Affiliate Content, Duplicate Content And The Crucial Differences Between Them And More...

Going by word on the Search Engine news group, alt.internet.search-engines, it's looking like Google is getting better at spotting and demoting affiliate content. It could well be that because the same text content is repeated over and over on

every affiliate site that carries it it gets demoted by Google purely for being duplicate content. I see this as being a problem, a growing problem, for every affiliate merchant and client using a data feed to power the pages. While the templates folk use may well vary in detail due to individuals customising them to their taste, essentially they're all variants on the same theme and of course they all contain the same few lines of text content in the same order.

Repetition of this kind shouldn't be too hard to identify and either ignore or remove from the listings or do whatever with which may well mean in the future that the idea of affiliate sites as we now have them is simply no longer practical.

My crystal gifts site is powered by a feed from GoCollect.com using a Cusimano script. I've personalised the templates so if you know me you'll recognise the standard BB layout of the individual product pages. Visually, therefore, it isn't like any of the other sites using the same feed. It still has the same text content, though. Inputting a sample into Google produces "about 584" results, all of which, or the majority of which we must suspect as I'm not going to go through them all to check it absolutely, are built around the same feed. The problem here for both affiliates and for affiliate merchants and for Google is, what's the point in having them at all? If there's one site that has them,

namely, the original, where's the point in Google having the rest of them in the index? They all sell the same product for the same price, so why bother to index them? At the moment, it's the battle of the SEO's. Why should someone buy product A from my site as opposed to anyone else's? The answer would be, because when they search for product they find my site before they find any of the others, and there are ways of promoting sites with which we are all familiar here. But this can't really last. The world only really needs just the one web site for these custom-made products and speciality items, and that's the one from the original manufacturers. All the rest essentially constitute duplicate content and we know what happens to that, it gets filtered out.

So, to counter this problem, you could substitute your own text for the original, and you could take your own photographs of the product. Not a problem for a small site, however, many have tens of thousands of pages. How is anyone going to re-write that lot? Obviously any lone affiliate can't begin to, so the idea of affiliate sites as we now have them, I think, must inevitably give way to niche sites where the affiliate presents a small range of items in an individual style that will appeal to certain of the buying public. The idea would be to create a brand of presentation that clients would get to be familiar with and feel comfortable with. If you look at the items on my crystal gifts site they're all photographed out of context. In your home they are unlikely to be suspended in mid-air against a white background, which is how they're presented in the data feed and thus on my site. I'm suggesting taking pictures of items as they might actually appear in situ, do a little mock-up of a down-lit corner table and snap that from a typical viewing angle, or have an item on a coffee-table against a background of muted lights, featuring an expansive sofa, giving a feel of general relaxed easy-living. This, by comparison with simply outputting the existing data from the feed, would cost a bundle, but it just might might be the only real way forward for niche affiliates. You know what that would result in? Quality sites.   The kind Google professes to like. 

Meanwhile, though, I suspect people who've built one multiple-product affiliate site, and seen it do well and are now busily engaged in building more and more multiple-product sites on the basis that they'll all do well too, are in for multiple disappointments. I'm trying to go niche in general with my affiliate sites and I've picked on crystal and glass gift items to work with as I can break then down into categories and maximise the potential of each category. What I've got then, in effect, is a legion of niche sites all interconnecting.

For choice, now that I understand more of the industry than I did when I began with affiliate sites, I'd really like a site that does watches and jewellery, these are the items that people are happiest buying from the web, research has

suggested, but I don't know a good feed other than Amazon and I've stayed away from getting too involved with Amazon as it has the high profile it does and will inevitably attract the greatest number of affiliates and so likely will be penalised in the earlier days of any affiliate purge. From what I'm hearing, this purge has already begun.

Lead fraud is possibly the largest obstacle to successful lead gathering via Affiliate marketing on the internet. Finding pre-qualified leads online can be either very successful or very frustrating depending on how you set up your program to deal with fraud.

