Are you a new or aspiring website owner who is considering which internet marketing strategy to use to promote your site? If so, you should take the time to familiarize yourself with the various marketing techniques and strategies used for website promotion before you choose one that is ill-fitting to you, your site, and your life.

Crash Course 101: Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a general term used to describe a method of website advertising. SEM increases a sites’ web traffic by improving its Google PageRank. This is the position a website or web page places when keywords are typed into it. SEM includes a wide variety of marketing techniques such as:

Search Engine Optimization
Social Media Marketing
Email Marketing
Affiliate Marketing
Referral Marketing

What is SEO and How Will It Effect My Website?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of improving the visibility of a website in search engines via unpaid or algorithmic (also described as “natural”) search results. The goal of SEO is to strategically build traffic by using keywords and phrases that describe the business. These essential keywords are chosen by the website owner.

SEO Promotes a Variety of Searches

Image searches
Local searches
Video searches
Academic searches
News article searches
Industry specific searches

It is not unheard of for webmasters to write their own SEO articles. However, this is virtually impossible for people who own multiple sites or have limited time. We incessantly work to try and find new and improved ways to take Search Engine Optimization to the next level. Listed below are a few important items to remember when writing your own SEO Articles:

8 Tips To Enhance Your SEO Approach

1. Focus on value
2. In-depth keyword research
3. Add internal links to content
4. Consider global opportunities
5. Competitor analysis
6. Get Wikipedia page
7. Forecast the Future Using Past Trends
8. Link articles to site map

Let us save you time, money, and resources by considering and researching how search engines work, what people search for, what actual terms are typed (keywords), and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may even involve editing its content and associated coding to increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove the barriers of indexing activity by the search engines.

Link Building

Link building is another vital way to insure that your website has traffic and your business flourishes. Link building is the process in which links are created on other web pages leading back to your website. Links and back links (inbound links) tell search engines such as Google, Bing, MSN, and Yahoo that your website is a “real” site with value. It is imperative that links are added and checked throughout the year.

Keywords and quality writing are the other ingredients necessary for a successful SEO\SEM campaign but back links are the “backbone” of SEO. You must remember, just because a link builds traffic does not necessarily mean it is good for SEO. Not all links get indexed. Google’s web crawlers do not always check things accurately and tend to miss some. Secondly, Google does not always tell you which links they have actually indexed.

Web Crawlers: Friend or Foe

The internet is much like the human brain in which only a relatively small percentage of it is actually utilized by search engines. In order to achieve the maximum amount of visibility and ensuring a good page rank, Industry monopolizing search engines such as Google and Bing create automated programs called web crawlers to wonder robotically around other websites downloading viewed pages and indexing the site.

Another form of web crawler (also referred to as bots, spiders, or simply crawlers) is responsible for spam. The webmasters behind this unethical program is either affiliated with another website or they act individually harvesting email addresses. This is called Email Marketing.

Email Marketing

Bill Gates reported that he received over 4,000,000 spam messages last year. Email Marketing is the most expensive of these advertising methods costing its consumers hundreds of billions of dollars this year alone.

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a form of internet advertising that utilizes social networks and social media to reach a large-scale audience, It is another very important part of SEM. SMM is a growing force to be reckoned with thanks to Facebook and Twitter.

One reason more and more businesses prefer to advertise on Facebook and Twitter because profiles are displayed in search engine result pane. Blogs are also added to SERP’s.

One of the best forms of social media advertising is through blogs. Blogs are directly linked back to your website and contains personalized content. It is advised to use specific keywords throughout headings and even when updating your status and tweets. This will attract more traffic and potential revenue.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is comprised of a central business which rewards “affiliates” on a per-visit, or per-customer, basis. Customers and/or visits resulting from the direct efforts of the affiliate are compensated by the business. This is a four-tiered system of equally ranked components such as:

1. Retailers (brands, merchants)
2. Networks (systems for containing ff offers and payment regulation
3. Publishers (affiliates)
4. Customers

Affiliate Marketing is a broad field with few industry-general categorization standards. Affiliate Marketing tends to share similar traits with other int marketing techniques such as: Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing, SEO, email marketing, and general advertising by display. The websites that utilize this marketing technique vary, each using distinct techniques but the same market niche.

