Google’s Love / Hate Relationship With Affiliate Marketers
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Programs, Google, Internet Marketing, seo
This fantastic infographic provided by SEOBook, shows how Google’s attitude towards affiliates has changed over the years. First, they loved you because you bought PPC traffic, then when that traffic began to get noticed by big companies, they started a slow but steady campaign to oust most affiliates from their PPC network; even going as far as to ban many affiliates.
At first you would think that it may be the affiliates problem right? They should have known that their ads would get banned. Not so fast…whenever you delete or pause a PPC ad in Google, no matter how old it is, it still remains in your account. Many affiliates were banned because these old, outdated ads, which may have been deleted or paused, were at the time completely within Google’s terms and conditions; however, because they currently don’t adhere to the rules, they were banned, some for life.
Essentially, Google had them by the throat. They ran completely legitimate ads in Google say in 2005, decided that they didn’t want to run that ad anymore for whatever reason, deleted it, (although still contained within the account, thus, not truly deleted), and then had their account banned because it didn’t adhere with Google’s current terms and conditions.
Can you see the problem here?
Over the years, affiliates have been taking some pretty big hits by Google; either getting their sites pushed down in the search results, or whatever the case may be.
Ironically, during this short amount of time, Google has opened up their own affiliate network. Which leads one to wonder if these same sites were to promote products from Google’s affiliate network, would it make a difference in rankings? I haven’t tested this but would sure be curious to hear of anyone who has.
So, all this rant out of the way, here’s the infographic I was telling you about…
Internet Marketing Infographics by SEO Book
Success at Affiliate Marketing WithOUT a Website?
Many times I have heard “I don’t have a website so I can’t be successful at affiliate marketing.” – nonsense! While it is 100% possible to earn affiliate income without a website, I won’t lie to you and tell you that it will be easy; as a matter of fact, it can be downright difficult.
But before we go any further however, I do want you to know that if you have been putting off creating a site because A) you felt it was too complicated or B) you felt it would be too expensive, I have some really great free and easy alternatives at the bottom of this post.
But for now, let’s just assume that you don’t want to create a site.
Just remember, the way to become a successful affiliate is to get people to click on your affiliate link and subsequently make a purchase, fill out a form, or whatever it may be that gets you a commission.
Therefore, the most important thing to do is to get your link in front of people right? There are a multitude of ways to do so but, again, they will take time because no matter where you go, how you participate, or even what you say, it will take time to build up trust in you so that someone feels comfortable clicking on your link.
First off, one thing that you can do is create a free eBook that you simply give away. Within this free eBook, you can simply add in your affiliate links so that as your eBook gets passed around (which should be encouraged), the more people will have exposure to it, and the more likely you are to get clicks on your affiliate links.
Obviously, this eBook would be on a similar topic that your affiliate links are promoting. You don’t want to write an eBook about soy candles and then promote golf clubs.
Participate in forums. Virtually any forum online will allow you to add a signature to your profile and this signature can then link off to your affiliate offer. That being said, you should pick a forum that again, is directly related to your affiliate programs’ topic. Once you’ve found these forums, you can then start posting but whatever you do, make certain that you are posting helpful information. If you create a new account and then start making posts on the forum that say things like “great post!” or “thanks for the information” or some other comment that doesn’t directly contribute to the conversation itself, you will not earn a heck of a lot of trust. It takes time.
PPC Marketing. Now, this gets a little “iffy” because if you don’t want to put out the money for creating a website you probably don’t want to have to pay the costs of pay-per-click advertising. Not to mention that Google will probably not let you advertise a direct affiliate link on their network; Facebook however (at least at the time of this writing) will. Not to mention, Facebook is a lot cheaper, and you can target groups of people by age group, interest, where they’re located in the United States, etc. So this is another option to consider as well.
There are lots of ways to market your affiliate link but without having a website but to be honest, it takes about 1,000% more work than if you have a website of your own. Plus, having a website of your own let’s you track how well something is doing for you – something that would be incredibly time-consuming without a site.
That being said, I want to give you some really cheap alternatives to start with. Each of these locations will let you build a website for free (although I do recommend that you have your own domain name if not now, at least a little bit further down the road), and these sites are so easy to use you’ll even surprise yourself!
A Few FAQ’s About Kristine…for friends, family and well, anyone else :-)
Filed under: Facebook, Google, Internet Marketing, Local Online Marketing, Niche Marketing, Online Marketing, twitter
So often I get asked the question “What exactly do you do?” and most often this question comes from friends and family members. If you work online yourself, and you’re reading this, I’m sure that you get these same kinds of questions, and they’re not often easy to answer are they?
