Affiliation Cash - The affiliate frontline

GadZooks! The Fauklands are being invaded AGAIN!?

When it comes to ranking in the SERPs that count, there’s no such thing as enough back links (well, unless they come from bad neighbourhood sites… but that’s a post for another time). But how do you get good quality back links for free? Especially when sites with a decent PR are usually out right refusing, or want some hard cash?

Press releases…

Not only do these things often rank well for given terms, you’re also basically guaranteed a spot for a few minutes in the “real time” search on Google & Bing, and you’ll stick around for a little while in Google News if you’ve submitted to a quality site.

Of course the problem is finding quality sites that you can submit to, without it actually costing you anything. And I know you guys have better ways of spending your time than researching that stuff, so I’ve done it for you.

Here’s 18 free press release distribution sites for you, and I’ve thrown in their basic Google PR as well because I know some of you love to sculpt that stuff like it’s Play-Doh.

The real benefit of a press release is that, under Google’s current algorithm, as they age, they gain importance by virtue of being a press release and are more likely to show up in informational searches. It’s not like article marketing on EZA where they basically get tossed aside after a while because of the disposable nature of the site.

However you do need to keep in mind that you can’t just spam a press release site, and your article does need to be 1) professional in tone; and 2) actually seem newsworthy in some way.

Many of them actively actively approve or prune articles, and will ban spammy accounts.

Happy Hunting - Harvey

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Dammit! They're co-opting EVERYTHING!

We here at Affiliation Cash would like to wish all of our affiliates a very merry Christmas (and I suppose we should have wished you a happy Hannukah about two weeks ago… Apologies to Muslims, I have no clue when Ramadan is/was. Also, does anyone know what Buddhists do at this time of year?).

Either way, may the best of the season be with you and your loves ones.

Seasons greetings aside, this time of year is actually a gold mine of opportunity for those willing to put in a little bit of extra work.

Why?

December 26th.

Would you use this at ANY other time of year?

People world wide will have just opened gifts. Many of those gifts are going to be media players. Either brand new or upgraded. People are going to want to fill the extra capacity and capabilities of their new device. They’ll be looking for a way to do this cheaply. Others will buy the device and will be looking to purchase some sort of free downloading service to go along with it directly.

You might want to get a PPC campaign on the boil with things like “Need to fill up your new Mp3 player?” or “Need to put some Mp3s on Johhny’s Christmas iPod?” or some such.

Happy (Hannukah?) Hunting - Harvey

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"Awesome! Everyone one of these results is about hair styling products!"

Google has once again changed the playing field for those attempting to make money online. This time around it has been decided that they are going to basically ensure that everyone gets “personalized” search results.

The gist is that, even without being logged into any Google services, every computer (the computer, not the user, because Google seems to be running on the assumption that they are one in the same here - See pic below for humorous consequence) will have its searched preferences logged in cookie form so that subsequent searches on the G will yield results that are more in tune with what the person that predominantly uses that computer is after.

It should be stated that this is entirely an opt-out system, meaning that people that aren’t aware of it which is probably 85% of users (to pull a realistic but totally made up number out of my nethers) will get these results, and a further 10% of people simply don’t care enough to bother, or actively prefer the personalized results.

The typical reaction of an SEO based affiliate upon hearing about any change at Google

Naturally this (like every other change) has much of the SEO community up in arms as there seems to be the belief that people will never again be exposed to websites that they haven’t ever been to before. The logic of that seems to fail on the basis that people tend to bookmark pages that they intend to revisit, or at least remember enough about the name of the page or product (sometimes even the URL) and search for that, instead of the generic terms.

Where this becomes useful the end user is simply that Google search will finally be able to contextualize searches like they’ve been promising since 2001. No longer will I be offered coffee or holidays when I look up “Java”.

Grandpa just wasn't the same after attempting to look up information on Google using Little Jimmy's computer, due to Little Jimmy's search history & preferences

If you’re looking up “red socks”, and you’re not in the US, you’ll most likely get information that is more about something to go between your shoes and feet than it is about baseball teams.

