Building Lasting Relationships with Your Affiliates

Getting new affiliates to signup for your affiliate program is only the beginning. In order
to keep them highly motivated and eager to sell your products for you, you will first need
to establish a solid relationship with them. We’ve come up with some solid tips that you
can use to make sure your affiliates keep on raking in the big bucks for you, day in and
day out.

Train Your Affiliates Well
Most affiliate programs on the Internet think that by giving your affiliates a couple of
banners and some text links, they will then go out and start making massive loot for you.
This is just not the case. Many of your new affiliates will not know what to do when they
first sign up for your program. All they know is that they like your product and they
want to promote it to make a few extra dollars. Additionally, many of them will have lost
their motivation to sell your product for you if there aren’t any clearly defined
instructions as to what they should do to promote it.

If you think about it, a salesman isn’t going to get too many sales if he doesn’t go through
some sort of training seminar on the ins and outs as well as the type of customers they
should sell to would they? This is where your affiliate training course comes in.

Your Own E-Training Course
You really should invest some time in putting together a good 7 to 10 day training course
via email. This is quite easy to do, and follow up to your affiliates every day. You can also utilize a third-party Autoresponder for this as well.
( My suggestion for autoresponder is here )
SeoAftermath AutoResponder Hosting

How Do I Create a Training Course?
Creating your own email training course is fairly simple. You’ll want to start by creating
an outline of what you want your affiliates to know about you, your company, and your
products. Here are some suggestions:

Affiliate Welcome Email – Your Initial Contact
This is the first email that gets sent to your affiliate after they have signed up to your
program. It welcomes your new affiliate member to your program, and gives them the
details of his account. These include such things such as his unique affiliate link, login
information, and account details.

In the Welcome Email, you should take some time to introduce your company’s products
as well. Since this is what they will be selling, give them a brief description of how well
it works, and how it can really benefit the customers who buy it.

Finally, give them a few simple instructions on getting started with your promotional
tools. If you have some banners and text links available in your members’ area, give
your affiliate step-by-step instructions on how to copy and paste them right away on their
home pages. This will make it easier for them to begin.

Introduction to Your Promotional Materials
For each of the next training emails, focus on instructing your affiliates about how to
promote your products. You can probably send them an email each day on how to
promote your product using a particular type of marketing strategy. For instance, you can
focus on teaching them how to market your product using Pay-Per-Click on Day 1, Using
Ezines on Day 2, Creating Articles for Submission on Day 3, and Using Traffic
Exchanges for Promotion on Day 4.

Make sure you are explicit in how you want them to market your product. Give them
example code or even copy and paste text that they can use right away for submitting
articles or creating content on their site. The less work that your affiliate needs to do, the
better it is for you because you alleviate them of the stress needed when creating
marketing material.

Always Keep In Touch
We already suggested that you create your own e-training course to prepare your
affiliates for marketing your product. But other than that, you should also keep in touch
with them on a regular basis. Sending them a weekly or monthly newsletter with updates
on your products and services, as well as news regarding your company or affiliate
program will help keep you in your affiliate’s mind.

Affiliate Contests
Another way to motivate your affiliate members is to run regular contests. Offer up some
prizes for affiliates who generate the most sales or commissions in a given month. This
is a very simple and inexpensive way to drive your affiliate’s competitive spirits going.
We’ve seen affiliate programs online giveaway things such as an iPod for the top selling
affiliate, and even cash prizes for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place. You can even add these events as
part of your regular affiliate newsletter that goes out to your members.

Your Partner in success
Dan Cochran

Search Engine Optimization

There are so many websites all over the internet so it’s essential to promote and optimize your website. A new website needs to be visible to search engines. Before submitting your site to search engines it is very important to optimize your website. If you can not afford a search engine optimization service, make sure to follow our few search engine optimization tips to have your web site well optimized for the top placement in search engines.

Step 1. - Analyze your competition

The best way to start optimizing your web site is analyze your competition. Take a look at the web pages that currently have top rankings (Top 10) on Google for targeted keywords and try to find out what these pages have done to get these rankings.

- analyze the first top ten web sites related to your branch
- analyze keywords they are using
- look at their source code, meta tags
- look at their keyword density
- look at their comment tag, alt tags, title tag
- internal and external links on their websites
- look how many sites linking to them
- check out the quality and link popularity of sites that are linking to your competitors
- look how many pages they have After all you can tell is it easy to beat your competition or it is not.

Step 2. - Start to improve your website with quality content

When optimizing your website always use keyword in the meta tags which are reflected in your page. It is not going to help your search engine ranking if the page has nothing to do with the topic.

