If it has in fact affected your site, the next logical question on your mind will probably be, “What exactly about my site may have caused it to be affected by the change?” To answer that question thoroughly, the first thing you’ll want to do is review the actual content on your website(s).

Content Is Still The King

As we’ve all heard so many times before, and rightfully so, content is king. The first thing you should do is take stock of your web site’s content and evaluate whether or not it’s offering something useful to your web site visitors, or, if it is engaging in deceptive practices, intentional or otherwise.

Content Audit With A Fine-Tooth Comb

Pay especially close attention to your web site’s affiliate program. Ask yourself if this part of your business is simply mirroring other websites instead of providing unique, useable content for your visitors.

In addition, you’ll want to review your content from the perspective of an outsider looking in, because that’s basically what Google is going to do. Ask yourself if the content you’ve posted is engaging to the viewer, or if it’s poorly written and nonsensical in places.

Does your page or pages content read as if it would make people want to stay on your site for a longer visit, or simply hit the back browser and look somewhere else for the answer to their query? If you notice a degree of stagnation or incoherent writing, then you should consider updating it with some fresh, engaging content. Your aim here is to make the visitor stay long enough to really read what you have to say.

The Fall Of The Blogger Automatons

Prior to the Google May Day update, using auto blogger software had been an effective way to generate fresh content; many sites simply used content scrapers to populate their web site’s updates. This practice was an extremely effective way to generate fresh content while using minimal labor, time and expense.

Unfortunately, after the Google update, any articles that are not written by the original publisher of the content will most likely be seen by Google now as being of lower authority and will not return the ranking and traffic benefits that this practice once used to.

While this is not always going to be the case, it is what Google has stated as a primary goal of the update, and we are all painfully aware that they update the algorithm regularly. If they missed it the first time, chances are they won’t miss it a second time.

Don’t Forget Your Product Pages

It will also help to make yourself aware of any of your product pages that could possibly be viewed as unrelated or having inadequate content. Pages that fit that profile will not assist in ranking anymore. Site depth is one of the stated factors that Google is weighing heavier than ever, which is to say you should make sure everything appears as correct and as fresh as possible throughout your site, not just on the upper layers.

The Appearance of Authority

In addition to automated scraping, and reproduced blogging and content, your website’s “appearance” needs to be authoritative and legitimate. It needs to present itself as being a serious, “real” business. Google is now reducing relevance for web sites that appear to exist simply to convert visitors to a sale. That is not to say that Google is anti-merchant, but the effect will be that web sites perceived as being of that “conversion only” nature are going to be ranked lower under the new algorithm change.

Some websites that are known as “Thin Affiliate” sites, which to Google may appear to offer no additional value to site visitors beyond a sale, will see a drop in their rankings as well. These changes have affected a great number of businesses, and in a very significant way.

Internal Links and Back-links

Other factors for you to consider are your internal links or “internal linking” as Google sometimes calls it. A web site’s obvious lack of links to deep pages, for example any product pages coming from the homepage, are going to be devalued under the Google May Day update. It doesn’t matter whether this is intentional or not. The absence of links to deep pages can and will have a serious effect on your traffic going forward.

Lastly, take a hard look at your site’s deep linking or back-links. The May Day update reduces relevance for sites displaying a lack of links into the deep pages. When landing on your site, if your content appears to have all links which seem to point to the homepage, regardless of what is stated on each individual link, then you are probably one of the web sites feeling the effects of the recent update.

Deep linking is probably the most time consuming of all the solutions for the May Day update, but the easiest to make. Those links need to go somewhere, and unfortunately, all links pointing to the homepage won’t earn you any points with Google. If you have products to sell, consider modifying these deep links to go to new products or offerings. This is the equivalent of “killing two birds with one stone” as far as the Google update is concerned, and you should see some of your ranking or relevance return, and quite possibly even see an increase in ranking in certain areas.

For example, instead of linking: www.yoursite.com, use something like www.en.yoursite.com/new/product if you have multiple language pages. Even an URL like www.yoursite.com/julysalepage may be more effective for your purposes. The idea here is to differentiate these links from simply reflecting 10 links on your site that read www.yoursite.com but are hyperlinked elsewhere.

Spell Out Your Sell

Spelling out what you’re selling is beneficial in more ways than just the obvious; it will get you traffic from Google as well.

