|
6 Great Reasons To Be An Affiliate
Deciding to start your own business can be a scary process. There are dozens of questions you need to ask yourself before you even get started. What product or service am I going to sell? Where do I advertise? What kind of start up costs are...
Are You Making These Mistakes With Your Affiliate Program?
You spend a few weeks putting together, or finding your product - now you can sit back while your own ARMY of eager sales people drive sales and fill your bank account. Sound about right? It can happen to you. You really can develop an online...
How to profit from your affiliate
=An Affiliate program will enable you to recruit an unlimited number of individuals to sell a product or service for you. The key to obtaining affiliates is to offer a nice commission for each sale. The higher the commissions, the more affiliates...
Increase Profits With Affiliate & Distribution Channels For Your Digital Goods
It's a lot of fun and hard work developing digital products, but
even the best product can get lost in the crowd. As more and
more people create digital products like ebooks, templates and
software, it can be hard to get visibility in recruiting...
Mr Affiliate
You've launched your affiliate program and everything is in place to track your affiliate sales. Affiliates are signing up but aren't making as many sales as you might have hoped for. You know it's not your product as you're still making sales...
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Google's Secret Guidelines On Thin Affiliates
Journalist Henk van Ess has caused a flurry of excitement on blogs and forums.
In his blog he revealed that Google uses teams of humans all over the world to evaluate the accuracy of Google's search results.
These "international agents", who are paid $10 to $20 an hour, were recruited mainly through universities. They're paid to check search results at Google every day.
Don't be distracted by the debate over whether Google should be doing this.
Of course it should. It's just a form of quality control.
Google can use the evaluators' findings to tweak its algorithms and reduce search engine spam.
What affiliates need to pay careful attention to is Google's "Spam Recognition Guide for Raters", which Henk revealed.
If you're a "thin affiliate," beware.
Although the report is a year old, about 80% of its contents are still being used by Google's evaluators, Henk says.
The confidential document gives us an unvarnished look at Google's attitude to affiliates.
If you're using any of the "manipulative techniques" Google describes, this report will probably encourage you to take a hard look at your website.
I hope you're not silly enough to be using hidden links or hidden text. Not surprisingly, Google teaches its "raters" how to detect them.
Are you creating pages without much content with the aim of collecting pay-per-click (PPC) revenue? Google's raters are taught to mark such pages as "Offensive", and gives examples.
Google secret guidelines spend some time discussing different ways in which some affiliates display results from pay-per-click search engines, so if you're doing that, you'll definitely want to study this report carefully.
Are you displaying ads disguised as search engine results? Google finds them offensive.
Are you adding a dmoz.org feed to your site with the aim of earning PPC revenue? That's "offensive", too.
Google says:
"We differentiate between affiliates that produce extra service, value, or content, and those that simply are duplicates of other sites, set up to boost traffic to other sites and earn a commission for it. The former ones are not Offensive and should be rated on the merits to the query. The latter ones
are Offensive... "Thin affiliate doorways are sites that usher people to a number of Affiliate programs, earning a commission for doing so, while providing little or no value-added content or service to the user. A site certainly has the right to try to earn income; we're attempting to identify sites that do nothing but act as a commission-earning middleman."
To Google, affiliate links such as qksrv.net, bfast.com and myaffiliateprogram.com - on the page or in redirects - "strongly suggest" that the site is a thin affiliate.
Are you using an affiliate datafeed? To Google, that's another warning sign.
However, if you offer a comparison of prices between different online merchants, you're OK, you're not a thin affiliate.
Google provides an incredibly tough guideline, which hundreds of thousands of affiliate sites fail to meet.
Google says:
"Do not call a page affiliate spam when an affiliation is only incidental to the message and purpose of a website. To determine whether participation in affiliate programs is central or incidental to the site's existence, ask yourself this question: Would this site remain a coherent whole if the pages leading to the affiliate (merchant) were taken away?"
That probably counts out most affiliate sites.
In summary, if you want to be friends with Google, make sure you provide extra value or content.
I've quoted only parts of the report. Any serious affiliate will want to study the whole thing carefully.
You can read the full report on Henk's blog here...
http://www.searchbistro.com/spamguide.doc
Note: A Google employee broke a non-disclosure agreement by revealing this report. I don't know how long it will stay online. You may want to do what I did - save a copy of it on your hard drive.