Step 3. Choose the right keywords.

As mentioned before, analyze your competition but never use the same keyword and description tag. There are two great resources for finding out the most effective keywords.
- Overture
- WordTracker

Step 4. Creating meta tags

- TITLE Tag
The most important tag is the Title tag, because it is in the head section of your website and many search engines use it. Title tag should be short (about 14 words), descriptive and to the point. The title is appeared on first line in the search engines.

Step 5. Creating meta tags
- DESCRIPTION Tag The next important meta tag is description tag. It describes content of your web page
- shouldn’t be longer than 120 characters - description is for the search engines not for the viewers to see

Step 6. Creating meta tags
- KEYWORD Tag
- use the most important keywords that your website represents
- we recommend to use 5 keywords separated by a commas
- one keyword should have 1 - 3 words

Step 7. Creating meta tags
- ( see My other Post about building basic meta tags )

Step 8. - Check your website URL before submit to search engines.
Your website should be finished without errors:
- no broken links
- no spelling mistakes
- have a good design
- no html tag mistakes
- have a site map

Step 9. - Submit your website to search engines
Submit your website into the most important search engines, it brings you the most of traffic. Make sure to submit your URL for free to www.google.com, www.yahoo.com, www.altavista.com, www.alltheweb.com, www.excite.com, www.lycos.com, www.webcrawler.com, www.Alexa.com, www.Jayde.com, www.whatuseek.com, Open Directory (The ODP powers core directory services for some the most popular portals and search engines on the Web, including AOL Search, Netscape Search, Google directory, Yahoo directory, Lycos, DirectHit, and HotBot, MSN and hundreds of others).

DMOZ and Yahoo Directory listings are tremendously valuable. There are a lot more free and paid search engines and directories to submit, but if you do not have time to search for and submit, you can also use our search engine submission service.

Step 10. - Build your link popularity (offpage optimization)
Next significant step you should do with your website is build your link popularity. Link Popularity is the number and quality of other websites that link to your site. Top rankings depend on your link popularity. It can be done with creating a quality non-reciprocal and reciprocal links from related web sites and Internet directories, blogs, forum sites …

SEE MORE ON (INTERNAL LINKS) VERSUS (EXTERNAL LINKS)

Internal Links versus External Links

The SEO offers some very different classifications, such as “link popularity within the Site’s internal link structure”, “quality/relevance of links to external sites/pages”, “global link popularity of site”, “topical relevance of inbound links to site”, “link popularity of site in topical community”, and “global link popularity of linking site”.

So as I considered possible reasons for including such irrelevant classifications in a “search ranking factors” document, I was asked whether I feel internal links count as much, more, or less than external links.

It seems like a pretty good question, though it could be asked many ways. The answer is that, in my opinion, it depends. What it does not depend upon, however, is how many links point to other sites. Nor does it depend on how many “global” links (what, exactly, is a global link?) point to a Web site.

Since the survey doesn’t define any of the unusual terms it uses (like “global link popularity”) we have to guess what these terms might mean — and did the respondents all use the same definitions or not? That question alone points out the unreliablity of the survey, but let’s assume for the sake of this discussion that “global link popularity” refers to all the links that point to all the pages on a site.

Who links to page A on a site has no impact on the value of a link from page B on that site if there is no chain of linkage from page A to page B. So links pointing out from page B are not going to pass on any value from page A’s inbound links. Hence, “global link popularity” has no impact on search engine results.

It may have an impact on trust.

Most SEOs today seem to be of the opinion that internal links don’t help boost your rankings for competitive queries. I’ve never understood that point of view, but time and again I have seen people say truly irrational things like, “Internal links help with uncompetitive queries but not with competitive queries”.

Really? Well, let me sell you some sand bars in Texas, because obviously you’ve got money to burn if you believe nonsense like that.

Links are links. Just because links are internal to a site doesn’t mean they should be trusted less than external links. In fact, your internal links are more likely to pass value in some form than any random external link. Neither you nor the search engines really knows where that external link has been. It needs to go through a bit of filtration before it can pass value.

But the search engines have never mentioned filtering internal links. No academic paper has ever mentioned filtering internal links. And while I have found many a spam directory doesn’t pass value to other sites, I (and millions of other surfers) have seen how they manage to get crawled.

If a crawler follows a link, the link passes at least some value.

So that means search engines will trust internal linkage much more easily than they will trust external linkage. Internal links possess no more innate value than external links, and they may pass less value than really good external links, but they’ll pretty much pass some value and that is more than what many external links pass these days.