So why am I writing all this when it clearly has little to do with Affiliation Cash?

Simple. I’m reminding people that the sky isn’t falling, and that SEO still has it’s place.

Most people are generally searching for something they don’t actually know about already, which means personalized search is useless for anything other than providing context around it. If your site is SEOd to the hilt for download based terms, and someone decides they want to “download free programnamehere”, there’s a good chance that your site will still have the same SERP as it would have without these changes. The differences lie pretty much only in areas where language becomes ambiguous, such as “bowling”. Someone might be looking for a lane of 10 pin, lawn bowls, or the equivalent of pitching in cricket.

So just chill out, and keep trying to get your sites decently optimised.

Happy Hunting - Harvey

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Most of the posts we make on this blog are generally about ideas to get more traffic, more conversions, etc. We don’t often talk about future events (at least one’s that aren’t guaranteed) or of social trends that don’t directly relate to being able to market things a little better. But these last few days, reading the news, I keep getting a stronger and stronger impression that we’re going to get a bit of an aftershock to the GFC’s earthquake from 14 months ago. I’m not sure how many of you pay attention to the global financial markets. I’ve often found if you’re an affiliate marketer the two often go more hand in hand than you’d think.

Either way, over the weekend while everyone in the USA was happily chowing down on some turkey, while the rest of the world contemplated the beef or fish, there was something of a market hiccup in Dubai. A large number of their insanely large buildings were not going to get completed due to lack of funds.

Precisely what does this have to do with people buying memberships to download music and videos with?

The answer is more than you’d think.

A lot of money, particularly North American money, flows through that region in the form of investments and bonds. that are owned by US financial firms that deal in equity and bonds for a lot of smaller investors (other trading groups, people saving for retirement, 401k/superannuation funds, etc). A lot of these groups are going to feel the pinch, and that in turn will take about four to six weeks to flow down to regular consumers, who will once again tighten belts.

What it has to do with Affiliation Cash and the programs it sells is that between this ripple effect, and people having gone and gouged a nice new hole in their credit cards with all the Christmas spending to show precisely how much they still believe in the economy, there are going to be a lot of people in the English speaking world that suddenly can’t afford to buy another DVD, download more tracks from iTunes or go to the movies.

They’re going to want to find something that provides for a cheap night in.

And you have about four weeks to build a campaign, either SEO or PPC, that can take advantage of it.

Happy Hunting - Harvey

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About a week ago I had someone ask me how it was they were managing to show up so well in Google for certain keywords, but they couldn’t even find themselves in Bing.

Whilst I’m fairly certain that this was a rhetorical question, I attempted to answer it anyway from my own observations, and that of a few other friends in the marketing world that I chew the fat with on a particular forum.

In so far as we could gather, Bing liked sites that:

• had a commercial motive behind them i.e. had a shopping cart or payment gateway in them, and were there to sell products or services;
• were well linked by other sites that were well linked;
• had some decent domain age to them.

For the most part, it seemed like a more commerce oriented version of the previous MSNLive search engine.

However, in an attempt to get people on the right foot with them, MS has released a general guide on how to optimise for Bing properly. You can read it all here, or the cliff notes below.

What you should do:

Honestly, I like this Bing better...

Basically all the same stuff that Google loves, because it’ll be a globally warm day in Al Gore’s world before MS innovates something entirely on their own steam.

• RSS feeds
• Bloggers linking to you in their posts
• Social media links
• User generated content like Wikis*, forums and MU blogs.
• Article marketing
• etc

*It should be pointed out that Wikis are good for pretty much any SE that relies on links for establishing authority, as they basically generate a lot of internal links for very little effort, as well as creating fresh content on a semi-regular basis.

Of course, the problem with using wikis is that they are applicable to very few sites that work with Affiliation Cash programs. I’ll go into more detail about how you can exploit wikis on your site in another post when I feel like writing a bit of a diatribe.