When considering whether or not to make use of Affiliate Marketing, one should have a general knowledge of the varying types and techniques that are available.

The Benefits of Affiliated Marketing

Mass-reviewing of a service, product, or partner agency
Allows for a broader distribution
Dominates market sectors
Strong visibility

What are the Commonalities and Differences in Referral and Affiliated Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is often confused with RM because both are third-party driven retail redirection services with a goal client. In contrast, Affiliate Marketing depends entirely on financial motivators to influence sales where as RM involves personal relationships and trust-based social contracts to do the same thing.

Reasons to Consider Efficiency When Considering Internet Marketing Strategies

If you are considering Affiliate Marketing to promote your website or page there are some small details you should consider first. Some merchants make use of in-house affiliate programs with software available to the public, others prefer to employ third-party service providers also called intermediaries. Neither of which are free,

Intermediary services make the life of the parent merchant easier by increasing autonomy and decreasing micromanagement responsibility. By keeping tabs on website traffic, sales, and successful referrals they lighten the load considerably for the

When choosing between an in-house affiliate program and a third-party service provider, one must consider what is efficient and better suited for their particular website. For example, an intermediary company is more expensive and even if you can afford it, one must consider which program is more efficient. An in-house affiliate program is more practical for smaller websites that generate less income.

Revenue Sharing

Affiliate Marketing is a marketing strategy in which a single advertiser organizes campaigns with different publishers on a pay per performance basis. A PPC service creates an enormous network of pay per performance mini markets and provides purchase opportunities throughout the countless venues of the web. In turn, sharing a percentage of the profit with a partnering company.

Google uses PPC revenue sharing with the Google AgSense Application. Advertisers pay Google to place their ads on a corresponding site and in turn, Google then splits the profit with the owner or the website in which the ad was originally placed.

High-traffic websites are generally uninterested in revenue sharing deals because of the high amount of risk involved. CPC and Cost Per Mille agreements have a low to medium risk and are likely to be much more suitable.

Google, home page to the world, can teach you a lot about how to make the home page of your website more attractive to both readers and search engines.

Home Page to the World

The world’s most visited home page is also one of the simplest. However, don’t let that familiar, simple-looking web design fool you; there is more going on than what can be seen on the surface. Google is an expert at using the bare minimum … for maximum impact. In this article, we will use Google as an example of how to build a home page that helps you and your website visitors.

Less Clutter, More Impact

By adding in only what’s necessary, you eliminate the clutter that typically diverts visitors away from the main content. As a result, you create a web page where no one could possibly be confused in any instance. When visiting your home page, people want to grab the information they need and move on because what they need from the site is almost always beyond the home page.

Because your average website visitor will spend only a few seconds on your web page, you need to make every second count. The truth is, every single element on your web page affects function of your website. The more elements a page contains, the less impact each element has.

Mirror, Mirror … A Look at Your Home Page

Look and your home page and what do you see? Where is the first place your eye goes to? Are there so many images or so much text that you don’t know where to look or click first? These are tough yet critical questions you have to ask of yourself. In order to have a home page that is as effective and powerful as possible, you first need to be able to look at it through the eyes of a first time visitor. Be honest, be critical … your answers, no matter how tough, will help you in the end.

What Google Is Great At:

1. Communicating a concise message.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. The main function has been and always will be search, and that is immediately evident on their home page. The other options offered by Google, from search to mail to Google+, are clearly and simply listed on top and bottom headers.

To help you figure out what your concise message needs to be, consider this: as quickly and cleverly as possible, your home page needs to answer the four questions the visitor has in their head when they enter a new site for the first time. These questions are:

What is the website about?
What do they offer?
What can I do here?
Am I in the correct place?

If those questions are not answered for your website visitor within the first few seconds, people will get frustrated, hit the back button and leave your website for good.

2. Integrating social media.

Google easily allows you to share content and connect with Google Plus. The design of this social media aspect of Google fits very well with the classic streamlined Google look and helps to draw more attention to the content that users are sharing.

