Experience Advertising uses personalized affiliate management techniques to connect with their affiliates to increase production. They also have a philosophy of actually doing the work for the affiliates, such as composing original content and helping launch niche sites and blogs free of charge. If you are interested in growing your affiliate program to it’s fullest potential you should definitely check out Experience Advertising.

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

First off, let me say this – you definitely can get affiliate sales by brute force on social media. If you blindly spam enough people and get them to your landing page, someone is bound to buy. To succeed without getting yourself banned on a daily basis, though, you’ll need a different strategy.

Frequently, you’ll hear guys like Gary Vaynerchuk and Chris Brogan talking about how the key to social media success is building relationships and fostering trust. That’s great for them, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that strategy.

The problem with relationship building is that it’s very time consuming. Those guys are heavily invested in a single area of expertise, so it makes a lot of sense for them to go all out with relationship building. What if you want to drive leads to a health insurance offer, though? Do you really want to spend months or years getting to know people and convincing them that you’re an expert? Do people even want to build relationships with an “insurance shopping expert”?

Luckily, there is another way to do things. Let’s take a moment to think about the typical mindset of someone visiting a social media site. Most of the time, they’re focused on either entertainment or getting some kind of specific information. Although people know that ads are a “necessary evil”, they generally don’t take kindly to blatantly commercial messages intruding on the areas of sites that are perceived as being ad-free (namely, in the user-generated portions of the content).

If someone is looking for tips on losing weight, they don’t want to see an shallow answer that refers them to a landing page for acai berry supplements. If they see a link labeled “The Best Way to Lower Your Auto Insurance”, they don’t want to be directed to a page for insurance quotes. If you take that approach, your accounts are going to get flagged, your content will get thumbed down or buried, and you’re probably going to spend more time trying to make sure your contributions stay up than doing anything else.

None of that means that it’s impossible to submit advertisements to social media and get the support of the community, though. What you need to do is find a way to make your message valuable to the user while still maintaining the commercial thrust. A couple of examples that you can run with or build on today:

Auto Insurance - Instead of sending users to an auto insurance landing page, make a list of auto insurance companies you work with and then do a little research about each one. Which states do they work with? What kinds of discounts do they offer? Who offers online bill-pay? Write it up as a one-page guide and then insert your affiliate link beside each company.

If you use promote insurance quote services, do the same kind of thing. Call them up and find out who they offer quotes for, what kind of privacy protection is in place, how long they’ve been in business, etc. You’re delivering real value and you’re going to be much more likely to gain the trust of your users this way.

Weight Loss Supplements – Yes, there are honest ways to promote them. Skip the flogs and instead try piecing together a brief 3 or 4 week action plan that your visitors could use. Make sure it combines exercise and healthy meals along with the supplement you hope to promote, and be sure to make it clear that you’re just a fitness enthusiast – not a doctor, trainer, or nutritionist. Sure, not many people are likely to follow through with your plan – but that doesn’t mean they won’t like the idea of taking the supplement to boost their usual regimen of Diet Coke, Doritos, and couch-warming.

Dating – Pick your niche and then thoroughly investigate the alternatives. Instead of pretending to be a real girl or just pushing users to the landing page, try creating a page that talks seriously about the benefits. I’m not saying you should make a review page – in fact, it’s best not to pass judgment unless it’s to say which ones are best for different types of people. Talk about privacy options, the number of people in different age groups, and the overall feel of the site. Is one better for older daters while another caters to the college and early 20-something crowd?

You could also take the approach of making a quiz that determines which dating site is best for you based on your personality. That way, it’s not only fun but it has some viral potential when people post the results to their profiles, too.

Basically, the idea here is to create the kind of page you’d want to browse. You don’t have to fill a site with 80 articles to add value when it comes to social media – a single page that fills someone’s need will do the trick.

You can join all of these affiliate programs through Commission Junction affiliate network. A few are available through Shareasale. We hope you get involved in their awesome affiliate sales contest and win some great loot for the Holidays!

Whilst it never quite descends into the levels of violence seen throughout Ennio Morricone’s film, using the term ‘lead generation’ today in front of advertisers, agency workers or even your average Joe on the street can lead to questioning looks.

How has this happened? Too many times lead generation campaigns have pushed a huge volume of leads of questionable quality, leaving a bad taste in advertisers’ mouths that is only recently beginning to be turned around. Campaigns were based around heavily incentivised creative and featured on poor quality sites resulting in data that bore little or no relevance to the target demographics of the advertiser.