Gathering leads through an Affiliate program can be a very successful venture if you find the right Affiliates. Names and contact details of people who have an active interest in your product increases conversion rates for offline sales and hopefully increases your bottom line. That benefit may, however, be adversely affected if the time you spend sifting through rubbish leads becomes too great. But there are a few things you can do.

Choosing Affiliates

As with all Affiliate programs, you will need to choose your Affiliates wisely at the beginning to have a fraud-free campaign. This means manually vetting Affiliate applications to join your program. Look at other sites your Affiliates have gathered leads for and ask for references if you think it is warranted. Remember also that seeking legal redress against fraudulant Affiliates is much easier to do in your home country, or countries with a similar, enforceable legal systems. Be sure that you know all of the contact details of your Affiliates so if something goes wrong you can contact them quickly.

Monitoring Your Lead Campaign

You will need to monitor your campaign manually, especially at the beginning to ensure you are receiving quality leads. Look at the leads you are receiving - if they all exhibit similar properties then you could have a problem. Things to watch out for include similar spelling mistakes on each lead (which would indicate one person is filling out the lead many times) and identical IP addresses (which could also indicate that one person is filling out the lead form several times or getting friends and relatives to do it). You will need to keep doing this manually until you are happy with your Affiliates and the quality of leads they are sending through.

With just a few hours of diligence at the beginning when you are setting up your lead campaign you can avoid days of frustration. The bulk of lead fraud is preventable - it just takes a little planning.

When I first started out on my journey to become a successful Internet marketer I used to wonder about all the advertisements I came across that begged me to join an affiliate program. They made huge claims about how much money I would earn if I joined them so I just ignored them. That is until I started to understand more about affiliates and affiliate programs.

WHAT IS AN AFFILIATE?

An affiliate is someone who promotes other people’s products or services. When you become an affiliate you have a money making business opportunity but you have none of the worries or expenses of a typical business. You’ll never have the bother of dealing with processing or shipping an order or be involved with customer care.  You will however receive money for your promotional efforts. When someone purchases a product or service through your efforts you receive a commission on the sale.  All you have to do is promote and wait to receive your payment cheques.

WHERE DO I FIND AN AFFILIATE PROGRAM?

There are literally thousands of affiliate programs to choose from. Many of them will tell you that you will earn thousands and thousands of dollars per month if you join them. They will state all the amazing benefits to you and how new and fabulous their particular product or service is. I’m sure you have seen these advertisements everywhere on the Internet. If you type in affiliate programs into your search engine you will see what I mean. You will also just come across them as you are surfing.

It can be quite over whelming to make a choice. 

HOW DO I DECIDE WHICH AFFILIATE PROGRAM IS FOR ME?

There are three approaches to choosing the right program for you.

Choose something that has a high demand

Choose something that you have a passion for

Combine the above two points so you will have a product that is in high demand and you are passionate about it.

I personally think a combination of these approaches is the best.

If you choose something that is in high demand then there will be a market for the product or service. It is essential to have a market otherwise you will find that no one will be interested in buying from you. The down side here however is when there is a high demand there is also a lot of competition.

If you choose something you are passionate about then you’ll have more fun and you’ll be more passionate about what you are promoting. When you have something you can put your heart and soul into you will generally do better than if you are promoting something you don’t care about or know nothing about.

Make a list of what you are passionate about. Then do a search on the key words to see how many other people have this same interest. You can do this by using a key-word search. www.goodkeywords.com offer free software you can download. Use this to search for the information. Just type in the key word and see how many results come up, i.e. how many people searched for those word over the last month. Then use your search engine to locate your affiliate program.

For example my personal primary interests evolve around living a better life. This means I am interested in health, wealth, developing better relationships and emotional and spiritual well being. Because I have these fundamental desires I searched for an affiliate program that helped me to attract more of these things into my life. 

You may decide to go with just one program. The ideal situation would be to find one program. Understand how it works then branch out to include a few more that connect to your primary interest. Once you’ve understood what’s involved in promoting your primary program it will be only a little more effort to hook up with other programs and start increasing your monthly cheques! You may also find that as you go along you will need to buy a few things for example, web hosting and domain names. You may then see the value of adding these services to your affiliate list too.