Here are the top features of Google+:

Circles – With Circles, Google proves beyond a doubt that it wants to work like people think: In real life we divide the people we know into special groups. For example, we have relatives, friends, close friends, colleagues, classmates etc. And with each group of people we behave, talk and act in special, quite different way. The same way we want it to be on the Web, right? Well, with Circles, yes. Instead of grouping everyone together as your “friend,” you can create different circles for the different types of people in your life.

Hangouts – Remember chatrooms? Ah yes, the old-school chat room gets an update via Google’s Hangouts. Send a broadcast to your friends that you’re online and ready to chat face to face, and your pals can drop by your “hangout” to video chat with you.

Sparks — Once you get Sparks up and running, it acts like your very own cognitive personal assistant. It knows exactly what you want and delivers it to you whenever you want it so you never get bored. All you need to do is designate your interests in Sparks, and Google+ will collect articles, videos, and photos of the things you love from around the web to read when you’re free (like an RSS reader). You can even share these items with specific circles of friends instead of all of your friends.

How To Integrate Social Media On Your Home page

Now, this might seem like an unfair comparison, after all, Google has its VERY OWN social networking outlet to fall back upon. The rest of us, however, have to depend upon external social media outlets, including but not limited to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Pinterest, and, naturally, Google+.

However, if you look at how Google brings together all of the best features of the top social media outlets into Google+, you can easily see all the options available to you, and then decide which aspects and options you want to incorporate into your own home page. There are literally hundreds of free social-media plugins you can easily download and integrate onto your home page that will highlight any social media icon you actively participate in.

3. A call to action.

Google’s call to action is pretty easy an obvious: the Google Search button. However, do you know what the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button is all about? Ordinarily when you type in a key phrase in a Google search, you press the search button, and Google returns a results page that shows multiple Web sites matching your search phrase.

The I’m Feeling Lucky button skips the search results page and goes directly to the first ranked page for that search phrase. For regular Googlers or people just wanting the top search result from a specific query, I’m Feeling Lucky button meets their needs by saving them a few extra seconds parsing through the list of search results.

Your home page needs to have a clear call to action in order to take the next step in the conversion process. There are several obvious steps that can be taken including: request a quote, view our work and a phone number.

4. Stickiness

What does stickiness mean? Give your website visitors a reason to keep coming back for more. You’d think with just their name serving as the page’s only real image and content, Google might not have anything that would be ‘sticky.’ But then again, that’s why they are Google: the company is always pushing the boundaries of what is possible online.

So how to make a site interesting and dynamic enough to get people to return on a regular basis? Introduce Google Doodles. These often playful illustrations regularly transform Google’s home page to mark things like notable holidays and anniversaries, famous birthdays and notable discoveries and inventions – everything from Halloween to the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina to the launch of the Hubble telescope.

Stickiness Can Be Contagious

The Doodles make opening Google’s home page a little like unwrapping a present, there may be a surprise inside. But while the Doodles have become an online art extravaganza, the company makes sure to keep their brand identity consistent, first and foremost.

“The first rule is leave the company identity alone, keep it consistent,” Dennis Hwang, one of the earliest Google workers, said. “You look at Coca-Cola or McDonalds or Starbucks, anywhere in the world, and the symbols you see are very consistent.”

So yes, it is okay for you to have fun with your company branding and logo – or other aspects of your business or industry- just not at the sacrifice of your overall company image. This might take some trial and error, but the great thing about the Internet is that you can make something go away immediately after you make it appear. Post the wrong hours for a special promotion? Wrote too long a headline? No problem, you can easily and instantly fix it. You can’t do that with print!

So as you tweak and experiment with perfecting your home page to make both humans and search engines happy, don’t be afraid to take a few risks. It’s better than doing nothing at all.

Behavioral Targeting is an emergent field of methods and technologies employed by online website advertisers and publishers. These tools allow them to refine and target the effective elements of their campaigns by analyzing and then employing data generated through stat-gathering programs like Landing Page Visit logging programs and other related software. While it does pose a risk as a potential breach of browser security, simple disclaimers informing your clients that their visitation data is being recorded waives this problem.

