Lets make some money - affiliate systems

[RazoRmedia]

Part 1 - Content is king

Introduction
After a conversation I had with Jay last night, I thought I'd share with you all a few hints and tips to bring in some extra money next year. Basically I work for an online bookmakers and all these tips are used in our marketing, development and planning but they can stretch to anything such as selling books and products online, comparing credit card prices etc.

What is an affiliate
An affiliate is someone who introduces someone to a product or service where they will spend money. An example could be I have a website on gardening and I advertise gardening books on that website which are available through amazon. If a user see's my site and wants to buy one of those books, they click on the link and are redirected to amazon (with my affiliate tag linked in the URL). If amazon then sell the user that book, I get a certain percentage of the cost as I introduced the buyer to amazon. This is the basic principle for affiliates but they all work in different ways. Casinos normally work on 20% of the players losses so if I introduced a player to an online casino who signed up and lost £1000, I would receive £200 of it. There are shock stories of Saudi and Japanese businessmen who have signed up to casinos through affiliate links and lost millions of pounds making the affiliates very happy but these are few and far between.

Starting out
So what do we need? First of all, you need an idea of what you want to sell or what service you want to provide. Theres no point creating a site that tries to do everything as unless you plan to spend all of your waking moments on it, its just not possible. So first of all, you need a clear idea of what your going to do.
Heres my normal thought process:

Online Gambling
Online Gambling > casinos
Do I want to include poker or sports betting? no
Do I want to stick to one geographical area? yes - UK
How much time will I spend on the site? 20 hours to build and then 5 hours per week
Will I do email marketing? Yes

After this initial thought process, its then that we start to design and think about the website / email templates / other areas.

website design
Ok, for this example, I'm going to create a website to promote UK casinos. There are two rules to remember:
1) Content is King
2) Content is King

It doesn't matter how your site looks (although visually pleasing will get you a higher conversion rate) but it does matter about content because search engines love content, they feed off it and the more content you have and the better it is, then the more your site will be spidered and indexed by search engines and the more it will visited and the more revenue you have the chance of making.

For example, look at the following two paragraphs:

Download Bruce casino today to play the best games available.

Download and play on Bruce online Casino today to experience the ultimate in online casino gambling within a secure casino environment. Bruce Casino offers its players the chance to win great cash prizes, unbelievable bonuses and all using the latest online casino software with the sharpest and fastest casino games available in the UK.

If we look at these two paragraphs, they're both perfect English and can be read by users but when search engines read them, they're looking for certain things. If someone searches for the term 'online casino', with the first paragraph, they're getting a partial match for one of the words but with the second paragraph, they're getting 3 complete matches and multitudes of partial and permutated matches. Remember the two rules and you can't go wrong.

website tricks - layers
Obviously, with content being important, flash and graphics are not all that important but the layout of the page is. If we have a large logo at the top of the page with a flash banner next to it, the search engine spiders and robots have quite a bit of code to get through if they want to hit the content thats below it. For example,

check out www.freesoccerbet.com - after the body tag, theres 114 lines of code before decent content is reaced.

compare it with www.onlinecasinocheat.com - there are no lines of code between the body tag and the first bit of content. This is done using layers.

<div id="Layer1" style="position:absolute; width:590; height:125px; z-index:1; left: 5px; top: 73px;" class="normalblack">

By using layers in this way, I can place it in on the screen anywhere I like regardless of where it appears in the source. This also makes a difference to the user as all the content loads before the images or banners on the page giving the user something to read whilst they're waiting.

website tricks - dynamic content
To be honest, its very time consuming updating a static website and its static websites that search engines love. Search engines will not read anything after the '?' in a URL string so if I want a news page on my site to be spidered (http://www.onlinecasinocheat.com/news/news.php?cat=01), I could submit it but with the search engine ignoring everything after the '?', its pointless. So what do we do, turn all our dynamic pages static?