In general just keep in mind that these changes, while frustrating, are actually good for your business in the long run. Furthermore, you can be encouraged by the fact that there are multiple solutions and ways available to you to ensure a positive outcome for your business.

Next in the series, we are going to take a hard look at how to improve your web site’s quality to combat the effects of the May Day update, and we will make a few recommendations to get your traffic back, and in some cases, even improved.

***This article is the second installment in a five part series brought to you by our partners at Metamend, the Search Marketing Experts. Since 1998 Metamend has been widely recognized as one of the leading search engine optimization firms in the industry. Providing advanced organic search and Internet marketing searches to clients in over 60 countries, Metamend works to bring pre-qualified visitors to their clients’ websites and to convert those visitors into long-term commercial relationships. Metamend’s search and Internet marketing methods follow the best practices outlined by the major search engines, and its staff maintain strong personal relationships with others at all levels of the search marketing industry.

This update is part and parcel of Google’s “caffeine” modification, which returns data that’s 50% fresher than what was yielded in past searches. This increase in the volume of fresh data rendered is now made possible by Google’s switch to processing data in “pieces” rather than in “layers”, which was standard practice prior to the update.

Schizophrenic Algorithms

It might not come as much of a shock, but each year Google changes its algorithm anywhere between 350 and 500 times. What often happens as a result of these changes is that people who get too focused on exact ranking factors see their site drop when Google releases these algorithmic tweaks.

Minor Quakes From The May Day Update

On the face of it, the May Day modification is simply a rankings change, not a crawling or indexing one. That said, it has still had its effects on some websites. For some it has resulted in a decrease in traffic volume, even though their pages are still getting indexed. After the update the pages seem to not rank as high as they did before, and this is where the stress comes from.

Google’s changes seem to be primarily affecting “long-tail” traffic stemming from the longer search terms that more sophisticated searchers use. When you calculate the net effect of those searchers per site, it adds up fairly quickly, given that long-tail searches convert at a higher rate.

The algorithm change also seems to be affecting very large sites with “item” pages, such as e-commerce sites. Pages of this nature usually don’t have many inbound links, and the links they do have are usually buried within the site. Chances are also very high that these types of sites don’t have substantial amounts of unique content.

The Importance Of Unique Product Descriptions

An important observation to make is that it’s beneficial to keep unique product descriptions for anything you’re selling on your site. To date, the sites that only use a manufacturer’s generic product copy could suffer the most from the May Day update, experiencing a heavy loss in direct traffic to their product pages.

Provide The Freshest Content Yet

Products aside, having relevant content that addresses the search terms that you’re trying to rank for is always a good idea, and the main search keyword is just the start; Google looks for synonyms, uniqueness and strength of the linking profile.
***Looking for original content? Check out our friends at www.constant-content.com

What Is Google Trying To Achieve with This Update?

The goal of the May Day update is to universally improve search quality and user experience. Google has openly stated its intent to ensure when you search for something, you’re provided with the highest quality content on a per search basis. Basically Google trying to make search more helpful and weed out any content duplication, as well as minimizing the impact of what it considers to be lower quality websites.

What Types Of Websites Are Being Affected By This Update?

The hardest hit by the Google Algorithm change are auto-generated pages and content farms. As already mentioned, the May Day update is basically engineered to improve search quality.

This is a good reminder for affiliates that you should always be providing the highest quality content for your consumers. A recommended tactic is to provide content not available anywhere else, and ensure that it’s helpful; also,  avoid scraped, generic and low quality content whenever you can.

How Can You Determine If Your Site Is Affected By This Update?

The best way is to check on your own around the time between April 28th-May 3rd. This is when a lot of sites notice a loss of 5-15% of their normal long-tail traffic. Furthermore, if you check your search referral traffic between April 28th and May 3rd you may have seen a drop in these statistics as well.

Check to see if the change is in the number of referrals, or the number of pages getting traffic. A drop in traffic to your bigger terms probably is not a May Day effect, but drops in search referrals could be. Also, if your index or crawl stats changed suddenly, this could indicate you were hit by the update.

To be certain, check any links to your child pages across the site; these pages may have suffered a May Day relevance drop. If you don’t have unique content, even on your less important pages, you may have seen a dip.

In part two of this five part series we will cover in more detail what factors cause the site to be affected, and in subsequent articles we will discuss what improvements can be made and what you can do to minimize the impact of this algorithm change.

