Archive for the ‘Strategies for Success’ Category

Written by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

Those of us in the affiliate marketing world work hard to get visitors to our pages, so it’s disappointing when they turn on their heels and walk out without even clicking a HopLink. The disappointment is intensified if you actually paid for the traffic using PPC advertising.

What can you do about this? Is it possible to still get value from visitors who are leaving your site? Do you just let them walk away, or can you still convert them into potential customers without requiring them to buy right then?

A lot of smart Internet marketers realize that every visitor to their site has value, and they maximize that value by realizing that even though not every visitor will hand over money, they can part with something that may prove just as valuable – their email address. Having a list of qualified, opted-in visitors can be very valuable to your marketing efforts, allowing you to re-market to these visitors later (just follow all CAN-SPAM guidelines), and can be a powerful bargaining chip when negotiating joint ventures with other Internet marketers.

Studies indicate that the majority of site visitors leave within 8 seconds of visiting a site. Another significant percentage leaves after reviewing the landing page and deciding the content is either not relevant, or not compelling enough for them. A mere 3% will actually make a purchase, on average. Interestingly enough, though, approximately 30% of visitors will sign up for a newsletter.

If you’re not getting many email addresses from visitors right now, and you’re feeling frustrated by all the traffic just walking away, then I strongly encourage you to try the following methods to improve your signup conversion rate.

• Popover – A popover is a small overlay containing newsletter signup information that can be set to appear on every visitor’s screen shortly after they arrive at your site. Unlike popups, browser blockers do not affect popovers. They can’t be missed either. They appear in an overlay that sits over the top of the page and can be as detailed as you like, listing the reasons why they should sign up and fields for their name and email address. You can see an example of this on SaleHoo’s main landing page (give it a few seconds to show up). You can style them any way you like and include as much or as little text as you want. To maximize your chances of a signup, make it clear what’s in it for them and make sure the whole process is easy and works smoothly!Testing indicates that delaying the popover for about 20 seconds gives visitors a chance to get familiar with your site so they’ll be more inclined to sign up.

• Sidebar signup – If you run a WordPress site, then adding a sidebar widget is something you can probably do in your sleep. Signup form code can be pasted into a standard text/HTML widget. With your signup form appearing on every page of your site, it increases the chances of it being seen and capturing an email lead before they exit, regardless of the entrance page.

Give them a reason to give you their email

Asking for an email address outright doesn’t generally work. The novelty of getting emails wore off about 10 years ago, so there needs to be a good reason for someone to part with their email address these days!

The secret to getting a visitor’s email address is to think about what they want. It sounds obvious but it’s often ignored. You get them what they want and they’ll give you what you want. Simple.

Think about what you have of value that you can offer in exchange for an email address.

• A free eBook
• A free 7-part mini-course
• A free trial membership
• A free SEO report on the visitor’s website (using an SEO tool like Traffic Travis)

Obviously free is a good start, but make it relevant and you’ll be on to a sure thing. For example, if you have a site about dog training, then offer a 7-part course on house training a puppy. Or, if your site is focused on Internet marketing, tempt them with a “Beginners Guide to PPC” eBook.

Give visitors two options: Buy or leave their email address

If you’re only focusing on making sales you’re ignoring around 97% of your visitors. That’s not good business practice. If you put as much effort into capturing email addresses as you do trying to make a sale then you can look forward to a far more successful online business in the future, with an email list that can potentially earn you a lot of extra dollars in the months to come.

Do you try to capture email addresses? What works for you?

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Written by: Steven Clayton, Guest Blogger

One of the things I get asked a lot is where to begin as an affiliate marketer.

It can all be so overwhelming. There are so many different ways to get traffic, build sites, and pick products to promote (these are the three components of any affiliate marketing effort). In addition, some of these traffic and site building options can be expensive and highly technical, requiring a lot of training and expertise.