Theres a wonderful little thing called mod rewrite in the apache config which we can use to 'fool' spiders and people alike into thinking we have static pages. Heres how I did it:

1) Locate the '.htaccess' file (normally in the root of the website).
2) Add the following rule to it:

rewriteEngine on 
RewriteRule ^casino_news/([0-9][0-9])/$ news/news.php?cat=$1

3) develop the dynamic pages as normal using news/news.php?cat=01 with two digits for the identifier (01, 02, 03 etc)

When used, this takes the url
http://onlinecasinocheat.com/news/news.php?cat=01
and turns it into
http://www.onlinecasinocheat.com/casino_news/01/

making it seem like the pages are static when in fact they are not. All links on the site to this page point to the latter static link and thats the one search engines will follow.

Hope this is help to some people, more coming soon including pay per clicks and email marketing.

Bruce

[JabezStone]

Bruce,

This is fantastic information.
I'm currently going through the discovery phase right now... looking at what my options are, what demographic/niche I want to connect with, and the affiliate options I want to use to reach them.

So far, I am considering an online affilliate store (two options in mind there... Amazon looking like a good choice, and cj not looking bad either), and google affilliate ads.

My idea is a resource site to a particular segment of society, that will provide articles (good for search engines, too) that are specifically relevant to them. The articles part will take a little more time than just merely doing advertising, but my idea is that good articles will actually become part of the advertising; i.e. people will link to them, boosting my google PR.

In the site, I will use google ads in the body of articles (at the end of the articles, just before the comments), and have an affilliate store as a section of the site, which will sell items relevant to that niche group of people.

I will be using a blog-publishing system for the main part of the site, because my thought is that allowing people to comment will create a community atmosphere... hopefully propelling the return visits to the site.

My next step is to actually figure out how to include the affilliate store into the site, and also work on the design.

As far as initial Google submission, I am going to link this new site from 3 existing sites of mine that get spidered every day... Google should follow the link, and it should get picked up rather quick.

[mrpauly99]

great stuff mate. isnt another way to get ahead of your competitors to keep this to yourself though and not share it to the world? but hey then again it is xmas

ps im in the same business as you razor, maybe our paths will cross someday.

[JabezStone]

Originally posted by mrpauly99
... isnt another way to get ahead of your competitors to keep this to yourself though and not share it to the world? but hey then again it is xmas

Well, yes, that's very true. But then again, with that thought, even Flashkit wouldn't exist, true?

It's nice to be able to give away some tricks without having to give away all of them...

The info Bruce gave so far is a GREAT leaping point to get started with, but it still comes with a lot of work. In fact, I think most of the people who read this thread will say, "Hey, that's great stuff!" but then never do anything with it...

Of course, that's just my thoughts.

I currently now have all of my site plan laid out, and am working on a good design for it.

As Bruce said, the content is the most important part (gets you ranked, and gets you relevence) but I am really interested in having a finely tuned design that people will want to come back to. My goal is to build a resource site that people will use over and over... not just once.

Once the design is done, I'll be able to implement the other features, including blog-style articles (Going to use TextPattern for this) and an affilliate storefront (most likely go with either cj, or amazon, as they both offer web services for their products), and place google ads in the body of my pages.

To start, I will not use any graphical banner ads... I want to gain credibility first. And then, still, I'm not sure that I will use banner ads then. Google-type text ads are the least obtrusive and, (as I've read elsewhere) are more likely now to be clicked then the graphical ads.

[RazoRmedia]

Originally posted by mrpauly99
great stuff mate. isnt another way to get ahead of your competitors to keep this to yourself though and not share it to the world? but hey then again it is xmas

ps im in the same business as you razor, maybe our paths will cross someday.

I do okay on my own, I have lots of individual tips I use to keep me ahead. Believe me, I couldn't start to tell you everything I use as its far too in depth. T|o make money from being an affiliate takes time, money, patience, a hell of a lot of knowledge and hard work.

I can give you advice (like this post) to help people out but theres a lot of work to be put in by yourselves if you want to make a go of this.

Good luck, part II coming soon. Merry Xmas eveyone

Bruce

[Hellsbellboy]

That's great information.. I recall you mentioning it in this thread http://www.flashkit.com/board/showth...hreadid=573224

I'm interested in trying something like this.. and definitely look forward to part II.

[Hellsbellboy]

One thing to think about.. is that Amazon.com had it's busiest Holiday ever http://home.businesswire.com/portal/...53&newsLang=en selling a lot of Ipods, and Lord of the Rings movies, as well as heavey traffic for gifts for Soldiers in Iraq/Afghanistan.