For example once I found my primary program I realised I had to advertise in order to get customers. I also discovered that I really did need my own website even though I had acquired several free ones when I joined my affiliate program. So I learnt all about web hosts and domain names and website design. As I went along I picked up a few more affiliate programs. After much trial and error I came to develop an understanding of the concept of organic search engine optimisation. I loved the whole concept so I added this to my list of programs too.  I have also developed a deeper understanding and appreciation for how Internet business works.

HOW DO I MAKE AN AFFILIATE PROGRAM WORK FOR ME?

The big thing is PROMOTION. You will need to promote your affiliate products or services. When you join an affiliate program you will usually be given one or more free websites and some links and banners. When someone clicks onto the links or banners and purchases the product or service you will receive a commission. This is how affiliate programs work. 

Regardless of which program you are involved in, advertising and promoting your links and banners will become your number one priority!

 If you are not prepared for this you will not be successful.

 It is that simple. 

There is no way around this.

The best way to do this is by becoming educated in the right things to do. 

You have a choice of paying for advertising or not paying for advertising.

A great place to start is with understanding how organic search engine optimisation works and how to get it to work for you. This method of advertising is time consuming to get set up if you do it manually but once your done it will provide you with an endless source of free targeted traffic to your website. There are soft-ware programs you can buy that will get you set up if your short on time.

Unfortunately the truth is that 95% of Internet entrepreneurs make no money. There are lots of reasons for this. Some of the more serious and common reasons are that many people just don’t understand how to promote. Many still don’t even realise that they have to have their own websites. Many spend more money than they are comfortable with because they head down the road of paid advertising and they aren’t in a position to afford this.

My best advise to you is that you enjoy your affiliate programs. Get your own website. Learn about organic search engine optimisation and spend your money wisely.

I hope this article will help position you for great success with you Internet marketeering

Employing a manager to run affiliate systems on a retainer with bonuses is a win for product owners, a win for managers and ultimately a win for affiliates.  Having them happy is the only way to keep them actively selling your product or service, and in turn improving business.

Russell Brunson knows how to manage his affiliates after losing over two years of work, and 6,500 affiliates in one day when his system crashed.  He wrote down what worked and what didn’t, then started again and in less then two months he was back.  Now 18 months later he has an affiliate list of 30,000 and draws in a six figure amount of cash per month from his affiliates.

So successful has his been in recruiting affiliates that Russell Brunson, along with affiliate manager Stu McLaren, has developed an affiliate training program for managers.  Both men believe there was a shortage of experienced managers and yet they were the most important element in an effective affiliate marketing program.

Here is a broad look at the most important three elements to be an effective manager:

1. Affiliate Research

It is important that managers draw in the best sales people to sell the products.  The number of affiliates is irrelevant if they don’t sell the products each month.  Stu collects up to 2500-3000 websites that could be interested in selling the product, and then he looks at which ones collect a large amount of quality traffic.  This can be time consuming, but it forms the bases of an effective marketing plan.  In the end there may be 150 to 200 sites that could be quality affiliates.

“We would divide them into either A affiliates and B affiliates. There is no difference between A affiliates and B affiliates except that A affiliates have more traffic or greater numbers in their e-mail lists,” he said.  “Those are the people you want to go after first because they will have the biggest impact on your business in a short period of time, and have the most influence on the most amount of people.’’   

2. Recruiting Affiliates 

Once managers have identified which potential affiliates they wish to pursue, they must pursue. Increasing quality affiliates will increase sales.  The secret here is to be pro-active and go beyond what is expected. 

“It is not hard, we just pick up the phone and call all the people on our A list,” Stu McLaren said.  “The reason that we call, was because every lazy affiliate manager out there will send an email.  By ringing them we are instantly separate ourselves from other affiliate systems out there.  You instantly start to build a relationship.”

“Before we call we do our research; what is their web site? What are they selling? What sort of people they are drawing to their web site?  Prepare promotions for them ahead of time, the more you reduce the work for them the more likely they will say ‘yes’.  That is the position you want to be in.’’ 

