1. Build Organic Traffic - Post fresh content, articles, blog posts, Tags
2. Posting Frequency - Several times a day works best
3. Target obscure, less competitive keyword phrases, i.e. long-tail
4. Syndicate your RSS feeds - Robin Good; manual RSS submission
5. Social Bookmark all your articles and posts - Digg, Delicious
6. Post your content to Twitter, Facebook, et al - Ping.fm
7. Incoporate social sharing features - Facebook Like button, Wibiya
8. Post good comments on related blogs - Google Blog Search
9. Submit articles to article directories - EzineArticles.com
10. Join related forums - set-up signature links and post!

These are but a few ways to increase your free traffic….now go out and build the web!

There are a lot of companies launching into the performance marketing space with an affiliate program, a great amount of desire, and “wanting-ness” to succeed. But if you don’t have certain things in place, it’s going to fall flat on its face or never gain the traction that you want it to.

So, the first thing you need to address is your website and your conversion rate. How well does it convert? How well does your landing page convert? Do your part. If your website isn’t performing like a rock star, your affiliates aren’t going to be very happy. If they send 100 quality clicks and they aren’t making any sales they are going to say, “this sucks” and they will move on and you are going to lose the opportunity to get them as a regular producer. Now, if they’ve sent the same 100 clicks and they got three sales and they made $50-100, then you are in the ball game. So you have to keep working on your website to make sure it performs for your affiliates to gain traction.

Effective ad units and banners are a must. You have to have dynamic banners, good text, and email creatives. However, the creative you are using to facilitate your partners has to be high-end, has to look good, has to have calls to actions, has to have a high click-through rate in order to just get the clicks. Give them a chance actually to make a conversion now that you’ve got to them there. Reliable tracking is essential. We recommend HasOffers to handle internal tracking. With internal tracking you can track everything. Not only can you track direct partnership and affiliates, you can track major networks and CPA networks all through one central interface. You can also track your paid search and whatever other paid campaign you are engaging in.

You must have responsive, pro-active affiliate managers…this I can’t stress enough. I would say 90% of affiliate managers aren’t pro-active enough and that might even be a generous amount, giving them a 10% pro-active rate, because a lot of the problem is people don’t know what to say to people. So if you don’t have a very experience affiliate management person in-house or using a very competent affiliate management agency, it’s kind of like babysitting your kid with a zombie. They’re not going to get that nurturing and that education that they deserve and that’s going to enrich their lives. They are going to get someone that’s sitting there on the couch watching TV while your kid beats his head against the wall. So you need really good affiliate management or partner management, and then obviously you have to take it really, really seriously.

Have a strategy for your affiliate marketing growth…put a strategy together! Ask yourself: How are we growing this affiliate channel? The performance channel in Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4? Don’t be cheap, don’t say, “what’s the cheapest we can do this for”, say “what can we spend to grow this effectively and what’s a good expenditure of money to grow our affiliates.” If you can spend money wisely, you can really grow your affiliate channel broadly and very quickly, but you have to do the right things and you just don’t spend money willy-nilly anywhere, but you should confer with somebody that can advise you accurately on how to spend the money. You can effectively spend money to grow your affiliates and grow your partners, but like I said, talk to the right people to advise you.

You should be offering to provide tools, resources, and training for your affiliates. Give them resources, give them tools, give them keywords, give them content, fresh content, unique content, something they can use to market with. If you facilitate people they will market easier. It will be a much broader program if you can facilitate a thousand people as opposed to a hundred people. So you really have to manage on a broad basis in order to get the most participation.

Behavioral re-targeting is something that’s sort of all the rage. Try out companies like FetchBack, Advertise.com, and Google (does behavioral re-targeting now through AdWords). It’s going to increase conversions overtime by retargeting them with banners when they leave the site. When they visit, the affiliate cookies are going to drop, and they are going to make the sale. So when you’re retargeting the visitors of your site, you’re kind of giving an affiliate a chance to get an extra conversion, which only benefits them and you.

Find more partners and do more BizDev, BizDev, BizDev. I will beat my head against the wall about Biz Dev because companies just don’t do it enough and they don’t do it smartly. It’s really kind of troubling to me because it could be so effective if you just did it occasionally with the right amount of gusto and the right amount of follow-up. Business development is a very effective thing to do, but a lot of companies just don’t do it the right way, so it’s a little personally frustrating, but it can be done properly and it can be fruitfully.