Consumers visiting a website generate all kinds of data. Which pages do they view or visit, for how long do they view certain pages, which searches do they make and which searches do they repeat, what kind of media do they interact with most often; all of this data is collected by certain sites and compiled into profiles that link automatically to individual users’ browsers. Site publishers, once they are in possession of this data, can further group sets of users into marketable sectors based on similarities between profiles. Visitors returning to certain sites or groups of sites using the same web browser they did initially can be targeted for greater effect based on demonstrated interest and engagement.

Theoretically, targeted ads increase consumer interest and the publisher (or vendor) is able to increase their fees for these premium advertising services given their greater efficacy compared to context-based advertising or random ad placement. Behavioral Marketing (also referred to by professionals as “Audience Targeting) tactics can be employed on their own or in concert with other targeting-focused marketing techniques like demography, geographic dispersion assessment, and contextualizing Web page content.

Network Behavioral Targeting

Advertising Networks are longtime employers of behavioral targeting, although the manner in which they make use of it differs from the methods used by individual sites. Because advertising networks service a broad array of advertisements ranging across many different sites, they can build a reliable picture of the most likely demographic breakdown of internet users. For instance, consider a user who crops up on women’s fashion sites, ballet sites, and parenting sites; a safe assumption about that user is that they’re female. This kind of demography analysis, handled internally through user surveys or externally by third-party vendors, lets networks to offer entire audiences as products, rather than just sites.

Behavioral targeting has greatly increased the accuracy with which networks market. The handling of data allows a focused, targeted approach that lets networks cast their nets wider.

On-Site Behavioral Targeting

The following theses hold that the set of methods and techniques that comprise Behavioral Targeting as a marketing discipline can be applied to any online property, product, or agency: first that the visitor’s experience is improved by it, and second that it benefits the online property through improved conversion and spending. Initial users of the techno-philosophical approach to Behavioral Targeting were primarily editorial websites offering online advertising, e-commerce, or other retail services, used it as a way to pump their own relevance on an individual basis with each visitor. In the current market environment, though, less traditional companies who may not even engage with e-commerce have begun attempting to integrate Behavioral Targeting into their business plans.

The usual overture toward starting a Behavioral Targeting program is the use of web analytics to dissect the number and “types” of visitors into a variety of predetermined or organically generated categories. Each category, once analyzed, has a virtual profile or set of terms assigned to it as an arbiter. These profiles are often based on or referred to as Personas, giving Web operators reference points for determining the navigational layout, content types, and other factors presented to each of the site’s visitors according to their Persona association. Special software, Content Behavioral Platforms, assign unique ID cookies to every visitor to a given site and its constituent pages. This allows the website’s operators to track the users as they browse and make use of the Web. Based on the algorithms discussed above, the platform software then makes a ruling about which types of content to present to which visitors. A greater variety of data points and deeper information can be produced by incorporating demographic data and a user’s past purchase record.

Quality onsite behavioral targeting systems and platforms will perform a sort of rudimentary self-learning process, monitoring site users’ responses to content in order to further refine said content to produce the desire effect: a conversion event. Multivariate tests, conducted in large numbers and simultaneously, are the accepted method for producing content suited to the various Personas identified by the platform. On-site behavioral targeting efforts rely on substantial levels of traffic to develop the Personas they need to succeed, and statistical confidence in the matter of successful conversion rates can be dubious below a certain volume of traffic.

Privacy and Security: How to Use Behavioral Targeting Safely

Online users and advocacy groups concerned with issues of internet privacy often bring up behavioral targeting as a violator of internet privacy rights. Targeting-based online media marketing in general comes under fire regularly, but the behavioral targeting industry is taking steps to quell and minimize the controversy through advocacy, educational programs, and self-imposed product constraints designed to keep information garnered through data collection unconnected to users. End-user license agreements are another tactic used by behavioral targeting marketers to avoid clashes with users.

