The Reason Many Associate Marketing Activities Don’t Work And How To Avoid The Same Pitfalls: Part One

Becoming involved in affiliate marketing is not an activity to be done on a whim. You will very likely have been inundated by spam emails, tweets and I expect SMS messages as well, offering amazing wealthy for working at home online. Actually, it’s become so common that comedians are able to make jokes about them in the knowledge that the crowd will know what they are talking about and receiving a chuckle. And quite right too, since for the most part, these ads are aimed at getting a few charlies to sign up for a time, have a punt, stick at it for a few months and then cancel when they realise that they haven’t and probably will not ever, make any income.

However, done right, there’s no grounds why with affiliate marketing they would not have been profitable, maybe not to the extent that sends them running off to the Zonda dealers with debit card in hand, but adequate to put a few extra shekels in the pocket. What they did not comprehend and most likely couldn’t have realised (as they would not have been told), was that there is no possibility that anyone was going to go to their site, let alone buy anything from the advertisers whose adverts graced the page. The reason for this is that most people with a site they build themselves have little or no awareness about search engine optimisation.

SEO is a system by which a website is made conducive to Google so as to make it straightforward for them to be indexed, graded and assessed for significance. This is done in concurrence with the building of the affiliate marketing site by selecting the keywords which describe the site, what it does and what it offers. As an example, if you were to select your niche area to be a shop for fishing tackle supplies, your keywords may be along the lines of fishing, fishing tackle, fishing rods, fishing reels, fishing line, fish hooks, fishing books, fishing DVDs etc. These keywords then want to be incorporated into the description of the webpage in the HTML header section which is not shown on the screen to browsers, but is available to search engines, but they also want to be included in the text written into the page that people do see. This binds the two sections of the pages together and gains the search engine approval for relevance.

You then sign up to plenty of affiliate marketing schemes and locate as many companies selling goods and services in your niche area as you can. Choose the banners that you like and will look good on your page, and put the code into your pages, sort them into some kind of reasonable order such as by country (as you can promote affiliate marketing firms in any territory, not just your own, target markets all over the planet to maximise your chances). Once you are pleased with the page then you can begin the SEO and a useful way to begin is getting links to your website included on business directories all over the internet. The easiest way to do this is to find a website that will help you add hundreds through them rather than track them all down individually. Beware though, this is a long and very boring task.

However it is worth it as search engines devour links and they want to find them to your site in association with the relevant keywords so you want to check for ways to do this. Directory listings are a good one and also using social network sites to boost your site with links is another as hopefully, as well as creating links for the search engine robots, humans will see them and hopefully follow as well. These are all excellent, solid SEO ways which can be utilised in the early days of affiliate marketing, the subsequent article will explain more ideas to get your site seen.

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