3. Training affiliates

If the affiliates have a reason to sell the product then they will remain active affiliates.  Other affiliate programs will create only one program, and then expect affiliates to sell again and again each month with the same material. Russell Brunson focuses on creating a reason for affiliates to sell each month and will focus on events in promotional material.

“We create new promotions every month.  My advice is start with holidays or events. Imagine if you created tools around these promotions for your affiliates.  You are saving them time and work and the likelihood of them selling your product is sky high,” Stu said.

Each of us has its own interest or has a hobby. Some love all kinds of books, music, and movies while others are into sports and traveling. There are also people who love to grow flowers and loves pets. These things help us to relax and forget our everyday problems and troubles and these things are common to people. But not everyone has a hobby that makes money for him/her except if you love your job. 

Money making hobby could let you treat your family and friends with the extra cash or you can even quit your current job that you almost certainly hate. That is why many of us today go online to start a business; their reasons are either to supplement their income or to gradually replace their offline income from their job. Affiliate marketing is a great way to start in making money online. 

Affiliate marketing is a revenue sharing partnership between a web merchant and one or more affiliates. The affiliate is paid a commission for referring clicks, leads or most often sales to the merchant. An affiliate’s advantage is that he can make money in a business where he doesn’t have the upfront costs of creating his own product, and he doesn’t have to worry about e-commerce, bookkeeping, or even customer support for it is the merchant’s responsibility. 

Now, for sure you want to be an affiliate marketer with all that benefits an affiliate could get. But, do you have what it takes to be an affiliate marketer? Before you begin your venture into affiliate marketing, you need to decide first which area interest you. What products do you know the most and which products you could do the best job of selling? Once you discover your specialty, perseverance, patience, determination comes next. These are the qualities you should possessed to be a good affiliate marketer.

Too many online business prospectors lose out because they become impatient. You also have to know what your strengths are, the things in which you are good at and your capabilities and abilities related to your chosen streak. And the most important thing is you have to have a strong desire to succeed in affiliate marketing. 

To be an affiliate marketer is not an easy task. You have to learn the techniques of marketing your product or service. You shouldn’t be looking at every chance because marketing is all about attracting you to look at this or that particular opportunity. To be a successful affiliate marketer, you should learn how to listen and to be taught because in life we need to learn skills to get by. 

For an affiliate marketer, you should know how to market your site effectively, in will enable you to get thousands of visitors coming to your site which transforms into more sales. This only means that the faster you set up a website, the bigger your chances of making money online faster. You should avoid the same mistakes some affiliates make everyday, they are only building a short-term business where they just make a small sale. Make sure you do understand that you should be building a long-term affiliate business and not just something that makes you a few dollars on one sale.  

It is also better to have knowledge on how to upsell your visitors for expensive services. This will in turn make you become recognized as an expert in your field and making money will be easier. There are some people thinks that just by having affiliate links on their website will bring them good profits. This can have some truth to it, but then most successful affiliates still believe that making use of strong marketing campaigns for their affiliate programs is still important. But affiliate marketers become much more successful when they treat their customers or online visitors as friends. Make a commitment to establish relationships with your customers and especially with visitors to your site. It is very important for an affiliate marketer to have a good business relationship with customers or visitors.

Affiliate Marketing is one of the hottest subjects on the Internet today. Some people think that it is hard to make money this way, others say it is very easy. My opinion is that there is money to be made in almost any kind of industry. You must just find a way to simplify your work and profit more from your efforts. So, the point is to use leverage, lots and lots of leverage. Bellow I will briefly explain how to do all of this. 

For those who don’t know, affiliate marketing is the kind of business in which you sell other people’s products and/or services in exchange for a fraction of the profits. So, if you are an affiliate you don’t have to create anything. You don’t have to own products or services. All you do is to advertise. 

You may think that advertising is expensive. I affirm that it could be, if you choose to pay for it. In the other hand, if you choose to advertise for free and you know how to do it, it won’t cost you a red cent. There are many marketing techniques out there that you can implement in your business life which will help you boast your exposure and increase your profits.

