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Why is Aaron Wall one of the top SEO???s?

Aaron Wall SEO Book, is one of the highest ranking SEO sites but why, on the face of it his site is nothing special a glorified blog it???s not even hugely optimised for the term SEO so why is it there?

Answer: Affiliate marketing
Aaron runs an affiliate program yep that???s his book we are promoting on the right, this scheme provides thousands of back links all from highly targeted relevant sites. For him it???s a win win situation his book gets promoted and he gets back links, lots of back links.

If you provide a service or product you to could be harnessing the power of an affiliate network.

Before you start
Now before you go getting all excited there are some cons to this win win situation and the con is the win your affiliates.

You soon realise that their good affiliates and then the spam junkies managing your affiliates can become a nightmare its one of the reasons people look to affiliate management companies to act as middlemen.

The second problem is the affiliate cut, you see they may be driving sales to you but they are also taking a cut from that sale if you have only a tiny profit margin on your goods you will see that shrink even further.

Doing it alone or Affiliate marketing company
Still with us, great now comes the big question do you run the affiliate scheme yourself or ask an affiliate management company to do it for you.

A Management Company takes care of finding, advertising and running your affiliates for either a percentage of the sales (cutting profit margins even more) a variable fee or both.

Doing it yourself means you need to find, manage and run your affiliates, organise payments etc

Ultimately this is going to come down to the way you want to handle your expansion, either way is going to cost at least a little, though the DIY is probably cheaper in the long run, you will not have the ability to fall back on the experience of your affiliate management company when it goes wrong. For this post I???m going to presume you went the DIY route (we will do a round up of some of the best affiliate management companies in a later post)

Self managing affiliates

You will need software to manage and track your affiliates, their sales etc
Both myself and Aaron use iDevAffiliate software its very reasonably priced with the basic version being just $99

However unless you are reasonable coder you will want to get the SEO friendly links module which is another $99.99. Personally I use the Gold version, which includes all the addon modules. There are plenty of others out there but iDevAffiliate does a pretty good job at a good price and I would recommend it.

Setting it up is a breeze and you will be managing your affiliates in no time, remember to use the SEO addon to create nice 301 redirects for your affiliates this way your affiliates will not only be bringing in traffic but also helping with your rankings.

A good affiliate scheme will provide banners and various link etc to assist its affiliates the more you can provide them the better, I offer banners, button???s, targeted anchor text links, and even example landing pages with additional graphics for their use be creative.

Recruiting Affiliates should be the easy part a good way to start is the ???closed membership??� advertise on forums etc for a 100 or so affiliates places like DP, Webdigity and Wickedfire are packed full of people eager to be your affiliate sadly for you they are probably not the ones you are after. However a mixture of forum activity and contacting well known and respected affiliate marketers might well pay off, after a few months expand the group a hundred at a time. I find this works really well particularly if you provide a waiting email list.

Paying your affiliates is the next problem the quickest and easiest way is through PayPal, make sure you have a PayPal business account that is verified, other options could include Google checkout or good old fashion cheques (though these come with their own added issues).

Final thought

This was a brief intro to the world of affiliate marketing from the other side and its suitable for everyone from a drop ship merchant, Directory owner even an SEO consultant!
One very final thought Aarons??? book is actually very good so maybe the reason he is considered one of the best isn???t just down to affiliates but you will have to read his book to find out!

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Update: Talk about a cock up, I initially named this post Multi layer marketing, this while a quite accurate description is not what MLM stands for! I’m now suitably embarrassed Thanks to Linda Buquet for spotting it (shame she didn’t post a comment to tell me! – I do hate embarrassing trackbacks!)

Have you ever been in a forum and met a poster who wrote a really inane comment such as “sure that’s great” or just blatent spam. Normally these darlings have a link in their signature to an E-Book but what are they doing and why are they polluting forums, news lists and anywhere else they can find? Welcome to MLM or multi level marketing

Introduction

I’m sure the modern day MLM pushers would say it came from the late 90′s but its far older, indeed while it may not have routes in ancient egypt they share a very similar symbolism!
MLM (when discussed in this context) are a modern version of the Pyramid scheme and while they take many forms the timeshare is the most famous real world example.

Pyramid scheme works on the principle that members recruit new members and earn money not only from bonuses for recruiting new members but that of the recruited member and who ever they recruit. For most members of such schemes there is a rather obvious problem that we will come back to in a minute. But let us just say only a few will profit from such a scheme.

At this point I should point out that the term MLM has been polluted and the original concepts of Multi level marketing were not pyramid schemes as their was (is a physical product) involved, keep in mind most MLM today and on the web have no physical product at all (except perhaps a virus)

A second point to bear in mind is that in the UK, US and many other countries pyramid schemes are illegal people have in the past gone to prison for running such schemes.

How does it all work

Let’s presume we are talking about the legal MLM schemes and take a traditional (if grey example)

An Ebook seller wishes to distribute his pride and joy, he therefore offers a great scheme where he asks people to sell his ebook on his behalf, he offers commission per sale but it is much lower then normal affiliate schemes however anybody who refers another member not only earns commission on their own sale but that of the new member and all members they recruit and so one.

Sound familiar?
It could be worse people actually pay to join such schemes!
Lets look at what’s happening here…

The guy at the top in this scenario is our ebook seller he as you can see is laughing all the way to the bank, the next layer, spend their time recruiting others rather then selling books, soon they have recruited another level, who start selling, but realise they are not making money as fast as they thought, they ask the “guru’s” what to do, and so they start recruiting and selling as well, layer after layer with those at the top getting richer and those entering finding it harder.