Networking socially through social networking is an absolutely must! Your affiliate managers, your business development people, your marketing directors, they should all be on Facebook and Twitter, working your fan page, on forums, meeting people, networking with people, getting Linkedin with people, building their networks. In my own personal network, I have over 2000 LinkedIn connections that I worked very hard for years to acquire and it took a lot of work, but it allows me to have a lot of reach and have a lot of partners that I can turn to in a second to work with. So building their own personal contact network on behalf of your company is very, very important.

Affiliate conferences are very important to developing relationships. Affiliate Summit, that’s definitely the number #1 conference. Great show…everyone should go to at least one of them a year. Ad-Tech is sort of the mother of all digital marketing conferences and I think the New York Show and the San Fran Show are a must. LeadsCon is a newer show that focus on lead generation and they’re having one very shortly and then the Performance Marketing Expo is the new show that is coming to Miami this September, and this is going to have some great speakers and some great attendees. Should be a great show. So you should be sending someone from your company to these shows every year to meet people and to network…and tell them not to be scared! Tell them to be friendly and go up to people and shake people’s hand. Tell them what you do, ask what they do. If they aren’t going to network, don’t even bother, don’t sending them, make sure they’re really friendly and proactive.

These are but a few of the ways you can ensure you gain traction with your affiliate marketing program. Thank for reading and let me know your comments!

The great thing about twitter is that you can use it to connect with pretty much anyone at any level in any company. It is also used by writers, editors, journalists, bloggers and media types of all persuasions. It is also easy for anyone to pick up, so you can get started today, and if you cannot then find someone who can help.

Everyone has their favourite publications that they like to read: find out which publications your audiences like to read. How would you do that? Ask them, survey your customers and suppliers: you can do this formally or just by casually asking them in conversation.

Research those publications for the edits and contributors and find them on twitter. Listed to the conversations which they are engaged in and see if you can contribute something of value within those conversations and make additions. Then when the topic of conversation comes around to an area which you can really contribute something of value add that, ideally with a link to a blog post or video or some other point of content that you have which shows a source of interest.

You can also ask those writers what they are writing about at the moment, and if they are looking for other elements to contribute to what they are researching or looking to research in future weeks and months.

Trend spotting: we all have our pet fads and things we really like and are interested in at the moment or on an ongoing theme. Reading someone’s twitter stream will provide you with that insight. See if you can spot which journalist or blogger has what pet project. Make a hobby of it and then when you have something of interest to say on that topic tweet it to them and see if they pick it up.

Online as in the real world, some people are much more open to being approached and talking to new people then others are. Find those that communicate only with their friends and those who like to communicate with a wider audience. It is those people you want to connect with.

Looking for corporate Social Media Management? Check out Experience Advertising for effective, pro-active social media management for your company.

Social Media Marketing 2010 - Harnessing the Viral Powers of Social Networks - is being put on by my good friend Murray Newlands this year in London on the 17th of June.

The event comprises a one day conference filled with some of the finest social media experts including: Chris Brogan & Brian Solis (via video), Mat Morrison, Andrew Walker, Charlie Osmond, Richard Sedley, Murray Newlands, Luke Brynley-Jones, Sue Keogh and Nadeem Azam who will be answering your questions. You can follow the conference on twitter at #SMMUK10.

Murray Newlands event co organizer director, Influence People renowned blogger and social media consultant, said “…so you will have had your ears burned over the last few years with people talking about how great social media is, well this event is for people actually doing social media. We have asked all our speakers to provide in-depth case studies to ensure they have quantitative and qualitative stories to tell. It is important to ensure participants leave the day having learned much more about running successful social media marketing campaigns than they knew before, plus making some good connections.

Register now with the discount code Costpernews and get 10% off: www.socialmediamarketing.co.uk

If you cannot make it to the UK Murray will be one of the speakers in Miami at the Performance Marketing Expo.