My goal in this post is to highlight a way to get started as an affiliate that’s relatively easy, risk-free, zero cost, has a great chance to make your first money online, and doesn’t require any technical knowledge or experience.

We’re going to use ClickBank for our product, a BlogSpot blog for our website, and search engine optimization to get traffic. If you’re totally new to search engine optimization and want a very quick introduction, you may want to check out this video.

Step 1 – Find 10 products you’re interested in promoting

• One of the best parts of being an affiliate for ClickBank is that it’s so easy to get started because there are thousands of unique products to promote. Once you have a ClickBank account, go to the Marketplace and browse it to find products that you have an interest in and/or that you or someone you know would buy.
• Make a note of the products, including their Pitch Pages and the custom HopLinks you’ll use to promote them (you’ll get these by clicking the Promote button next to the Marketplace listing). It’s a good idea to save this information in a text file on your computer.

Step 2 – Find potential keywords using Google’s keyword tool

• Go to Google’s external keyword tool.
• For each product you picked in Step 1, enter the most generic keyword that applies to your product. For example, if you’re promoting a product on how to cure tinnitus, use the keyword “tinnitus” and click the Get Keyword Ideas button.
• Go over to the Match Type drop down box and select Phrase Match.
• Sort the list in descending order of global search volume by clicking on the column Title.
• Make a list of any keyword that is between 10000 and 30000 global monthly searches, and that has something to do with your product.
• At the end of this step, you’ll have 10 lists. Some of these lists may be empty, as it’s possible that there won’t be any keywords that meet our criteria.  We’re being very careful about selecting only the ones that will work for us, so have patience and don’t get discouraged.

Step 3 – Evaluate the competition for SEO

• Now we need to see if it would be possible for us to actually rank in Google for terms that would drive traffic to the product we’re going to market. For each keyword identified in Step 2, head over to Google and type the keyword in quotes. For example, if the keyword phrase was “cure tinnitus,” you’d type “cure tinnitus” into Google.
• You’ll see the search results and the words “Results 1-10 of about xx,xxx” on the right hand side. If the xx,xxx number is less than 100,000, move on to the next step. Otherwise, discard this keyword.
• Do another Google search by typing inurl:”keyword phrase”. For example, for our keyword above it would be inurl:”cure tinnitus”. Take a look at the number of results again. If that number is below 1,250, this keyword is a winner. Make a note of it.

Step 4 – Pick the keyword you want to start with and build a BlogSpot blog

• We’ve picked a BlogSpot blog for 2 reasons: it’s easy to build a nice-looking site quickly, and blogs rank very well in Google.
• In general, pick the keyword phrase that has the highest search volume, the lowest competition numbers from step 3, and seems to be the best fit for someone looking to actually buy your product. There are really no wrong answers here, just go with your instinct using these criteria as a guide.
• Build your BlogSpot blog. Sign up and watch the tutorials on how to create content like posts. When setting up your blog, make sure that the blog title is your keyword phrase.
• Make sure that the blog address (URL) also contains the keyword phrase you’ve picked in some way. So in our example, best-tinnitus-cure, my-tinnitus-cure, etc., all work just fine. Dashes are fine anywhere, so with a bit of creativity you should have no trouble coming up with a name that’s not been taken.
• The goal of your blog is to inform and to sell. Provide valuable content from the Pitch Page of the product, as well as outside resources. Add your HopLink to the actual product using text and possibly images. You can often get images from an affiliate page for the product, which can be found in the product’s Vendor Spotlight in the ClickBank Marketplace.
• Important: Never make up any information about the product! I encourage you to buy the product or have someone you know purchase the product, so you can give a truthful and accurate opinion of it.
• The exact steps to build out the site are too extensive to go into here, but an example should do the trick.  Check this page out.  It will give you a great idea of what we’re after.