Then, how much money can you make? You can make a lot of money. The good thing about it is that you don’t have to deal with anybody as an affiliate. The owners of the products do all the customer service, deal with the refunds and process the payments. As I said above, all you do is to advertise. So, you are making piles of cash from products and services that you didn’t create and that you don’t own. 

You may ask, yes but exactly how much can I earn? Some affiliate programs pay as little as just 10% of the sales price. Others pay as much as 75%. Then, imagine that you join this affiliate program which is paying you 50% for every sale you generate. If you are selling a product that is retailing for $50, then you will make $25 per sale. If you sell one hundred products in one month, you will make $2,500/month. 

Now, you may be thinking . . . Yeah right! I don’t like to sell anything. I am not a marketer. This is not for me. Let me tell you that you are not the one who will be directly selling. The point is as I mentioned above, to use a lot of leverage. How does this work? What is leverage? Leverage is literally any system, tool or process that helps you magnify your efforts. 

I explain in my book Easy Web Riches, how you can use many different techniques that allow you to profit from this business easily. Basically the point is that the Internet will take care of most of the work involved. I cover a wide variety of strategies you can use to expand your knowledge and increase your profits. By following simple rules you will see how much money you can make. 

In my opinion, those who think that making money as an affiliate is hard, think so because they haven’t tried it yet or because they lack the knowledge necessary to succeed in this business. Once you know how to do it and how to benefit from leverage, it becomes very simple.

This is one of the easiest and fastest ways you can start earning substantial income from home. Think about it. You won’t only earn automatic income, but also residual income. I mean, on this business like many others home based online businesses, you make an effort once and you profit thousands of times. 

What attracts most people to affiliate marketing is that it goes to the next level of financial freedom, in which you don’t only profit from products that you didn’t even create, but you don’t have to deal with the clients either!

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Affiliate marketing can greatly increase sales figures with only a little increase in the quality and quantity of affiliate partnerships.  The advantage of using affiliates is that it increases the leverage in the marketplace. 

Imagine getting people out there selling your product all day for free, and they don’t make a penny until they start selling stuff for you.  It’s great writing checks because each dollar you write to an affiliate, you are getting two dollars back into your own pocket.

Someone once said in response to a question on increasing page ranks in search engine searches that eight simple words that has been incredibly important, ‘I rely on my own network of affiliates’.

Affiliate manager, Stu McLaren, said the advantage of increasing affiliate numbers was clear, but it was important to have active affiliates that continue to promote the product each months rather than in a one off attempt. Understanding how affiliates increases sales can be easily seen in a formula. 

Fig. 1

Total Sales = Product or service price * the number of active affiliates * number of monthly sales per affiliate.

    

Increasing any part of the above formula will increase sales; however increasing the product’s price will have a decreasing effect on the other two variables in the formula.  Not all people that pay $30 for a product of service will be as willing to pay $40.  However increasing the number of affiliates, or sales they make will have an exponential increase on the bottom line.

Fig. 2

Original sales:

Total Sales $10,000 = Product price ($100) * affiliate numbers (10) * monthly sales per affiliate (10)

Increasing affiliates:

TS $15,000 = Product price ($100) * affiliate numbers (15) * monthly sales per affiliate (10)

Increasing affiliates and monthly sales:

TS $22,500 = Product price ($100) * affiliate numbers (15) * Monthly sales per affiliate (15) 

What this example shows is that it doesn’t take huge increases in the number of affiliate or units sold to have a substantial increase in the bottom line.

It is important that the affiliates are active, and they worked each month to get the product out to the marketplace.  The role of an affiliate manager is to ensure that affiliate numbers increased and there are a high number of active affiliates.

It is just now coming to peoples’ mind that such a small increase can have such a huge impact.  Businesses are now looking for affiliate managers and if you look at the employment lists, affiliate managers are being sort after.

There is a very small amount of affiliates that would be classed as active affiliates.  I would say on the average affiliate list about 2.5 to 5 per cent would be active.  The role of the affiliate manager is to increase the number of active affiliates and train them to sell the product.

It is in the best interest of the manager to train affiliates because they were more likely to remain active and draw more affiliates into the system if they increased their own individual sales figures.