Are you are looking to establish and build a winning presence in the social space for your company, but don’t have the time or know-how? You should check out Interactive Agency Experience Advertising. They take a very pro-active approach to building out each company’s social media presence with good content, as well as handle it in a very professional way. They offer proactive, effective social media management services for both large and small companies. Here is a break-down of the affiliate management services they offer:

- Complete set-up on 20+ major social networks including Twitter and Facebook Fan Page
- Completely takeover and manage existing social networking accounts
- Daily unique content updates to social networking accounts (including: tips, great articles, company news, promotions, surveys)
- Friendly interactions with Followers and Fans on behalf of the company
- Alerting company when there is a customer service question or issue to be handled
- Running creative, exciting contest and promotions to user-base
- Establishing Blog and Social bookmarking articles and content from company website
- Strategizing with company to better integrate and promote social networking to customers and visitors
- Implement revenue generating and customer retention strategies

If you are looking to ramp up and grow your social media strategy for your company be sure to check them out.

Here are some real-world affiliate marketing strategies that were discussed at the Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas. Why pay for affiliate marketing systems when you can get all the knowledge you require to make money online for free? Here are some really great affiliate tips, techniques and strategies:

Intro: Niche website/blog building is an integral part of publishing content on the web, generating traffic, and therefore producing affiliate sales. Content is king and the more content you are able to allow the search engines to “spider” and then rank, then more possible traffic you can generate to your sites. Here are some site, SEO, and linking concepts to get you moving in the right direction:

Site Building Tools – I highly recommend WordPress to build sites with (our free site builder with free hosting uses Wordpress. There are many sites builders you can use to get a presence up on the web. Make sure to set it up properly with good titles and categories. If using WordPress, utilize tagging as well which multiplies the actually amount of spiderable pages on your site.

Site Organizational Strategy – When you go to launch niche sites, to promote affiliate merchants, make sure to stay organized in a spreadsheet with info like: Merchant promoted, platform used to build it, login info (passwords), and posting frequency, i.e. (Date.com, WordPress, Evan@exper.com (jimihen5478321), twice daily). This will help you stay organized and will allow you follow a pre-established plan of action. Strategize on posting frequency to maximize your efforts.

Daily content posting – Posting content daily (i.e. articles, bog posts, essays, merchant reviews, product reviews) is a great way to ensure that the search engines will be coming back to your site frequently to check for new content to “index”. Over time, the more frequently you post, the more pages you will have in the search engine’s “cache”. The more pages you have in the cache, the more possible times your site’s pages can come up in the search results for various search terms, i.e. “Purchase flowers in Las Vegas”. Daily content posting is the best way to increase the number of pages on your site and therefore increase the amount of possible traffic you can generate with that particular site.

Use the Best Plug-ins to Enhance Your SEO – One of the advantages to using WordPress to build your sites is all the amazing plug-ins you can add to your site to increase functionality and “stickiness”. Here are some links to the top plug-ins available:
http://yoast.com/top-wordpress-plugins/
http://wphacks.com/wordpress-plugins/
http://mashable.com/2009/03/20/wordpress-seo-plugins/

Socially Bookmark Articles – Social bookmarking is a great way to generate traffic, inbound links, and better rankings for your site’s content. You have to join the sites and create a profile. This will allow you to bookmark any articles you wish. You can submit your own articles to these sites and other people may bookmark them if they find them interesting. You should bookmark mainly other people’s articles and some of yours as well, so not to appear like a spammer.

Top Social Bookmarking Sites: http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-bookmarking-websites
Social Networking - Create a Twitter account and Facebook Fan Page for each actual entity you wish to build up. Example, you are running a site advertising flower affiliate merchants, so you would create an identity “FlowerGuru” on Twitter and a FlowerGuru Fan Page on FB. This will allow you to advertise these groups on your sites and generate followers and fans. Then, these followers and friends can be messaged and communicated with to generate traffic back to your sites. Social networking is very powerful and shouldn’t be abused. Always remain professional and post content you think your followers and fans would benefit from, i.e. helpful tips, informative articles from trusted sources, interactive polls, and affiliate promotions. Try to avoid being annoying because you will lose followers. You should also have a main personal identity that you can maintain in order to network professionally and with actual friends and business associates.

Coupon Sites – Coupon sites are all the rage because people are looking for coupons to save money with retail merchants. Many affiliate merchants provide coupon codes to affiliate to help them promote. Some merchants provide coupon feeds that you can grab and publish on your site on a page or per merchant. You need some skills or tools to accomplish this. Posting unique merchant descriptions and merchant reviews will allow your site to rank well because it has unique content and isn’t just posting coupon codes. Unique content is absolutely essentially to good rankings, especially for a coupon site when there is so much competition and possible duplicate content.