Step 5 – Do some link building

• Link building is the key to search engine optimization, and the best way to quickly get included in search engine results for the keyword you’re targeting.
• The process of getting a backlink is a bit different for each option listed below, but you can’t go wrong here.  The idea is to do three things: get a link to your site, use your keyword phrase in the description or tag when you’re using a bookmarking site, use your keyword phrase as the “anchor text” (the text that’s clickable…that is the actual link to your site) whenever possible.  Don’t worry about getting this perfect…any link is better than a perfect link, and you can do no harm!
• Blog comment posting is a popular way of getting backlinks.  Here’s a nice page that explains how to do it.
• Social bookmarking can be a great way to build backlinks to your site.  Here’s a huge list of them! Just set up an account with them and add your site.
• Web 2.0 properties like Squidoo, Hubpages, etc. are great places to put up a small amount of content and then to add a backlink to your site.  Here’s a nice list of these types of sites.
• Also take a look at this guest blog post I did previously for other ideas.

Try to build at least 5-10 backlinks every single day! This will give you the quickest results.

Conclusion

The most important part of this process is the keyword research in steps 2 and 3.  If you have trouble finding the right keyword phrases for the 10 products you selected, go get 10 more and try again. Have patience. If you stick it out and find the right keywords, the rest will usually take care of itself.

After a while… it could be days, could be weeks, you should show up in the Google search results and people will click on your links to the ClickBank product and you’ll make your first money online! Best of luck in your affiliate marketing efforts.

About the author

Steven Clayton and his partner Tim Godfrey are the creators of several best-selling Internet Marketing information products, including Commission Blueprint 2.0, Niche Blueprint, and SEM Business Blueprint. You can get more great advice and information on their blog.

Written by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

This is the final post in my “Competitive Niches” series. Be sure to check out Part 1,  Part 2,  Part 3 and Part 4 if you haven’t already!

#5 – Look for the niche within a niche

Some affiliates fail because they think of a niche as a single entity. So if you ask them what niche they’re in, they’ll say “weight loss” and then they wonder why they don’t seem to be getting any traction. The sites that thrive in these competitive niches are the ones who have discovered niches within the niche.

For example, some successful affiliates have targeted a specific subset of weight loss customers, such as people looking for high protein diets. When you start researching this sub-niche you start to discover a lot of different products you can promote, and it can be enough to support your Internet marketing business.

So remember, you don’t need to take on the whole niche. Just find a healthy niche within the niche and you’ll have your sales without the excessive competition that comes with being too generic.

For example, some weight loss sub-niches you could try include:

• High protein diets
• Bride diets
• Belly fat diets
• Low carb diets

We’re barely scratching the surface here, but something you’ll find with competitive niches is that they fragment really well, allowing you to easily find a sub-niche you can quite happily take on.

Have you been scared off taking on a competitive niche? What would make it easier? Do you think taking on competitive niches is a waste of time? Please leave a comment with your thoughts!

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Written by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

This is Part 4 in my “Competitive Niches” series. Be sure to check out Part 1,  Part 2 and Part 3 if you haven’t already!

#4 – An organized link building campaign

It’s been said that 80% of search engine “love” comes from backlinks to your site. That’s not to say that all the on-page SEO you do is not worth doing – it is – but you should remember that without backlinks you won’t stand a chance in a competitive niche.

Link building can be challenging and you might actually feel it’s more ‘link begging’ than link building. While there’s nothing wrong with asking for a link, remember there are lots of other ways you can get a backlink to your site. Here are a few suggestions:

• Article directories such as ezinearticles.com or squidoo.com
• Industry directories that are directly related to your niche
• Forum posts or blog comments (search for CommentLuv blogs that offer dofollow comment links)

The advantage of creating your own backlinks is that you can use the anchor text of your choice, and using the keyword phrase in backlinks to your site is a huge plus for boosting your site’s relevancy for a specific keyword phrase.

Remember to monitor your backlinks with SEO tools like Yahoo! Site Explorer, Google Webmaster tools or Traffic Travis. While not all backlinks are reported, these tools will help you gauge how successful your link building campaigns are.

