A4U Expo – Day 2 at 4pm – Advanced Link building Strategies for Affiliate Sites

Wednesday October 13th
Achieving strong natural search engine rankings for an affiliate site is a hard task, especially when you consider the advantage that brands have in the current Google algorithm.

This seminar will deliver some actionable tips on building a link-profile that ensures long term sustainable rankings as well as looking at case studies of the natural link building strategies that are being used by super affiliates to dominate the search landscape today.

SEOmoz & Distilled Pro SEO Seminar

Tuesday 26th October

This is a bit top secret but I will be sharing some advanced link building algorithm information. Again it’s day 2 at the end of the day so hopefully people won’t have left or fallen asleep by the time I start talking.

I will also be at the breakfast where delegates can meet all the experts which sounds pretty good, the menu choice was Full English and Champagne so it can’t fail really.

Please note that I won’t be making these presentations public so if you want to see them you have to sign up and come to the events.

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My presentations for A4U Expo and SEOmoz Distilled Pro Seminar

Treiber is the CEO of RevTrax, which has a point-of-sale technology that enables retailers and other businesses with brick-and-mortar technology to identify sales that came through online marketing.

In plain English, they use bar-code technology and gift card technology that tie back into affiliate tracking systems. And while he was trying to interest affiliates and merchants in his platform, Jon wasn’t pushy, and made clear the appeal of such a system in general.

While Treiber’s presentation was fluid and eloquent, what really impressed me was how deftly he handled the Q&A afterwards.

Is this a call-tracking system?

Treiber told the audience that while he had the ability to do phone-tracking, that wasn’t really what his platform focused on, and referred people interested in phone tracking to Ring Revenue, an affiliate platform servicing networks, so affiliates can get paid for calls generated. (They currently work with Shareasale, CJ and LinkTrust, for those of you interested.)

Is it possible to do without coupons?

You need a digital ID, an offline ID, and something to tie them together. Jon’s presentation featured coupons, but he made the point here that it’s not strictly necessary to have a coupon from a technology perspective. (The question is how would you get a customer to bother bringing in any tracking device that helps you out, if there’s no incentive [eg coupon] for them to do so.)

Another possibility is to have products/sales/prices that are only available online, so that you know if that’s what people ask for offline, that you had an online touchpoint.

Do you need new hardware or software?

No, RevTrax’s system piggybacks on existing systems. You can think of it as a plugin.

Is it possible to use RevTrax for local internet marketing?

No, it isn’t, because the budget involved is significant. Also, the problem for local retail, restaurant and other service providers is that there are bigger risks of mistracked redemptions. The reason being that you might have a short-term orientation to boost your own profit by shaving commissions, which is less likely when the cashier isn’t the owner or a family member of the owner.

Can you extend the system with print media buys?

Yes, but it’s less exciting because there are less analytics. (I’m not sure why that would be. Perhaps something to do with the ability to micro-target tracking to a particular person as opposed to just a general tracking code for newspaper X?)

How can affiliates promote this kind of campaign?

Ranking for local store names and places in the longtail, or for product and location combinations (eg product, Miami, FL) is a possibility. Jon referenced CompUSA’s campaign around this point, I think because someone did this kind of local marketing for the big computer retailer.

How does this compare to other forms of direct marketing?

Treiber shared a case study with us about S&K men’s suits. 46% of clients RevTrax drove to their stores were new vs 26% seen from other forms of direct marketing. In other words, there was less cannibalization.

Also, there was $12/click in incremental revenue, according to their tracking.

With regards to commissions, they’ve found that 20% of coupons printed get redeemed, so you can go from a cost/sale model to a cost/print model for tracking purposes. (Eg changing the action in the definition of the program’s “CPA.”) In this respect, RevTrax competes indirectly with Coupons.com, since Coupons.com uses a pay-per-print model, though they work mostly with grocery brands in the consumer-packaged goods area.

How long do coupons last?

It’s a 30 day minimum. The latency is often just a few days to conversion or even immediate conversion for restaurants. For S&K suits it was 1-2 weeks.

Update:

There were a few things I missed or didn’t explain well initially, so I’m copying Jonathan’s explanations (which he just got to me by email) here:

Q: What about leaks with your system (eg human error, tech failures with the barcodes etc.)?

There will always be leaks at the register with human errors the same way there are errors with landing pages and ecommerce sites “going down” for some reason. Both hurt conversion rates. We can track conversion rates across impressions, clicks, prints and redemptions. If we see the numbers dip from print to redemption, we can set flags and institute an investigation with the merchant to understand why.