Communities and Forums – Launching your own social communities is great way to build something real and substantial that will grow over time. Social communities are great for repeat traffic and building a large member base. Like sites, the larger it builds the more traffic it can generate. Ning.com is a tremendous free tool for niche community building. Vbulletin for forums.

Link Building Strategies – Acquiring inbound inks to your sites is essential to building better search engine rankings over time. There are many different ways you can get links to your site, such as:
- Blog roll links – when a fellow blogger links to your blog sitewide, you can reciprocate
- Blog commenting – posting comments on blogs related to yours (Google Blog Search)
- Forum posting with signature link – Join multiple forums, set-up sig links, start posting good comments

Site Stickiness – Site stickiness is a tremendous concept to grasp and implement. Making your site more sticky will allow you to capture more from your site’s traffic. Some essential sticky features are: newsletter signup, bookmark this site, follow on Twitter and FaceBook Fanpage, and RSS Feed.
RSS Feed Submissions – Every blog has by nature RSS feeds included. RSS feeds allow you to syndicate your content all over the web and into people’s feed readers. Your RSS feeds need to be manually submitted to get the best effect. Definitely check out Robin Good’s site for more excellent info on RSS and the top 200 RSS directories to submit to: masternewmedia.org

Content Ideas – Coming up with article and blog post ideas can be challenging at times. Here are some examples of article titles:
- “Top 10 ways to Find a Date Online”
- “Best Ways to Lose Weight in the New Year”
- “What are the Top Phone Service Providers for Home Phone Service”
Also how to’s, breaking news, and new product launches are good topics to write about.
Brand Your Affiliate Sites – Creating a brand with your affiliate sites is a good idea because people will remember your site and revisit them frequently. Give people a reason to bookmark your site or join your newsletter. Treat them well and grow them huge over time!

Content provided by Experience Advertising, a leading affiliate management and social media management agency.

Having great social media management in place is absolute must for any company with an online presence in this day and age. Have a really comprehensive and proactive strategy for leveraging social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook is vital to keeping up with your competitors. There are many good reason to have excellent social media managers in place including:
- Posting frequent, valuable content to your followers and fans
- Increased interaction with customers and visitors
- Capturing more site visitors and facilitating interactions
- Providing better, faster customer service
- Generating more search traffic from your social media postings
- Conducting surveys and generating valuable feedback from your customers and followers

There are many other excellent benefits to have social media managers in place. Don’t settle for less than decent social media management. Your social managers should be extremely proactive, responsive, and engaging in order to do it truly effectively. Make sure to check out Experience Advertising for your best social media management solution.

This post promotes SponsoredTweets via their affiliate program (disclosure):

Have you heard about SponsoredTweets.com? It’s the latest way to advertiser through the Twitter platform with people who have a good Twitter following. You have to pick and choose who you want to Tweet your message and you can track the performance through links. From my initial experience with Sponsored Tweets it has been really great exposure for my campaigns. Also, I’m ready to be one of their Tweeters and make some money by Tweeting other people’s messages. I can approve or deny any requests to Tweet which is really cool. I’m completely stoked with SponsoredTweets…they have done a great job with the platform. It’s pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it. And they a really nice looking affiliate program as well. You should definitely check out and sign-up for SponsoredTweets!

I wanted to let you all know about Experience Advertising’s new affiliate management client: pingg.com.

Just in time for the holidays, this service allows you to send ad-free
custom designed / branded eCards to your customers, suppliers etc… it also includes a branded eCard web site where you can post interactive content like photos and videos, and integrate your twitter stream etc…it’s really freakin cool. You should check it out.

I know a few people traditionally find eCards cheesy, but this is done *right*! Save a few trees, time and money, and check it out here.

Their affiliate program is available through the CJ affiliate network: https://signup.cj.com/member/brandedPublisherSignUp.do?air_refmerchantid=2838046

Thank you,
Evan

On Page SEO: Online Marketing’s Building Blocks
2009 Update: Changes You Need To Know

Search engine optimization comes in many flavors, but marketers must think about more than on-page elements and old best practices. Good on-page SEO is only part of the solution you need to attract quality visitors to any type of site. Good SEO is the heart of online marketing. Poor on-page SEO will cause any site’s efforts to crumble in other areas.

