As an affiliate manager, one of your roles is to ensure that your channel gets credit for all the sales that it makes – and that there is no attribution to it of sales generated by other channels.

Today, we’ll think of solutions to attribute credit fairly between email and affiliate marketing programs, when the two overlap. Read more >>

This is a guest post by Gab from SEO ROI

As an affiliate manager, one of your roles is to ensure that your channel gets credit for all the sales that it makes – and that there is no attribution to it of sales generated by other channels.

When an affiliate marketing program is the sole marketing channel, this isn’t a problem. But throw in some search marketing, portal buys, banner network campaigns, public relations and an inhouse email newsletter (aka CRM), and life gets complicated! Here’s how to make sure that your marketing channel attribution gives out credit where it’s due! We’ll focus on affiliate related issues in particular.

My perspective is more that of an intermediate-level web analytics user and that of an affiliate; I’ve never been an affiliate manager. But the tips here are mostly about analytics, so I do still feel competent to talk about the subject.

Read more >>

Visitors to Blogstorm over the last few weeks have probably noticed we have taken on a new advertiser, Netpartner. We don’t accept many advertisers here so you can probably guess Netpartner have impressed me with their attitude.

Netpartner is an affiliate network along similar lines to Commission Junction or buy.at with an offering for publishers and merchants alike. They have a variety of offers in the system throughout the world at present.

From their website:

NetPartner provides a vast network for Publishers to find the best offers, from the top domestic and international advertisers, for their (web, email and search listing) advertising space with performance based revenue. Our goal at NetPartner is to provide good traffic performance for our advertisers and at the same time generating high profits for our publishers.

Here is what Ivan Chan, Netpartner General Sales Manager said in a recent press release:

The creation of Netpartner represents years of research and development of our Affiliate Network team. It was developed with the combined ideas, feedbacks of our affiliate marketers and super affiliates, we aim at providing the best and sophisticated traffic exchange experience and convenience to users.

Equipped with enhanced user-friendly interface, Netpartner provides high transparency with the access to accurate tracking and payment checking. Now Netpartner is running a referral award program in which any publisher might be able to win welcome gifts with value equivalent to USD800.

Please visit www.netpartner.com if you are interested in setting up an affiliate program or becoming an affiliate yourself.

Search engines are not quite decided on whether they class affiliate links as paid links or not. If you take the time to set up an affiliate program why not use it to generate thousands of high value links to your product pages?

This post will tell you everything you need to know about maximising the SEO value of your affiliate links.

Easy: Don’t go through a 3rd party

Search engines won’t count your affiliate links if they go via a third party affiliate network. Either go with a network that allows you to use your own links or run the program in house.

Easy: Allow deep links

Most people do this already but it’s important to make sure your affiliates are linking to your product pages not just the homepage.

Harder: Consolidate your links

Most affiliate programs have links like
http://www.site.com/category/product.html?aff=123

This causes duplicate content problems – the way to fix the issue is to set an affiliate cookie and then redirect to the normal product page http://www.site.com/category/product.html

Really clever: Don’t make it look like an affiliate program

Any URL with the parameter aff=123 clearly looks like an affiliate link. Amazon is smart and uses tag= as their parameter. Why not try some of the following as affiliate links?

http://www.site.com/page/123/
http://www.site.com/product-name/page123/
http://www.site.com/blogpost/123/product-name.html

Confuse Google by using a non-standard nomenclature for your parameters.

Really clever: Intelligent use of cookies

Do you name your affiliate cookies affid? Just because Google doesn’t accept cookies doesn’t mean it doesn’t see what cookies are being sent in the header information.

When Google sees an affid cookie being set followed by a 301 redirect to strip out parameters it’s a fair assumption the link is an affiliate link.

Try calling your cookie something random like “visitor” or even cloaking the cookie so that it isn’t sent to search engines.

Super clever: Don’t use URL parameters

A few sites have started tracking based on referrer headers, this gives a clean link and search engines have no way of knowing the links are affiliate links, unless you are stupidly telling everybody about it.

My favourite trick is to use links in the following format:
http://www.site.com/#john
http://www.site.com/product-name.html#steve

Search engines view urls with different # tags as the same page so you can have as many of these as you like without coming across duplicate content issues. The way to handle tracking is to use JavaScript to parse the # tag and use it to populate a hidden form field which is posted to your shopping cart when the “add to cart” button is pressed.

I’m sure most of you have read Shoemoneys blog post about how lucrative local affiliate marketing can be and are busy trying to figure out a strategy to make money from his ideas.

Most people can’t be bothered to make the connections with local businesses in the same way that Shoemoney did so we need to find a merchant that has a network of shops around the country and are willing to give commissions. Read more >>

Building links for household brands is tough, building links for affiliate websites is even tougher. In this guide I’ve asked two of the leading affiliate and SEO experts how they approach link acquisition for affiliate websites. I’ve also added my answers too. Read more >>

Last week I attended my first a4uexpo at ExCeL. Overall the event was fantastic and I would definitely recommend it to any SEO or affiliate marketers next time. Read more >>

As you read this I’m on my way down to A4U Expo in London.

I’m there to watch a few sessions and meet as many people as possible so make sure you say Hi.

Hopefully I will be able to publish the best tips from the sessions on BlogStorm so look out for that.

You can follow a4uexpo or myself on Twitter.

The UK’s premier affiliate marketing event a4uexpo takes place in London on October 14th and 15th and I’m planning my first visit.

See you there! Read more >>