***This article is the first in a five part series brought to you by our partners at Metamend, the Search Marketing Experts. Since 1998 Metamend has been widely recognized as one of the leading search engine optimization firms in the industry. Providing advanced organic search and Internet marketing searches to clients in over 60 countries, Metamend works to bring pre-qualified visitors to their clients’ websites and to convert those visitors into long-term commercial relationships. Metamend’s search and Internet marketing methods follow the best practices outlined by the major search engines, and its staff maintain strong personal relationships with others at all levels of the search marketing industry.

The EU Court of Justice (Europe’s highest legal authority) ruled that companies using competitors’ names as Internet advertising keywords are not infringing European trademark laws. It further allowed that customers of Google’s paid-for Adwords service may choose whichever words they want, within reason, without infringing trademark law.

You can read more details about the case and its effects here:

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=B1FB02FD-1A64-67EA-E4153A0926DAC5EF

A similar ruling was also recently handed down in a Canadian BC (British Columbia) Court:

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5104/135/

The decision means the Courts are taking a more laissez-faire approach to the issue, allowing advertisers to duke it out in the PCC world, but ultimately putting the onus on consumers to an independent and informed choice about the ads they click on and the products they buy online.

What do you think about the ruling? Drop a comment and let us know!

Direct marketing, more than any other method, is all about testing and quantifying consumer responses. The advantage that online direct marketing has over its offline cousin is that the responses generated online (click-throughs, conversions, sign-ups, etc.) are likely to get measured, tested and improved upon more rapidly. The Internet is a giant data recording machine, so it has naturally taken David Ogilvy’s founding principles of “testing, testing, testing” to the next level of awesomeness.

Definition of Online Direct Response: The process of generating a lead, sale or other similar action directly from an Internet ad. Online direct response is measured through click through rates (CTR) and conversion rates (CR). Cookies and special tags are used to track which ads, landing pages and paths deliver the most conversions. This type of tracking is also used for cost-per-action (CPA), where the advertiser pays for a pre-specified action (e.g. sale, sign-up, etc.).

Probably one of the most underused online direct response techniques is email. This personalized, targeted and simple tool can boost average conversion rates into the stellar range (e.g., STOPzilla’s emails convert at an astonishing 10%), far higher than other affiliate methods such as PPC. Affiliates should definitely look into using email as part of their campaigns. (Stay tuned for more articles on this subject!)

Direct-response is a powerful strategic tool for affiliates. Do you actively use direct-response techniques in your affiliate campaigns? If so, which ones? How successful are they? We’d love to hear what you think!

If You Build For Quality, The Conversions Will Come.

This is probably the biggest topic in affiliate marketing today. Affiliates have to change the way they think about their business. Gone are the days where you could tack up a flimsy download button-crazy landing page stuffed with slimmer than trim content, and still make bang for your buck.

Nowadays, the game has changed. The role of the landing page has morphed. It’s become the final step in a much larger process watched over carefully by Google’s quality administrators, instead of the be-all and end-all of the online sales funnel that it used to be. The landing page is now just one critical component in a much larger structure that’s driven by the need to provide consumers real value.

Affiliate marketing’s new gold standard involves building out rich, relevant content sites around highly-targeted landing pages that are designed for the sole purpose of closing the sale. The new industry buzzword is “pre-sell”, rather than “hard-sell”. Today’ s affiliate has to do the legwork. They have to run as much value-selling up front through their site, so that when the consumer gets to the landing page they’ve already inspired them with an unmistakable commitment to the highest standard of customer service.

Build Topic-Related Sites With Authentic Content.

The art of the pre-sell is about loading up the front end of your sales funnel with original, useful content and trust building elements that aren’t directly related to the product you’re selling. The content you offer is directly related to the larger problem or need your customer has, and the product becomes the natural solution to that problem rather than the focus of your site. In other words the product becomes an adjunct or aside to the primary goal, which is to provide the consumer with the best solution, i.e., the perfect answer to their search query.<

Creating a site with a Home Page, Features Page, Contact Info, Testimonials, and an authentic Blog is necessary and best way to tackle this pre-sell method. It's also the key to staying alive in the affiliate game. The content on this type of site has to have true value. It has to be relevant to the solution your product provides, and give the customer precisely what they're looking for when they go from one of your PPC ads to your site or product landing page.