Stay tuned for Part 5, where I talk about focusing your niche to be even more competitive.

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Written by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

This is Part 3 in my “Competitive Niches” series. Be sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven’t already!

#3 – Thinking outside the box

It’s difficult to tackle competition head-on. Like any great battle commander will tell you, it’s more effective to attack your enemy from the rear or even the side. Similarly, affiliates can be more successful by thinking outside the box and coming up with new ways of doing things. Dell was able to shake up the computer industry by selling direct to the public online, rather than through retail outlets. So instead of thinking about what your competition are doing, think about what they’re not doing.

If you’re in the weight loss niche, is there something other affiliates are not giving customers? For many customers in this niche, a sense of community support is vitally important and has been the basis of success for offline weight loss services such as Jenny Craig. As an affiliate, could you fill this gap? For example, you might try some of the following ideas:

• Add a weight loss widget to your blog that allows readers to enter this week’s losses
• Build up an online discussion forum around reviewing weight loss products
• Allow visitors to your site to create their own profile page where fellow members can post messages of support
• Add a Twitter list to your site that collects inspiring and encouraging tips for people trying to lose weight

Stay tuned for Part 4 next Monday, where I’ll talk about organized link building campaigns.

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Written by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

This is Part 2 of my series “Competitive Niches.” Be sure to check out Part 1 first if you haven’t already.

#2 – An effective SEO strategy

Most website owners say they do SEO, but a lot of them are half-hearted about it. They forget that the O in SEO stands for optimization. When you optimize for something it means you are thorough in covering all your bases to make sure your site is built for ranking, with every screw tightened and every page fine-tuned for search engine love. Just having the keyword in the page title is not enough!

You can review how heavily optimized the top 20 sites are for any given keyword phrase using the SEO Analysis feature in Traffic Travis. It looks at 12 different things a website can do to optimize for a phrase, so you can check if a site is dropping the O out of SEO!

Some particularly important SEO factors to keep in mind:

• Keywords in H1 headings, page titles or page description
• Directory listings in DMOZ or Yahoo!
• Backlinks to your site (including trusted backlinks from .edu and .gov sites)

If any of your competitors are missing one or more of these things, then you’ve just found a significant weakness that can be exploited for your own benefit.

While SEO is sometimes talked about like a way to ‘game’ the search engines, it’s better to think of it as preparing a good CV (or resumé for you Americans). And as we all know, when it comes to getting a job, sometimes half an hour’s extra tweaking can make all the difference.

Stay tuned for Part 3 tomorrow, where I’ll talk about “thinking outside the box” when it comes to your niche.

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Written by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

Something that I love about the internet is the way it has removed a lot of the barriers to getting started in a particular industry or niche. There is a certain amount of democracy to the online world that has removed the stranglehold that large, well-established players had on the marketplace. Ten years ago it would have been very unlikely that a small Internet marketing company from New Zealand would be competing successfully on the global scene, but now it’s a reality.

With that said, it’s still not exactly a piece of cake. Taking on a competitive niche and clambering your way to the top is a challenging task involving tactical thinking and determination.

If it seems like shooting for the stars, I invite you to think about these 5 ideas on tackling top niches – you might decide it’s more achievable than you think.

#1 – Know your target

If you’re thinking, “this sounds familiar,” then you’re right. I talked about knowing your target in a recent post about keyword research, but it’s worth repeating.

So what does knowing your target have to do with tackling a competitive niche? Lots. To illustrate my point, I want to use Subway as a real-world example. Subway took on the world’s biggest franchise, McDonald’s, and became a big player in the fast food niche. They didn’t do it by trying to copy McDonald’s – they did it by getting to know their target better. Learning that fast-food customers wanted healthier options, Subway targeted that hole in the market and became very successful, building up almost twice as many outlets in the US as McDonald’s.

