In this post, when we say alias, you say, “KUMBAYA!” But seriously now. By “Alias” we actually mean something a lot more applicable to your online business. We call it our Alias ID System. This is a powerful RevenueWire feature you may not yet know about that has numerous benefits for the campaigns you run.

So Here’s The Thing…
The RevenueWire Alias system allows you to create custom affiliate links using “aliases” or custom IDs.  Additionally, you can enable and disable an alias at any time.  A “Memo” field is also provided to help you later identify what a particular alias was used for, or where the alias link can be found on your sites. The “Memo” field is free-form and can you can add any text you like.

What’s The Benefit Of Using Alias IDs?
RevenueWire’s Alias ID System allows you to track different campaigns without having to create multiple affiliate accounts. That means you can compare different campaigns under a single name, while consolidating your campaign tracking and payment wire transfers from a single account.

All you have to do is simply come up with the alias name(s) for a given product. The Alias you enter into the text field actually replaces the affiliate ID in the given link schema, so it’s a highly accurate tracking method.

How Does It Operate?
To create an Alias ID, select the “Setup” tab and select “Alias Setup” from the sub-menu. Once you’ve created an alias, when selecting “Get Links” for any product in the “Products” tab you’ll notice your alias affiliate links appear below the link containing your primary account ID.  You can then cut-and-paste the link you’d like to use into your affiliate landing page.

Again, with the Alias system you can track multiple campaigns associated to multiple products all from one master account, saving you from having to deal with the hassle of managing multiple accounts.

Gripping The Handle
When it comes to actually choosing the words you use, it helps to keep it simple. Keywords that indicate the product or a distinguishing aspect of that particular campaign are the best. You want to be able read the Alias and instantly remember what campaign/product you’re looking at.

How Is An Alias Different From a SubID?
Basically these two methods accomplish the same end, but their structure and how you apply them to your campaigns is where aliases and SubIDs differ. (BTW, RevenueWire offers both options.)

Aliases are recommended for campaign level application. SubIDs are an addendum to the Affiliate ID and are more effective when used to differentiate links within a particular campaign. That means you can create SubIDs of your Aliases. All of this leads to more accurate tracking and simplified campaign management, which leaves you more time and space to make money doing what you do!

Alias IDs and Custom Tracking Codes (TIDs)
RevenueWire’s affiliate links support the use of both an alias name and a custom tracking code variable.  In a case where you choose to use both an Alias name and a custom tracking code, your link would look like this:

http://aliasid.merchantid.revenuewire.net/productname?yourcustomcodehere

Combining Alias IDs and custom tracking codes can add an entirely new level of custom reporting possibilities to your sales tracking.

Also, merchants see only your primary affiliate account ID regardless of what alias is used. This ensures your custom tracking links remain private.

WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT REVENUEWIRE’S ALIAS SYSTEM AND HOW IT CAN BENEFIT YOUR BUSINESS? EMAIL US AND WE’LL BE HAPPY TELL YOU MORE.

Contact: affiliates@revenuewire.com.

TO SIGN UP WITH REVENUEWIRE, VISIT HERE.

Is there a silver lining in these slap-happy times? Of course. Affiliates who learn to roll with the punches and make the necessary changes to their campaigns stand to make more money in the long run.

Watch Our New Google Slap Video For Awesome Pointers!

To help you adapt to the changing landscape, we’ve created a short video covering the basics of what the Google Slap is, the criteria that govern it, and the different strategies you can use to avoid it.

This short video is tailored for affiliates in the digital product niche, with real-world examples of what to do and what not to do with your campaigns. The main goal is to communicate that providing quality, unique content on your sites is the most effective way to stay out of Google’s doghouse and build your business for the long haul.

You can watch the full video here and now right on this page, or scroll down to read the individual segment descriptions and watch the video in 4 parts.

Sign Up Now with RevenueWire to get your one-page summary of The Google Slap video and other great marketing support materials from our Tutorial Center.

Part 1. What Is The Google Slap?
Ever wondered what exactly constitutes a Google Slap? You’ll find out in the first segment of our new Google Slap video, anchored by RevenueWire Affiliate Manager Seth Hornby. Watch It Now >>

Part 2. Tips For Your AdWords
This segment covers 3 tips for how you can meet and exceed Google AdWord Guidelines, including Relevant and Original Content, Transparency and Navigability. Watch It Now >>

Part 3. Real-World Examples
Seth takes 2 real life examples of a Driver Product Landing Page and a Driver Mini-Site that have been blacklisted on Google. You’ll learn in detail the different page elements that can result in a Google Slap. At the end, Seth shows an example of a well-designed landing page to provide you with a clear idea of how your landing pages should look. Watch It Now >>

Part 4. Brief Summary
The Google Slap is not all doom and gloom. Seth shares a few positive changes that have come out of the recent rise in number of Google Slaps, including its beneficial effect on competitive keyword bid price. Seth concludes the presentation by explaining the long term advantages of building content rich web sites as promotional tools. Watch It Now >>

You can also watch the video in 4 segments in the Playlist.