Given a choice between a free external link from some obscure PR 9 Web site I’ve never heard of and 100 of my own internal links, I’ll take the 100 internal links every time without hesitation. I control those links. I know where they come from. I know where they point to.

In search engine optimization, trust begins at home. If you don’t trust your own content search engines won’t trust it either. And in that respect neither Yahoo! nor CNN nor any other Web site is going to pass more trust to your pages than your own pages.

SEOs get all wrapped up in (internal) PageRank. Well, I say PageRank ShmageRank. It has never had as much influence in search results as link anchor text and it’s unlikely to ever surpass link anchor text in value. Link anchor text is the search engines’ endorsement of spam. You can spam your way to the top of search results all day long with link anchor text. Search engines not only don’t care if you do that, they encourage you to do it.

And that is why SEOs wrongly believe that links are necessary to achieve high rankings in search results. After all, you’re not allowed to put “SEO theory SEO theory” on a page 500 times, but there are no rules against getting 1,000 other sites to link to you once each with the text “SEO”.

Either way, you get to add “SEO” to your content 1,000 times. When your document says “SEO” 1,000 times, you’d better believe it’s going to ring bells and hit the top of the search results for “SEO”. That’s just the way it works.

You can boost your relevance score by bolding SEO and by italicizing SEO. You can even put it in an H1 header:

SEOAFTERMATH

Search engines like it when you put your keywords into your title tag, your page URL, and occasionally even your meta keywords tag. They like it when you spam them to death.
So what’s the problem with internal links? If search engines let you repeat keywords endlessly, why should they care about whether your links are internal or external? If anything, internal links should count more than external links because internal links are placed with editorial care. External links might just be spammed.

If your pages are stuck in the Google Supplemental Index, your outbound links won’t pass much value to other sites’ pages. Your anchor text will not be associated with those sites’ pages by Google. But the Supplemental Googlebot will still follow your links — at least enough to index your site.

Maybe Supplemental Googlebot will crawl from one supplemental site to another, too. I’ve never seen any Googler deny that would happen. Neither have I seen them say it would. All I know is that I have seen new sites show up with all or most of their pages in the Supplemental Results Index. Those pages didn’t all get into the Supplemental Results Index through external links.

But the whole question of whether internal links matter more, less, or about the same as external links presupposes that search engines weight linkage on the basis of location. The literature has never indicated this happens. No search engineer has, to my knowlege, ever implied or stated that internal links matter more or less than external links.
They do tell people to get links from other sites. But you need links from other sites to be crawled and indexed.

On the other hand, some spam analysis papers do talk about where links come from. They do distinguish between potentially spammy links and potentially good links. Of course, those papers are all concerned only with external links. I have never read a paper that proposed internal links should not be trusted.

Still, most SEOs spend a lot of time looking at backlink data. They seek out new external links. Now, don’t misunderstand me. I also go for external links. I know how to use them. I know how to pick them. But I put more faith in my internal links than I put in external links.
Backlink analysis is unrevealing in these matters. That’s not to say backlinks don’t help. Of course they do. You just don’t know which ones help.

Assuming you could identify all the backlinks Google knows about for any competitor’s domain, you won’t know which of those links pass value, you won’t know which of those links helped get the competitor crawled. And yet, knowing nothing about a competitor’s backlinks, most SEOs solemnly swear that those backlinks help those competitors achieve their high rankings in search results.

Maybe a page ranks well for a query simply and solely because it has 1,000 internal links pointing to it with relevant anchor text. Link anchor text is like sand. Put enough sand together, apply high pressure to it, and you create stone. Put enough link anchor text together, pass it to one page, and you create strong relevance for a query.

I’ve been able to adjust my rankings for competitive expressions simply by changing internal link anchor text. Of course, I have sites with lots of “global link popularity”. In fact, I know more about my backlinks than most SEOs know about their own backlinks. I created most of them.
Think about that.

Google Webmaster Central divides links into “external” and “internal” links. So now we know where all the (reported) links come from. But we still don’t know which links are not being reported and which links are not passing value. And I don’t mind telling you that many of my inbound links are transient. So even when Google tells me it found a link on a page only a few days ago, I can visit that page now and find no sign of a link.

The only real difference I see in internal links versus external links is that I am far more ready to depend on my own links than I am to depend on yours. I don’t know if your links will pass value. What I do know is that, if my links don’t pass value today, they will. I won’t settle for anything less.

The only good link is the link that passes value, and where it comes from is completely irrelevant in that respect.