You can replicate Subway’s strategy by thinking about the niche you’re tackling and really getting to know your target market. For example, are you in the ‘stop smoking’ niche?

• What products are quitters talking about right now?
• Is there a new product that’s just come out and is in demand?
• Is there something in particular that is a real concern for people trying to quit, such as dealing with a relapse? Remember to really listen to what people are saying here. Be prepared to alter your perceptions and don’t make the mistake of clinging to your own assumptions.

You’ll notice that effective affiliate sites keep up with the latest trends and stay in tune with what their target market is talking about.

Stay tuned for Part 2 tomorrow, where I’ll discuss developing an effective SEO strategy.

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Posted by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

Even though a lot of marketers are turning to social media to ‘tweet’ their message, email is still a powerful way to promote your ClickBank products. With over 100,000 subscribers on our mailing list, Affilorama has to wield the power of this medium carefully. Emails that are overly promotional quickly turn potential customers into irritated readers who won’t think twice about hitting the delete button or, worse, reporting it as spam.

By providing value to subscribers we’ve been able to prove the ‘money in the list’ axiom true (we can’t release exact figures but sales improve around 300% with a good email newsletter) and we’d like to share a few secrets we’ve learned along the way that you can use to market ClickBank products or create newsletter collateral for your affiliates.

Beware of these 3 dangers!

Before we talk about what you should be doing to promote products using email, here’s a little checklist of things which can help you avoid being tagged as a spammer. Sure, they might be common knowledge, but they are important enough to be repeated.

• Beware of honeypots – Honeypots are a form of spam traps. Spam traps are specifically set up with the aim of catching spammers. They are email addresses “hidden” on a web page, but which can be found by address harvesting programs, commonly used by spammers. Unfortunately it can affect legitimate email marketers, too. In one case, a prominent email marketer lost 100,000 email addresses after a honeypot email address was added to their list by a competitor. To make sure this doesn’t happen to you, choose an email service that offers a double opt-in option. This way any email address has to be verified with a confirmation email before being added to your list.
• Get familiar with the law – Laws on emailing people vary from one country to another so make sure that you are familiar with the legislation that governs electronic messages. For example, the CAN-SPAM act introduced in the US in 2003 dictates how businesses should follow certain protocols when sending emails to avoid prosecution. The FTC provides a good explanation of what it means for commercial email marketers, such as affiliates.
• Make it easy to unsubscribe – Sure you don’t want to actively encourage people to leave your list after you’ve worked so hard to sign them up, but if you make it difficult, complicated, or hide unsubscribe options, not only will you lose them mentally but instead of unsubscribing they’ll probably report you as spam. And make sure your process unsubscribes within a week (most email services do it automatically).

Enough of the ‘shalt nots’, time to move on to some good ideas for getting ‘bang for your buck’ out of your email newsletter.

4 secrets of effective email marketing

I’ve picked 4 because it’s a nice even number, not because there are only 4. In fact, there are plenty more and I invite you to add your own in the comments, but for now here’s a quick rundown of four ideas that will get your email promotions off to a good start.

• Kick off with a fantastic subject line – Some people have to deal with so many emails that they often make a decision on whether to read an email based on the subject line – so think of it as your one shot at glory. Give them a great reason to read your email, such as “1-day 50% off sale” or “5 reasons why your dog doesn’t listen to you.” The better you know your audience, the more effective your subject lines will be.
• Remind them why they signed up – Sometimes people sign up in a moment of weakness. To keep them on your list, you’ll need to regularly remind them that it was a good choice. By listing reasons why it’s good to be a subscriber (exclusive offers, secret links to valuable resources, etc.) you’ll not only make them feel good about being a subscriber, they’ll actually look forward to your next newsletter and may even encourage their friends to sign up.
• Create valuable content – This point probably suffers from a bit of overuse but it can’t be stressed enough, particularly when you have a commercial overtone. Some successful email marketers will only send a sales email every 4^th or 5^th email – the rest will just be useful content that they give away for free. When promoting ClickBank products this should be easy, since you quite likely have good information on the niche from the merchant, PLR content, or your own research. This can easily be packaged into an email to give your readers value.
• Set an expectation for frequency – The key with frequency is to strike a happy medium. With email frequency, this is more about setting expectations, rather than a particular interval. For example, if you offer a free six-day mini-course then obviously your subscribers will be expecting an email a day for the next six days. Beyond that, a weekly email might be the right frequency, particularly if your emails are short, relevant, and to the point. The other extreme is not emailing them for weeks, then surprising them (not in a good way) with something out of the blue. By that time, there’s every chance they will have forgotten they subscribed in the first place!

