Recently I was on the look for affiliates, and one of the
best ways to find them is to look for similar products and
then look for the links to site. Some very interesting
things started to appear when I started doing this.
I was doing research on one of favourite authors- Jim
Edwards, because he tells it like it is (no fluff!) and his
book, Turn Words into Traffic, is pure gold for anybody
looking for free traffic from articles.
Now Jim publishes products via Clickbank. They also mange
his affiliate program for him. Clickbank takes care of all
the issues with the accepting credit card payments,
affiliate tracking, paying affiliates and refunds etc.
The clickbank customer service is great and they are
generally the leader when it comes to managing/selling
downloadable information products.
From a linking or a search engine ranking point of view the
links the affiliates don't count in your search engine
ranking because logically, they don't go to your site- they
are redirected by clickbank hop links. Affiliate links from
Clickbank look something like this: hop.clickbank.net/?XXXX
It looks like Google is getting smarter and tracking not
just links provided by clickbank but also other redirected
links.
Lets look closer. By using the link command in Google when
can see the links that Google "sees" as the most important.
That's not to say it doesn't recognize (or include them it
its calculations) all the many other links to a site, just
doesn't show them all.
So in this case it would be:
link:[ include whole url: www.turnwordsintotraffic.com]
or use the google toolbar.
This bought some interesting links- one of them being a
link from a well-known marketer and writer 'Tim Knox
(prosperityandprofits.com) Now the link from Tims blog is a
redirect. (It redirects so fast I can't tell if its an
affiliate link or not!)
The link is something like this: /members/go.php?l=11 and
is on the middle right
So in following logic, that the link doesn't actually show
as a link to the site, Google must be following the link,
working out that it is an affiliate link using clickbank
and count it towards Jims site.
Lets have a look at another link:
www.biztipsblog.com/2007/10/drive-more-traf.html
(see
middle right for link)
By hovering over the link- you will see in the bottom
status bar of the browser that this is definitely an
affiliate link, which is also being counted towards Jim
Edwards site TurnWordsintoTraffic.com
So what does this mean to you? This is a good this that
Google does this, however keeping in mind that probably
yahoo or MSN haven't followed Google in doing this. (yet to
be checked at this time)
Be sure and plan or advise Affiliates to link to you using
your keyword or a version of it
If you use clickbank and you allow clickback to manage all
you affiliates, then you wont have much choice. I always
recommend that you manage a list of your own affiliates
using a sign up using aweber or a similar service - then
send them to clickbank.
This also allows me to provide specific training for
affiliates to help them make more sales- a win-win
----------------------------------------------------
Paul Easton is a self confessed online marketing nut- who
helps from an "in the trenches, doing it" point of view.
Free Guide: Get a Plan for free web Traffic here:
http://www.SEOTrainingLive.com/
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