Marketers should already know about page titles (aka title tags), alt image text and font decoration. An online marketer must be able to speak with absolute conviction about the characteristics of these and other influencers.

A wise soul described search engine optimization as a predator and prey game where the search engines show just enough about ranking factors to aid their mission, but not enough so that the results can be gamed. As search technology changes, marketers must also quickly change.

Consider these 2009 changes to on-page SEO so far:

Changes To Previous Best Practices: After an off-the-cuff (that’s how it seemed from the audience at SES San Jose 2007) remark about “no follow” links, Google announced in June that this type of “page rank sculpting” was unnecessary. And in October, Google pulled “PageRank” from its Webmaster Tools console. Why? Google says it’s a good indicator to use as a success metric any more.

Google also confirmed in September that meta keywords convey no search ranking attributes. A month later, Yahoo said the same, but then admitted a week later that it assigned a weak ranking signal for meta keywords.

To reduce duplicate content, all four major search engines agreed in February to support the “canonical” tag. Multiple ways to address the same page, including those resolved by rewrite rules or redirects can be winnowed to one “canonical” page, deemed to be the source and authoritative page.

And the fastest way for any site to be indexed, Yahoo’s Paid Inclusion program, will end in 2009.

New Partnerships: After chasing Yahoo! for a web eternity, Microsoft announced a search deal in July that would combine the #2 and #3 company’s search results. The deal is nowhere near final, but happened fast on the heels of Microsoft’s June launch of its rebranded Bing search engine in June. The new entity, quickly dubbed Microhoo, is expected to use Bing algorithms on Yahoo! properties.

New media darling Twitter cut its own deal with Microsoft and quickly announced a nearly identical deal with Google as both companies try to move into “real-time search”.

New Search Results: Google debuted six variants of search engine results pages (SERPs) in 2009, starting in January with a Timeline view that had previously only been seen in Google Labs. The largest search company followed with announcements in March of its “Vince” update that gives more weight to brands and branded terms. Google also previewed “Caffeine” in August – a jumble of traditional search results, news, video and even blog comments on the same page, but mixed together.

Google had already taken steps to assume searcher intent by starting to automatically display local results for service and product searches even if a geographical term wasn’t included in the search. Combined with the Vince/brand update, ranking nationally for generic words that brands traditionally use became extremely difficult using traditional methods.

Bing quickly countered with visual search in September, and as Google shortened its hotlist of trends to 40 terms, other companies including Twitter, Wikipedia and Bing quickly filled the void and reported on what terms were seeing the most search activity.

Title tags are important. But as an online marketer, you must stay abreast of monthly, sometimes weekly, changes in on-page SEO to enjoy continued success.

Guest Blog by Silver Beacon Marketing

I’ve decided to run another blogging contest this month for the Linked Affiliate group on Linked, which is bursting with 3500 members currently! All you have to do is write a unique article/post on any aspect of Internet Marketing you choose. The piece must be 400-500 words minimum. I will select the winners of the best articles and 4 people will win $250. Every single entry will be featured on www.CostPerNews.com, one of the highest ranking affiliate industry blogs in Google. No shameless self-promotion allowed. You will get a link to your site at the bottom of the post as well.

Here are some possible article topics to fire your imagination:

- Affiliate Marketing - Current State of Affairs
- SEO - How to Get Great Organic Rankings
- PPC Management - Tips and Techniques
- Email Marketing - How to Write Good Subject Lines
- Lead Generation - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
- Shopping Engines - how to Get ROI from Multiple Channels
- Social Media - How to Leverage Social Media for Your Business

Pretty much any topic in Internet marketing is OK. Once you have written your piece, email it to me and i’ll post it to the site. The winners will be chosen at the end of October. Good luck and happy writing!

Any questions please let me know!

Thank you,
Evan, CEO
email: evan at experienceadvertising.com
cell: 954-662-8010
twitter: www.twitter.com/experienceads

Hi all, I decided to launch a new Twitter account because the url affiliate manage was available. I plan to tweet about the best practices in affiliate management. Do me flavor and follow me here: https://twitter.com/affiliatemanage.