Say No To Black Hat.

Shady landing pages don’t last as long as they used to. The industry has definitely tightened its chops. And since Quality Score doesn’t allow you to start fresh with every new campaign or new content type – any bad history you’ve made follows you to your next destination. Having bad history also means you’ll pay a positioning and cost-per-click penalty foe stepping outside the lines.

So needless to say it literally pays to do it right from the very start. If your paid search advertising is opportunistic and inconsistent, or attempts to mislead or deceive users, you’re business will suffer in the end.

Build Your AdWords Accounts Sequentially.

When starting a brand new account, you should build sequentially. First add keywords and ad groups with a tight and narrow focus to your landing pages and give them enough time to earn a good Quality Score (6 at least) while giving the account some history of good performance.

It’s speculative to suggest the ‘right’ size or period of time, but a few weeks with keywords numbering in the dozens or low hundreds seems to work. Equally important is amassing click histories in the hundreds or even thousands – enough data for Google to truly evaluate your performance.

Conserve Your Top Performing URLs.

This one might seem a bit counter-intuitive, but after a little explaining you’ll see why it makes sense. While the precise impact of the historical CTR of a target URL is unknown, it makes sense that Google would give you the benefit of the doubt with any URL that produces consistently strong Quality results.

With this point in mind, you might want to lean on the conservative side with how you use those ‘big ticket’ target URLs. It’s a bit like what a coach goes through in sports when he has to decide how many minutes his star players should play. He doesn’t want to burn out his franchise go-to-guys before they get a chance to win the game, but at the same time he wants his best players on the floor as much as possible to give his team the greatest chance of winning. It’s a balancing act – and the same goes for your PPC campaigns.

Try to give your big URLs a rest in situations where you’re working with unknown performance variables, such as new PPC ads. Google tends to give less leeway with new niches and keywords i your text ads than with historically proven ads, so you don’t want any potentially poor performing campaigns hurting your QS on a landing page that is a proven winner. Try to use your best performing URLs as an anchor for your continued success.

What do you think about the way affiliate marketing is changing? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Post a comment and let’s get the discussion rolling!

No matter how you look at it, it’s inexorable. The thirst for MORE is always THERE, looming, chomping away silently at the back of your brain. And it’s the skilled marketer’s profession to tap into that state of mind and set your conversion neurons on fire.

Go Play In That Traffic

Our innate desire to acquire also applies to the analysis of your website traffic. It’s The Third Law Of The Dynamic Internets. Online marketers are constantly striving to drive more traffic to their sites. You might call it an obsession. Make no bones about it, driving more and more web traffic is definitely an awesome obsession to have. It’s also a necessary one if you want to attain any measure of online success. To prosper online, you straight up have to be able to draw the big crowds.

Get Your Full Monty On

The other half of the money equation is Quality. The traffic that hits your site or sales page has to be grade-A targeted in order to max out the odds of clinching each sale. Actually getting people to your site is the job of your emails, videos, and PPC and content network ads. Once they arrive, however, your site has to deliver on the message you’ve supplied.

You can create this “site stickiness” with streamlined design, succinct and compelling copy, and an efficient site architecture that divinely radiates trust and quality. To get his site luster, it should be planned out and executed to the hilt from day one, not just thrown together pell mell. Why? When it comes to making money on the Web, you simply can’t afford to leave your visitors in the dark.

Mind The Conversion Gap

Think of it this way. Say you get a thousand visitors to your site per day. Not bad, right? But how many of them found what they were looking for? Was the site and product/service what they wanted? Did it inspire them to take action? Did they buy something or leave you an email address for lead generation? Or did they just drop into the abyss of cyberspace, never to be seen or heard from again?

Aye, that’s the crux. You have to drive the traffic AND close the sale. If you only do the former, you’ll walk away vacant handed pushing a cart full of broken dreams.

“Hey Man, You Got a Drizzle In Your Speed Boat”

If a boat has a hole in it, it takes on water. More and more water. Until it sinks. The bigger the hole, the faster it goes down. If your site has holes in it, your business goes under. It’s elementary. It might not fail right away, but eventually it will tank L-A-R-G-E. Solution? It’s not rocket surgery. Fill the holes already.