WE HOPE YOU ENJOY THE VIDEO. IT WAS DEFINITELY FUN TO MAKE. MAKE SURE TO USE THESE TIPS AND STRATEGIES IN YOUR CAMPAIGNS!

The new interface makes it much faster and easier for you to search and sort through the entire RevenueWire product list, evaluate products, get key sales information, and view new and featured products at-a-glance. And it looks great too!

Key Product Catalogue Upgrades:

• Product Star Rating (5 Star System)
• Sort Features ((By Category, Merchant, Product, Ranking, and More)
• Short, Informative Product Descriptions With Embedded Sales Tips
• Short List Of New Products
• Short List Of Featured Products
• Added Product Imagery (Box Shots)
• Key Sales Info – Commission %, Average Earning Per Sale
• Convenient Pagination Feature
• Attractive Design and Streamlined Layout

New ‘Star Rating’ System

The most exciting change is the removal of the old EVR indicator, and the introduction of the new 5 Star Rating system. The Star Rating system is based on a unique calculation that determines a product’s score.

This rating takes into account the product’s earning potential based on it’s volume of sales over the past 6 weeks, and the number of affiliates who are promoting the product. It also reflects a product’s conversion rate relative to the average conversion rate of all products that have had sales in the last 6 weeks.

New Search & Sort Features

Three powerful new drop-down features allow you to quickly locate products by 1) Product Category, 2) Product Merchant, and 3) Sort (Rating, Product Name,  Commission, Earnings Per Sale). If you know what you’re looking for, you’ll be able to find the products that suit your needs much faster than before.

Summary

The new Product Catalogue is an important advancement that will have significant time-saving and sales benefits. You will now be able to evaluate product sales performance through the convenient 5 Star Rating system, which will help you choose the products that are best for you to promote, as well as what kind of opportunities are available for that particular product.

On top of that, products will be easier to find and get key information through a range of new sorting and searching capabilities.

We encourage you to try out the new Product Catalogue, located in the Product Tab of your affiliate dashboard. Also, feel free to contact us at affiliates@revenuewire.com for any questions you might have.

Wednesday September 15th @ 6PM

Coast Restaurant, 1054 Alberni St.

Vancouver, BC V6E 1A1

See you there!

How It All Started.

The RevenueWire team started things off with a bang by stepping out and lighting it up at Touch Nightclub for the NYC Affiliate Meet Up, ASE’s classic Pre-Game primer for attendees that want to get 188% from the event. Thanks to the benevolent sponsors, loads of pints were drained to their bedrock bottom (free of charge), which fueled a frenzy of awesome business conversation amongst fellow affiliate industry players, movers and shakers. Little did the RevWire team know that this pre-event evening would set the block-rocking tone for 2010’s colossally successful ASE adventure.

Day 1. Sunday.

This was the setup day. All hands were on deck to get the booth together and make sure all our materials were  prepped for the oncoming masses. After the booth was dressed to the hilt, the team headed over to the infamous ASE  Meet Market. OY! WHAT MADNESS WAS THAT? Unreal chaos and decibel levels that made it hard to hear your own thoughts. That mayhem, however, is part of the whole experience. Affiliate Summit just wouldn’t be the same without it. The team met a ton of great people inside a short time, and walked away with a lot of ideas to think about, people to work with, and new business opportunities to explore.

Day 2 & 3. Monday and Tuesday.

These were the 2 show days. The bread & butter of the event. The show floor was teeming and bustling from beginning to end. RevWire also had a an iPod and iPad up for grabs in our Nerf Blaster HIT THE TARGET Twitter contest. (Lots of extra rounds were fired off just for the fun of it)

Simon, one of RevWire’s top affiliates, won the iPod and Catherine from CBS Interactive took home the iPad. A couple people even got to take home the Nerf blasters too. A big shout out to all our winners and everyone else who stopped by – it was great to have you at the booth! At this year’s ASE we had the chance to meet so many great people, and we’re looking forward to doing business with all of you in the coming year.

We’d also like to offer a special thanks to the everyone at ASE who had a hand in organizing the show, as well as Shaun Collins (www.affiliatetip.com) and Missy Ward (MissyWard.com) for their part in making it all happen.

Bring On The Bright Lights.

The NYC night life pretty much explains itself. Great food, beautiful people, packed upscale clubs, drinking, cutting rug and tons of fun. WE GOT BIG LOVE FOR YOU AFFILIATE SUMMIT AND NEW YORK CITY. (Especially the Bikini Babes and the mega-sized Corned Beef sandwiches). BOOOOOOYAAA! WE WILL BE BACK!