Build, test and tweak!

As you spend time writing your emails, you may run into questions about whether to include direct links to the vendor or send people to your own website. Like other issues you may face with your emails, there’s often no right or wrong answer, and it may well depend on your audience. If they don’t click through to your website, then it may be better to try sending them direct to the vendor instead (remembering to track your HopLinks with a unique TID so you know how effective your emails are).

It’s all about testing to find out what works, and then tweaking so your emails hit their target.

Using email to promote ClickBank products is a great investment for times when organic traffic to your site drops off. This could be due to any number of reasons, from increased competition to poor ranking for an important keyword.

If you have a list to promote to, you won’t just be sitting back hoping buyer traffic will find your site – you will be proactively reaching out to them. Do it right and you’ll find it an effective way to increase your ClickBank sales.

So if you don’t already promote ClickBank products by email, what’s stopping you? Have you found a winning formula for writing effective emails that provide value to the reader but also promote your ClickBank products?

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Posted by: Steven Clayton, Guest Blogger

Anyone who pays attention to SEO techniques knows that getting high quality, “do follow,” and diverse backlinks is the key to search engine optimization. The challenge, of course, is where to find places to get powerful backlinks.

Most people build their link building strategies around blog and forum postings. This makes sense and is certainly part of our plans as well. However, it stands to reason that Google also knows that most marketers who are using SEO tactics to rank their sites are doing this, and it makes sense that they will be looking for a much more diverse backlink pattern to award the highest rankings to.

With that in mind, I’m going to share the top 5 non-forum/blog backlink sources that we teach in Commission Blueprint 2.0.

1. Squidoo Lists

Squidoo.com is a great place to get links back to your site. Type the following into a Google search:

“add+to+this+list”+site:squidoo.com

You will be presented with a huge list of Squidoo lenses where you can add your site, with custom anchor text. Many of these have very high PageRank as well!

For extra credit, append +”keyword phrase” onto the end of this query, and you can target your links for relevance. For example, if you were trying to rank a fitness site you could type:

“add+to+this+list”+”fitness”+site:squidoo.com

2. Web 2.0 Profiles

Many Web 2.0 sites that allow you to create profiles and interact with others provide high PageRank, “do follow” links to the website listed in your profile. Some examples include www.linkedin.com, www.flickr.com, www.twibs.com, and www.zoominfo.com.

When creating profiles on these sites (which you could do for every niche you’re in) you’re able to list your website, which becomes a high quality backlink to your site.

3. Article Marketing for Links

Most marketers are familiar with writing articles to get traffic, but we write most of our articles for backlinks. If you’ve put a link to your site within the article (and let’s certainly hope you’re doing that!), every article that gets posted becomes a backlink (or even 2 or 3). The more articles that get posted, the more links you can build.

To get started, you simply have to write the article and submit it to a few article directories. I recommend: www.Ezinearticles.com, www.goarticles.com, and www.articledashboard.com.

There is absolutely no problem or penalty with submitting the same article to all three places (submit to Ezinearticles first, though, as they are the strictest with regard to unique content), and if you are accepted by all three and have 2 links in each article, your article will result in 6 high quality backlinks!