Now we know what Google really thinks of affiliates. You've been warned.
About the Author
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Allan Gardyne has been earning a very good living from affiliate programs since 1998. Learn from an affiliate veteran. Get his FREE newsletter... http://www.AssociatePrograms.com
|
|
|
|
|
Affiliate Programs - Your guide to the best web affiliate programs. |
Your guide to the best web affiliate programs, associate programs and profit sharing. Our affiliate directory is ideal for both webmasters and merchants ... |
www.affiliateguide.com |
  |
Affiliate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
An affiliate is not the same as an owned and operated station, ... Affiliate marketing typically refers to this Electronic commerce version of the ... |
en.wikipedia.org |
  |
Affiliate marketing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
As per market statistics [citation needed], affiliate marketing in terms of ... By linking Geffen Records to CDNow, the affiliate marketing format was born. ... |
en.wikipedia.org |
  |
CafePress.com : Affiliate Program : Affiliate Overview |
Enables individuals and companies to sell a wide variety of products online with zero upfront costs. |
www.cafepress.com |
  |
Amazon.com Associates: The web's most popular and successful ... |
Launched in 1996, Associates is Amazon.com's affiliate marketing program. ... As one of the first online affiliate marketing programs, Associates has a ... |
affiliate-program.amazon.com |
  |
Casino Affiliate Program - InterCasino.com |
The world's first and largest online casino. Voted Best Online Casino 2003 by Gambling Online Magazine. |
www.intercasino.com |
  |
AffiliateFuture.com |
AffiliateFuture are performance-based marketing specialists, providing sales solutions and marketing services to advertisers, publishers and agencies. ... |
www.affiliatefuture.com |
  |
affiliate registration |
Programr.php3: () is not a programmer id nor a Form! |
https: |
  |
BidVertiser - Pay Per Click Advertising On Sites Of Your Choice. |
Pay per click affiliate program. |
www.bidvertiser.com |
  |
Apple - iTunes - Affiliate Program |
Now you can be part of the excitement by joining the iTunes Affiliate Program.* ... Apply to the Apple Store Affiliate Program, with a wide selection of ... |
www.apple.com |
  |
Affiliate Programs Directory |
Affiliate Scout is your source for affiliate programs. Our affiliate directory is composed of high quality advertisers that are looking for affiliates to ... |
www.affiliatescout.com |
  |
eBay Affiliate Program: Welcome to the eBay Affiliate Program |
The affiliate program on eBay pays web designers, internet publishers and affiliates to drive users and leads to eBay and for bids and buy-it-nows; ... |
affiliates.ebay.com |
  |
AffiliateFuture |
There are no set-up fees for becoming an affiliate with AffiliateFuture. ... Affiliates please login below. If you are a merchant click here. ... |
www.affiliatefuture.co.uk |
  |
Affiliate Network - Affiliate Window |
Affiliate network offering tracking and management solutions for maintaining an affiliate program. |
www.affiliatewindow.com |
  |
webmasters affiliate programs |
Webmasters earn money with today's most effective online advertising technology, contextual advertising at a cost effective metric of CPC, PPC, CPM or CPV. |
www.clicksor.com |
  |
UK Affiliate Marketing Forum - a4uforum.co.uk |
UK Affiliate marketing industry forum from affiliates4u featuring news, discussion, and affiliate program resources. |
www.a4uforum.co.uk |
  |
Affiliate programs directory - Associate Programs.com |
A searchable directory of rated affiliate programs. |
www.associateprograms.com |
  |
Affiliate Summit 2007 West - Affiliate Marketing in Las Vegas ... |
Affiliate Summit 2007 West at Bally's Las Vegas, January 21-23, 2007. Keynote Speaker will be Michael Sanchez, CEO and Co-founder of ClubMom.com. |
www.affiliatesummit.com |
  |
Affiliate Programs Marketing Training |
Most recent up-to-date developments in the affiliate marketing industry. ... The Affiliate Classroom is a step by step training program to help you easily ... |
www.affiliateclassroom.com |
  |
Affiliate Programs Directory - Affiliate Match.com |
Affiliate programs directory with searchable, categorized listings. |
www.affiliatematch.com |
  |