Q: What do you mean by incremental revenue (the S&K case study listed above)?

The incremental sales are incremental to online sales. The retailer measures what each click delivers in online sales. We show an average of $12 additional dollars of in-store sales to what they are making online.

Gab Goldenberg wrote this article on behalf of DoneSEO.com, which offers SEO services.

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The Lost Cross-Channel Affiliate Tracking Notes

It seems they are relying on TOS that say any link has to be from “Your Site” in order to be eligible for commission and Amazon is keen to enforce that.

“Your site” means any site that you will link to the Amazon Site (and which you will identify in your Program application)

This sets a worrying precedent because Twitter has potential with affiliate marketing (as long as you do it right) and there could be a lot of other networks following Amazons lead.

I’m also wondering how this works with people who read an RSS feed via Google Reader or a similar service – they are not following a link from “Your Site” so will the commission be honoured?

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Amazon Will Not Give Commission To Affiliate Sales Via Twitter

So far 80 documents have been filed in the case but the most interesting is number 68 which is the Second Amended Complaint against all defendants. Filed by eBay Inc.. (Eberhart, David) (Filed on 3/26/2009) (Entered: March 26, 2009).

Below are some quotes from this Second Amended Complaint which mentions an “advertising network” which I assume is the Digital Point Coop network which most SEO’s will be familiar with.

eBay is informed and believes and, on that basis, alleges that DPS and KFC each accomplished their cookie stuffing through software programs and/or code that, unbeknownst to the user, redirected the user’s computer to the eBay website without the user actually clicking on an eBay advertisement link, or even becoming aware that they had left the page they were previously viewing. As a result, the eBay site would be prompted to drop an eBay cookie on the user’s computer even though the user never clicked on an eBay advertisement or even realized that their computer had ever visited the eBay site. DPS and KFC stuffed a large number of Internet users, with the expectation and intention that some subset of those users would later come to eBay and take a Revenue Action.

On or about June 2007, eBay undertook an investigation into suspected cookie stuffing by the Hogan Group and the Dunning Group. eBay was able to verify the existence of the two schemes and to track specific instances of cookie stuffing through several different methods.

53. eBay first ran its own tests and was able to observe and confirm fraudulent cookie stuffing by both the Hogan Group and the Dunning Group.
a. For example, on or about June 5, 2007, an eBay employee visited the website www.drago-sim.com using a secure computer that had its IP address masked (to overcome countermeasures that prevented cookies from being stuffed onto computers with San Jose IP addresses) and that was equipped to monitor and record Internet activity occurring on the computer. The website www.drago-sim.com was a participant in DPS’s advertising network and contained a DPS-controlled banner ad. Although the eBay employee never clicked on, or requested, any eBay ad or link to an eBay website, the Hogan Group’s code in the DPS-controlled banner ad secretly redirected the computer being used by the eBay employee to an eBay website, and a DPS-associated cookie was dropped. eBay observed an identical cookie stuff by the Hogan Group on the same date by visiting the site www.songlyrics.com, which was also a participant in the DPS ad network and which also contained a DPS-controlled banner ad.

Having confirmed the ongoing cookie stuffing by both the Hogan Group and the Dunning Group, eBay next set out to determine the extent of that unlawful
activity. On or about June 8-19, 2007, eBay made certain alterations to its website to both detect further evidence of the cookie stuffing and, if found, to assess the volume of cookie stuffing by the Hogan Group and the Dunning Group. eBay placed a special “gif” image on the eBay.com home page. This special gif was served to any browser receiving an eBay cookie. eBay had observed that Defendants’ cookie stuffing schemes caused the user’s browser to be secretly redirected to eBay’s home page for only a short period of time—sufficient time for the cookie to be stuffed and little or no more.

The cumulative results of the investigation demonstrated that over 99% of the traffic directed by DPS and KFC during the time period of the investigation did not receive the gif image, and was therefore fraudulent cookie stuffing traffic. During the short period of this investigation, the data demonstrated that the Hogan Group had stuffed over 650,000 cookies and the Dunning Group had stuffed close to 20,000 cookies.

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Update on eBay vs Digital Point Solutions / Shawn Hogan

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

Before I begin, I just want to make 3 fast points:

• Background: Check out how to attribute credit where portal ads, brand traffic and affiliate marketing overlap – where both are responsible for generating the sale to a given visitor.
• [Non-]Expertise: I’m not an affiliate manager, nor have I ever been. I am an affiliate however, and an intermediate web analytics user. So just take this with a grain of salt.
• Assumption: Your web analytics guys can handle the tracking tasks I describe below.