However, as so often happens in online advertising, the landscape has changed. Publishers are placing the emphasis on quality leads, achieved through transparency, accountability and technological developments. Leads can be dependent upon the fulfilment upon a number of criteria, whittling down the number of accepted leads to include only those of real value for the advertiser. Remnant inventory is also leveraged to enable leads to be captured from IASH accredited websites that fit with the target demographic – any incentive to opt in purely for a prize or free offer is also removed. For a mobile phone operator, the criteria could be as follows (with criteria up to 20 questions long not uncommon):

Are you currently nearing the end of your contract: Yes
Would you be willing to consider a shift to a different operator/network: Yes

Postal/ZIP codes and email addresses are verified, phone numbers qualified by number of digits and names scanned for a set list of false identities – Mickey Mouse etc. Only after these criteria have been met will the lead then by cross-checked against the advertiser’s database in real time to determine if that contact is already in their system. Once the lead is verified, most publishers will then send a solus email to the confirmed lead, instantly targeting them at their warmest. Companies with the capacity to do so can also feed these leads directly through to their call centres, vastly increasing conversion rates for products with a high order value or long-term commitment.

Through the development of tracking technologies, the value of leads can also be made highly accountable – in a world where ROI is pushed increasingly to the fore, this is invaluable. To give an automotive example, an individual lead’s journey can be tracked from its inception through to a test drive, and then through to final sale. A cruise brochure sent as PDF can be tracked back to the booking of the actual cruise. What this allows is for the advertiser to see the actual ROI of the leads that are being generated, based upon the price of the lead itself, any additional efforts needed to complete the process through to final sale, and the value of the sale itself.

As an affirmation of the work that has been carried out by publishers to rebuild the reputation of lead generation, these changes have been reiterated by guiding voices such as the IAB, who in November 2008 launched a lead generation taskforce to educate advertisers on the benefits of the channel. The recent result of this is a series of white papers aiming at illustrating its benefits to the very marketers who have been questioning its value until so recently.

Despite all of this, those involved in lead generation cannot afford to become complacent – even now, just by Googling the term ‘lead generation’ you are greeted with a sea of companies offering their services, not all of whom seem to be of a sufficient quality to aid in the channel’s renaissance. By adhering to the core values that have seen lead generation move from a misconceived specialism to a regular presence on media plans, we can continue the move from ‘The Good, The Bad And The Ugly’ and move towards another Spaghetti Western, where we can all clutch ‘A Fistfull Of Dollars’.

By Guest Blogger: James Atherton

There is so much information online today about the best methods and techniques about building a proper authority site to rank high in the search engines. Part of the problem, are people claiming to be SEO experts, yet when you go and check what keywords they rank for, they are no where to be found on the first 5 pages of Google. So where do you begin? Grab some coffee and have a read as I expose the insider secrets to ranking well in the SERP’s.

The methods that I discuss are for Google. Now some of you might be wondering about Bing, Yahoo etc. Well, since Google is the king of search engines and where most of the organic searching is done, I will be focusing on G. If you want to make money online with Google, then you also need to understand and follow their terms of service. If you try and use black hat techniques to game the system and Google finds out, which they will eventually, then your site and money will disappear with the push of a button - literally.

Many people wonder, what does Google want?

It comes down to 2 important key points. They want to see quality and relevant information for their end users. This is really the challenge given so much data that is added on a second by second basis to the internet. You see, the search engines have to compromise a bit when it comes to giving you and me the results in a timely manner. Most people surfing the internet, want the information yesterday and having to wait for 10 or 20 seconds would be unheard of today. So, naturally Google is not indexing every single piece of data every 24 hours. Now they certainly have the storage capacity to do so in my opinion, but its unlikely given the competition.

What is an Authority site?

Authority sites are essentially what Google considers trust worthy that have been around for awhile. Authority sites will usually contain hundreds of articles over time. Now some of you might Some people confuse this with a niche site. Niche sites usually have 5, 10 or 20 articles around very specific keywords. In reality, you can turn any website into an authority site with enough work.

The Process to Building an Authority Site.

Step 1 - Getting a Domain Name

Your domain name is an important first step in deciding what direction you will head with your authority site. This goes hand in hand with picking your keywords, which is discussed in the next step. Some people use their name or some interesting sounding name that is unrelated to what your site is actually about. I always recommend when possible, to buy a domain name around the specific topic you are generally going after.

For example, if I were going after home based business, then I would try and buy a domain with that term in there. Now you won’t get something like that since its already taken. But with some variations in the name by adding a word before or after can usually work. There are still thousands of good domain names to buy.

One other point about buying a domain name. The search engines like aged domains. The reason is simple. If you have been around for awhile, then likely your website is legitimate. Most spammers will buy a domain for a year by year basis.

If you are serious about your business and hopefully you are, then consider buying your domain for at least 2 years or more. Some people like Matt Cutts who works for Google, have suggested 5 or 10 years is better. I have one site that doesn’t have the term home based business in it, but the site is almost 6 years old. I didn’t understand SEO 6 years ago, so I picked a nice sounding name. However, I can still use that aged domain to my advantage.