What you shouldn’t do:

• Go on massive link building campaigns. At least, not in a short period of time. Unlike Google, they’re watching for the number of links in comparison to how many you would normally get. Google, in so far as I’ve gathered, expects sites to go “viral” and get a few links, then a flood, which slowly scales down. Bing on the other hand don’t want that. They want sites to have staying power, so if your link building suddenly goes up by an order of magnitude, they’re going to think something’s pretty suss.
• Blog comments on non-relevant blogs. Comment spam is great because most blog owners have accidentally left out the rel=nofollow part of their site as they’re not SEO savvy. Bing is basically attempting to stamp that one out though, and if they don’t deem the blog you’re commenting on to be related to the comment: penalty! Likewise, one can assume that track back spam probably won’t work anymore, although it also means that you won’t be able to negative SEO competitors by linking them from known to be bad blogs anymore either.
• Linking out to known spam sites. Ok, this one’s a bit easier for most people to deal with. Just don’t do it… But what if you’re running a link wheel? What if one of those sites gets flagged a spam site? Game over! Because a lot, if not all, of your link wheel sites are going to be pointing back to the now known spam site becausey ou were trying to game Google.

Whether MS realises it or not, they may have actually helped Google along in the market place with some of their own optimization rules, simply because if people want to optimise for traffic from both, then they’re playing against rules that normally would have allowed them to slip on a black hat and go on their merry way.

Still, the black hatters that make their own tools, as opposed to just buying those out there, will surely find ways around this themselves and will shortly come up with some nice exploits that I will be sure to tell you about as I find out about them myself.

Happy Hunting - Harvey

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When you’re in the world of Affiliate Marketing, there’s one thing you can’t get enough of.

Websites.

The cheaper the better… and if they’re free, and come with some decent PR and have forgotten to slap rel=nofollow into their <a> tags, it becomes all the sweeter.

Squidoo has gotten pissed with people using it for spam, and is out for revenge!

To that end, I’m sure you guys are aware of Hubpages and Squidoo. They offer this specific service, plus a few other extras, and used to have some serious rank on Google, until various people in AM over-abused this particularly sweet deal and ruined it for everybody for all tiem, and various SEs stopped giving these wonderful sites the link quality they so richly deserve… *cough*

If you’re already somewhat savvy when it comes to making sites and getting them to rank, by all means, you’re welcome to ignore this post. This one will certainly be of invaluable help to all you fresh faces though.

My point is if you go around blabbing about this wonderful site I’m about to reveal, a) you’re probably going to ruin it for everyone, just like Squidoo, and b) I’ll start abusing your trust by loading every link I possibly can here with my own aff links.

The site I’m talking about is Yola (Formerly Synthasite).

It’s a relatively idiot proofed WYIWYG editor based free site… thingy. You can basically make sites appear like a static site, or a blog/CMS driven site. Technically speaking, this is all decided during the signup process, and you can actually edit your “blog” in an editor remarkably like the Wordpress back end. However, the “site” making back end is roughly the same, although perhaps a little more drag & drop oriented.

But why is it good? Well, there are a few reasons.

1) It’s heavily trafficked. We’re talking lower than Alexa 5,000 for the main page, which throws up random pages from inside, so there’s some chance of natural, organic traffic ala StumbleUpon.

2) The links you place on the site are still followed, giving you some sweet link-juice. Don’t over do it, but if you’re trying to rank for a few keyphrases, you might want to dump those links in here. This is the major difference between Yola and most other free website sites.

3) You get 5 of these sites to screw around with on the free package, and an insane amount of space… So if you want to actually use it to dump some files to incentivise the offers you’re giving to people, go for it. There’s probably enough space for you to give away a few DivX movies!

4) It will generate a subdomain for you @ yolasite.com, which you can make as keyword rich as you like. Whilst sub domains don’t tend to rank very well, especially not compared to the actual domain, within the SERP, it’s better than nothing, or some sort of acronym… or a .INFO.

5) If you’re a total n00b that’s just started out recently, sites like these make your life a hell of a lot easier as you don’t have to try to figure out any of that weird PHP or Wordpress nonsense.