This brand of fix is easier than you think. First identify where the ship is taking on H2O. Where should you look? One of the most common places to find leaks is in the disconnect between the ad the visitor clicked on, and what they actually found when they landed all boggle-eyed onto your site. Tons of affiliate sites serve up campaigns like this, where the ad message and the offer or site content don’t match. They’re conversion path is riddled with gaps in the sales funnel, like someone took a Tommy Gun and shot up the hull. (Leaking money like a tanker).

The affiliates who own these type of sites typically build their ship for No.1 rankings on a favorite-flavor keyword, then, when they actually lock up the number one spot, they panic because it’s not earning the money they expected. In a wild knee-jerk response, they start chasing more search terms to grab more and more traffic. They’ve missed the point. What they should’ve done first and foremost is find the leaks before its too late.

YO YO! SHARK ALERT!!!

While sales might increase by continuing to drive larger volumes of traffic, it’s totally unsustainable for individual affiliates in the long term. Competition for top page rank combined with rising bid prices make it difficult to maintain as a viable strategy. To solve the problem, you should really be focused on improving bounce and abandonment rates and then worry about any secondary tweaks you want to make.

A Full Shock Of Downloads

The best way to increase sales is to audit your site and test to see how it actually works. Scout where the gaps are at, then close them up good and tight. Along with some spinal-tapping SEO work (meta-tags, title tags, keyword selection and density), you should also scan your entire site with the following points in mind:

• Make the navigation clear
• Include prominent, can’t-miss, compelling calls-to-action
• Include a company profile page
• Make the checkout process easy to navigate
• Make the offers clear and prominent
• Provide and promote SAFE online transactions
• Offer added benefits such as subscriptions to newsletters

Let’s go back to our previous example for a minute. Say you have a 1000 visitors a day and out of those you make 10 sales. Just by fixing the gaps in your site you can easily add 10-20 sales a day, depending how much like Swiss Cheese your sales process is, all without dropping a red penny on bids.

How Many Mistakes Can a Marketer Make?

Here’s a list of the most common mistakes affiliates make when they create their websites and sales pages:

• No profile or bio page (this offers the visitor reassurance)
• Site doesn’t display correctly in Internet Explorer or Firefox (always check your site in both browsers)
• No privacy page
• No testimonials or reviews
• No trust badges or security seals
• No customer service contact info
• Confusing terms of service
• A lack of call to action
• Underwhelming sales copy
• Badly designed contact forms
• Poorly designed landing pages
• Unrelated or inappropriate images or stock photos
• Lack of a subscription strategy

Fixing any one of the above listed glitches will help you cut down on your bounce and abandonment rates, and immediately juice up your online revenue. If you have the mettle to repair them all, you’ll come out of it all with a rawkin’ e-com juggernaut and a bank account stacked to the brim.

Bing Gains Momentum

Recent data suggests that Bing has around 28% market share, making it a slice of the pie that’s unwise to ignore. With its recent acquisition of Yahoo! Search you can expect this percentage will continue to grow. So, if you’re having problems getting listed or staying listed with Google, Bing is an eminently viable place to look as a revenue-producing alternative.

The Search World According To Bing

As far as Bing is concerned, “Ultimately, SEO is still SEO… it benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content and website design.”

That being said, the majority of the standards laid out by Bing pertaining to SEO are straight up basic. For example, things like using unique titles and meta-descriptions, consistent data structure, and an XML sitemap are key.

The Myth Of “Meta-Descriptions Nevermore”

If you hear someone talking smack about how Bing search engines don’t bother to spider meta-descriptions, be sure to chew on a grain of salt while you listen. This will protect you from their seriously antiquated conjecture.

While there was in fact a time a few years back when the major search engines started disregarding meta-description tags due to search engine spamming, recent algorithms have improved for identifying tags that don’t sync with their respective page content, making proper meta-tag insertion important again. The lesson? USE META-DESCRIPTIONS.

BTW! The biggest mistake to avoid with your meta-tags is using the same one for every page. That just screams duplicate content. The best thing to do is create a unique tag for each page, or else don’t use meta-tags at all. The same goes meta-descriptions on Google.

