firstly they are usually free to add to your hosting account and easy to create, and secondly bring lots of added value to your website as the sub-domain is viewed as an entirely unique domain, meaning it will usually appear as a separate site in the search results.

Link building is one of the major aspects of SEO. You can build your inbound link base naturally by writing interesting articles that will attract the audience’s attention due to their content, which will then be likely to be linked to by other people. You could try writing something outrageous or eye-catching, a technique commonly known as ‘”link baiting” which has become a powerful way of generating natural link building but may not be suitable for corporates.

Some other ideas for generating inbound links include writing a topical article, talking about something newsworthy, being controversial or humorous, engaging in a debate. You basically need to use your imagination and make it interesting to as wide an audience as possible. For example if you specialise in Halloween products, write an article about safe trick or treating, or the top 10 costume ideas.

Another tip is to try guest blogging on a site that relates to your field. If your website blog has barely any visitors it makes sense to build a profile on one that does. Some blog owners will allow you write a small biography about yourself and include it at the end of your guest article with a link to your website. You should know your industry well enough that you know the best blogs to contact. Try using Google blogs to find ones that are suited to you. For a general blog, Blogcatlog.com offers a range of topics and lets you submit as many articles as you like.

This might seem obvious but analysing your competitors is a great way to get ideas. Look at the websites which are ranked number 1 for your target keywords and try to work out what it is that they did to get there. Look at their inbound links by entering “link:competitordomain.com” into Google. Have a look at the websites linking to them and decide whether or not you could request/win a link from the same sites. There are lots of handy tool available that you can add to your browser. In particular, there are some very strong addons for FireFox from seobook.com. Downloading the tools is free and gives you access to a range of facilities for gauging search engine performance and comparing competing websites.

Directory submissions are commonly used by webmasters to try and increase traffic to their site by building their inbound link base. However, this method has good and bad points to consider. Links from directory sites are generally very low value so they won’t really give your site much of a leg-up. They are very good at hiding your high value links from competitors though. Do not buy links as it could be disastrous – Google has been known to de-list sites faster than you can say “page rank” on discovery that link buying has been used.

Consider article submissions as a way to build up a profile for your site. They work in a similar way to guest blogging. Some websites enable users to post their own useful, interesting articles and if considered newsworthy, you may even get paid a small fee! Once the article is live, there will be a link for readers to find out more about you/your website. One website to look at in particular is Nettuts.com. They pay up to $150 for one article and are constantly updating the topics that they require from readers. Of course, the article will be reviewed to check its relevancy and content, but if you find a website tailored to your interests then it’s a good idea to look into.

Another good way to optimise your search engine results is to enlist the help of a PR company. They will be able to submit an article about your company or about a development in your industry on your behalf, and might even be able to write the article for you. You can submit to some online PR companies for free, whilst others charge. The more companies you submit to, the more likely it will appear on a search engine linked under the press release site.

Finally, it is important to remember that the best inbound links are the ones that take a lot of work or that your competitors can’t get. If it’s easy, it’s worth nothing. It may be more time-consuming, but will give you better results in the end – after all the ultimate aim is to drive traffic to your site.

In a two part blog feature on affiliateteacher.co.uk, this article addresses the views of affiliate marketers on affiliate networks.  Can the suited and booted big boys of affiliate marketing remain nimble and prosper within the increasingly innovative affiliate marketing arena?

Affiliate networks sit between a merchant (or retailer), and an affiliate who works hard to promote the merchants products or services.  Merchants and networks encourage their affiliates to write content rich websites that review, blog or critique a merchant’s products.  Networks exist because integrating with every merchant is a complex and bespoke technical task.  If each affiliate had to integrate with every merchant individually, the barriers for entry into affiliate marketing would be prohibitively high.  Networks technologically enable merchants to work with affiliates.

Networks also add value by allowing affiliates to track every link and campaign element they place on their site.  This allows affiliates to maximise the output from their affiliate campaigns by targetting the content that works best.  It also allows merchants to see the ROI from their affiliate campaigns.

Networks get their money by charging merchants a fee for becoming part of their network.  They also take a slice of the commission from the affiliate called the network override.  This is typically 30%.

It all sounds great.  Networks bridge the gap between merchants and affiliates allowing them to monetize their content.  So what’s wrong with this seemingly harmonious relationship?

There are several areas where the values that networks are adding to affiliate campaigns are being questioned.  The service that networks offer to their merchants is a typical bone of contention amongst merchants.  There is anecdotal evidence that there are sometimes over 30 merchants to one account manager at some of the leading networks.  With perhaps thousands of affiliates spanning these merchants, it is difficult to see how those campaigns can be managed effectively.

There is also a perception that most of the major affiliate network technology for tracking is somewhat outdated, and does not offer affiliates the transparency and capabilities they would like to see.  However, some of networks are currently refreshing their control panels: for example, Affiliate Window have recently released Darwin.

Despite these grumbles, affiliate networks are the only technological solution for affiliates wishing to interact with online retailers.  They are ever expanding the range of interactive content affiliates can use (through widgets and feeds), and their APIs are becoming increasingly open for tech-savvy affiliates to integrate into their sites.

There is also a new nimbler range of technologies that use the affiliate network as a platform to build their technology: easycontentunits allows users to drag and drop components from any affiliate network and ProfitBite aggregates all the major affiliate networks under one roof to give affiliates seamless access to any merchant on any network.  Many merchants also get around the variable level of service provided by affiliate networks by being a member of several networks.  They can then offer their affiliates different offers within different networks.