4. Relevant Lists and Resource Directories

There are many websites that function as a resource for people interested in a particular topic. For example, one site may maintain a list of top weight loss sites to visit. A backlink from pages like these can provide high quality, highly relevant backlinks. The relevance of backlinks is being talked about much more by Google lately, and it is assumed that relevance will play a larger role in site ranking in the near future.

The trick is to find these sites quickly and efficiently. We’ve found the following Google search queries to work very well:

“Keyword phrase” + “add url”

“Keyword phrase” + “add site”

“Keyword phrase” +  “add website”

For example, if you’re looking to build backlinks to a fitness-related site, you can search for:

“fitness” + “add url”

Google will return a huge list of sites that will allow you to add your web site, creating a backlink to your site.

One thing to watch out for is that many of the sites you’ll come across will ask for a reciprocal link (i.e., we’ll link to you if you link to us). These should be avoided. It’s worth the effort to sift through these sites to find ones where you can add your link without having to place a reciprocal link on your site, because these links are less valuable for SEO purposes.

Make sure to keep a list or database of all of these great link building sites/resources that you find, so you don’t have to search for them again the next time!

5. Easy EDU Links

I’ve saved my favorite and most unique tip for last. It’s commonly accepted knowledge that .EDU and .GOV backlinks are valued very highly when Google decides on your search rank position. Some people also know the “trick” to finding blogs and forums on .EDU domains, where they can leave useful comments that link back to their sites. If you don’t, here’s a great Google query to find .EDU blogs:

site:.edu inurl:blog “post a comment” -”you must be logged in”

We’re after something more valuable, though. How about a whole page on an .EDU domain where you can put an article or a whole blog post, as opposed to just a comment? All you need is a willing college student!

At many schools, college students are given web space they can use for anything they like. Of course, this web space is hosted on the .EDU domain. All we need to do is to get this college student to allow us to post our material if they like it. But how do you go about finding these students?

If you really think about it, you can’t possibly be many degrees of separation away from knowing someone who’s in college right now. Think about your circle of friends and family, and branch out from there. For example, even though I’m “older” (I have teenage children… sigh), I still have 3 cousins that are attending college right now. If I expand my reach further, friends of my parents have children in college. I’m also getting to the age where my friends are starting to have kids in college. In short, I can’t throw a rock into my personal network without hitting a college student!

All you have to do is approach these students in your network and ask for their help, or give them something in exchange, for the privilege of putting some content on their site. It’s as simple as that.

I hope these tips help you improve your search engine rankings and make you a more successful Internet Marketer!

About the author

Steven Clayton and his partner Tim Godfrey are the creators of several best-selling Internet Marketing information products, including Commission Blueprint 2.0, Niche Blueprint, and SEM Business Blueprint. You can get more great advice and information on their blog.

Please note: Any opinions or strategies expressed here represent those of the author, and cannot be guaranteed to work by ClickBank.

Posted by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

Disclaimer: Please don’t take any of this as legal advice. I’m not a lawyer. I would always recommend seeking professional legal advice if you are unsure on any areas.

Nike, iPhone, Google, ClickBank – these words catch your attention because they are strong brands and are instantly recognizable. So why not use that to your advantage and include these names in your advertising? Could you get into trouble for using a brand name?

With a pretty decent AdWords spend each year, our own advertising here at Affilorama needs to be highly effective yet fully compliant. Let’s talk about some ways you can safely use trademarked brands in your advertising, and some dangerous pitfalls you want to avoid.

Vendors – Protecting your brand

If you’re a vendor, you know how important it is to develop a strong brand and look after your reputation. As your success grows so will the number of competitors, affiliates, and resellers interested in using your trademarked name(s). But the internet is a massive playground to patrol – how can you effectively monitor your brand?