Quick Tips For Advertising On Bing

The rules on Bing seem less stringent compared to Google, especially in the manual review category. Bing doesn’t yet have the heavy policing standards, making it an opportune time for affiliates to start incorporating it into their marketing campaigns.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind for Bing campaigns:
*Make sure each page has at least 350 words on it, not including typical page elements such as menus and titles
*Use inbound links with keyword rich anchor text

*Put keywords in your URLs
*Building quality outbound links to reputable sites (e.g., merchant site)
*Microsoft also offers the Bing Webmaster Center where you can troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your site, submit sitemaps and view statistics about your sites. There’s also this document “Bing – New Features Relevant to Webmasters” (PDF)

Bing is definitely a legitimate contender. If you’re getting pinched on Google, it might be time to diversify.

The Power Of The Niche

First up, niche sites work really well with AdSense because they draw targeted consumers; people who are interested in that specific niche and its related content.

Digital products such as registry cleaner review sites are great examples of this type of niche strategy. When all the content is focused on a single problem, solution, product or subject, it makes a significant difference to your conversion process. The symmetry between content and advertisement makes the initial click and then the purchase a much more intuitive decision for the consumer to make.

Google’s AdSense code displays ads relevant to the content you’ve built into your sales pages. Since the viewers that visit the site are already there for a very specific reason (to read about the topic addressed in your content), the correlated ads they see generate higher click-through rates than ones on less targeted sites.

Basically, niche sites are the best way to get that close correlation between site content and the ads that get displayed.

One Keyword Only, Please

This is something a lot of beginner affiliates don’t know about. Many assume that optimizing their pages for multiple keywords is the best way to go. Evidence, however, suggests the contrary.

Keywords are one of the primary factors that determine what AdSense ads get displayed on your pages. It’s been shown that if you isolate and optimize for a single keyword, the chance that AdSense will deliver ads relevant to your pages is much higher than if you use multiple keywords. If you target too lots of keywords on the same page, you risk getting displaying that aren’t relevant to your content, and therefore losing clicks.

All you have to do is make sure you choose the right keyword for your niche through the research and ongoing testing.

Coordinate Your Ads With Your Site Content

Using colors in your ads that match the colors of the content on your website has proven to work very well through AdSense. Maybe it’s because the human eye associates common colors with common ideas and patterns. Whatever the reason, design continuity is an important part of campaign optimization.

Design continuity includes things like using blue for all the clickable links on your AdSense blocks. Blue is the universal link color and gets instant recognition with viewers. It communicates without equivocation, “hey you, this is a link.”

Also, the “open air” display format (no borders around the AdSense ads) has proven to generate better click-throughs. This one is a bit of a mystery as to why, but the numbers don’t lie. If you want to see for yourself, try testing the open air format for 100 unique visitors to your website, then record the click-through rate and the average amount generated per click.

After the initial testing phase, change just one variable of your AdSense block. You can try swapping out the color of the font in the headline as ann example. Again, wait until you get 100 unique visitors with the new headline and then gage your click-through rate for that color variate. If click traction spikes, stand pat with the with the new header color and switch up another single variable for your next test.

Continue testing this way to keep improving your campaign performance.

Place Your Ads Above the Fold

This tip works every time. Setup an AdSense block above the fold. Why? Internet users are notoriously impatient. They want to see what they’re looking for as soon as they hit the page. Placing ads above the fold is an absolute must for getting your ads noticed and generating the high-volume clicks affiliate marketers need.

Also, digital heat maps have shown that the human eye tends to be naturally attracted to the top left side of a web page. Place an adsense block in that spot and see how it performs.

Proper Ad Spec Selection

The medium rectangle format [300 pixels X 250 pixels] is the most popular. Other affiliates swear by the [468 pixel X 60 pixel] format . Want to be sure? Test both. See which one does best for you.

Monitor Your Account Closely

Keep a keen eye on your ads and how they’re performing. This is probably the most critical activity in maximizing your AdSense ads. You should also know that your AdSense account is a great resource, you just need to dig a little deeper to get the most out it.

For example, The Channels feature is pretty solid. It lets you know what’s happening on which pages of your site. All you have to do is set up different channels for different pages so that you track what pages are generating the clicks. This works best for small sites designed specifically for AdSense.

According to the news release, AdSense’s content publishers earn 68% revenue share compared to 51% for search. Google keeps the remaining percentage for administration, R&D, and business development.

How is this important for affiliates? The 68% compared to 51% is a strong indication that using the content network is a significantly more cost-effective way to advertise than search. Combine that with recent evidence which suggests the content network is the best way to build lasting online customer relationships, and what you get is a powerful argument for using the content network in your campaigns.