6) You can get nearly unlimited free accounts on this service if you’re clever in the way you go about it. I’ve check up on this and already have three accounts of my own. A total of 15 sites that I intend to use to basically dump junk content on and insert a few three and four word long links for the keyphrases I’m attempting to rank for, and interlinking them within each other to pass on that little bit more authority.

So have a play with it. If you’re new to all of this, it’s a good way of figuring out how to create content and play with anchor text. Just don’t expect it to be a turnkey solution that will realise all your money making dreams. It won’t. You actually need to do some work.

Happy Hunting - Harvey

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If you keep up with news from Searchenginia (it’s my made up name for the land of search engines… although who am I kidding? Really it’s part of the San Fernando Valley) you’ve probably heard that Microsoft is taking over Yahoo’s search function by basically dumping a Yahoo skin on top of Bing, much in the way that Google now runs Baidu.

The point is that the Yahoo algorithm sucks, they’re finally acknowledging this, and letting people with some idea run the show. No, really, Bing is actually a quality search engine for anything that involves you handing over cash. Not so much for general information & research though.

The point is that if you’re trying to rank your site high via SEO tactics, a) you no longer have to bother about trying to go for Yahoo traffic, b) you will have to worry about going for Microsoft traffic, and c) the categorically dumbest customers have now been rolled into one for you.

This is good news!

As of July this year, Google had 67.5% of the global market. Yahoo came in second place at 7.8%, and MS’s various search names held a paltry 2.9%. The combination means you’re effectively getting a slice of 10.7% of the global search market. Now, I’m well aware that 10.7 is not even a sixth of 67.5… but you’re dealing with less intelligent people that are more inclined to buy things! Don’t forget, these are the people that use Yahoo!Answers that we’re going for

So start trying to rank #1 in Bing. It’ll grow into importance over time, and your site will have been optimized for it long before the others, giving you the first mover advantage.

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So those of you that are promoting via SEO tactics are most likely totally in love with the higher tier social bookmarking sites, i.e. Digg, because of the high quality dofollow links it provides.

The value of social bookmarking when promoting something that is available from other providers is simply the SERP boost you can get out of having good quality backlinks.

Well, strike Digg from your list.

Whilst you were probably aware that the main links were nofollow to begin with, the comment links are no longer dofollow as well. This  means you no longer get the delightfully tasty linkjuice from them. Sure, you might still get some organic traffic… but let’s not kid ourselves. Unless you have something that’s seriously newsworthy or bizarre, it’s unlikely to make it terribly far on its own steam, and people aren’t likely to +1 it on their own either.

(Not quite so) Happy Hunting - Harvey

P.S.  Sorry that this news is late. I didn’t notice this until recently because I don’t really do much social bookmarking so I don’t keep on top of it…

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Keyword metatag: As useful as doing this

For the more advanced users that read this blog, this will come as no surprise.

For those that still read WF or DP and believe them to be reliable sources of useful information, you are in for a nasty shock.

The Keywords Meta-tag has no effect on your SERP in Google or any other current, semantically driven search engine. This includes Bing, Yahoo, and numerous others that aren’t worth mentioning.

Now, if you don’t believe me for some bizarre reason, maybe Matt Cutts can convince you. After all, this comes straight from the gift horse’s mouth.

Now, this isn’t to say that they’re entirely worthless. Mismatched keyword entries can adversely affect your ranking because major search engines work in a semantic manner. That is to say, they’ll connect words that are similar in meaning (i.e. “Dogs”, “husky”, and “canine” ), or are conceptually linked through common real world occurence (i.e. “CPU”, “computers” and “video games”) throughout your content, assume that’s what your page is actually about, and then cross reference that against the keywords metatag.

A visualization of conceptually linked keywords

If that info is totally conflicting, then they’re likely to figure you’ve got no clue what you’re talking about and say you’re not as relevant as someone that does. It’s a reason why you shouldn’t have keywords about free porn, cialis, and beer when you’ve got a post about the latest Harry Potter film that’s then linked to a download link on one of your Affiliation Cash Programs (although I dare you to try and link those concepts up… go on, try it).