• Register your brand – You can choose to register your brand for added security in key markets. For example, in the US you can register with the US Patent and Trademark Office. This can be a powerful asset to have when you need to prevent someone using your trademark without your permission.
• Google Alerts – A great way to monitor online activity that involves your brand name is to set up a free Google Alert.
• Traffic Travis PPC Analysis – Monitor advertisers who are using specific keywords, such as your trademarked names, using the PPC Analysis tool.
• Social Media search – Some social media sites are “walled gardens” and won’t appear in a standard Google search. This means you will need to perform manual searches on sites like Facebook.

What can you do if you come across what you feel is misuse of your brand?

• Is it misuse? – First, make sure your brand is actually being misused. Google has recently relaxed the use of trademarked names by advertisers, particularly in the US. It’s also possible that the use of your brand by someone else is actually to your advantage, in the form of free publicity.
• Contact the offender - If you are still unhappy with the use of your trademarked name, then the best course of action is to attempt to contact the offender directly and resolve the matter. Beware of “burning bridges,” as the offender may not have been misusing it intentionally and could be a powerful advocate for your product.
• Legal recourse – If the matter is still not resolved to your satisfaction, you can turn to a third party for assistance. Google has clear guidelines on its policies for trademark usage and ClickBank has its own trademark policy that all clients must adhere to.

Affiliates – Using trademarked names the right way

Using a trademarked name can be a very effective method of promoting a product, but done outside proper usage guidelines will only create problems. So what’s the best way to use a trademarked name?

• Work with the vendor – Cooperation and openness is the best policy to gain maximum advantage from using a trademarked name. A vendor can provide extra support and resources to boost your promotion. For example SaleHooReview is an affiliate website that promotes our popular wholesale directory service, SaleHoo. He contacted us and thus began a productive relationship that works for both parties, an arrangement that allows him to use our trademarked SaleHoo brand on his site and in his domain name.
• Avoid negative intent – Some affiliates have been known to use a trademarked name in a negative way, such as advertising a poor review of a product to grab attention, or to switch to a competing product. If you intend to use the trademarked name in a way that casts the vendor in a bad light, then expect to be challenged for its usage.
• Keep it ethical – Trademarked names are often used in a negative way to trick consumers. Counterfeiters are notorious for tricking consumers into believing they are buying the real thing by using names that closely resemble the original product name. Other unethical uses include impersonating the actual vendor and directly linking to their site with an affiliate link. Some of these practices are thoroughly policed and banned by Google.
• Check advertising guidelines – Google updated their policies in June 2009, relaxing its rules on the use of trademarked names in selected countries including the US and the UK. Trademarks can be used in your targeted keywords and AdWords ad copy if you sell or review a product. But just because Google allows it doesn’t mean the vendor will – it pays to check if they place any restrictions on using their trademarked names.

Vendors and Affiliates working together with Vendor Spotlight

There’s a certain synergy that comes from vendors and affiliates working together. Rather than a vendor spending their time hunting down the “bad guys,” they can focus on working with the majority of affiliates who are genuinely interested in promoting their products in a legitimate manner.

An excellent way to build bridges with affiliates is for vendors to create their own Vendor Spotlight. The Vendor Spotlight is a good way for vendors to communicate with affiliates, and potential affiliates, about what support and resources they offer affiliates, current promotions, sales trends, and other news and tips for selling more product. We use the SaleHoo Vendor Spotlight for keeping our affiliates informed of new material we add to the affiliates area on SaleHoo or special promotions that we run.

If you need to ask the vendor questions about use of their trademarked names, and seem unable to find a way to contact them, talk to ClickBank. They may be able to mediate on your behalf.

Using trademarked names when promoting ClickBank products can really boost your sales, increasing your profile and your commissions. But when the rules of fair usage are ignored, the resulting conflict is not good for anyone.

Do you use trademarked names or brands in your promotions? What’s worked best for you? Do you feel the policies on brand name usage are too relaxed?

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education and software tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers.

Please note: Any opinions expressed here represent those of the author, and are not necessarily recommended or endorsed by ClickBank.