Since Web pages acquire personalization based on a user’s implicit data (age, interests, social standing, context, etc), personalization presents the implication that things like purchase history and pageview history are being recorded. Customization, a branch of behavioral targeting as a marketing discipline, is a term used only when the site’s changes are gleaned from explicit data (data provided personally by the user through reviews, ratings, preferences, comments, etc). Making sure your users understand the way in which their actions are recorded in order to improve their experience is essential to avoiding user discontent.

Methods of Personalization

Models for achieving Web personalization include rules-based logic engine filtering and processing and collaborative filtering (the serving of relevant material to users based on a combination of their own past preferences with the preferences of other individuals with similar tastes). Collaborative filtering is proven effective in the selling of media, especially books, DVDs, music, and related items. However, it can also be ineffective in certain situations, and has proven of mixed utility in selling apparel, cosmetics, and other personal hygiene and accessory purchases. A third model, Prediction Based on Benefit, has been gestated based on problems with this aspect of collaborative filtering as a way to market apparel, etc.

Addressing the subject more broadly, there are three usual methods of personalization. The first, implicit personalization, relies on Web pages and information systems derived from the categories discussed above. The second, explicit personalization, the information system or web page is affected by the user making use of the features it provides. Hybrid personalization combines these two approaches, trading on a best of both worlds approach to negate the weaknesses of implicit and explicit personalization.

Personalization and discretely collected lists and databases of user behaviors allow companies to exist as meta-marketers selling information, recommendations, and e-mail recommendations as lots. The industry of online retail has embraced third party personalization tools and services from vendors in all net sectors. Providers like MyBuys, Vignette, and PredictiveIntent all offer these and related services to retailers on the internet.

Conclusion and Implementation

Securing the services of a third-party information analysis and recommendation service, or else conducting similar operations in-house, are an essential part of running a competitive online network or vending site. Without the refined and targeted marketing provided by Behavioral Targeting, modern sites can’t compete with giants like Amazon and other internet vendors.

Remember that explicit behavioral targeting is just as powerful a tool as implicit targeting. Maintaining a database of associated items, media, services, etc, and working with algorithms that link and suggest these items to users who purchase within their fields is a great way to make sure your customers keep coming back, and that they go away satisfied. In short, behavioral targeting market tactics should be a key component of any serious marketing campaign. The business is about clients and consumers, and ensuring their satisfaction should always be a top priority for vendors, agencies, or service organizations.

When writing articles for online marketing publication, most marketers pursue a ranking in the search engine results pages of internet monsters like Google with religious fervor. Writing content to appeal to search engine algorithms isn’t the most stimulating literary exercise, but it’s necessary to achieve financial viability in the highly competitive online marketplace. Establishing searchable articles is part of creating and expanding online visibility.

The path to achieving lasting internet success, though, requires a two-pronged strategy. While writing for search engine visibility is a critical component of this strategy, it also demands readability. Writing articles that appeal to the hundreds of millions who use Google daily can be a challenge, but with a little bit of basic information on the subject you can start to tailor your online content to trending interests. Let’s examine some common techniques for making your articles more visible and more readable.

Stick to Natural Keyword Integration

Niche keyword research is absolutely essential. You’ve got to know what your target audience is interested in, and with online tool suites like Google AdSense and other keyword-oriented programs easily available you’ve got no excuse to not stay ahead of the game. While keywords are an important part of any article-writing strategy, though, their use has to be well considered. Too many keywords crammed into any given article won’t just drive away readers tired of irritating writing; it will also alert Google or other search engine providers to your spam tactics. Negative attention from giants like Google can crush your chances at mainstream success, and even if you’re not removed from search engine results for utilizing spam techniques, readers won’t exactly be flocking to your clunky, engine-oriented articles.

Making sure you utilize keywords organically while still structuring articles so that Google realizes what their topics are is a challenging undertaking. Keyword Stuffing may have been the word of the day in the late 90’s, but now there’s a different set of rules for working inside a search engine framework. In order for an article to be identified accurately and grouped according to its intended topic or message, keywords have to appear, and they have to appear in specific places, namely: The article’s title, the body of its opening paragraph, the body of the article at appropriate and sensical intervals, and the closing paragraph.