Check out the Google news release here: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.html

That’s because blogs are the heavy-lifters of the Internet. They’re the beast of burden that all the freshest of the fresh daily content gets loaded onto. Readers flock to them to get their daily feed of pulp news, knowledge, buzz, anecdote, and gossip. They’re also a great way to “presell” to your target consumer too.

Blogging: Easy as Le Cheese

So what’s so bodacious about blogging? For one, you don’t have to be a 5th level code-wizard named Chester Merlin The Third to make your blog operational. You also don’t have to know any scripting languages either. Good news for those allergic to code, right? No more Java rashes, thank you very much. I choose to exercise my constitutional right to “Not-Know-Code.”

Truth is, any online marketer can build their own blog and give it life quickly and inexpensively. In fact, if you’re focused, you can have your blog up and running in a matter of minutes and be promoting your offers and services to the online world within the hour. Snap, just like that.

What’s even better is that most blog services (such as WordPress and Blogger) provide free hosting, site building software, templates, and other forms of benevolent assistance. This is especially meaningful to the beginner affiliate marketer that doesn’t really know what needs to be done to write and publish successfully online.

How To Make Blog Payola

The most popular way of generating revenue from your blog is by placing textual hyper-links to your sales page in the body copy of your blog posts, and by placing sponsored images or logos in various areas of the blog page.

In effect, everything in your blog should be linked to your sales page and optimized for the highest conversions. All the reader/customer has to do is “click” on one of these links to be taken to the product sales page you’ve so skillfully designed to correspond to the great content you’ve packed into your blog.

Be aware that the amount of revenue generated from a blog featuring affiliate marketing links will vary dramatically depending on the amount of traffic the blog receives, as well as the payouts offered by the merchant.

A good rule of thumb to follow is that the amount of traffic is often determined by the quality of your blog’s content.

Why Quality Unique Content Is The Shiznit

Ok, so this is where we come to the slippery slope in the matter. You absolutely don’t want to create a blog that is cheaply constructed. When we say cheaply we mean little effort and attention was put into the actual CONTENT.

Quality content should be your number one priority. That means if you’re promoting a Driver Update software product, your blog content should feature original content on that subject, not keyword-stuffed meaningless garbage or copy & pasted fluff.

The key here is quality. You want your blog to be an original and authoritative site that offers something of REAL-VALUE to the consumer. Yes, this is where the hard work comes in on your part. You’ll need to write original content or contract it out. The content you offer will have to be highly-correlated to the product you’re promoting. Also add in the right kind and amount of keywords related to your product to get picked up in the search engines. Trust us, that effort will come back to you tenfold in the end!

A well-focused blog helps to ensure that visitors will not only be interested in the affiliate marketing links enough to click on them, but also not be distracted by links that don’t yield revenue.

Monitor Your Blog’s Performance

There are a few important factors affiliates should consider that will help optimize their profits. This includes regularly evaluating the effectiveness of the affiliate links you’re using to promote your products.

Basically, you want to know whether or not they’re generating sales. You can do this by comparing the percentage of blog visitors who click on the affiliate links to the overall blog traffic, and the number of visitors who click on the links that actually make a purchase.

If you’re blog has high traffic but a small percentage of click-throughs on affiliate links, you need to smack yourself in the face and start making some changes. Tweaks can include switching up the colors, sizes or locations of the ads as well as rewriting your copy for style and emphasis.

Remember: Making just one change at a time makes it easier to evaluate which ones work the best.

From The Grassroots Up

One way to create more sales traction is to occasionally mention the products you’re promoting directly in the blog posts. When you use this method, be sure not to flog it to death. Consider it a subtle suggestion technique rather than a keyword stuffing bonanza. The occasional shout out to the product you’re promoting within your blog content can help generate grass-roots interest in the hyper-linked ads.

Respect The Terms and Conditions

Pay careful attention to the affiliate marketing agreements you enter into. Some merchants put restrictions on the representation of their products and websites, and you have to follow these when designing and uploading content to your blog.

Always make sure to represent the integrity and image of the brand you’re promoting. As an affiliate marketer it’s your responsibility to showcase the product as the merchant would. If you stay within these parameters your blog could generate significant sales!