To see the rest of our #ASE10 pics, check out our Flickr album.

NEXT UP? Affiliate Summit West!

Google is also operating under the assertion that if their search engine does not return the most relevant results, they could possibly lose both users and revenue.

They believe they could see a drop in their market share and in this competitive climate, that situation would be unacceptable. Both Bing and Yahoo! are positioning themselves with new offerings and partnerships, so the competition is now stronger than ever. Google’s solution to this competition is what is driving the new directive that we have all come to know as the “May Day Update.”

Defining The May Day Update

In the first installment we covered what the Google May Day Update is, and how it may affect you and your web sites. We provided warning signs that you can use to determine if your site has been affected and explained what Google is trying to accomplish by changing their algorithm in this way.

Overcoming The Algorithm Change

In the second installment of the May Day update articles, we explained what factors would cause your web site to lose ranking and relevance under the new Google rules. We provided some ways to help overcome the initial ill-effects and explained how effective back linking could help your web site. The provided examples illustrated what could possibly be done to get the ranking and traffic returned.

Improving Website Quality and Relevance

In the next installment, we demonstrated how to improve our web sites to catch the desired attention and ranking from Google.  We focused on website quality and relevance; two factors that are important to you in the post-Mayday update world. We applied effective strategies and provided some examples to illustrate how they are implemented to our benefit. Our clients not only saw traffic return but they even have seen traffic gains by following this advice.

Internal and External Link Building

Finally, we displayed some effective methods to improve our web site’s relevance through targeted and carefully executed internal and external linking strategies. We showed you how to reduce the link jumps, move products closer to the home page, and even encourage organic visitors. Changes of this nature will render your web site “algorithm proof” and even improve your end user’s experience. This will strengthen the relationship with customers and separate your legitimate web site from the fraudulent ones.

Cultivating Top-Notch Content

To overcome and even thrive under the new algorithm, we have shown how to develop content that is of value to your web site visitors, and explained how to focus particularly on deeper pages within your web site and specifically your product pages.

The content on these pages should always appear to be “fresh” and updated on a regular basis, so we explained how to keep your web site update labor minimized by making the best use of user generated content.  Keep in mind that good quality pages will be rewarded by better rankings in Google in addition to increased rankings for many “long tail” phrases. We described how this strategy will naturally develop some of the back linking we are all striving to create.

Fortunately, Metamend’s clients have seen no real negative affects as they have been following our recommendations for developing and improving their site for the search engine algorithm change.

In some of the more properly executed strategies, some clients have actually seen an increase in traffic compared to their competition, which have lost rankings during the May Day update. Google has given these unprepared competitors a low ranking for not accommodating the new requirements; many are still using the old systems like content farms and blog scrapers, to no avail. While these methods have had a good run, they are less effective now, especially since the May Day update.

Google’s attempt at improving the quality of their search results requires webmasters to also improve the quality of their websites. This requires webmasters to put in time and effort to improve their websites in order to position themselves for relevant keywords and to drive traffic. Many web site owners will now find difficulty in devoting these resources to achieve their goals and as a result, the top ranking positions will be held by those who are seen as providing fresh content on a regular basis. This does not have to be as labor intensive as sounds, as we demonstrated.

By following Google’s guidelines and developing a web site that provides value to the web site visitors, we will ensure that our own web sites consistently rank for keywords and develop the desired authority over time. Then by applying our strategies consistently, we can insure that these valuable sites are never negatively affected by any sort of search engine algorithm update.

To briefly summarize, we have demonstrated what the Google May Day update is, how to determine if your web site has been affected, and what you can do about it specifically with examples and strategies.

You are not alone in this issue, and we hope this article series has been helpful and informative. Remember that you have the ability to not only overcome the effects of Google’s algorithm change, but to actually improve your site’s rank and positioning with a little effort and some dedicated strategy.

RevenueWire will be there in force to talk shop, share the latest on what we’re doing, future plans, and ways we can make you more money selling the latest in digital.

We’ve also got an awesome ASE Twitter Contest ready to go and the prizes look ultra sharp:

Find out all the details of the contest at our meet market table and our booth!

Exhibit booth: RG2022 / RG2024

Meet Market Table #81

The Hilton New York

1335 Avenue Of The Americas

We’ll see you crazy cats on the show floor.

Starting August 15th, 2010, all affiliates who sell ParetoLogic products have the chance to win their choice from a long list of the highest powered luxury cars ever to grace the pavement. That means both new and current affiliates are eligible to compete for the ULTIMATE AFFILIATE GRAND PRIX, PARETO STYLE.

SO WHAT’S NEXT? MAKE CRAZY SALES. WIN ONE HELL OF A SEXY CAR. NO DOUBT. THIS CONTEST IS ON FIRE!

See Prize Details Below >>

What’s Your Pick: Ferrari Italia or California? A/B Testing Has Never Been This Much Fun!