But what’s the con?

So far this hasn’t sounded to bad but you got to start thinking about it logically for a moment, in the above scenario we actually do have a product an e-book to sell, their is a finite number of people who wish to buy such a thing (and remember most MLM schemes the product is complete crap) we also have a second more pressing problem both MLM and pyramids schemes only work if each new layer recruits more people on their own a single member will not make any (or very limited money) this is common sense as 3 people will in theory earn more money then each other but lets say the scheme has 6 original members, they suggest that each member recruits 6 members, that’s pretty easy now isn’t!

Now if your at the top or one the first its looking good, but more then 2 layers down and your chances of making money has dropped now remember this version is legal as their is a product so you can still make money selling that ebook right?

Difference with Affiliate marketing

So what is the difference simply affiliate marketing offers commission on a per sale basis and in some cases offer referral bonuses for new affiliates but do not allow you to gain either money from their commissions (not quite true some offer a small percentage) nor any bonuses from subsequent members they recruit. However the commissions are normally much better then MLM schemes.

How do I know what I’m joining

Some obvious things to avoid,

• Join up fee, with bonuses for recruiting members – this is a traditional pyramid scheme and on the whole utterly illegal
• Low commission but promise that bonuses and return of commissions from recruited members – Traditional MLM not always a scam but your chances of earning money is limited by which level you are joining
• Any one who says using forums to sell ebooks works

The official difference between MLM and pyramid is an MLM scheme has a product which doesn’t require membership and therefore provides two methods of income and in theory is more sustainable. In reality most of these schemes have dodgy products worth almost nothing with no physical value such as ebook is it a pyramid scheme or an MLM you decide.

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Wise Camel writes about 10 Sales and Marketing Tips he learned from Strippers

Lee Odden publishes the results of a poll about the best keyword research tool.

Eric Enge gives some very valuable information regarding paid links which you should consider in your next paid link campaign

Andy Beard give us a lot of valuable information regarding SEO and wordpress. A must read article.

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Today I will try to post a small tutorial on how to create a search engine using Clickbank’s marketplace. For that we will need some basic PhP knowledge, a clickbank account and CBcontextual, a script that has all the technical problems solved for us

The Basics

I am not sure what do you know for all these so let’s start with the basics :

What is Clickbank?

Clickbank is an affiliate network that deals with download products. Download products are anything someone can download, software, ebooks, content, etc. Clickbank is not selling products of their own but instead they work as a middleman between you and thousands of vendors.

The good thing about this company is that they have very high commissions that go up to 75% so it is an affiliate network that really worths to join.

What is CBcontextual?

CBcontextual is a php/mysql script that uses the Clickbank marketplace in order to deliver high targeted contextual advertisements to your web site. So suppose that with this script you can have adsense like ads to your site but those ads pay you commissions up to 75% of each sale you may deliver

Using the CBcontextual script to create our own Clickbank search engine

Creating our search engine using Clickbank products would be really difficult before some time, but thanks to CBcontextual’s API it can be done very easily and fast. So here is how the API works :

The CBcontextual script API

The API can work with 3 formats :

• XML
• text
• PhP

For this tutorial we will use the php method witch is the easiest to use. It simply returns a serialized array with the listings so there is no need for extra parsing.

Creating the seach engine

The first step is to create a form to submit our search criteria :

<form method="post" action="/example.php" >
<input type="text" name="q" value="" />
<input type="submit" value="Search" />
</form>


Then we need some settings regarding our CBcontextual installation. What we need is our username and password (the one you use to check your statistics, and the url of your installation (eg. http://example.com/clickbank)

<?php
$uname = '';//Username in your CBcontextual installation
$pass = '';//Password in your CBcontextual installation
$instURL = 'http://www.example.com/clickbank';//The url path to your CBcontextual installation. No trail slash
$limit = 10;//How many results to display
?>

And now the core code. As you can see working with CBcontextual’s API is very cool because our search engine needs only 8 lines of code to coded


<?php
if ( !empty($_POST['q'])){
$results = unserialize(file_get_contents($instURL.'/api.php?
uname='.$uname.'&pass='.$pass.'
&nr='.$limit.'&type=php&keywords='.$_POST['q']));
if ( !$results )
echo 'No results. Please search again.';
else{
foreach ( $results as $res )
echo '<a href="'.$instURL.'/clk.php?i='.$res['id'].'">'.$res['title'].'</a><br />'.$res['description'].'<br />';
}
}
?>

And that’s all, we are finished If you want to download the full example please click here.

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Eli offers paid subscriptions

Eli of Bluehat fame is offering access to a SQUIRT an enhanced version of his QUIT tool on a paid basis along with piles of other goodies the catch is it aint cheap at $100/month and the real bad news is there is a waiting list to join but if you want some serious tools it will be worth the money!

Blogstorm causes a storm

UK based Blog Storm have launched their new tool for tracking links to your site with many pundits hailing it as the next big analytics tool. However perhaps more of a storm is their fantastic blog which while young has come up with some amazing posts including to very good Google Analytics posts looking at some of the advance features and how to include tracking software in Flash.

Getting the most from Adsense

Dosh Dosh has a fantastically detailed article on placing Google Adsense units on a site plus explaining the new rules from Google expanding the number of units from 1 to 3, this will make a fair few people happy I’m sure. “The Ultimate Guide to Adsense links unit” a payment blogger recommended read this week.

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Have we missed something fantastic or great then tell us, you never know we may feature it next week