Unless your business runs solely online, you probably get some odd looks from time to time when you say “I’m an affiliate marketer” or “I run niche websites.” Most often, these answers are met with a blank and confusing stare. And there’s nothing wrong with that, not at all! If someone came up to me and said “I’m a Comb Capper” I’d probably give them a pretty blank stare myself.
(A Comb Capper is someone who hacks off the top of honeycombs in order to get to the honey inside of a hive. And yes, I had to look that up!)
But what I’ve found is for those folks who don’t work on the Internet, it can be a little difficult to understand exactly what we do and how we can turn a job out of it.
So for those of you with tons of curiosity, here’s the 30-foot view of my “job” online. Although I don’t really think of it as a “job” since I truly love doing what I do.
My primary job is that of owning and operating WirthMarketing.com which helps local businesses get found by current and potential customers online. You can either hire me to do the work, consult with you, or come to speak to your business about it.
As a matter of fact, local businesses are gaining SO MUCH steam online, and there is such a mass amount of confusion surrounding local online marketing, I’ve also decided to…
…create an online video course specifically for local businesses. This video course takes local business owners step-by-step through the entire process of getting their business online. From adding their businesses to Google and Bing, to getting listed in the Yellow Pages online, to creating a website and optimizing it so that the search engines can find it and show it to who really matters…their current and potential customers. (wow! that’s a run-on sentence isn’t it?)
On top of that, I’m writing a book on this exact same topic. This will either be available at your local bookstore (provided someone finds it important enough to publish) and if not, I’ll still add it to Amazon for download.
Since I’ve worked online for so long (initially part-time from 1996-2000) and full-time since the year 2000), and worked for companies such as Working Mother Magazine (mainly doing their back-end PHP programming and database work), I’ve created dozens if not hundreds of websites all focusing on specific niches.
Some of these sites worked well, and others not so well, but, such is the life of working online. I make money from these websites by recommending products that people may be interested in; if someone is interested in a product I talk about, and they subsequently buy it, then I make a commission. This online, is referred to as “affiliate marketing”, offline it’s referred to as a “salesman” (or woman). 
Sometimes people don’t even have to buy a product, all they need to do is click on a link from an ad on one of my pages, and I make money. Not as much, mind you, but it’s still another source of income.
During these years online I became extremely interested in how search engines like Google ranked websites.
Just building a website is not enough. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
And, me, being as analytical as I am, became very curious as to what search engines like Google and Bing found to be “important” when determining how to rank websites. Again, I found a lot of confusion online from website owners about this topic and so I created BoneheadSEO.com which is currently in hiatus (because I’m busy creating the local online marketing course), but will soon be revived with much up to date information. You can read some of my past blog posts here.
My other website at KristineWirth.com (which is where you’re reading this at), currently gets tens of thousands of views per month. And is a blog that focuses on online marketing in general, as well as affiliate marketing.
My “Main” website which is the hub to all of the aforementioned sites (aside from my niche websites), is KristineWirth.net (and this is brand-spanking new). I needed a “mothership” if you will that let people have a one-stop access to all of my sites. This way, whomever stops by can pick and choose what they want to read about, whether that be local marketing, online marketing in general, affiliate marketing, or search engine optimization.
Now, you’ll often see me post on Facebook and my Facebook Page information that may seem a little strange to you. This is because in both of these places there are many people in the same kind of industry that I am. About 80% of the time, the updates that I make in these locations is information that I believe is helpful to them and their online businesses.
Sometimes too, you’ll see me make updates that contain weird little characters such as “@” and “#”. The @ symbol is a symbol used on Twitter in order to refer to someone else. So if your name on Twitter was “JohnDoe” I would reference you in my Twitter update by using your name on Twitter (@JohnDoe). The hash symbol, or “pound” sign (#) is what’s called a hash mark on Twitter and this is used whenever you want to reference something in particular.
For example, recently, I used the hash tag of #bss11 which references an online blogging event that will have speakers who are considered very powerful and popular people in my industry.
Those who are attending or speaking at this event also use this hash tag whenever they’re referencing the same event. That way, anyone who is interested in the event can look up the hash tag on Twitter and see all of the updates about it.
In an effort to streamline my updates so that I’m not having to visit each individual source and make updates for hours on end, I use two separate programs; Amplify and Hootsuite. Sometimes it just depends on my mood which one I use. These programs allow me to update all over the Internet by making one single post which is why you sometimes see the @ symbol and the # symbol in my updates at Facebook especially. These are specific references to Twitter.
In a nutshell, I live and work online.
Someone once said to me “Wow, you’re on Facebook a lot.” Which is true. I’m on Twitter a lot too. The best explanation for this is that the Internet IS my office. Much like others leave for work in the morning and head off to their office building, I head to my own home office, fire up my computer and my laptop and get to work.
So I hope that helps to answer any questions anyone has about me and why you always seem to see me online. If you do, it means that I’m “in my office working”.