Keeping to this ideal will help both visibility and user retention. Natural, sensible articles that fit Google’s search indexing algorithms get you the best of both worlds.

High Content-Update Volume

Newness and the rate at which updates occur are important factors to Google and other major search engines. It’s a basic approach, but producing new material and updating your blog continually can really help to increase the volume of Web traffic moving through your site. Because Google ranks page popularity with Web Crawling programs, automated bot programs that browse the internet and assign ranking according to preprogrammed algorithms, producing fresh content at a regular rate gets your site “crawled” more often.

The more often you update your website’s contents by producing new crawlable text, the more often Google will crawl your site to search for novel content. This, in turn, leads to your increased prominence in search engine results. Google loves an active website!

Semantic Networking: Related Terms & Links

The freewheeling inclusion of links in articles geared toward Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has caused a lot of problems for Web-based vendors and marketers in the past few years. Lack of clarity over appropriate use of directory submission regulations and relational linking has contributed to a sloppy, unprofessional morass of articles plagued by unrelated links and terms selected solely for SEO concerns rather than integrated naturally.

Making proper use of links and related terms helps increase and broaden a blog or website’s relevance. Google’s Web crawlers weight related terms and keywords quite heavily, so including them is seldom if ever a bad idea. Google really simplifies the process of figuring out the best way to handle this, too. Just by searching for the keyword(s) you’re hoping to build your article around, you’ll acquire valuable knowledge about related terms from the bottom of the first page of a standard Google results page. For example, let’s say you’re writing an article about marine biology. The bottom of the first Google search engine results page will include a list of related keywords, i.e., marine exploration, marine climate change, etc.

Google, as has been explored earlier, places a high value on relatedness and relevance within a single article. Links to relevant content in other articles or on informative sites is also of value when Google’s crawler processes your site. Don’t worry about outgoing links distracting attention from articles. The rewards reaped by building a quality article as a central node in a network of more broadly oriented information can be considerable in traffic and ranking both, and increased traffic will help keep your ranking high!

Don’t go overboard, no matter how tempting it might seem. A handful of related terms and links really go a long way, and they should be sufficient to display to Google or another search engine provider that you know what you’re doing. Overdosing on helpful links can give your articles a cluttered, unprofessional feel when what you want to cultivate is an aura of effortless information and broad appeal.

Good Backlinks & SEO

Any page seeking a consistently good ranking in the search results page listings of major search engines has to engage with backlinks as a key component of their strategy. Backlinks add hugely to Search Engine Optimization. Google’s 2011 changes to its sorting algorithms made backlinks even more important, increasing their weighting in indexing and ranking of pages. Efficacious link networking is something many businesses struggle with, and a concern that really weighs down the efforts of some sites is how to acquire quality backlinks. Let’s look at some techniques and methods you should employ in pursuing backlinks to build your website’s online presence and prestige.

Farming guest posts to visitors is a great way to get your name out in the field. Keeping a deep bench of pre-written articles appropriate for fields related to your site’s content and purpose can help you jump on any opportunities that arise. Remember that many webmasters are busy professionals, so approaching them with finished work can encourage them to take you seriously. By providing quality guest posts on visitors’ websites you can ensure broad exposure for your site and instantly create quality backlinks in various market sectors. These backlinks typically last anywhere from a month to five weeks, and the more you have out in the Web community at one time the better the reactions of search engine crawlers will be.

Following the in-house rules of sites to which you’re posting as a guest is very important. You don’t want to suddenly lose backlinks because of absentminded rules violations, so read carefully and be attentive to any regulatory quirks individual websites might have. Making sure your articles are formatted properly doesn’t take long, and it can help prevent unfortunate mistakes that could damage your site’s reputation as well as your future chances to expand your guest posting endeavors. Make sure, though, that you’re staying on-message for your own site even while you’re being mindful of the rules of whichever site you’re posting to. You want to get as much as you can out of networked publicity.

Working with backlinks can yield impressive results, and often serves two purposes. Firstly, by creating backlinks it sweetens its chances for being ranked highly by Google, Bing, Yahoo! and the other big search engines on the block. Secondly, these widespread backlinks themselves will draw people to your site, and increased traffic is another important factor in strengthening your search engine ranking.