Step 2 - Keywords

So you picked out your domain name and are now ready to get some G-bucks. Well this is where the work really starts. You see many newbies will go after big keywords like make money, work at home or travel etc. Big mistake as a newbie and even as a veteran. The competition is very fierce at those levels and the people on page 1 of Google know exactly what they are doing and have the financial resources to compete. So you better have your “A-Game” on if you ever decide to go after the higher end market.

Stick to the lower end keyword selections. For example, if you wanted to go after the travel business, then go and search out a long tail keyword that has the term travel in it. A long tail simple means the primary keyword like travel is within a longer term phrase. It could be something like, “how to set up a travel business”.

So here’s my keyword 101 recommendation. By starting at the low end of searches per day, you can build up authority for your site as you get page 1 rankings. You may pick a term that has 5 or 10 searches a day. That’s fine to start there and work your way up the food chain. Once you rank on page 1, pick another long tail keyword and keep repeating. Over the course of 6, 12 or 18 months, you have built up a nice authority site.

This is why most people won’t ever build an authority site because the amount of work required. This seems especially prevalent with newbies entering the internet marketing game. They see an ad promising instant riches with no work. Trust me, I have been at this IM game long enough to know that easy money online is a lie. Treat it like a real business and work it like a real business.

One other piece of advice to save you some money. There are a lot of people trying to pitch software programs that will help you find the perfect keywords and give you all the necessary information to have success online. Let me tell you straight up that you don’t ever need to buy something like that. Use Google’s free tools because even they can only give you an estimate on how many people a day search for a specific term and they are not accurate. So how the heck do you think someone else is going to have the magic software. Go here and enter your keywords: Google for your free keyword tool and save yourself some money.

Step 3 - Link Building

Up to now, I have covered picking a domain name and selecting long tail keywords with low competition. The actual methods to building authority sites is about writing quality articles for both your website and submitting other unique quality content at other places.

What I specifically mean is that the only way Google will know how relevant your website is, will be by the number of quality links pointing back to your site. Every time you submit an article to an article directory as an example, you are telling Google that your site is relevant for a specific phrase. The more quality links (back links) that you have pointing to your website, the higher in the search engines you will go over time. Some low competitive terms you may be able to rank on page 1 with only a few articles to at the right places. Other competitive terms, you may have to submit dozens or hundreds of articles all over the place.

How to Get Back links

The best places on where to get noticed quickly by G is submitting your unique content to places like Go Articles and Ezine Articles. Those are 2 article directory places that have authority and Google is constantly spidering their content on a daily basis because of the new content.

There are literally thousands of places to submit your content and here’s a few other ideas. Go to Google and search the term, “list of blogs, article directories, ezine directories, forums etc. You will have people that have compiled a list of dozens of good quality places to submit your content to. The main point and emphasis is to submit unique, quality and relevant content. For example, some places like EzineArticles.com will require you to have unique content, otherwise they won’t accept it. Yes, they have staff checking to ensure this is the case.

One other important piece to the puzzle is making sure when you submit your content to those directories, that they are a “dofollow” link. What I mean is that when Google spider bots come along and search the content and links, they will follow your link to your website. You get a credit from Google. There are many places that don’t have this and its called “no follow”. So when doing a search, enter “dofollow blogs” as an example and you will get another list that many people have compiled to help you out.

Now one trick I learned that has saved me countless hours is to go to Firefox, type in “dofollow Firefox plugin” to get a list of software plugins that you can download to Firefox. That way, when you are submitting your content, you can go up into the tools tab, select that phrase that has “no dofollow”, check it off to activate it. When you have it turned on there’s a check mark beside it. When you are at a particular site, it will show phrases that are in purple and a light pink color. The purple phrases mean “dofollow” which is where you want to submit your content to. To turn it off, just repeat the process and remove the check mark.

So there you have the process on building an authority site the Google way. Start by picking out your domain name, keywords and building back links to rank in the search engines. Remember, the more relevant and useful your content, the better you will do in the search engines.

Guest Post by: Darrell Lischka
Make sure to visit his home based business website.

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

You really should try to attend this event. Whether you are a company or an affiliate, this will be a great learning and networking experience. I went to the last one in Denver and it was a really great time. I was a presenter on Affiliate Marketing 101 and my sessions we packed to the hilt with hungry-for-knowledge affiliates. And I met a bunch of great people personally afterwards. There were lots of friendly people there to brainstorm with and have little meetings at the event itself. And the parties they had out at night were really fun, with a few suprises. I ran into a bunch of people I knew and met tons of new people, so it was a very successful endeavor to say the least. I highly recommend attending this next one in L.A.

Check out their site to register and learn more: http://www.AffiliateConvention.com

They have lots of great sponsorship opportunities and booth opportunities you can check out. Make sure to be there. There will be tons of great affiliates and companies there to meet with and learn from.