The big area that may change significantly (and alter the structure of networks in affiliate marketing) is tracking.  There are many issues around tracking that could change significantly in the not too distant future: de-duplication, and the last click wins policy are two much talked about issues.  Expect to see networks keenly developing their control panels and perhaps even some open standards emerging to target these issues.  The network’s dominance in tracking could be upset further, if a 3rd party tracking solution was to emerge.  If this could outperform current network technology this may give affiliates the transparency and enhanced functionality that they desire.  A target area for the Google affiliate network perhaps?

But are they wrong to miss out on this opportunity? And what about smaller retailers and merchants?

For smaller retailers the issues around brand protection and incrementality are less poignant.  Small retailers are interested in any traffic that boosts sales.

The main problem is that Twitter is full of spammers.  I am constantly amazed by the number of spammers trying to follow my burblings on Twitter.

For affiliate marketing to work on Twitter, marketers will have to become a lot more intelligent.  Genuine recommendation (as with all marketing) is the most valuable whilst spam links add no value.  Indeed a genuine recommendation from a big celebrity, even to a large Internet player like Amazon, will have enormous value.  It follows that recommendations from reputable but less high profile Tweeters will also add value: less than the celebrity but more than the spammer.

But can Twitter get its house in order and curb the spammers?

It may be too soon to tell.  Twitter is a relatively new service, and is still having teething problems; it was down again
yesterday evening for me in the UK for example.

I also suspect that affiliate marketing networks and merchants will need convincing that Twitter is a manageable and safe place for their affiliates to promote their products.  This will take time.

Users will also need access to better tools to allow them to link to a wide range of retailers quickly and easily.  Tools like these are becoming available, ProfitBite is one such example.

Affiliate marketing through Twitter is already happening.  I suspect it will develop and grow into a large industry that will once again attract back the big Internet marketers like Amazon.  It will take time though.  The tools and technologies will be required before anyone can run successful affiliate campaigns with confidence from Twitter.

References:

• “Damn Marketers.  Affiliate Links on Twitter.” – http://www.jangro.com/affiliate-marketing/damn-marketers-affiliate-links-in-twitter/
• “No Precedence For Social Media – Amazon Hangs Us Out To Dry” – http://www.searchenginejournal.com/amazon-affiliates-social-media/11654/
• “Affiliate Links in Twitter, Amazon Says No” – http://www.jangro.com/affiliate-marketing/affiliate-links-in-twitter-amazon-says-no/

• Affiliate – An affiliate (in the context of affiliate marketing) is a website which refers visitors to one or more e-commerce sites via affiliated links with the intent of earning commission on any sales generated subsequently.
• Affiliated Link – A link to a merchant site which is tagged with a code to enable tracking of the purchasing habits of the users clicking on it.
• Click – The action of a site visitor using a link on an affiliate’s website.
• Commission – A share of the revenue generated by a merchant when a sale is made to a customer referred by an affiliate.
• Cookie – A small file placed in the browser of a visitor to help identify whether or not they make a purchase after clicking a link from a publisher website. Some cookies last for up to 30 days, meaning a commission will be paid if the visitor makes a purchase within 30 days of first clicking the link.
• CPA – Cost Per Acquisition. This is a measurement is used in online advertising to gauge how much a merchant pays for each lead/sale generated by an affiliate partner.
• CPM – Cost Per Mille. This is a metric used in online advertising and refers to the cost per 1,000 impressions.
• CTR – Click Through Rate. This is the ratio of clicks to impressions, usually expressed as a percentage. A CTR of 5% means that an advert displayed 100 times has generated 5 clicks.
• EPC – Earnings Per Cent. This is the earnings per hundred clicks and provides a measure of the relative worth of clicks in terms of the commission generated. It is calculated by taking the number of commissions earned and dividing it by the total number of clicks. The result is then multiplied by 100.
• Impression – The showing/display of an advert to a web visitor.
• Lead – A lead is a visitor who indicates interest in a merchant site as the result of marketing activity by an affiliate. A visitor is usually converted into a lead through the action of signing up for a newsletter, registering with a site or downloading a file in exchange for providing contact information.
• Link Popularity – This is a measure of the popularity of a site based on the number of other websites which link to it. In affiliate marketing it is used to measure the power of an affiliate.
• Merchant – This is the brand/business engaged in an affiliate programme and paying commissions to sites which generate sales or leads on their behalf.
• Network – Networks provide a bridge between merchants and publishers. Merchants sign up for accounts with networks to connect with publishers in order to generate sales/leads, whilst publishers register with networks in order to access the affiliate marketing campaigns of merchants and earn money.
• Network Override – This a charge to merchants added by networks on top of commission payments and may be up to an additional 30%.
• Pay-per-lead – This is a means of commission payment whereby a flat fee is paid by merchants for each qualified lead generated.
• Pay-for-performance – This is an arrangement whereby a publisher is paid a commission for generating leads for online merchants.
• Pay-per-sale – This is a means of commission payment whereby a flat fee is paid by merchants for each sale generated.
• Publisher – A website owner/manager. Publishers are responsible for creating adverts and links on their websites which visitors click through to merchant websites via. Publishers are paid commissions by merchants for generating leads/sales/revenue.
• Reversal – Also known as a “charge back”, this is when a merchant withdraws the commission due on a sale/lead due to it not clearing for payment. Typically, this might be due to the sale being generated through fraudulent activity or because of a charge back from the card issuer after the sale has completed.
• Tiered Programme – Some merchants offer tiered schemes whereby publishers are given performance incentives for selling above a particular target level.

The terms above cover the most commonly used terms, but if there’s a term you’re not sure of the meaning of, why not add it to the comments section of this article!