Conclusion

Working with modern Web-modeled technology is absolutely essential to success in the online marketplace. Being mindful of the way your site handles its writing andposting isn’t hard, and there are a lot of creative options in those sectors that can help to first establish your online visibility and, later, to expand it. Make sure you’re getting all you can out of the content hosted by your site, because if you’re not updating regularly enough with fresh, targeted content then you’re doing yourself a disservice.

Affiliate marketing can be a highly rewarding and lucrative activity if implemented successfully.  It can work one of two ways – you can market someone else’s product or you can get other people to market yours.  Whoever is doing the marketing gets a fee, typically in the form of a commission, each time they sell an affiliate product through their site using an affiliate link.

Too many site owners become publishers believing affiliate marketing to be a great way to make their millions in passive income.  The reality is that affiliate marketing, as an advertiser or publisher, takes skills and knowledge to get the most out of the experience.  There really is no quick fix to making money online anymore.  The virtual marketplace is too crowded and changes so fast that if you take on affiliate marketing without adequate know-how, the fruits of your labor will not be realized.

As you learn more about affiliate marketing, keep the following common pitfalls in mind. Take advantage of the “fixes” provided to develop an affiliate marketing strategy that truly supports your business and is a revenue generator.

Pitfall #1: Being an Indiscriminate Affiliate Marketer

Don’t care which programs you associate with as long as they pay well?  Well, that could be problematic for several reasons.  A fast way to lose PageRank is to have content on your website that is not relevant to your site’s purpose.  You also need to think about your customers. Having affiliate ads on your site that counter your mission can cause current customers to flee.  The purpose of affiliate marketing is to increase traffic not offend your customer base.  Include ads that your customers are most likely to be interested in and avoid the others unless you can figure out a creative way to make them relevant.

Fix:  Use a credible affiliate program such as Google Affiliate Network to find appropriate products to market or publishers to advertise your own products. You should get affiliate links from sites that are related to your own. This requires research on your end.  You want to find compatible but not competitive affiliates. If you are not careful you can end up marketing a competitor.

Pitfall #2: Signing Up for Too Many Programs

You don’t need to sign up for every affiliate program that is related to your site’s purpose.  There are several reasons not to go overboard with affiliate programs.  Depending on the size of your website, it may appear you are placing too much emphasis on your affiliates rather than your own content.  This is a good way to trigger a Google penalty and lose rankings with other search engines as well.  It also takes time to manage these programs and if you over commit, you are just diluting your outcomes.

Fix:  Pick and choose a few that are “best fit.”  You can always select several backup programs and test each one to see which have higher conversion rates with your customers.

Pitfall #3:  Placing All Affiliate Ads on Landing Page

Not only does this confuse customers by weakening your call-to-action, it can trigger a search engine penalty.  Too many ads can appear spammy to search engines which may result in a drop in rankings.  Ad placement can also impact conversions.  If the ads are more prominent than your content, customers may view the page as misleading and decide not to use your site any further.

Fix: If you have multiple landing pages, use different affiliate ads on the pages.  Try to use the ones that are most relevant to each landing page’s content.

Pitfall #4:  Not Knowing When a Good Product Goes Bad

Selecting the right product to sell is the hard part.  There are many factors that go into your decision. But once you begin marketing for that affiliate, you need to make sure the affiliate remains credible.  Linking to an affiliate that has been hit by Google Panda or otherwise been penalized can have major ramifications for you.  You don’t want to be sending your customers to bad sites or sites that have been shut down for some reason.

Fix: Monitor your affiliates daily.  This includes reading news articles about major brands that you may be marketing.  Even a hint of a scandal can make customers leery if you associate with an affiliate that is having problems.  You may need to temporarily suspend the relationship and use another affiliate program until the issues are resolved and you know your reputation will not be harmed by advertising for them.