Situation 1 – Non-sale email newsletter combines with affiliate review

Your company has an inhouse email list, featuring a double opt-in procedure.

You send an email and promote a selection of your products. There’s no coupon, voucher or other sale.

It’s not April Fools and no one’s using you to spam their friends. So you have no spam-related delivery issues and your normal percentage of recipients click through directly.

Others type in your domain name and still more search for you and visit via a search engine. Being a savvy Blogstorm subscriber, you already know to only count the marginal increase in type-ins and branded-searchers above your average.

Some of this traffic browses products, and maybe even add a few to cart. But they’re still anxious, so they leave to read some reviews.

After reading reviews on an affiliate site, they click an affiliate link and purchase.

To review, your email marketing team:

• Earned the email subscription
• Squeezed the newsletter past spam filters and sent you traffic
• Generated a fair amount of interest, but not enough to convert

The affiliate marketer:

• Attracted the visitor looking for reviews (often via SEO, e.g. by ranking for “product X review”)
• Provided content that informed and convinced the prospective customer to buy
• Sent the visitor back to your site

Your brand helped get the affiliate click, and your site then beat out competitors – who the review affiliate may also have sent the visitor to – and completed the conversion.

So your marketing generated the interest, but it was the affiliate who substantially closed the sale.

My Credit Attribution Solution:

1. You can partly avoid this problem with inhouse reviews. But because of some unscrupulous types like Amazon.com, third-party reviews will likely be more trusted than first-party reviews, in the future. So there’s still a role for review affiliates to play.
2. Because both generating traffic and using LIFT to convert visitors is significant work, I would share the credit 50 – 50 here.
3. Some other factors you might consider to modify the 50 – 50 split:

• Prominence the affiliate gave the link to your site vs the prominence given to competitor merchants. More prominence should mean slightly more affiliate credit.
• Whether the product is exclusive to you. Obviously, this heavily tilts the credit attribution to your inhouse channels.
• If several affiliate review sites had banner views before this visitor converted, you may want to credit those. Robin Neifield has explained viewthroughs’ value, and Kevin Lee has covered viewthrough caveats.

Situation 2 – Email coupon is shared by wannabe-coupon affiliates

We’re in a similar situation as above, but here, your email did offer visitors a coupon. Often it’s a “1-day only 20% off sale” or a volume discount.

This traffic either buys or doesn’t, but since they have a coupon code, they won’t leave at checkout to search for “Merchant name coupon.”

The problem is with your other traffic.

Some affiliates, who subscribe to your newsletter, will copy the coupon code from your email newsletter and put it on their site.

This creates two problems:

1. Your web analytics break. The coupon that was supposed to track email sales is now also mixed into the affiliate channel. This leads to erroneously low payouts to affiliates, messes up your budgeting for the next quarter, and can cause a double-counting problem.
2. Where the coupon is limited (to a time-frame, to email-tagged links etc.), your affiliates end up angering customers. The coupon won’t work for the visitors, but your web analytics will think the affiliate deserves credit for the sales that happen regardless.IMHO, these fake/non-existent coupons hurt your brand with bad usability. The bait-n-switched marginal sales aren’t worth it. Also, any future promotions you run will suffer from credibility issues and be less effective.

My Affiliate Management Solution:

A. You first need to prevent your web analytics from breaking. That breakage causes a lot of follow-up problems.

-> So if it were up to me, I’d give affiliates a warning after the first time, and then boot them from the program.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in online marketing, it’s that an opportunity “lost” is just another opportunity “saved.” I’ve turned down awesome job offers from Microsoft headhunters only to end up later doing work for the Canadian government that I’d have missed by moving to Redmond.

The same goes for affiliate marketing. One affiliate dropped is just an opportunity in your schedule to work with someone else.

You can generate the same revenue by working with other affiliates, AND save yourself the headaches by cutting loose the current bad apples. Yes, you can have your cake and eat it, too.

Of course, this isn’t black-and-white. Big affiliate companies may have had some bad apples in their organization, whom they’ve disciplined. Other affiliates may have a great relationship with you, so you might be a little more lenient.

But the CORE of any company is analytics. Where online marketing is involved, that means web analytics. If the analytics are broken, you’re flying blind and are in an unsustainable position.

Functional analytics are ultimately more valuable than a few more sales from an unruly affiliate.

B. Second, you need to protect your brand and the credibility of future voucher sales you may create.

For one thing, I’d first seek to identify this bait-and-switched traffic. Then, you can:

1. Offer this traffic a new, inhouse coupon code – if they join your email newsletter. They’re obviously good prospects – they’re looking for coupons and your email newsletter offers voucher codes.