Not that it makes it much easier to understand, but I’ve put in a visual representation of how semantic search operations kind of work.

Likewise, this doesn’t mean all metatags are useless either. Plenty of them have uses, and the description tag especially so as it’s the text that shows up under your page title in the SERPs. What I’m trying to get across is that you don’t need to bother with keyword stuffing, or trying to figure out which five long tail phrases you want to put in there to rank for, because it’s doesn’t really matter half as much as just accurately matching the content of what you’re putting in a post.

Happy Hunting - Harvey

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Another week, and more people asking me for ideas… Seriously, except for the stuff that’s outright shady or illegal, I’ll put it up here. And no, don’t ask me to tell you the outright shady and illegal stuff either. I only know it so we can spot the people using it and slap down their accounts. Blackhat methods we don’t mind so much. Fraudhat and Scamhat we do.

Now, back to what I was going to talk about: Wordpress, and why it’s great for Warez sites

For those of you out there building sites, Wordpress is a potential godsend. You’re going to have to do all the legwork on this one, but I’ll give you a few ideas that you should really consider using the next time you decide to do a site build, and want it to rank well.

Scraping Your Content

I’m not going to tell you where to go and get a scraping script from, or what one to use, or any of that, mostly because they’re shady, and secondly because we’d rather not vouch for the efficiency of any particular 3rd party product. Hell, go get a custom solution made for you specifically at eLancer or something if you’ve got the money.

The point is get a scraping script for Wordpress, one that you can target at a site’s RSS feed, and that can distinguish between a few sorts of information, specifically, the title of the links in the RSS feed, what category they fall under, and their description.

You want all that posted back on your site, regularly if possible, and you want it to differentiate things correctly for you. You want the title of the download as the Topic/Title of the post. You want the download type to be the post category. If it’s got a description, you want that description to be your post’s main body, followed by a link that should ideally lead to your Affiliation Cash join page, if not just to our payment gateway directly (see Landing Page)

This will get you set for the regular content that search engines love to see happening.

You may also want to get a content spinner, so that you don’t get hit with dupe content penalties.

SEO All in One

Just install this, and let it do it’s own thing. Really, it’s not worth the headache of doing it all manually. What it will do is embed decent tags, titles, meta descriptions ra-ra-ra for you. So, while it’s not going to get you to #1 on Google, you’re not going to get there without it.

Yet Another Related Post Plugin

Visual representation of internal links structure between articles

Mmmm, internal link juice… it helps build authority, rank, etc., YARPP will put links at the bottom of any article on your blog to other posts that are in some way related, and therefore of interest to your potential readers. Now, whilst it’s technically going to take the browser to the exact same content (the payment gateway, we hope), the Search Engine spiders just see it as more internal linking, and therefore it helps build the site’s foundations.

The point is that Google and Bing love internal links. The picture demonstrates better than I can say I guess.

aLinks

We’re using this plugin right here and now. It’s wonderful.

Give it some keywords, and some URLs in a CSV file, and watch as it automatically links those keywords to those URLs as many times per article as you want, without you having to actually type in the links or anything.

Much feared by SEO gurus, as they own yachts

This is of major benefit to getting your category pages to rank. Every time your delightful scraper script mentions the word “music”, it will link it back to your category slug for music. If you have other sites you want this spreading some link love to, you can do it for them as well, provided that the site you’re running this on doesn’t end up with massive ranking penalties. If it does, just remove the external sites from the aLinks directory and get rid of the links, or they’ll weight your other sites down like a giant squid does a 17th century Spanish galleon.

Caveat

Now, a single one of these sites may not be amazingly effective. In fact, it probably won’t be.

Set a  few up in a chain, theme them, and have them internlink into each other, and you’ve got a whole other story. Just remember that these sites should not be located on the same server, or in the same IP range, if you’re going to be doing this with multiple sites that are supposedly not all the exact same site.

Happy Hunting - Harvey

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