*Make your sales per day quota for 3 months (90 days) in a row, and you win a car at that level!

*Pareto’s latest smash hit products PC Health Advisor, DriverCure & FileCure all count towards your daily total.

*Contest runs until January 15th, 2011.

*If you’re already a ParetoLogic affiliate, get started today!

Click Here For More Contest Details >>

Never Sold ParetoLogic Products Before? Not a problem.

Sign Up With RevenueWire And Start Selling ParetoLogic Products And You’ll Be Eligible To Win.

SIGN UP NOW >>

BEST OF LUCK IN THE PARETO AFFILIATE GRAND PRIX!

Link Building Is Where It’s At

As we all know, search engines crawl your web site looking not just at content, but also at the number and types of web sites that are linking to your web site. The updated algorithms used in these search engines, like Google for example, are continually making determinations on the quality of your linking. Higher quality back linking will yield a much better result than a back link determined to be of lesser quality or no quality at all by the search engine’s algorithm.

Under current search engine algorithm rules, this becomes a question more of quality than quantity in the post- Google-May-Day-Update world. Given this new importance of properly formed links, let’s look at what characteristics make a link a higher quality back link.

What Makes A Link High-Quality?

Higher quality back links possess one or more of your web site’s keywords, especially somewhere in the anchor text. Back links with keywords located in the anchor text are generally viewed more favorably by search engines than back links without keywords in the anchor text. This is because it appears that the links are coming from sites with related information when the keywords are found within the anchor text. Therefore, the link appears to possess higher relevance to search engines like Google. Websites that appear to have a multitude of irrelevant incoming links will not be viewed as important by the search engine as would a handful of properly formed and relevant back links and keywords.

There are some beneficial strategies and techniques that we can use, and for clarity we will separate them into two categories: 1) Internal linking, and 2) Back linking.

1. Internal Linking Strategy

For internal linking strategy, we are looking to reduce the amount of “link jumps” which have to be followed to find affiliate product pages. These link jumps not only confuse the search engines, but they can confuse and turn off the customer as well. Consider the idea that wherever possible, you should link the pages and / or products that you wish to promote closer to the relevant homepage, or possibly closer to the featured products on the homepage. There are tangible marketing benefits to this strategy beyond the search engine ranking. The end user experience will be better and this can also encourage return visitors to your site organically.

In addition, keep in mind that it’s beneficial to ensure these links go to pages that have been updated with the type of quality content we previously mentioned. It pays to be thorough and consistent in this step. Again, the end user experience will be improved by taking these important measures.

When properly formed, optimized pages and links have the benefit of passing on your desirable page rank directly to your product pages, by featuring links to those products from the very same valuable pages. This is especially true of your pages with a high or “higher” Google page rank.

This will help increase the ranking for your product pages while simultaneously increasing your long tail traffic. This is especially true if the content requirements are correctly applied as we previously described.

2. Back Linking Strategy

Now that we have our internal links working correctly, we will look at back linking, and how to make this crucial step as beneficial as possible to your web site.

The goal here is to see continued increases in back links to your deep pages or the properly formed product pages. Then, we will want to make sure to keep the applicable content relevant and valuable. When something in your business changes, then make sure to update your content. While no one can update their sites on the fly all of the time, regular updates to what you have will keep your site relevant. This step alone, on pages of this nature, will tend to attract links over time.

Let’s keep in mind that back linking should be an ongoing, continual process, as older links will decrease in value over time and fresh, relevant content will still draw the desired attention. For example, if your product offering is static, there is no reason that your descriptions and photos need to be that way. By changing the descriptions periodically and adjusting photos and comments, you can generate a level of freshness that will get noticed by the search engine.

In fact, by encouraging site visitors to leave comments or product reviews, the customer will actually do much of this work for you. Regular visitors leaving commentary can generate the level of freshness we require. We need to make our changes while keeping in mind that relevance is key for back links, not page rank as you might think. In fact relevance, not page rank, should be the deciding factor you use when acquiring links. The end goal after all is to get found by both the search engines and your customers.

One way to insure that you’re forming the back links properly is to consider each web page as a separate entity. Develop your links with that in mind and work carefully on a per page basis. This will keep the content relevant as your focus will be only the page at hand. These properly formed links will give you the traffic that you are looking for, and it will get the customers who are looking for you to their desired destination.

We now have some beneficial tools in our arsenal to combat the effects of future algorithm changes, like Google’s May Day update. By modifying our collective focus to enhance our internal linking and back linking, and changing our view of what is important from page rank to relevant content instead, we are prepared to keep our web sites highly searchable and, somewhat by default, the rankings will follow.

In the next and final article in this series, we will demonstrate how to tie all of this advice together to give you the necessary tools to properly adjust and overcome this May Day algorithm update and plan for any future updates.