At the same time, make it clear that the affiliate site who referred them had an expired coupon, and that the code being given comes from you, not the affiliate.

This both (i) protects the user experience and the brand associations related to that; and (ii) builds your inhouse email list.

2. Avoid crediting the affiliate with any resulting sales, since the affiliate’s bad work almost damaged your brand. That will dissuade the affiliate from sending you this type of traffic in the future.

3. Finally, as an alternative to booting these affiliates, speak to them and see whether they might like to get paid for legitimate newsletter signups they generate. Tracking those and avoiding fraudulent signups is a huge issue in itself, though, so be careful which affiliates you offer this option to.

This post was guest-written by Gab Goldenberg, for PromotionalCodes.org.uk, a coupon affiliate that generally does things right, like with their Apple vouchers and Boots.com coupon codes.

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Attributing Credit When Email and Affiliates Overlap – Affiliate Management for Beginners Part 2

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.

Before I begin, I need to specify that my assumption throughout is that you have a holistic credit attribution scheme in place. For a primer on the topic, see this crediting post, ClearSaleing’s webinar-video via SMN, Mediapost’s article, and check out these conference blogging bits on it.

Problem A – Overlapping Time-Specific Portal Buy and SEO. If you’re buying traffic from a portal for a “One-Day Only Sale,” you can expect to see a spike in your type-in traffic and search referrals too, on brand keywords. And despite the sale being one day only, the spike in branded search referrals will often last 3-5 days.

Portal Promotions on MSN Shopping

Do you give the portal buy or the direct traffic and search referrals credit for the sale? A better question would be, “how much credit should each be attributed?” In this case, the portal did most of the heavy lifting and type-ins/search just facilitated things. So it should get the majority of the credit.

However, you need to make sure that you’re only crediting the portal for the marginal sales that also came via type-ins and brand search. Presumably, you had a brand prior to buying portal traffic and were getting direct type-in traffic and branded search visitors. The sales generated from those traffic streams should be credited to your brand building work.

Only the additional traffic/sales beyond your average on brand traffic/sales should see any credit given to the portal.

Problem A1 – Overlapping Time-Specific Portal, SEO and Affiliate Coupon. Imagine you have the same problem, but now, the person has gotten to checkout.

At this point, your marketing has brought the visitor in, persuaded them to buy, and moved them so far along the purchase funnel they’re virtually at the exit.

But the visitor notices that you ask if they have a coupon. So they search Google for something like “Boots coupon code,” and a coupon affiliate page like this attracts the visitor! The type of coupon you have available to your affiliates at this stage is crucial, as I wrote in my guide to affiliate coupons for Search Engine Journal.

Assuming you’ve created a valuable coupon that supports your business objectives, as per that SEJ post, the visitor will see that they can get 20% off orders over $ABC threshold or some similar volume discount. And they take you up on the offer, adding something to their cart to bring their total purchase order above the $ABC threshold.

Should you credit the affiliate with the sale? To what degree?

My answer is that you should attribute most of the marginal sales volume to the affiliate, since their coupon was mostly responsible for that. But you can’t give them 100% credit, because the sale wouldn’t happen to begin with if your other channels hadn’t attracted the visitor and persuaded them to buy. The affiliate commission you pay on these sales should reflect this reality.

That said, I’m sure there are other valid answers with fair arguments for them. If you take a different view on how to handle Problem A1, please say so in the comments!

If you come back later this week, I’ll address a new problem with affiliate and cross-channel crediting, namely overlap between email campaigns and affiliate campaigns. In the meantime, browse a site like PromotionalCodes.org.uk if you’re interested in learning more about how this sector affiliate marketing works. Also, check out Geno Prussakov’s great blog for tips on affiliate management, like how to be a value-added coupon affiliate and what banner sizes you need.

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Affiliate Management For Beginners: Attributing Credit For The Sale

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.

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Introducing the Netpartner Affiliate Network

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.

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How to make sure your affiliate program passes PageRank & SEO benefits

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.

The perfect example is opticians and I’ve been talking to the team at Vision Express this week about their affiliate program. Basically they are offering £15 commission on attended eye exams which sounds like easy money to me.

Recommended Strategies

Vision Express have stores all over the country and every town has search volume for phrases like the ones below:

• eye test leeds
• eye appointment leeds
• vision express leeds
• specsavers leeds
• opticians leeds

I’m sure you get the general idea – people are already searching locally for somewhere to have their eyes tested. You just need to find a way to intercept them and then get them to click on your affiliate link.