Pitfall #5: Forgetting the Rules of Advertising

Affiliate marketing involves direct advertising activities.  And there are limits on what you can say in an ad.  You cannot make unsubstantiated claims. Even if you use banner ads from the affiliate, you need to be aware of what the ads are promoting.  If your customers end up dissatisfied with their affiliate purchase, this will reflect just as badly on you as the affiliate.  The customer trusted you to promote a product that would stand up to its hype.  Fully understanding advertising rules can help you with your affiliate marketing efforts.

Fix: Verify that the advertising language is ethical and will not cause you legal problems down the road.  Avoid overselling an affiliate product.  If you need to, hire a professional copywriter to help you with your content so you do not inadvertently create obstacles for yourself. If you decide to write a product review to help promote it, be honest in your assessment and avoid duplicating content from the original product site. And use graphics creatively to grab your reader’s attention.

Pitfall #6:  Selecting Low Converting Products

One of the factors you need to consider when selecting affiliate products is conversion rates.  Affiliate programs should include information on typical conversions so you know what to expect.  Use this information to determine which products offer the greatest return on your investment.  Even if they are free, you still have time and resources to consider when implementing your affiliate marketing strategy.  Products with low conversions may not be worth the effort.

Fix:  Do your homework. Check multiple resources to make sure the stated conversion rate is the same for all. If you are only given extraordinary examples of affiliate marketers’ successes, then you should skip that particular opportunity.  Look for those affiliates that have high conversion rates and relatively low maintenance requirements.

Pitfall #7: Committing Insufficient Resources to Affiliate Campaigns

Managing successful affiliate campaigns takes resources.  And the more campaigns you are running, the more resources you need. You will not be successful if you plan to simply display affiliate ads on your site or create your own affiliate program and hope people find you in order to sign-up as an affiliate marketer.  You must actively market ads and programs to get the results you want. You need to monitor each campaign’s performance and make adjustments where needed.

Fix: Depending on the number of affiliates you are managing, you either need to dedicate a certain number of hours each day to your affiliate marketing efforts or assign the same to a member of your workforce.  It is possible to outsource this aspect of your affiliate activities.  Companies dedicated to affiliate marketing as well as certain SEO firms provide affiliate support.

Pitfall #8: Failing to Develop a Budget

Not developing an affiliate marketing budget is one of the biggest mistakes made, especially if you plan to optimize your ads. Because most affiliate programs are free to publishers, site owner assume there are no associated costs. But as stated above, you will need resources to manage your campaigns.  And resources cost money.  You will not truly know if your affiliate activities are profitable without including all of your costs associated with the program.

Fix: Create a budget that allows you to easily separate your affiliate programs from other online marketing activities. You need individual budgets for each affiliate program to effectively monitor profits and losses. This will help you decide which to keep as well as the ones that need to be traded in for fresh affiliate opportunities.

Pitfall #9:  Leaving Money on the Table

There are several revenue models that affiliate programs take and knowing the difference can stop you from getting shortchanged.  In addition to the straightforward fee/commission model, you can also get paid per click or impression of the affiliate ad on your site.  Obviously these commissions will be much smaller but over time they can add up.  You do not have to be solely dependent on actual sales to make money.

Fix:  Understand the different fee structures that are available with each affiliate opportunity.  Consider each before selecting the one you believe will produce the highest financial rewards. Make sure the affiliate programs has a good tracking system that allows you to see when sales, clicks or impressions occur so you can manage your revenue.

Pitfall #10: Having Unrealistically High ROI Expectations

Many site owners go into affiliate marketing only to turn around and abandon it within a short period of time.  They are disappointed the money did not immediately begin to roll in.  They expected too much too soon.  You need to take the time to build your affiliate programs and test ads within your own content.  All of this takes time.  And remember you are not the only one marketing those affiliate products – they come with built-in competition.

Fix: Use average conversion rates to establish a realistic monthly revenue goal.  Assume you can reach that within six months and work backwards with lower monthly goals until you reach your first full month of advertising.  You should build up to your anticipated goal with smaller goals rather than assume you will reach it right out of the gate.

Affiliate marketing is not for every site owner.  It does take time and effort to manage affiliate relationships. But is can be exciting to see the payoff when ads begin to convert and your profit margins increase.  As long as you follow basic program development and management guidelines, your affiliate programs will be successful.