Affiliate Marketing for beginners (Me)...

I have no experience of affiliate marketing whatsover, but I'm constructing a new website purely for affiliate purposes. I'm going to throw myself into it and see what happens. I'll post the details of this site on here once it's done.

Thin Affiliates
I've researched various areas on affiliate marketing and it would seem that site quality is very important. I've heard people talk of cutting commission paid to low quality affiliate sites that add no value to the users journey. As well as this, the 2005 Google report on "Thin Affiliates" made it clear that Google doesn't want poor affiliate sites clogging up their SERPs (A common strategy with affiliate websites).

This increasing pressure to design well laid out and good quality affiliate sites will put a lot of less skilled affiliates out of business. I'm not too hot on the whole affiliate business myself, but I won't have any trouble coming up with a high quality website with good usable SEO'd content.

I don't think this is bad news for affiliates at all, it just improves the overall quality of sites and actually adds value, rather than adding spam! The same goes for dodgy Adsense sites, this is a great way to earn commission and Google does all the hard work. All you need is a website with great content (an area you are interested about always helps). There is always room for a great website with a unique content offering, whether you are a life coach, a managing director or an addictive games designer, people will always be interested in specialist areas.

Content is King!
I think this is an important point when you set out to design an affiliate website because there are so many affiliate programs, you will always be able to find one suitable for your content. I would focus on developing great content on a subject you are experienced and knowledgeable on. Then find an affiliate program to suit it. If you can't find suitable programs on Commission Junction and Affiliate Future etc, you can always use Adsense, I think it's content sensitive targeted adverts are fantastic and you can filter out competing sites.

Affiliate marketing: The Basics
From what I've read so far, Affiliate marketing requires good web design, good SEO and great content with some functionality to help engage users. I have a suitable background to develop websites in this way, I just need to find my niche!

Post links to any great affiliate sites and I'll take a look at them!

Case Studies
My next post will be the start of a series of case studies. I will be investigating the online marketing of current company websites and analysing their effectiveness and how they could improve, so add my RSS feed so you don't miss out on this free content!

Stealing competitors traffic & controlling your brand online

SEO: Stealing competitors traffic with brand comparison pages

Creating a brand comparison page is easy in theory. Put together a page of info about one of your competitors and you will get traffic into your site from searchers looking for your competition.

To make a good comparison page is a bit more difficult. An easy example would be a page comparing rival credit cards to your own credit card product. This would show a user why your product is good (APR, 0% balance transfer etc) in comparison with your competition (this could be done in a nice neat table).

This way of making a comparison page is good because it offers the user info on what makes your product better than the competition and you will be able to steal some brand term searches from your competition. Although this sounds great, most pages constructed with this in mind are very low quality and offer a user very little other than a load of content seemingly stolen from another site. As long as the idea of the page is good, you will be able to steal traffic from your rivals and keep the user interested in whatever it is you are selling. The key to this is to have a useful page anything else will not captivate a user.

SEO: Protecting your brand online

I found a nasty looking search engine result page recently, this example of a search engine result page (SERP) is for the brand search term "starbucks". Although it was worse not so long ago, the results still feature some sites that Starbucks won't like. This got me thinking, how hard could it be for Starbucks to get a load of new domains pointing to different pages about Starbucks? Set up a few subdomains too, and load it with content about the good things Starbucks do (can they really be that bad?), this along with some good link building (internal and external) will allow all these new domains and sites to rank for the keyword "starbucks", and because of the links from actual Starbucks websites, these pages should move up the rankings and push out the results you don't want people to see!