Vision Express tell me that successful affiliates are using the following strategies:

• PPC (they allow brand name bidding as long as you don’t out-bid them),
• Natural search (a huge long tail opportunity)
• Email marketing (great if you have a list of people from a certain area)

This is a big industry and from my analysis of the search results it wouldn’t be too hard for a clever affiliate to take over both the PPC and organic search results for most of the long tail queries.

What are you waiting for?

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How To Do Local Affiliate Marketing With An Optician Affiliate Program

1. Day one of link building for a brand new affiliate site. What do you do?
Aaron Wall, SEO Book

I try to throw up a blog and add a few posts that make it look informational, such that it is easier for me to get links from directories like the Yahoo! Directory and Business.com. I think submit the site to those 2 and maybe a couple other directories.

Marcus Tandler, Mediadonis

Scanning the Top200 sites for my keywords
• Identify the common backlinks of those sites
• Finding the Hubs & Authorities in my niche
• Identify the key bloggers / forums / directories in my niche

Patrick Altoft

My first step would be to ensure the site doesn’t look like a typical affiliate site, this increases the success rate and ROI of any link building tasks you do in the future.

Day 1 is to look at all the sites that are ranking and figure out where they get their links from and why. Check which blogs are linking regularly to your competitors and subscribe to their feeds. Basically just get to know the link patterns in the industry.

2. Can you summarise your strategy for the first 2 months link building?
Aaron Wall, SEO Book

If I have any nepotistic linking opportunities I try to add those. Sometimes I actually throw up a site and let it sit for like 6 months before promoting it seriously though…just get it a few links and let it age for a while. That way while I am actively working on the site I am likely to see some results rather than the frustrations of grinding it out for minimal returns off the start. It makes it easier to put effort into promoting a site when you know the site will be making a hundred or a couple hundred a day by the time you start monetizing and serious link building.

Marcus Tandler, Mediadonis

Basically go after all of the identified links
I’ll also be pretty active my niche, contribute to the community, build up a good social profile – since it’s a longterm approach, rather then a quick-win situation, it helps getting to know the community slowly, rather then be to pushy (and therefore spammy).

Patrick Altoft

During this time I would be working to create a popular blog, submitting to perhaps the top 5 general directories and ten of the best niche directories and getting as many of the same links as my competitors as possible provided they are half decent.

3. How would you approach link building for an established site where the traffic seems to have plateaued?
Aaron Wall, SEO Book

I would use any nepostic linking opportunities I could – interview others I know, ask my audience to link to me, etc. The other big piece is to look for linkbait ideas and software you can give away to get the link juice and reach needed to take the site to the next level.

If the site already has tons of link equity but few pages it might be a better strategy to work on adding content and making sure the on page SEO is done well then it would be to keep working on links…the return is best if links and content are built together, rather than relying on either one of them too heavily.

Marcus Tandler, Mediadonis

Identify good traffic keywords (and longtail keyword kombinations), I´m ranking on pretty ok, but not great (maybe like a page 2 or 3), and focus on those. Test a couple of keywords and keyword-combinations by exact-matching them in AdWords, and see how much traffic they´re getting, and then include those in my linkbuilding strategy.

Patrick Altoft

See my posts on Googles Glass Ceiling and Breaking Through Traffic Barriers

4. How successful do you find linkbait to be for affiliate websites?
Aaron Wall, SEO Book

It is huge. If you and 1,000 other people are selling the exact same crap, it can be hard to differentiate and hard to build a sustained competitive advantage (especially if you come to the market later than competing sites). Linkbait creates editorial links that competitors can not duplicate…them creating a similar piece of content and marketing it to the same people who liked your content might not generate any links for the competitor since the people already linked at your site.

Another big plus with linkbait is that it creates an organic traffic stream that is not entirely driven by search…this offers you another promotional avenue for future linkbait/content ideas.

Marcus Tandler, Mediadonis

I really don´t like the term “linkbait” anymore – that term has really gotten a negative connotation in the last couple of month. Just create compelling content, and be active in your community / niche – don´t worry that much about baiting!

Patrick Altoft

Affiliate sites don’t have to worry about branding so you can take huge risks with your linkbait. It’s also a lot less worrying when you are just linkbaiting for yourself rather than a client who might have paid a lot of money for the service.

Any site can get good results from linkbait as long as you don’t rely too much on social media sites such as Digg – go directly to the people you want links from.

What are your top link building strategies?

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Link Building Strategies For Affiliates